Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 22

Zozobra 2012

Claire and I just returned from a weekend trip to her home town for the Fiesta de Santa Fe. While there we got to see the burning of Zozobra, which Claire has wanted me to see for years and years. Usually I can't come because it's the same weekend as SPX, but luckily this year they were one week apart, so I finally got to see the spectacle! There were also cool parades and music and food carts and other fun local Santa Fe stuff all weekend long. Claire took a bunch of pictures if you would like to check them out.

I was sick all last week, but I managed to finish all the Basewood corrections the night before we left for our trip. Now that we are back I am feeling better, which is a good thing, because there is another busy week ahead! On Wednesday I teach my first Professional Practices class at CCS (via Google Plus), which will be an interesting experiment and then on Friday I leave for SPX!

I'll put up another post before I leave to list my table number and the various panels I'll be participating in, but for now I need to continue trying to catch up on email. More soon!

San Francisco Zine Fest this weekend!

The San Francisco Zine Fest is this weekend! I will be tabling with my good buddy Greg from Tugboat Press who is coming down from Portland. We will be at table 56 and we will be selling the following cool stuff:

Greg will have his new Clutch/Invincible Summer split and free copies of Runner Runner, as well as a bunch of Papercutters, and I will have Drop Target Zines, a bunch of issues of Phase 7 and even a few copies of The Dvorak Zine (old school!) which I unearthed during the move. If you are in the bay area, please swing by and say hello, there is going to be lots of amazing stuff there this weekend!

Basewood Corrections

Yikes! Another week has passed by in a blur. I spent most of it in front of my computer, working on corrections for the L'employé du Moi edition of Basewood. It's not fun work, but as you can see above, it is really going to tighten up the book and make things look a lot more consistent. Many of the changes will only be noticed by me, but I think that small stuff is important! I just want to be able to flip through the whole book and not cringe at any of the little mistakes.

Claire's brother Natch was here for a few days and now my sister Courtney is here, so I'm getting a chance to explore San Francisco a bit with our houseguests. It's good to get out from behind the computer once a day and to get some fresh air in my lungs!

Upcoming Comics Events!

After a week of rearranging things, I'm starting to feel pretty well settled here in Oakland. I built a new and improved standing desk for my computer workspace, which I have been using to chip away at all kinds of different projects.

Now that I've got the present figured out, it's time to start thinking about the future! I had a big phone meeting with Greg today, and we have figured out the list of fall shows where we will be tabling:

San Francisco Zine Fest 2012 - September 1st & 2nd in San Francisco, CA
Small Press Expo 2012 - September 15th & 16th in Bethesda, MD
Alternative Press Expo 2012 - October 13th & 14th in San Francisco, CA
Short Run 2012 - November 3rd in Seattle, WA
Angoulême 2013 - January 31st - February 3rd in Angoulême, France

Actually, Greg will not be joining me at Angoulême this year, but I am very excited to return to France to help promote the French edition of Basewood, which will be released in November! I have been working on the covers, endpapers and corrections which are all due by the end of this month. Speaking of which, I better get back to it...

In closing, I'll point out the obvious: if you live in one of the cities listed above, I hope very much that I will see you at one of those shows!

So Long, East Coast

Well, I'm sitting in the CCS lab, getting ready to leave White River Junction once and for all. This time I'm not just leaving Vermont though, I'm leaving the entire east coast.

One of my students recently remarked that it was so weird to think of me being on the west coast, because he thought of me as an "east coast cartoonist." This seemed way off to me, because internally I feel like a west coast cartoonist, probably because I grew up on the west coast, and started Phase 7 out there. But really, if I look back, I only drew Phase 7 #001-#005 on the west coast, which took three years. #006-#016 were drawn in Manhattan, Brooklyn and White River Junction over a period of seven years, so I can't blame him for thinking of me as an east coaster.

When a big life experience like this comes to an end, I tend to look back at its beginning. It's crazy to think that almost exactly eight years ago, I arrived in New York City. Although this website has been up since 1999, my move to New York also marked version 3.0 of this blog which is as far back as the archives go. From that first post to this post, this blog now documents my entire east coast experience... it has been a wild ride!

