Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 20

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Well, after four days and three nights in the hospital, Claire is finally back home where she belongs. The surgery was a success and Claire's physical recovery was pretty quick. We just had to hang out for a few days to make sure all her levels were back to normal. It was kind of a drag hanging out in the hospital so long, but we were glad that the doctors were playing it safe. The last thing we wanted to do was go home and then have to come back to the hospital. The staff at the hospital made sure that her stay was very comfortable and pain-free, and day by day she is getting back to her good ol' self.

We are glad to have this part of the process behind us, and we are both very much looking forward to having some quiet time at home. Claire's mom Ellie has been here the whole time, which has been a huge help. Claire has lots of support and told me to send out a big thank you to everyone who has been pulling for her over the last few weeks. I too am grateful to have such a caring and supportive network of family and friends!

Angoulême Trip Canceled

This morning I was scheduled to get on a flight to France, so that I could attend the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême. I was very much looking forward to meeting some of my French readers and signing copies of the French edition of Basewood, but unfortunately I had to cancel this trip. To explain why, I have to go back a few months. There has been a lot going on...

The day before Thanksgiving Claire was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. It is a very treatable form of cancer and all the doctors reassured us that everything is going to be fine, but this is still pretty horrible news to receive.

If you are a cartoonist, you might be thinking to yourself, "Papillary thyroid cancer? That sounds so familiar..." That's because it is the exact same kind of cancer that Laura Park was diagnosed with last year. She has undergone the treatment (thyroid removal, low iodine diet, then radioactive iodine) and is doing well, which gives us great hope for Claire's treatment.

The night we found out about the cancer, I asked Claire to marry me, and she said yes. This is something we had been talking about for a while now, but it seemed like a good time to make it official. Not only would it vastly simplify all kinds of healthcare concerns, it also gave us something wonderful and joyous to fight back with against the cancer.

After many more doctor's appointments, and some stressful waiting, the surgery was finally set for January 15th. We planned out a very simple marriage ceremony for January 14th. Our parents all came out, Claire's from Santa Fe and mine from Seattle, and our friend Liz Prince came all the way from Boston (she is the whole reason we are together in the first place).

The civil ceremony was short and sweet, and so we were married on Monday morning at 9am in the Oakland Hall of Records! We had a nice brunch with our families, went to Sears for some wedding portraits and later that night ate a delicious ice cream cake from Fenton's. We fully plan on having a bigger celebration later on down the road (in 2014?) with all of our friends and family, but for the time being this did the trick.

The next morning we reported to the hospital at 8am for Claire's surgery. They got her prepped, put the IV in her arm and then I sat with her, next to her hospital bed, waiting for the doctors to come in and wheel her away. The surgery was set to begin at 10am.

At 9:30am one of Claire's surgeons walked into the room wearing his street clothes, and told us that his retina was beginning to detach and that the surgery would have to be rescheduled. This was obviously quite a shock!

Claire's parents were planning on staying a few days after the surgery to help us out, so their flights had to be changed, and Claire and I had basically cleared our work schedules for the next few weeks, so we had to rearrange all of that stuff as well. Worst of all, we were back playing the waiting game again.

Originally, Claire's surgery was on the 15th, which we hoped would allow enough time for her to be pretty much back on her feet by the time I had to leave for Angoulême. Unfortunately her surgery was rescheduled for the 31st, right smack dab in the middle of my trip.

Canceling the trip is an easy call to make, as I obviously need to be here with Claire to make sure she is okay and to help her with her recovery, but I am sad that I won't be going to the festival. I was very much looking forward to going again and meeting some of my French fans. Oh well! Maybe there will be a French festival later in the year that I can attend.

As announced on the L'employé du Moi blog, if you buy a copy of Basewood at Angoulême, make sure to leave your name and address at the table. I will mail you a hand-drawn dedication!

So... it has been a hectic start to 2013 to say the least! We both wanted to wait until Claire was on the road to recovery before publicly sharing all this information, which is why I have been so quiet about this. Now however, it is affecting my professional obligations, so we decided to spill the beans.

