Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 23

One Workshop Down!

My first week back in Vermont was a whirlwind of activity. The CCS Summer Workshop. It's going to be a busy summer!

Boomerang Summer

Well, Claire and I made it safely across these United States. For all the details about our trip, check out Claire's great blog entry, which includes photos of the trip and links to all the state parks we camped at along the way.

Since arriving in Oakland, we have been checking a lot of stuff off of our move-in list: setting up our work spaces, getting a bank account, setting up the first-ever Phase 7 Post Office Box! (listed on the homepage), getting our new drivers licenses, registering to vote, etc. etc.

Ironically, after exerting all of this energy to get settled out here in Oakland, I am hopping on a plane tonight to head back to Vermont! Here's what the next six weeks hold for me:

June 25-29: I will be a faculty member of the new CCS Children's Book Summer Workshop
July 1-11: I'm going to visit Max and Thalie in Belgium!
July 12-August 3: I will help teach the rest of the CCS Summer Workshops. I think there is still some space available, if people want to sign up!

In my spare time I will be working on four big projects:

Penciling Phase 7 #017 - This will be the first of a three-issue arc called The Weezer Fan Trilogy. The first issue focuses on The Blue Album. I'm hoping to have this done by the end of the summer!
Coloring Walker Bean 2 - Aaron has drawn some amazing pages, and now it's time for me to color them in. Trust me, this book will be well worth the wait!
Basewood Corrections - The are dozens of little things that need to be fixed throughout the book, and they need to be done by early autumn, because the French edition of Basewood will be out in November!
Penciling Isle of Elsi - I finally finished the fourth (and FINAL!) draft of my first big Isle of Elsi story. In the photo above, you can see our kitchen table, which I took over while finishing up the script. I got some great feedback on the third draft from James Sturm, and last year's CCS seniors, which I incorporated into the story. It is hard work editing comics without screwing up all of the page turns and everything, but in the end the changes really strengthened the story. I'm so excited to finally start penciling some pages for this, my next big comics project!

I will also be working on some fun, smaller projects along the way. I'll post about those on here as they happen. In the meantime, I hope everyone's summer is getting off to a great start!

On the Road Again

Hear ye! Hear ye! The blogging hiatus is OVER! I met with James Sturm yesterday and turned over all of my Acting Director projects and papers, so this crazy semester is finally at an end.

A few weeks ago Claire and I flew out to the Bay Area to find an apartment in Oakland. It took a few days, but we did find a place. Then we had a few days to relax and have fun before returning to Vermont to finish off all of our packing.

We leave tomorrow! Above, you can see our approximate route, which should be pretty fun. Our goal is to only drive eight hours a day, and to camp along the way. We're also stopping in Santa Fe to see Claire's parents.

I'll be in Oakland for about two weeks before returning to Vermont for the CCS Summer Workshops.

Obviously, there is still a lot going on in my life right now, but I wanted to break the blogging hiatus and start talking about some of that stuff on here! So hopefully once we make it across the USA I'll start posting more often.

In the meantime, I am not going to have email access on this trip, so any Phase 7 orders will be sent out on Monday, June 11th. Sorry for the delay!

2012 Update: Oakland! Etc.

As predicted, this has been a very busy semester for me so far. Since I'm almost half way through, I thought I would quickly post a few updates:

1) Claire and I have decided that we will be moving to Oakland, California! There are a few toy companies in the bay area that Claire is interested in, it's relatively close to both our families, we both have friends there, etc. etc. etc. Anyway, it feels good to finally know WHERE we are heading. The plan is to move at the end of this school year. I'll be back in WRJ again for a good portion of the summer to help out with the CCS Summer Workshops, but come mid-August that will be our home for the foreseeable future.

2) After even MORE hemming and hawing, I decided at the very last minute to NOT apply for the last Xeric grant. I won't go into all the details, but basically after researching everything, I realized it would not be feasible to self-publish the book the way I want it to be made. Instead, I am now going to attempt to get Basewood traditionally published. For now, that means staying focused on the French edition, which is due out later this year. I am working with the gang at L'employé du Moi on the book design, a suitable cover image and dozens of much-needed art corrections. Once I have that all sorted out I can try to figure things out on this side of the Atlantic.