I originally moved from Portland to New York because I felt like my cartooning skills had plateaued and I wanted to go back to school, to study art. I was a moody, heartbroken 24 year old. I learned so much in New York... sure, about art at Pratt, but also a lot about life. It was a messy and busy and frantic time, but along the way I met a bunch of cool people and made some great friends.

I moved to Vermont because I was having a hard time getting work done on Basewood. Up here I learned even more about art, from the other side of the teacher's desk, and met an incredible array of students, artists and colleagues. I started to save some money for the first time in my life, met Claire and finished my book - everything felt like it was falling into place. Now I'm 32, and I'm heading back to the west coast a much stronger cartoonist, and a happier man.

I won't miss the heat and humidity, or the long winters, but I will definitely miss all the amazing people I have met and known over on this side of the country. I've long since learned that life is a sequence, and it's best not to have big dramatic good-byes, because before you know it, you will see people again. Especially in the comics community, where there are so many chances for our tribe to gather.

So instead of good-bye, I'll say see you soon to my east coast friends, and thanks for all the good times!

Star Wars Viewing Order

About six months ago, Joe Lambert mentioned to me that he had "never really" watched Star Wars before. He had seen the prequels when they came out, and he had watched a version of Return of the Jedi that had been recorded off of TV when he was a kid, but he had never really sat down and watched A New Hope or Empire Strikes back without distractions, from start to finish. He said he wanted to watch them with me, because I deeply love Star Wars.

I was so down with this, it's not even funny.

Unfortunately, when Joe sprang this idea on me, I was neck-deep in my Acting Director, teaching and freelance duties. We literally tried four different times to set up a plan for watching the films, but we couldn't get our schedules to match up. When I came back to Vermont this summer, I knew we'd finally have the time, so I brought them with me.

A week or so before we started, Claire sent me a link to this excellent blog post, which examines in great detail all of the possible viewing orders and their strengths and weaknesses. After reading it and discussing with Joe, we decided to watch 4, 5, 1, 2, 3 and then 6.

We started when I got back from Belgium, and we have been watching one or two of the movies each weekend, along with Joe's wife Becca. We just finished today, and I have to say, I 100% approve of this viewing order.

It provides the proper introduction to The Force, doesn't ruin the surprise of who Yoda is, or that Darth Vader is Luke's father. Then when you dive into the prequels, it's like one big flashback where you learn all of Anakin's back story, and how Palpatine came to power. Revenge of the Sith is such a downer, but instead of being the last thing you watch, you then get to watch Return of the Jedi, which ties up all the loose ends. Plus, it is so much more powerful watching the final scenes of Return of the Jedi with all of Revenge of the Sith fresh in your mind.

Anyway, every once in a while I meet someone who has never seen Star Wars, and I feel obligated to FORCE them to watch it. This will be the order I use from now on, and I suggest you do the same!

Workshop Home Stretch

We finished off another CCS Summer Workshop yesterday. This one was especially exciting because it was the first class ever taught in CCS's new Post Office Building. Above is a picture I took of the inaugural comics created in the new classroom. It's kind of a bummer that I won't get to teach in this amazing new space next semester, so I'm really happy that it was ready in time for us to use it this summer.

All that remains is three days of "Extended Studio" and then my teaching duties for this summer will be complete. Because of some weird scheduling stuff, I don't actually fly back to California until the 5th of August, so I will have a few last days in Vermont to try and finish off some odd projects and tie up loose ends. It will be sad leaving all the great friends and colleagues I have made here, but I am definitely ready to be back in California with Claire and the bunnies, where I belong.

I'm working on lots of cool stuff and I'm hoping to be very productive with the rest of my 2012, so I should have tons more posts on the way. I've only posted nine times this year, which is pathetic... It's time to hop back on the Blogging Bus. Honk honk!