Please send good thoughts Claire's way on Thursday. Now that everything is public, I will be posting updates here on the blog about how Claire is doing. It seems like the easiest way to share information with all our friends and family.

Angoulême Trip Canceled

This morning I was scheduled to get on a flight to France, so that I could attend the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême. I was very much looking forward to meeting some of my French readers and signing copies of the French edition of Basewood, but unfortunately I had to cancel this trip. To explain why, I have to go back a few months. There has been a lot going on...

The day before Thanksgiving Claire was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. It is a very treatable form of cancer and all the doctors reassured us that everything is going to be fine, but this is still pretty horrible news to receive.

If you are a cartoonist, you might be thinking to yourself, "Papillary thyroid cancer? That sounds so familiar..." That's because it is the exact same kind of cancer that Laura Park was diagnosed with last year. She has undergone the treatment (thyroid removal, low iodine diet, then radioactive iodine) and is doing well, which gives us great hope for Claire's treatment.

The night we found out about the cancer, I asked Claire to marry me, and she said yes. This is something we had been talking about for a while now, but it seemed like a good time to make it official. Not only would it vastly simplify all kinds of healthcare concerns, it also gave us something wonderful and joyous to fight back with against the cancer.

After many more doctor's appointments, and some stressful waiting, the surgery was finally set for January 15th. We planned out a very simple marriage ceremony for January 14th. Our parents all came out, Claire's from Santa Fe and mine from Seattle, and our friend Liz Prince came all the way from Boston (she is the whole reason we are together in the first place).

The civil ceremony was short and sweet, and so we were married on Monday morning at 9am in the Oakland Hall of Records! We had a nice brunch with our families, went to Sears for some wedding portraits and later that night ate a delicious ice cream cake from Fenton's. We fully plan on having a bigger celebration later on down the road (in 2014?) with all of our friends and family, but for the time being this did the trick.

The next morning we reported to the hospital at 8am for Claire's surgery. They got her prepped, put the IV in her arm and then I sat with her, next to her hospital bed, waiting for the doctors to come in and wheel her away. The surgery was set to begin at 10am.

At 9:30am one of Claire's surgeons walked into the room wearing his street clothes, and told us that his retina was beginning to detach and that the surgery would have to be rescheduled. This was obviously quite a shock!

Claire's parents were planning on staying a few days after the surgery to help us out, so their flights had to be changed, and Claire and I had basically cleared our work schedules for the next few weeks, so we had to rearrange all of that stuff as well. Worst of all, we were back playing the waiting game again.

Originally, Claire's surgery was on the 15th, which we hoped would allow enough time for her to be pretty much back on her feet by the time I had to leave for Angoulême. Unfortunately her surgery was rescheduled for the 31st, right smack dab in the middle of my trip.

Canceling the trip is an easy call to make, as I obviously need to be here with Claire to make sure she is okay and to help her with her recovery, but I am sad that I won't be going to the festival. I was very much looking forward to going again and meeting some of my French fans. Oh well! Maybe there will be a French festival later in the year that I can attend.

As announced on the L'employé du Moi blog, if you buy a copy of Basewood at Angoulême, make sure to leave your name and address at the table. I will mail you a hand-drawn dedication!

So... it has been a hectic start to 2013 to say the least! We both wanted to wait until Claire was on the road to recovery before publicly sharing all this information, which is why I have been so quiet about this. Now however, it is effecting my professional obligations, so we decided to spill the beans.

Please send good thoughts Claire's way on Thursday. Now that everything is public, I will be posting updates here on the blog about how Claire is doing. It seems like the easiest way to share information with all our friends and family.

Phase 7 #017 Sneak Preview!

I have uploaded the first ten pages of Phase 7 #017 as a sneak preview. This will be the first issue of the "Weezer Fan" trilogy which will cover Phase 7 #017-#019.

