Creators of New England

So exciting, the Maine Comic Arts Festival is in just over a week! Who’s going?

I’ve been working on all sorts of goodies to fill my half-table and will have a bunch of free postcards to advertise my webcomic, Under the Apple Tree. I’ll hopefully have a copy to flip through in person, too.

Something kind of cool that’s new this year is that there will be a day of just panels on that Saturday at the library right there in Portland. I won’t be able to go, but I want to hear how it is!

I’ve moved to Salem, Massachusetts to be closer to my job in Boston, so unfortunately I won’t be a very good organizer for the Maine Cartoonists group anymore. : ( I’ll try to come up for any events, but there’s no guarantee, so I leave it in the others’ hands to keep it going! I can’t wait to see you all at the festival, I know many of you will be there.

PS – After the festival we should all post our pictures up here, as well as the materials we brought to share!

I’ve been thinking about the future of comics lately. I think the challenges facing independent creators, from trying to get in anthologies, get “for hire” gigs or maybe the Holy Grail, get some kind of bigger publisher interested in our work in this economy often means you second-guess your creations, style and even “career” choice. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, and what helps me is to remember that the art form we call comics now is part of a continum that has it’s roots tens of thousands of years ago. In the past we see the future, and vice versa. What the Hell am I talking about? Let me explain:

The fact that humans are the only living thing on the planet that not only has symbolic thought, but makes recordings of these symbols: art. About 30-50,000 years ago symbolic representations of animals start to show up on cave walls and in carved forms like figurines and stylized tools and jewelry in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, as Modern Humans spread out from our ancestral homeland, Africa. Modern humans date back to perhaps 150,000 years, but the RECORD of symbolic thought is only a fraction of that time. What this means is we had the brains, hands and bodies we have now, but symbolic thought took a long time to refine, past down to the next generation and find the richness of meaning that finally led to the first art.

How does this relate to comics? Well, when people started living in towns, growing crops and domesticating animals, people started to need to trade for goods, since not everyone grew food or hunted. People started to have specialized “careers” and craft-people appeared along with the concept of the city state. Merchants needed to keep track of sales, so the first writing appeared around 7,000 years ago. Almost immediately the artisians took hold of the writing, and at the request of the leaders started to combine them. The birth of the written word is inextricably linked with the combining of pictures and more abstract, symbolic words. These are, for all practical purposes, comics.

In ancient Sumer, in the Kingdom of Ur, we see the clearest example of this, even more than in Egypt in my opinion. For one thing, the practice of anthropomorphizing animals started here, with the “Bull Cult”. We see an amazingly modern approach to the “bull woman” here, holding an offering of wine to the gods.

That what we call comics has such ancient roots in not just art history, but the way written language itself was born, should never be forgotten by those of us that practice this art form. We continue the legacy of telling stories, effecting our fellow humans that might be too busy to write their own. We continue civilizations true prize: the heightened level of communication that art represents.

Collective Folks,

Thought I should send you my  left-wing nut blog on Conductive Chronicle, a “progressive” (or communist if you listen to Glen Beck or Sarah Palin).

I’m just writing about comics, and comics related stuff, but I try to touch on broader issues, too. Let me know your thoughts and input or ideas on what you think I should talk about.

http://cchronicle.com/author/joel-rivers/

Peace out,

Joel

Hey all,

I’m happy to see you all here and posting! I want to make this place really useful, so there are a couple things I’m going to be adding to the blog to make it better.

1. A better calendar. The one up now isn’t showing up quite right, so instead I’ve put together a Google calendar. I’m going to add as many New England comics events as possible, and if you notice I miss something, let me know! (Are any of you familiar with how it works? I was hoping to set it up so any of you guys can add something to it, but I haven’t gotten it all figured out now.)

2. An “affiliates” section. Now I have one labeled “support” and a separate page fro contributors (which I finally updated), but I thought it might be cool to do link exchanges with you guys as well as local comic shops, blogs, etc can share traffic with us. What made me think of that is The Daily Cross Hatch mentioned us in a post (so awesome!) and I thought it would be cool to have something like that going on.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what we could add/change to make this place better and more functional?

Hi all, here’s some regional comics news via Trees & Hills:

The PUNCHBUGGY TOUR in New England
Liz Baillie, Gabby Schulz, and MK Reed read from their comics and sing songs for you:
Wed. 3/24 @ 7pm, Ada Books in Providence, RI
Thu. 3/25 @ 7pm, Hub Comics in Somerville, MA
More info & links here.

PLAY preorder & other shop news
The forthcoming Trees & Hills anthology PLAY is now available for preorder – spread the word! We plan to print at the beginning of April. The last anthology SHELTER is in stock now, with all the other T&H anthologies, plus comics by Marek Bennett, Colleen Frakes, Sam Leveillee, Colin Tedford, and Anne Thalheimer.
It’s all right here!

TREES & HILLS SPRING TOUR continues
We had a lovely time at the mini-Boston Zine Fair this past Saturday! Coming up:
- April 10-11: MoCCA Art Festival New York, NY
- April 24 & 25: SPACE (Small Press And Comics Expo) Columbus, OH
- May 1: Free Comic Book Day Festival Rochester, NH
- May 23: MECAF (Maine Comics Arts Festival) Portland, ME
We may add more events to this list as we confirm details.
More info & links here.

Call For Submissions:
Deadline August 1:  LESSONS - a new literary journal of prose, illustrations, and comics focusing on narrative non-fiction, but open to submissions of fiction as well, looking for reflective, passionately truthful stories about learning. Edited by Matt Young & Denise Warren of White River Junction, VT.
More info here.