3) On the scripting front, I finished my third draft of the Isle of Elsi story. It only needs one more round of corrections before it will be ready to draw, which I should be able to get done by the end of the semester. I also finished the script for the first part of my big Weezer story. So I'll have a nice big stack of stuff to dive into and draw this summer.

Okay, that's it for now. I'll do my best to post again if anything important pops up. Otherwise, I'll get this blog back on track this summer.

2012 Blogging Hiatus

Last week I went home to Seattle for a few days, to visit my family. I'm back in Vermont now, and as far as I can tell, that trip was the calm before the storm.

This semester is going to be my busiest yet at CCS. In addition to co-teaching Publication Workshop with Jon Chad and Senior Thesis Seminar with Steve Bissette, I am also going to be standing in as Acting Director this semester while James Sturm is on sabbatical.

This position is a lot of responsibility, and it is also going to require a lot of my time. I've been trying to figure out some areas of my life where I can cut back this semester, and sadly, I feel that this blog is one of them!

So instead of breaking big news up into separate blog posts as I usually do, I thought I would just do one big MEGA-post tonight, outlining all of the stuff I am going to be working on this semester and my plans for the future, and then I can take a blogging break until this summer. Without further ado, here is just such a post:

1) Basewood! The story is done, but there is still a lot of work to be done to make it into a book. Max has finished the translation and we are currently working on all the production ins and outs for the French edition, which should be out from L'employé du Moi before the end of the year. It is going to be big and beautiful and I can't wait to hold it in my hands. "But Alec!" I hear you ask, "What about an English edition?!" Well...

2) After some serious hemming and hawing, I have decided that I'm going to toss my hat in the ring for the very last Xeric grant. If I am awarded the grant, cool! I will self-publish the book and put it in people's hands. If I am not awarded the grant, I will start exploring other options...

3) Meanwhile at my drawing table, I am going to be scripting new comics projects which will hopefully be released later in the year, or in the near future. They include: A) a two-issue run of Phase 7 all about my favorite band, Weezer B) a fantasy webcomic for kids that I'm working on called Isle of Elsi and C) a picture book I am illustrating which was written by my sister, Galen Goodwin Longstreth.

4) I will also be finishing up the colors for Aaron's second Walker Bean book this semester, though who knows when that will be released. Big publishing moves pretty slowly.

5) I'm still going to create paintings for the 100 Watercolors challenge on my illustration blog. I need to keep up with that site, because I might need to start freelancing again soon...

Aha, yes, you see, the BIGGEST news of the bunch is that Claire and I have decided to move back to the west coast at the end of this semester (!?!) We're not sure exactly where yet, but we both want to be closer to our families (in Seattle and Santa Fe respectively), so it'll be somewhere over there in the West. Claire is all set up to attend Toy Fair 2012 in February, so hopefully she'll be able to do some good research and networking, which may give us some hint of where to head next.

Annnnd, I think that's about it! As you can see, it's going to be a very busy time. If you're dying to know what I'm up to, I'll still be updating my twitter account, which also reposts on the homepage of this site. Of course, now that I've said I won't use this blog until the summer, I'm sure something really exciting will happen and I'll be tempted to post... I'll get to it if I can, but I might be too busy!

Happy Holidays!

Wow, TWO full weeks without a post... I guess I've been taking a real winter break up here in Vermont. Here are some of the things I have been doing since the big haircut:

1) Packing up Basewood orders and mailing them out. All subscriber copies have been mailed and they have arrived safely as far away as Paris and Brussels, so if you have not received yours yet, drop me a line!

2) Claire and I went down to Boston for a weekend, to celebrate our friend Liz's 30th birthday, at an excellent '60s-themed party thrown by our friends Maris and Joe.

3) While in Boston, we went to the 7th Annual Yule Ball, which had tons of great wizard rock bands, including one of my favorite bands ever, Harry and the Potters.

