Bibliography Part 6- Trees and Hills

Trees and Hills is this great cartooning collective made up of people from the Vermont/New Hampshire/ Western Mass area. They've been putting out anthologies pretty regularly lately...I wanna say twice a year? And each one is a little better than the last.

Reasons I like contributing to the Trees and Hills anthologies-

1. The editors great.
2. They're REALLY generous with the contributor copies
3. They promote the books! I know this seems like an obvious thing, but so many of the mini comics anthologies don't send out press releases or review copies. It makes a huge difference!

You know...I don't even remember which comic of mine is in this one. Uh, little help?


For the next three issues, I did these fun little comics called "Space Ninja vs. Zombie". The title is pretty self explanatory. At the time Trees and Hills was trying to keep their anthologies all-ages, and I wanted something that would be kid safe, and also fun for me to draw.

Twig is a little Free Comics Book Day flyer that Trees and Hills put together. The strip I have in there was from when I tried (and failed) to make the history comics challenge.


For this one I left the Zombies and Ninjas behind, and did a little recipe comic about making soup with my Dad. When he was younger, he worked in a Chinese restaurant, learned a lot of the recipes, and taught my sister and I a lot about cooking. Seeds has been a real break-out bestseller for the group, and comes with a recipe book and packet of organic seeds you can plant.

If you live in this area, I would really recommend submitting to these anthologies. And buying them. Actually, I'd recommend that for people who don't live in the area, too.

Bibliography part 5- The Center For Cartoon Studies, Year 1

Here are the zines and minis I put together during my first year at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Hopefully you'll be able to see the improvement.

The "Ed Emberley" assignment is an annual favorite at CCS. Our class was asked to create a minimum four page comic using only characters/props from Ed Emberley's Make a World.
I loved this assignment, and sometimes worry that the comic I made for it is the best thing I'm ever gonna do.

My Fall final project for our Cartooning class with James Sturm, "Terra Incognita". We were asked to create a zine with a 2-color cover and minimum 500 typeset words. I've never been very good as silkscreening.

So I didn't bother with the color cover when I reprinted it.

"Terra Cognita" is a companion zine I put together for my Fall final project in Peter Money's writing class. He asked everyone to chose a word, then based all these writing assignments around it.

The Anthology Project is also an annual favorite at CCS. Our class was assigned them for Spring midterms, but now classes do them as the Fall final project, which works way better. My group was Elizabeth Chasalow (now Jarvela), Christine Williamson and Alexis Frederick-Frost. Our anthology was about a cursed box, and we each did a story about someone who finds it and the horrible things that happen to them. I think all the stories in this book are really amazing, but we had a lot of production problems so this was never reprinted.

"Cowboy Orange" was just a collection of poetry comics I'd done both before and after attending CCS. The first printing I ran a bunch of bad screenprints though the copier to make the covers...this was a bad idea. I should just stay away from screenprinting all together.

Towards the end of our first year, Ivan Brunetti, Seth and Chris Ware came to visit CCS. It was one of those life-changing events. Before they came, I hadn't even planned on staying at CCS for the second year. Michelle assigned us each to make a one-panel comic about the visit, then I designed the cover and Jon-Mikel Gates laid out the book, and we sent them each a copy as a thank-you gift.


Year One Final projects! I put together a book with every comic I'd done during my first year, 72 pages total. Only six copies where made, and each is bound differently.

More to come Monday!

Bibliography part 4- The Dead Year

Here's all the work I completed in the time between my last spring at The Evergreen State College and moving to Vermont to attend CCS. You guys sick of this bibliography stuff yet? I'm starting to get a little tired of it, and there's still a lot more to go.


Arbitrary Tenderness is a chapbook I put together for my final project at Evergreen. Sixteen poems, letter pressed cover.

Always the Quiet Ones was my second zine- a collection of short stories and comics that I pulled together for the second Olympia Comics Festival that I attended. Only thing I really like about this zine now was how cheap it was to produce, I found a print shop that only charged one cent for black and white copies...I made a lot of copies of this mess.

On Uneven Ground was an anthology that the Evergreen Writer's Guild pulled together. I've just got a story in there.

Slightly West was Evergreen's literary magazine. I was the editorial assistant there my last semester, and they printed a bunch of my work (not because I worked there- it was a blind judging process, I swear).

Anthology! Anthology! was a...well, an anthology of work by members of the Creative Writing program "Author! Author!" at Evergreen. We all had such different interests, so it's a really weird mix of work. At one point I had around fifty copies of this I was trying to give away. Just the one left now.

Bibliography part 3- Olympia!

It's Olympia, the annual anthology put out by the Olympia Comics Festival!