Joel’s and Jessica’s posts on digital versus traditional mediums inspired me to make my own. It’s definitely a process that has evolved as I’ve work on Under the Apple Tree, starting from almost all traditional to all digital.

The above image is something I put together to show the many different stages I’ve gone through as I’ve experimented with style, color, texture and mediums, spanning almost three years. All of the line work except the very last (and current) version were done traditionally with pencil or ink on paper. I would then scan them in and use Photoshop to insert texture, grays and colors. I never quite got the hang of it, though, and eventually just said “screw it!” and went fully digital.

I’m glad I did, as I commuting to Boston from Maine for work makes for very little time at home with my nice art supplies and scanner. This allowed me to use only my tablet and computer, which I always have with me regardless, to create the comic no matter where I am.

My choice was mainly for convenience, but I found I had a much easier time with color than I did traditionally – there’s much more room (and time) for digital experimentation than traditional.

It’s been neat to see everyone else’s processes and views on digital versus traditional work. PS – Thanks to everyone who has posted, I’m really glad you’re all here!

Hey all, my name’s Colin Tedford. I live in southwestern New Hampshire, where I self-publish my comics in a zine called Square Dance and on the internet. I also draw the strip Spinning World for neighboring Vermont newspaper The Commons.

Besides my own work, I co-founded and co-organize the Trees & Hills Comics Group. “Trees & Hills brings together cartoonists in VT, NH, & western MA to produce, publish, & promote comics, share resources, and build creative connections in our diverse communities,” as our mission statement has it. Yeah, we have a “mission statement” – but we didn’t always! We started as a way for cartoonists in the region to connect and reap the benefits of artistic community, but over time we’ve come to focus more on connecting with the larger community outside the comics world.  We publish two anthologies each year, and distribute comics for creators in our region.

It’s nice to be here!

Hello fellow comic creators!  I want to take some time to share my opinions on digital vs. traditional media, which Joel brought up in the previous post, but before that, I’ll take this opportunity to introduce myself.

I’m Jessica Shea- an Illustrator and Cartoonist from Georgetown, MA.  I went to school at Maine College of Art up in Portland and graduated just a few years ago.  Last fall, I opened my own gallery in my hometown- Jay Shay Art Studio & Gallery, which also serves as my studio space.  It’s been quite the learning experience, but I’m definitely having a great time and getting a lot of my own work done at the same time.

Anyway- I’ve been working on a big comic project for the past few months entitled “Ravenstar”.  I’m working on getting the first chapter finished to have available at the Maine Comic Arts Festival in May.  I started out working on the project using traditional ink lines, scanning them into the computer and using Photoshop to lay in grey tones.  I’ve worked this way on similar projects, but the process was getting boring, tedious, and above all else, I was totally unsatisfied with the final product.  It was just a few days ago that I said, “Screw it” and ditched all the digital work I had done so far and started working in watercolor.  So far, the difference has been extraordinary.

I’m not turning my back on digital though!  While switching back to traditional work, I encountered a problem.  I liked the way my linework looked better on Bristol than the textured watercolor paper.  Even though I turned my back on my computer for the coloring process, it saved me with the ability to layer my linework on top of my watercolors.

I’m now finding myself spending equal amounts of time on the traditional aspects of making this comic as well as the digital aspects of putting it all together, fixing mistakes, and making it look crisp and clean.  It’s become kind of a hybrid of both- something I’ve been doing for quite a while with my illustration work, but only just know have started applying it to my comics.  And I must say, I’m really enjoying it!

I think some attention should be paid to digital art vs. traditional, old-school comics. I love the craft and steps in creating “fine art” comics with watercolor, pencil and ink-even acrylic, but we don’t always have time for that, and scanning original color art is fraught with pitfalls if you are printing later. I still am learning the balancing act between  what I’ll call “to paper” and “to tablet” drawing, but if like me you can’t just sit around all week long and draw comics, and God forbid you had a deadline or a paying client, you may need to go digital, at least partly.

The thing that we all share as comic creators, is that we’ve had to use tools made to do, say photo-retouching as in Photoshop, or making books, as in InDesign, and adapt them into making comics.  In the above pictures I’ve scanned in the penciled art for a piece I did for a client, Students of the Unusual, and am “inking” it digitally in Corel Painter X. I also colored the art digitally later, but I think there is enough to talk about regarding digital “inking” and maybe adding tones to keep me busy here. Let’s talk pros and cons: The pros include, your get to “undo” without white-out or tearing your hair out. You can move quickly and not use up expensive art supplies and get your work area and hands (and often in my case clothes) all covered in ink. The cons, well, many artists my generation and older were introduced to computers rather late, and will never be as at home drawing straight on a tablet as onto paper. Digital drawing lacks, for now anyway, some sort of tactile quality that drawing with pencil or brush on paper has. Maybe it’s more abstract than that: you don’t create anything tangible-no object. Sure, you can print it out, but you can’t touch it as you create it. This may seem like a small point, but I assure you it has a been major challenge for me. I’m close to feeling like I’m really drawing when I work in say Painter or Photoshop, but it’s taken a long time. I assume other folks will find this a non-issue in the years and decades ahead, but, hey, my first year of college we learned graphic design with a light table and a font book… there’s a learning curve for everyone who creates comics, but the path is as unique as the individual.

Happy Drawing,

Joel

Hugh Tims is a native Mainer who has just recently set up shop in the country. That doesn’t stop him from being a one-man self-publishing house though. Hugh Tims currently works mainly on two books Two Spirit Deal, an eclectic actioner mature comic with LGBT superheroes and Lightning Duck, the ecologically savvy kids comic with musically inclined animeople tm. When not spreading himself too thin, Hugh teaches yoga and likes to surf. check out his blog @www.bettercomicsinc.com