4) On the same day we left for Boston, my copy of The Pinkerton Diaries and Alone III arrived in the mail, so I spent my bus rides to and from Beantown listening to new (old) Rivers Cuomo music and pouring over all 237 pages of his diary entries, photographs, sheet music, essays, articles, letters, charts and lyrics from 1994 -1997. As a Weezer fan who has always loved Pinkerton, it is an incredible glimpse into Rivers's creative process, and some of the horrible stuff he was going through during the album's conception. Also, my photo with Rivers is featured on page 184!

5) Back in Vermont, I built a new sketchbook.

6) A few days later, Claire arrived back from Boston along with her father, who had flown in all the way from Santa Fe. We have been hanging out with him ever since - eating lots of yummy food, watching movies, going for walks, drinking tea and just in general taking it easy.

With Christmas over and done, I'm now looking towards the new year... 2012 promises to be a very crazy year for me. The Spring 2012 semester is going to be my busiest yet, and there are a lot of big changes on the horizon as well. But more about that later!

For now, I hope that everyone is having a happy holidays. Let's all do our best to make 2012 a good year!

Basewood Wrap-up & Ordering Info

Hey check it out, I got a haircut! Below are a plethora of links associated with this momentous occasion:

1) At the last minute, (well, a few hours before the haircut), I figured out use LiveStream to broadcast the haircut across the internet. This was so awesome because it allowed friends to tune in from faraway lands such as Indonesia and Austria, as well as all across the USA. The whole event is archived on LiveStream if you would like to watch it.

2) If you don't have an hour to watch the whole video, you can check out the haircut highlights in this great Flickr set by my pal Beth Hetland who flew out all the way from Chicago to witness the event (!?!) She also helped me with the printing of the books, adding a deluxe face trim to each copy. Thanks Beth!

3) Besides giving me the final haircut, Claire also edited together this amazing video of all my Basewood photos, which we showed before the haircut:

4) Last, but definitely not least, Phase 7 #009 is finally available to order! And now that Basewood is complete, I thought it would be cool to offer a "multipack" to simplify shipping for people that want all five chapters. I'm making it the same price as a Phase 7 Subscription, so it'll also save people a few bucks! When you order this, you will get all five chapters of Basewood in their minicomic form. This is $7.00 cheaper than ordering all of the individual chapters in the USA, $7.50 cheaper to Canada and a whopping $13.75 cheaper for international customers!

I'm going to spend all day tomorrow getting the subscriber copies ready, so keep an eye on those mailboxes. There are comics on the way!

Phase 7 #009 is done! Haircut Friday!!!

After a long radio silence, I am pleased to announce that I finished drawing Basewood Chapter 5 at 3am on Friday morning. A few hours later Claire and I jumped in a car with James Sturm and both of the current CCS Fellows, Julie Delporte and Blaise Laramee, and we all headed down to New York City for the weekend.

Julie and Blaise both headed out to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, which I sadly did not get to check out. But Claire and I ran a bunch of errands, James and I had a meeting with Al Jaffee (!!?!) and then Claire and I hung out with her extremely nice friends Amanda and Dustin.

We went and saw The Muppets which I LOVVVVVED. I pretty much cried through the entire movie. It was very cleverly written, the songs were great (I already bought the soundtrack and have been listening to it non-stop) and I think it will be very satisfying for hard core muppet fans as well as newcomers. Highly recommended!

Now that I'm back in WRJ, I'm in full-on production mode. As of this entry I have about half of the book scanned in, so I should be able to finish it up tonight and tomorrow. Wednesday I'll print, and as you can see above, on Friday I am having a book release party, which will be open to anyone who wants to attend. After a brief presentation, Claire is going to FINALLY cut off all my hair. We are going to tape it, so if you can't be there, you'll be able to watch it online.

If you are a Phase 7 subscriber and your address has changed since this summer PLEASE send me your current mailing address. Subscriber copies will be going out this week!

The Further Adventures of Marek Bennett

One of the key concepts I try to constantly remind my students is that you need to become an interesting person. There's that old adage, "write what you know" and the more you get out into the world to interact with people and have new experiences, the more material you'll have to draw from for your stories.