On Speculation

A guy emailed me last night, looking for a cartoonist to create characters and storyboard some pilot episodes for a TV show that he wants to pitch to a network. I told him I had no interest in working in television and he suggested that I might pass along the info to The Center for Cartoon Studies alumni, via the CCS message board. Payment would be "a partnership percentage in the production company." I told him this was spec work and I could not post it, which he did not understand. Below is the email response which I sent him. I get offers like this every once in a while, and the school gets them all the time, so I thought I would publicly post my response, with the hopes of cutting down on these types of unwanted and insulting offers.

Hi [name removed],

Movies, TV and Mainstream Publishing are all "hit" based industries, meaning that about 1-10% of the content created is actually profitable. This means that as an artist, there is a 90-99% chance that projects in these industries will NOT be profitable. Therefore, work in these industries that does not pay up front is referred to as "spec" work (short for "speculation" or "speculate verb - invest in stocks, property, or other ventures in the hope of gain but with the risk of loss").

Why should a freelance artist absorb the risk for YOUR concept? Whether or not your idea is going to be successful is YOUR gamble, not ours. If you want talented people to develop good ideas (and increase your chances to be in the 1-10% of profitable content) you should pay your creators. Even if the contract is "work for hire" (meaning the creators do not retain any of copyrights for the characters they create), they need to be compensated for their time and the expertise which they are providing. You can find fair rates in the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook - Pricing and Ethical Guidelines.

In short, most freelancers (including all of our alumni) are highly trained individuals, who have bills to pay every month. We can not spend our time working for free, with the hope that someday our efforts will pay off, especially with those odds. If YOU are taking a chance to produce YOUR idea, then YOU need to raise money to pay talented people to generate great content. Then if YOUR idea is successful, YOU will reap the rewards.

I hope for your sake, that your idea is in the upper 1% and that you enjoy success with your endeavor. I would be very happy to look back on this email in ten years and say, "Darn! I could have worked on that great project!" But here, right now, with bills to pay and only 24 hours in each day with which to work, I can not afford to work on spec projects, and it is a CCS policy to not pass on such projects to our students.

Best of luck with your TV show,

Alec Longstreth.

If anyone is still confused, you can check out the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) page on spec work.

Another Workshop Complete!

Yesterday we wrapped up another successful CCS Summer Workshop. You can see some photos from the week in this Flickr set. The highlight of the week was when the students undertook our annual "Connect the Plot" challenge, which Aaron and I invented back in 2005.

Above is the cover for the book, which is quite possibly the craziest screen printing I've ever seen (dreamed up by bookmaking mastermind Jon Chad). Basically, the class invented an ice planet for our story, so we used blue paper with a vellum overlay that was screen printed with white ink on one side (not shown) and blue ink on the backside. The main character is seen skating through the snow on the cover, but when you open it up, she's racing towards The Sweaty Yeti (our bad guy). It's always really fun to jam out these covers while the students are creating the story. I think it might have been our best one yet!

On Friday, after the last class, we moved all of the tables and chairs into CCS's new Post Office building. I am super excited that I will get to teach the first ever class in the new space. It's a lucky thing that the first class is happening this summer, because I won't be here in the fall!

Liz and Maris are coming up to hang out with Aaron and me tomorrow, so I'll get to cram in a few hours of summer fun before the next workshop kicks off!

Belgium!

I've been back in the USA for a few days now, but I only just found the time to upload some photos from my trip. They are in this Belgium 2012 photo set, if you would like to check them out. I annotated everything, so it can walk you through some of the highlights of my trip.

I also wrote a post for the Drop Target blog all about playing pinball in Europe, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

I had high hopes of doing a bunch of drawings while I was on the trip and then making a zine out of them when I got back to the USA, but once I got over there, I felt like just taking a real break for once in my life. And I did!

It was great. Max and Thalie were such gracious hosts, and they showed me so many different great parts of their beautiful country. I'd say how much I wish I could visit again soon, but as luck would have it, I will be heading back to Europe in January to help promote the French version of Basewood at Angoulême 2013! For now I just need to dig in on the corrections and a few of the last design elements.

Another round of CCS Summer Workshops start tomorrow... busy busy!