BASH! Magazine news

Hi all,

Washington D.C.'s free monthly comics paper, BASH! Magazine is moving from print to web format. Here's the press release from editor Jonathan Hampton:


For Immediate Release, February 12th, 2009

BASH! MAGAZINE MOVES FROM PRINT TO WEB FORMAT

Contact:
Jonathan Hampton
editor@bashmagazine.com
http://www.bashmagazine.com/

So begins the next incarnation of BASH Magazine. We've put seven issues featuring exclusively comic content onto the streets of Washington, D.C. in a big way, approximately 20,000 copies of each. We've grown our pool of artists and brought a unique form of comic storytelling to thousands of people who would have never been exposed to it. Producing and distributing BASH Magazine in this way is a helluva lot of fun and, we believe, worthwhile. But, it has not been sustainable. As a niche magazine fighting for print advertising dollars in a recession, let us say simply, "Yikes." That said, we're ready to usher in the next age of BASH Magazine.

Beginning in March, we will stop monthly printing of the free comic paper. Our website, www.bashmagazine.com - which has heretofore redistributed the paper content with a few extras - will become the focus of our time and efforts. We will continue to showcase unique comic storytelling from a variety of artists. Additionally, this freedom will allow us to provide more content to a growing audience. Our artists, our readers, and us - we love to see comics on a printed page. As such, we haven't closed the door on printing: keep an eye out for special printed collections in the future. But, as of now, BASH Magazine Online will be our focus. A whole new website is in the works. We'll keep you posted on its progress and launch date.

Until then, we remain,

BASH Magazine


You can find work on the BASH! Magazine comics calendar from I Know Joe Kimpel and Center for Cartoon Studies artists Colleen Frakes, Bryan Stone, Sean Ford, Dan Archer, Jeff Lok, and Morgan Pielli.

Happy Reading!

PROGRESS!

This was a weekend for getting things done! I tried to wrap up as many small, side projects as possible so I can start really concentrating on the bear story. Here's what I've been up to:





My friend Andrew is an amazing writer, and I've been trying to get a collaboration going with him since I came to CCS. Think we've finally got something going with this long form erasure poem he's been sending me in pieces. Finished the first section yesterday. The text is based on the memoirs of 17th-century English explorer dude William Dampier.


I've been working on this short comic in my sketchbook on-and-off since November, finished it up yesterday, too. It's monsters and sexy girls in glasses and their underwear in the woods. What's not to like?




This is part of a panel from my submission to "Awesome 2: Awesomer" :
www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog.php?type=12&title=639
I totally flipped out when I was invited to submit to this anthology! Jeff Smith did the cover, and the list of contributors is just amazing. Part of the profits from sales of the book go to a scholarship for The Center for Cartoon Studies, which is...well, awesome. Finished this up and sent off the pages yesterday.

Just one small side project to finish now, and I'm free. In the meantime, I've got bears to draw.

I want to go swimming.

Monday is Groundhog Day. Please, benevolent rodent, make this winter end!

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!

Making Comics, Reading Comix

February's issue of BASH Magazine should be out soon, and I'll have another comic in there. This one, for Valentine's Day, is from the Chinese story, "The Bridge of Magpies". Have I mentioned that BASH Magazine is FREE?

As you can see, I have only the most basic idea of how a loom works. I used photo reference for this, I swear!

I had a ton of fun doing costume research for this one. Ended up settling on the Qing Dynasty clothing, just because it worked best with my paired-down style. Han is prettier, but there's all these layers and crazy hair ornaments and things that make it too complicated.


I think I've been trying too hard to work stars into all of my comics lately. It's all this Vermont winter sky.



Also got some excellent comics in the mail this month. Last year at MoCCA I traded Marek Bennet a copy of my book for a subscription to Mimi's Donuts. I really think I got the better end of that deal. Marek recently got a Xeric grant, too, so there'll be a collection out soon. My copy of Always Comix Age Eight arrived, and it's SOOOO pretty! Man, do I envy people who can screen print. I also joined Liz Baillie's Mini Comic of the Month Club, and my first comic arrived like two days later. And there was a squid in it. Total bargain!

Bibliography Part 8- Summer Camps

Short post today- all about Comics Camps! I've been a teacher at four of these now. Each one was only a week long, and only one of them was completely focused on comics, so getting a whole book done in that time was asking a lot. I only managed it twice:

Working at Tip Top Pottery, I coordinated three summers of the Tip Top Art Camp along with painter Rebecca Gottesman. The kids would spend half the day painting in her studio, then come downstairs and spend half the day making pottery. Because they were only allowed to do one pottery project a day, the rest of the time was rounded out with comics exercises. During the second summer I taught, the kids each made up their own super heroes and collaborated to do these great battle drawings. This was based on an exercise we'd done at CCS in James Sturm's class. I pulled all the drawings together into a little zine so each camper could read everyone's and take them home.

That same summer, I spent a week out at the Orchard School in East Alstead, NH, teaching a comics camp. This one was coordinated by Marek Bennet, who was also running another camp in Hopkinton at the same time! This camp was all about comics, and the kids were totally focused. It was hard to get them to do anything else! We had to force them to take a break and go swimming. They just wanted to stay inside and draw all day. It was great!

Each camper put together their own quarter-size mini comic that week. Some amazing stories came out of the class. All of the teachers and counselors were expected to complete one, too (no one got off the hook) and at the end of the week we held a mini comics convention for all of the parents, so each camper could present their comic and trade with everyone else.

Of course, the copy machine broke (doesn't it always?) and I ended up with only copies of my own.

Bibliography part 7- The Center for Cartoon Studies Year 2

Senior year at CCS means it's thesis time!

This wasn't supposed to be my thesis. I'd originally planned to do the first two chapters of a painted graphic novel called Marya and Death. I was overly ambitious. I later tried to revive that story as a web comic, but that didn't work well either. Not sure yet if I'll ever pick up the story again, but ANYWAY

This is what started the whole mess. I was sick of working on my thesis, and one day decided to take a break and draw mermaids instead. Those doodles, along with a lot of encouragement from my classmates, turned into this 72-page story. It wrote itself- the first draft only took three weeks. Sometimes, you just gotta draw mermaids.

And after finishing that first story, I immediately dove into the second one. Probably a mistake, since this is my least favorite of the Tragic Relief stories.

I finished three issues of Tragic Relief that Spring, and decided to try and turn it into a bi-monthly mini comics series from there. I kept that up for a little over a year. Seven issues seemed like a good place to stop. But anyway, by this point I'd given up hope of ever returning to my "real" thesis and turned these three issues in as my final project instead.


I contributed a short comic to Side A: A Music Lover's Graphic Novel sometime during this year as well. It's in a similar style to the Tragic Relief stuff, only cleaner. I had used a Pentel Pocket Brush pen as my only tool during Tragic Relief, mostly out of laziness. For this, I switched to brush and ink. Made a huge difference.

SUNDAYS! This book was amazing, and it was a real honor to have been invited to contribute to it. I did one-pager about the Basket Ogress, who terrified me as a kid. And still does, a little.

More to come! The month is almost over.