I think the best role model for this advice is Carl Barks, who didn't sit down to draw his first page of comics until he was 41 years old. Before that he had worked as a farm hand, a lumberjack, a railroad car repair man, a mule driver, a cowboy, a printer, a worker in a box factory, and probably a dozen other odd jobs, before he finally landed a gig drawing cartoons for the Calgary Eye-Opener and then an animator at the Disney studio. I firmly believe that it is because of these many life experiences that Barks was able to crank out more than 500 stories in 6,000+ pages of comics over the next 25 years. And what stories!

SIDE NOTE: Volume 1 of the new Carl Barks Library arrived and it is BEAUTIFUL. All of my apprehensions have been allayed. PLEASE buy this book! You will not regret it.

One modern-day cartoonist who embodies these ideals is my pal Marek Bennett. Not only is Marek a talented cartoonist, musician and educator, he is also quite the world traveler.

Currently, Marek is in Slovakia and he has created a blog to document his experiences there. It's fascinating to get a glimpse into another culture through Marek's eyes and to follow along with him as he learns the language and talks to various people and does research about art in churches and architecture and all kinds of other interesting stuff. Marek is great at capturing the humor in small moments and his simple, direct drawing style makes you feel like you are there while everything is happening (even though people are portrayed as bunnies!)

There's a donation page on the site, where you can preorder the book that will result from Marek's travels. If this forthcoming collection is anything like his Nicaragua Comics Travel Journal, it will be a graphic novel well worth having!

As for my own life experiences, I have nothing much to blog about right now because I am currently spending about 10 hours a day in front of my drawing table, trying to finish off Basewood (currently 94.64% done!) At the rate I'm going, I should have it done in a few weeks. I'll post all haircutting and book-ordering information on here, as it becomes available!

Obsession Check-In: MUPPETS

As if in answer to my last blog post, The Pinkerton Diaries became available for pre-order last night. Alone III looks to be everything I could have ever hoped for, including all of the remaining Songs From the Black Hole and demo versions of Susanne (my favorite Weezer song) and many other great Weezer tunes. I'm so thrilled that the book is hardback and 237 pages. I can't wait to sink my teeth into it. That'll be my reward for finishing Basewood... (if I can finish Basewood by the time it comes out, on December 12th!)

Anyway, the THIRD thing that I am really pumped about these days is the new Muppet Movie which is being released on November 23rd.

If you were to compare the Muppets to Star Wars, The Muppet Movie would be A New Hope, The Muppets Take Manhattan would be The Empire Strikes Back and The Great Muppet Caper would be Return of the Jedi. There have been other Muppet movies, just as there have been other Star Wars movies, but none of these sequels/prequels have ever been as satisfying as the classic trilogies.

When they announced a new Muppet movie, I was nervous. Even just looking at the poster above, I cringe a little. Listen Disney, as a Muppet fan, I could care less about Jason Segel or Amy Adams being in this movie. They are not the "star power" that's going to make me go see the movie, it's THE MUPPETS. If you look at the poster for The Muppet Movie it doesn't have a big picture of Steve Martin or Dom Delouise or any of the other humans that are in the movie, because it's not about them! It's about THE MUPPETS. I'm worried that Kermit the Frog is going to be some secondary supporting character to Jason Segel, when it should be the other way around.

All the trailers I have seen reaffirm this fear, and so I was preparing to go into this movie with very low expectations. But then this summer, I was talking to Aaron about the new Tintin movie. He was saying how excited he was about it, and I replied that I thought the trailers looked awful and that he should probably go in with low expectations. Aaron got really mad and threw that idea back in my face. "No!" he said, "It should not be that hard to make a good Tintin movie. I DESERVE to have high expectations!"

This was such a bold statement, it really made me think. And now I have adopted a similar stance for this new Muppet movie. Really, it should not be that hard to make a great Muppet movie. There are three great films to draw inspiration from - all the ingredients are there!

I watched this interview with Jason Segel where he describes bursting into tears at the first table-read of the movie, when Steve Whitmire pulled out the Kermit the Frog muppet. I'm pretty sure this is how any Muppet super-fan would react. And as Segel seems to be the one in charge of this project, it gives me hope that it might actually live up to my new, high expectations.