Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 18

Another trip back East!

On Monday I'm heading back to Vermont for a week, before traveling down to Washington D.C. for the Small Press Expo.

This Fall will be my sixth year teaching Professional Practices at the Center for Cartoon Studies and my second year teaching it remotely from Oakland using Google Plus. The CCS school year starts the week before SPX this year, so I thought I'd head up and teach my first class in person since I was already flying cross-country for the show.

While at SPX I will be co-teaching a comics workshop on the behalf of CCS, along with Josh Bayer who will be representing The Sequential Artists Workshop. That takes place on Saturday from 4:30-5:30pm in the White Flint Auditorium. It should be a lot of fun! I'll be tabling with Greg Means of Tugboat Press for the rest of the show at table N1-2. If anyone lives in the Washington D.C. area, please swing on by! SPX is always my favorite show, and this year is shaping up to be a big one.

The Basewood Kickstarter continues to exceed all of my expectations. Earlier this week I announced a "push goal" to fund a companion volume for Basewood that would include concept drawings, character designs and other cool extras. Oh, and also a ROCK OPERA version of Basewood!!!?!

"Songs From the Basewood" has been one of my big top-secret projects that I have been working on for years and years with my buddy Andy. As of this post, we're about $1,200 away from making that album a reality, with 20 days to go. Hopefully we'll get the chance to share this with everyone.

It'll probably be pretty quiet around here until I get back to Oakland. My goal is to not leave the state of California for the entire month of October.

Phase 7 #018 is now available for ordering!

If you can believe it, a few hours after my last post, the Basewood Kickstarter hit its funding goal! Thanks so much to everyone who has made a pledge so far. There is still money coming in, so I will be announcing a cool "push goal" later this week.

And because things don't seem quite busy enough around here at Phase Seven Comics headquarters, I'm pleased to announce that Phase 7 #018 is now available for online ordering. This issue tells the story of my first ever concert-going experience, to see Weezer live in Seattle in 1997 on the second leg of the Pinkerton tour. Tragedy, elation and ROCK! This chapter has it all.

You can read a seven page preview of this issue over on the comics page. Check it out!

San Francisco Zine Fest 2013!

Well, the Basewood Kickstarter is off to a great start! We're only on the second day of the campaign and it's already more than 80% funded (!!!?!) Thanks to everyone who has chipped in so far!

This weekend (August 31st and September 1st) I will be exhibiting at the San Francisco Zine Fest along with my stalwart convention buddy Greg Means from Tugboat Press. We will be at table 63 where I will be attempting to drum up even more support for the Basewood Kickstarter by handing out some cool new Basewood postcards as well as selling copies of Phase 7 #018. This issue is hot off the press and has been mailed out to all the Phase 7 subscribers. Keep an eye on those mailboxes! It will be available to order online, starting next week.

If you live in the Bay Area, please swing by! The SF Zine Fest is right in the middle of Golden Gate Park, so there is tons of fun stuff to do nearby and there will be a bunch of great cartoonists and zinesters there, hawking their wares. A good time will be had by all!

The Basewood Kickstarter has launched!

My Kickstarter campaign to get Basewood professionally printed has launched! This has been my big project for the last couple of months, and I'm very excited to finally send it out into the world. You can get all the details over on the Basewood Kickstarter page.

Obviously, I need to get this information out to as many people as possible in order for it to be successful, so I would really appreciate everybody's help spreading the word. There is a Phase Seven Comics facebook page, but technically I'm not personally on Facebook, so any posts in that realm would be greatly appreciated.

Also, to celebrate this launch, I have put the entirety of Basewood up online for people to read (for FREE!) Hopefully this will let people check out the book and encourage them to back the project.

Readers of this blog are already familiar with the massive effort it took to draw Basewood. It was ten years of my life, and I'm really hoping this campaign will be successful so that I can get the book printed the way I think it deserves to be presented. We'll see how it goes!

Claire's 30th

Claire turned 30 this week! To celebrate, we went camping just outside of Yosemite National Park last weekend with her extended family. It was fun to meet some of her uncles and aunts and cousins. In this photo you can see some of the hundreds of antique buttons that were handed down to Claire by her Aunt Cathy, who got them from Claire's great grandmother. What a birthday present!

The highlight of the trip though, was undoubtably when her Uncle Kip took us up in his little Cessna four-seater airplane and we got to fly above Yosemite. It was pretty incredible! Claire took a million photos which are over on her Flickr account if you want to check it out.

On Claire's actual birthday we went out to Hearst Castle on the pacific coast. It was pretty bonkers. I'll never get over seeing all those crazy carved and painted ceilings! Again, there are a bunch of photos in Claire's Flickr. We drove home along Route 1, which I have not done in a really long time. It was a fun, relaxing trip and I'm glad we did some memorable stuff to mark Claire's 30th birthday. That is a big one!

Now that I'm back home, I'm trying to catch up on a bunch of big projects. Phase 7 #018 should be back from the printer any day now, I'm still plugging away at my biggest illustration project yet, and I'm spending any remaining time that I have getting the Basewood Kickstarter ready for its launch at the end of the month. School will be starting up again soon, so things are only going to get busier! Buzz buzz buzz, I better get back to it.

Summer Update

Time feels like it's moving faster and faster, so I thought I'd better write a quick post about some of the things going on in my life right now, or before I know it, this summer will be over and I'll forget all about them.

I took a quick trip up to Seattle over the 4th of July weekend to see my family, which was really nice. I spent much of the trip in my parents' attic and basement, digging through all of my childhood belongings, getting rid of as much as possible. I managed to unearth some very important Weezer artifacts from my teenage years which will find their way into the next two issues of Phase 7. I'm a little over 90% done with Phase 7 #018 so that should be done and ready to ship out to the Phase 7 subscribers some time in August.