I contributed to four issues of this great little anthology, and as far as I know they're still putting them out every year. You don't have to live in Olympia or attend the festival to contribute, but it helps.

The first year I contributed, I was also the Editorial Assistant over at Slightly West, who did the production for this book. During my last few weeks of college, when I should have been writing final papers and saying goodbye to friends, I was locked in the lab scanning comics for this. We didn't know what we were doing, so the editor had me scan everything at 2400dpi, which took FOREVER. My blood and tears are in this book! Tim Sinaguglia did the cover. I love his work, I hope he's still making comics.

...I can't remember who did the covers for any of the other issues, and they're packed away in a box now so I can't really go look them up. If anyone else out there knows, clue me in and I'll update this!

Fun Fact: This is the only issues that doesn't have a cute indie girl on the cover! They know their audience.

Olympia is always a really fun book, with a good mix of established and new talents. The festival is one of my favorites to attend. The stage show is a ton of fun (and takes place before the sales floor opens, so all of the artists can actually attend), it's inexpensive (around $10 for a table, compared to $300+ for shows like SPX and MoCCA) and just really relaxed. Attendance varies a lot from year to year, and I've yet to see the kind of big crowds that the festival deserves, especially being so close to Seattle and Portland. Hopefully the festival's new director, Chelsea Baker, can help with that!

Hey Kids! Check this out:

There's a new issue of BASH! Magazine online with comics from Sean Ford, Jeff Lok, Bryan Stone, Eamon Espey, Theo Ellsworth, Keith Knight...and other amazing people I can't remember right now! You can also pick up the print version for free if you live in the D.C. area.



Short version- Great comics, FREE, check it out!

Bibliography part 2

Here's some examples of my earliest surviving work. It's all really embarrassing, but I'm just gonna have to get over that.

A collection of comedic short stories my Dad wrote in college that he asked me to illustrate. He gave copies out to the family as Christmas Gifts that year. I should note that my Dad finished college during my Sophomore year of High School...and that we both went to the same college, and had the same Creative Writing professor. It was a little weird. Beyond the family and his classmates, no one has ever read these, but they're pretty brilliant. I have secret plans to someday submit them to a bunch of magazines without him knowing, because he'll never try publish them. The illustrations...not so brilliant. Just some sloppy charcoal drawings that make me cringe now.

OH GOD. I hate this thing so much. While in my first year at Evergreen, I wrote an Independent Contract to make comics for a semester. I had no idea what I was doing, and everything went horribly HORRIBLY wrong. The contract was for 10 semester credits, and to earn those I had to make an 18 page comic plus covers, reproduce it, sell it at the Olympia Comics Festival, read these 5 books on making comic and write a 3-page essay for each one. BUT because of when the festival was scheduled, and because I'm an idiot, I ended up having to make, reproduce and sell the comic in a month, THEN do all the work on learning to make comics.

This comic makes no sense, and was crazy expensive to produce because I didn't know what I was doing. My adviser loved it though- she called it "refreshingly female". This comment really bothered me for some reason, and inspired the gag comic that I submitted to...





The Ovarian (love the title)! The annual Zine put out by the Women's Resource Center. I know some of the comics I'd drawn for the student paper pissed these gals off, so I was honored they'd still accepted my submission to their zine.

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone out there is having a good 2009 so far.

Like every year, I spent a chunk of New Year's Day trying to clean up my space and get things in order for the new year. This time "order" meant putting things in boxes, then carefully labeling those boxes and putting them away.

One box is now labeled "archive". It has a copy of (almost) every comic or chapbook I've done, or anthology I've contributed to. I took a picture of each one, and will indulge in a bit of nostalgia by posting some every couple of days during the month of January, and a little about the work.

I'll start with the stuff I've done that I don't have copies of:

Woe Is Me
This was my first mini comic, a four-pager about a girl whose hair gets possessed by demons. I think I made maybe ten copies and handed them out to friends, and posted it on my horrible website. It was pretty bad, but at the same time it's the only thing I've done where I got fan art (thanks, Nic!) I don't have any copies, or scans, or the original art. Still have the fan art though. If anyone out there has a copy of this comic, please burn it.

Tales of Insomnia #1
There never was a #2. This was a collection of all the strips I did in my first year for the Cooper Point Journal. I sold copies of this for a dollar at the Olympia Comics Festival, which was silly 'cause the newspaper is free. If anyone out there has a copy, I will buy if from you.

Always Comix Age Eight Anthology
I submitted a comic to this anthology over the summer...never got word that they'd printed it and I've never seen a copy. Their website says it came out in October, and I'm on the contributor list. Anyone out there seen it? How's it look?



...More to come (with pictures!)