I am hard at work inking the last few pages of this issue. Then all I need to do is tone the rest of the pages and get it printed. Phase 7 #017 should go out to the Phase 7 subscribers in early February, so please let me know if you moved in 2012! Once all the subscribers have their copies, I will make the issue available to order online. Keep an eye on this blog for more info soon!

CCS Portfolio Day at the Cartoon Art Museum

This Saturday I will be hosting a Center for Cartoon Studies Portfolio Day at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. It should be pretty fun! I'm going to talk about the CCS program, along with alumni DW, and Jon Fine. There will also be a digital art demonstration by the incredibly talented Jenny Hansen and then at 3pm we will wrap up the day with a screening of the Cartoon College documentary.

If you are a west coast cartoonist who is interested in CCS, this is a great chance to learn more about it, without having to trek across the country to White River Junction, Vermont. Space is limited, so if you are interested, you should sign up. See you there!

Basewood Publishing Update

About a year ago I released Phase 7 #009 which contained the last chapter of my first graphic novel, Basewood. I sent it out to all the Phase 7 subscribers, sold a bunch of copies through my website and went to a slew of comics shows to move the rest. A few weeks ago I sold the last of the 500 copies that comprised the first printing.

As far as my plans for Phase 7, this is all on schedule. I try to set my print runs so that an issue lasts for about a year. Once a book goes out of print, I usually put the whole thing up in the Phase 7 Online Archive and then once I have enough issues out of print, I create a print on demand collection using Lulu.com. Unfortunately, I do not feel comfortable doing that this time around.

Back when I was thinking about applying for the last Xeric grant, I printed up six copies of Basewood using Lulu.com and the results were not good. The full-bleed sections were all cropped incorrectly, and the flashback scenes with black gutters were smeared and unevenly printed because of the amount of ink on the page. I spent too long on Basewood to see it reproduced in such a crummy way.

After crunching the self-publishing numbers and a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally decided to abandon my Xeric application and focus on trying to get the book traditionally published. Editors at Fantagraphics, Dark Horse and Secret Acres expressed interest in Basewood and over the last nine months I offered it to each publisher in turn, and waited patiently for their responses. All three were very kind with praise for the book, but have ultimately decided not to publish it.

So now I'm trying to figure out what to do. I'm not excited about the prospect of trying to cold call publishers who have not expressed interest in Basewood, but I want to make sure I have left no stone unturned. I'm also not quite ready to pull the trigger on self-publishing it either. I worked hard on this book (eleven years of my life!) and I would like to get it into as many hands as possible. I know that most publishers would have a wider reach than I could achieve on my own.

So I guess this long, messy blog post is my solution. I'm putting all the information out there, with the idea that people can pass it around, and perhaps some publisher will read this and want to publish Basewood. If so, here are some things to consider:

I drew Basewood extremely large, with a lot of detail, so it needs to be printed at least 8.5" x11" if not a little larger
I would prefer the book to be hardback, so that the pages are not flopping around in the reader's hands
The book is black and white, 216 pages with full bleed
I would gladly waive any payment for higher production values (see above) or more complementary copies of the book
I have a large network of readers from my Phase 7 subscriber database and years of teaching at CCS. I am confident that I can personally sell 500 copies of the book within the first year of publication
I plan on going on a book tour once Basewood is published to promote the book, the details of which I am already beginning to plan
The French edition (pictured above) is being marketed as a Y.A. graphic novel
The first chapter of Basewood won the 2005 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Minicomic

If anyone is interested in publishing Basewood, or knows someone who might be, please contact me (my first name @ this website). I have a PDF I can send along for someone to review the book. If I do not hear from any publishers in the next month or so, I will start gearing up to self-publish the book.

In the meantime, I took down the Basewood minicomics for sale from this site, and I do not intend to continue reprinting them. If anyone missed the last chapter or needs to fill in a hole in their collection, drop me a line and we can work something out.