On the illustration front, I'm excited to say that I recently began illustrating my first chapter book. I'm under a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't talk about the specifics, but it's definitely my biggest illustration assignment yet and I'm having a lot of fun working on it. It's going to keep me very busy for the rest of the year. I'll share more about the project when I'm allowed to!

The most exciting news of the summer though, is that Claire's doctors say she is in good health. I guess with cancer you never really get a "cancer free!" high five from your doctor; Claire will always be a "cancer survivor." But the doctor did say that all of the treatments accomplished what they were supposed to. Claire will get a scan once a year for the next few years to make sure that the cancer isn't coming back, but other than that we are free and clear of the cancer cloud that has been hanging over us since last November. It feels great to have all of this behind us and we are both very excited about all that our future together holds. Claire turns 30 in August!

My old buddy Jon Chad is visiting us in Oakland next week and then he and I will both head back to CCS to teach the Cartooning Studio Summer Workshops. I'm not looking forward to the East coast humidity, but luckily Vermont has some nice rivers to swim in and plenty of ice cream to help keep you cool!

If I'm a while in posting again, this will give you some idea of what I'm up to. I hope that everyone is enjoying their summer!

Phase 7 Issue 18 Preview!

I uploaded the first seven pages of Phase 7 #018 as a sneak preview of Weezer Fan: Part 2. I'm hard at work on this issue (currently 76.79% done!) and should have it done and ready to send out to the Phase 7 subscribers sometime in August. This issue tells the story of the first rock and roll concert I ever attended, to see Weezer in Seattle in 1997. It will include photographs from the concert and some pretty great letters from other Weezer fans across the country. I'll post here when it is available for online ordering. Until then, Weezer Fan: Part 1 is still available!

The Internets, They are a Changin'

On Monday, Google is pulling the plug on Google Reader. I keep track of everything I read on the internet using RSS feeds, so I was pretty bummed out by this decision. After researching the available alternates, Claire and I decided to go with The Old Reader, because it pretty much does everything Google Reader did, in pretty much the same way.

While transferring all my RSS feeds over to the new service, I went through and cleaned out a lot of dead feeds. It was kind of sad seeing how many sites I used to follow that had closed down.

I can understand why though; I certainly know that my relationship with blogging has changed over the years. If you look at the little "Archives" section on the right sidebar of this page you'll see that my number of posts has steadily declined since 2007. I think part of that is because I'm getting busier and busier as I get older, but also I don't feel that burning need to share everything I'm doing all the time.

Anyway, losing Google Reader combined with the recent, horrible overhaul of Flickr has me kind of freaked out about the internet right now. I know I should be trying to keep up with everything (Tumblr, Pintrest, etc. etc.) but I just don't have the energy. Every time I see some new service pop up I just tell myself "I'd rather be drawing!"

Anyway, out here in the "real world" I'm going to be heading up to Seattle to spend the 4th of July with my parents, and then a few weeks after that I'll be heading out to Vermont to teach some of the summer workshops at The Center for Cartoon Studies.

I'm also gearing up to work on some really cool projects, but I can't talk about them just yet. When I can, I'll let you all know! Until then, I hope everyone is having a good summer so far. Stay cool!

CAKE! and Other 2013 Shows

Well, Claire made it safely through her radioactive quarantine and life is slowly getting back to normal around here. Since she is feeling okay, I am happy to announce that I will be attending the CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo this weekend (June 15th and 16th). I was hesitant to publicly announce this until now, just in case I needed to stay here and take care of Claire. But I don't, so I'm going!

If you are in the Chicago area, please swing by and say hello! As ever, I will be exhibiting with the incomparable Tugboat Press at table 43! I haven't been to Chicago since 2009 so it will be great to catch up with some of my wonderful friends who live there.

While I'm at it, I thought I would put up links for the shows I am planning on attending for the rest of 2013. Not all of these are 100% confirmed, so keep an eye on the top of the comics page, which I'll update if anything changes. I'll also post these dates on the Phase 7 Facebook page.

San Francisco Zine Fest 2013 - August 31 & September 1 in San Francisco, CA
Small Press Expo 2013 - September 14 & 15 in Bethesda, MD
Alternative Press Expo 2013 - October 12 & 13 in San Francisco, CA
Short Run 2013 - November 30th in Seattle, WA

I hope to see some of you at one of these shows or another!

Round Two

To say that Claire bounced back quickly after her surgery is an understatement. She has been incredibly active these past few months, teaching a fashion design club for a local high school and making mountains of Fluff Engine plush toys which she sold at the recent Maker Faire. If it wasn't for the scar on her neck, you'd think the whole "thyroid cancer" thing had never happened.

It did though, and June is the month where she undergoes her second round of treatment. A few weeks ago Claire was taken off her thyroid medication, which means that her energy level has dropped a little bit. She's also on a low iodine diet now, which is kind of crazy, because our culture puts iodine in salt and salt is in EVERYTHING. We have been making a lot of food from scratch, including the focaccia bread you see here!

The idea is that if there are any thyroid cells left anywhere in Claire's body they are being starved of iodine which they really, really want. Then this week the doctors will give her some radioactive iodine, which will wipe out the remaining cells. Claire will be radioactive for about four days, during which she's not supposed to be around anyone else. We're going to set up a little command center for her in the bedroom and I'll be spending my days at the other end of the apartment, working and sleeping in my studio.

Hopefully everything will go well and by the time July rolls around this will all be behind us. The "cancer cloud" has been looming over us this whole year, so we're both glad her second round of treatment is finally underway. Once it's over, I'm hoping we won't have to think about cancer again for a really long time!