Bibliography part 9- Post-CCS

This is the last bibliography post, hurray! Here's all the work I've finished so far since graduating from the Center for Cartoon Studies. After this I'll be all caught up to the present, and just posting things as they come out.

Tales of the TMNT #53. Oh man, this a huge deal! It all started with a tour of Mirage Studios during out FRESHMAN year at CCS. After that, we had a small contest among the class, where we all submitted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story ideas to Peter Laird. I think only four people chose to participate, and Peter ended up chosing an idea thought up by Jon-Mikel Gates and myself. There was a lot of back and forth with Mirage in the editing process (since we were just students and had no idea what we were doing), so between that and homework it was almost a year before we got final script approval.

THEN they held another contest to see who would draw it. Winners were fellow Innagural Class members Adam Staffaroni (pencils) and Andrew Arnold (inks). Between finishing their graduate theses and both getting real jobs at DC Comics, it was another year before the art was finished, so the book only just came out in December. My mom hasn't even read it yet!

I Know Joe Kimpel has been putting out regular Four Square Anthologies for about a year now. The idea is pretty simple- four cartoonists, four stories, in a sqaure format. I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the first one, along with Mario VanBuren, Caitlin Plovnick and Emily Wieja. We chose the theme "Sorry" after noticing that cartoonists tend to apologize a lot.

I was so impressed with the first Four Square Anthologies, that I asked the IKJK Krew if I could edit the next one. I picked the theme "No" because I wanted to continue the one-word title theme, and because I'd been in a long debate about the word with a colleague that year.

I knew that I wanted to ask Lauren O'Connell and Morgan Pielli to contribute, but was stuck on who the fourth person should be. Emily suggested Jon Chad, who had been an intern at CCS then returned to teach and work as a lab tech. He ended up screenprinting the covers for this issue, which saved my life since (as you've seen) my screenprinting and computer coloring skills are not sharp.

I did this four page testimonial comic as a "gift" to CCS right after graduating. Our class had been talking about whether or not to start the tradition of senior class gifts to the school (it was a little late, since the subject only came up a few weeks before graduation, and we were all broke and hadn't done any fundraising or anything). James Sturm brought up the idea that the best gift we could give the school was just to go out and make comics and succeed.
This whole point of this comic was just to explain that, even though I was often frustrated while at CCS and frequently considered dropping out, attending was the best decision I've ever made.

So I kept up with Tragic Relief after finishing my thesis work. I reprinted the books with new covers, grayscale on toned paper, after someone remarked at SPX that year that the painted/color printed covers looked "cheap". I've since had complaints from retailers that the grayscale covers also look "cheap". Can't make anyone happy!

So I did seven issues of that (just issue #5 is pictured) then collected them all into once volume, "Giant Sized Tragic Relief" when reprinting all of the issues became too much trouble. You can check them all out here.

Contributed a short story to Tree Fort Press' western anthology, "Dead Man's Hand".

Pulled together a book of comics about Lynda Barry's visit to CCS, which was another one of those huge life-changing moments for me, and it seems for a lot of others as well.

Secrets and Lies is huge and awesome and edited by Cat Garza! Think I've got a three page story in there (?)

Won a Xeric. Made a book. Tired of writing about it.

Co-edited an anthology by the women of CCS along with Kubby as a fundraiser for the scholarship fund. She's going to be editing the 2nd volume, and I'm working on fixing up and reprinting the first.

Pulled together a zine to welcome the fourth freshman class to CCS. By the way, this new class has some amazing talent. Watch out for them.

And FINALLY, this is what I'm working on now. "Woman King" will be my second grahic novella. Hope to have it all done by MoCCA (fingers crossed).

Okay, so math is not my strongest subject, but that's about fifty minis/chapbooks/zines/anthologies I've made or contributed to since I started making comics at age 19...which averages out to a little more than six per year.

I think I can do better. Let's go, 2009!