Claire: Part One

Twelve years ago I vowed to draw one 24-Hour Comic every year, for the rest of my life. This year, I really did not feel like doing one. Also, I was running out of 2012 in which to do it!

Then, this week I managed to rearrange my schedule so that I could draw all day today. There is a reason I made the vow, after all! Even when I don't want to do a 24-Hour Comic, I should still do one. I might even argue that it's more important to do a 24-Hour Comic when I feel like I don't want to do one. It is a chance to break out of whatever project I am stuck on and try something new. Or a chance to just sit down and CREATE something in one fell swoop. Or a chance to spend 24 hours meditating on one topic, and exploring it through comics.

This year's 24-Hour Comic felt very similar to my 2007 comic about my best friend Gabe. I drew that one the week before Gabe moved to New York City, and I used it as a chance to reflect back on the many different iterations our friendship had undergone.

This time, I focused on my girlfriend, Claire and the story of how we met, and fell in love. We are heading into some crazy new territory together in the new year, so I thought it would be good to spend a day thinking about how we got here. I plan on doing a part two (and maybe three!) in the future.

I'm leaving tomorrow to spend the holidays with my parents, so I drew the comic super small (4.25" x 5.5") and had a maximum of four panels per page - some pages only have two panels - to save time. I was able to draw the whole thing in under 12 hours. I'm glad I did it, but now I need to get ready for my trip and write a bunch of emails that I neglected today.

Anyway, you can read the whole thing over in the comics section. Happy Holidays everybody!

Phase 7 #016 is now online!

Phase 7 #016 is now available to read online, in its entirety. In the new year I will be gathering Phase 7 #012 - #016 into one giant print-on-demand collection for anyone who wants to put these comics on their bookshelf. If that's not you, then at least they are all in the Phase Seven Online Archive, so you can still read them digitally for FREE!

In other news, the lecture I gave at the University of Oregon a few weeks ago has been posted online as a YouTube video. So anyone is now welcome to watch and/or listen to it.

The end of the semester is approaching quickly, so I'm just trying to keep my nose down and get everything on my many lists checked off. It's going to be a doozie of a Winter Break!

Cereal Boxes!

A few years ago, I built a custom shelf to hold all of my minicomics. This has worked quite well, and it was a huge step forward in getting my minicomics organized.

When Claire moved in with me however, she complained that the shelf was inscrutable. Although the minicomics were separated by size, there was no other cataloguing system, so it was impossible to find a specific minicomic, or if she found one she liked, she couldn't find another minicomic by the same artist. I vaguely knew where everything was, in the same way I know where everything is on my cluttered desk, but this didn't help Claire out.

When we moved from Vermont to Oakland, I used it as an opportunity to organize my minicomics once and for all. Instead of just throwing them willy-nilly into boxes, I sorted through everything and placed minicomics by my favorite creators into mailing envelopes. I had about a hundred of these, each with a few minicomics in them. The rest I put into boxes.

Ever since we set up our apartment in Oakland, I have been saving cereal boxes, which I then cut down and label, so that they can hold minicomics. I have about 50 so far, and it has made a world of difference. I can easily locate anything I need, I know where to put it back when I'm done, if I get a new minicomic by one of my favorite creators I have a place to put it, and Claire can finally decipher the collection. Once I have all of the artist envelops moved into boxes, I'm going to create some A-Z boxes for the miscellaneous minicomics that are still floating around unsorted on the other shelves.

Anyway, this is an inexpensive and fun way to help organize minicomics, which I thought people might find useful, so I thought I'd share!

10 Years of Phase Seven Comics!

Ten years ago today, on December 3rd 2002, I picked up Phase 7 #001 from the printer in Los Angeles. I still remember sitting in the back of my car, signing copies before my shift at work. I was full of excitement, ready to share my comics with the world.

Over the last ten years, I put out sixteen issues of Phase 7 (most of which can be read in the next ten years, and many more after that. Thanks to everyone who has supported Phase 7 for the last ten years, especially the Phase 7 subscribers, I quite literally could not have done it without you!