Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 7

A Very CCS July!

This week I'm heading back to White River Junction, Vermont for my fourteenth consecutive year being a faculty member of the summer workshops at The Center for Cartoon Studies.

This will be the third summer I've taught my Introduction to Hand-Drawn Animation workshop. It's so much fun for me to share my love of animation for a week, and it's always great seeing the work that the students create. I'm very lucky this summer to have current CCS student Tim Patton as a teaching assistant. Together we're gonna help the students get their drawings moving!

As part of my work as CCS's Director of Academic Outreach, I'm also helping CCS run their first-ever Kickstarter campaign this month. The goal is to raise $6,000 to help take their new comic book, This Is What Democracy Looks Like, out on a tour to share it with high school students around the USA. This project uses the power of comics to clarify how our government works, and the workshops will help empower young people to get involved at the local level.

It's projects like these, which I really believe in, which make it very rewarding to work for CCS!

It's Been So Long!

Earlier this year my all-time favorite band, Weezer, released their 2019 fan club exclusive 7" single, "It's Been So Long." I had the honor of illustrating the entire art package for this project!

I wrote a super in-depth process post about the creation of the illustrations over on my illustration blog. And then recently I was interviewed by John Carroll to talk about the song and the creation of the 7" art package on his excellent Post-Pinkerton Podcast. You can stream the episode right here:

We also talk about my book Weezer Fan, which was how John got introduced to my work. It was a lot of fun being on the podcast, and hopefully I can return in future episodes to talk about other songs!

If anyone out there would like to purchase a copy of this 7" record, the only way to get it is to join the weezer fan club. Get in there!!

Another Successful Kickstarter!

Last week the Isle of Elsi Book One Kickstarter successfully funded. It was the biggest goal I had ever set out to achieve on that platform ($16,600) though not the most I've ever raised (the Basweood Kickstarter ended up at $21,444).

The campaign took a lot of concerted, sustained promotional effort on my part and ended up funding about 48 hours before the deadline. I learned a lot during this process, and I'm filling up a Google Doc with analysis, tips, tricks and pointers to hopefully make future endeavors of a similar sort go more smoothly. I'll be sharing these insights with my backers in various future updates.

Now that the funding window and its promotion is finally over, I'm super excited to be switching into production mode. This book will be my biggest-ever self-publishing project: a four-color (CMYK), offset, 144-page hardback book. Once I've completed that, it really will feel like I can self-publish anything.

Thanks to all the 288 backers for making this book a reality, and thanks to the many more people who helped me spread the word about this project. I can't wait to get these comics off the internet and into book form, so I can get them into the hands of my intended readers - KIDS!

DiNK 2019 - Table 307!

This weekend (April 13th & 14th) I will be exhibiting at the Denver Independent Comics and Art Expo (aka DiNK). You'll find me up on the third floor at table 307. I'll of course have all my Phase 7 and Phase 8 wares for sale, and I'll also be representing The Center for Cartoon Studies, and doing my best to promote the Isle of Elsi Kickstarter. This convention is the first time I've ever been invited to be a special guest, so I'm extra excited for this show!

It's going to be a busy weekend! In addition to selling comics at my table, I'll also be participating in three panels. I'll list all the info below, in case any attendees want to come check these out - they should be a lot of fun!

The Center for Cartoon Studies Alumni Roundtable - Saturday, April 13th @ 4:45pm in the Eisner Nook. I will be moderating this discussion with CCS alums Anna Sellheim, Bridget Comeau and Melanie Gillman!

Fun for All Ages: Creating Content in an Adult-Oriented Industry - Sunday, April 14th @ 12:45pm in the Eisner Nook. This panel will be moderated by Dan Crosier, and I will be discussing this topic along with Elisa Sargent, Faith Erin Hicks, and Chad Sell.

Workshop: Pirates and Dragons! - Sunday, April 14th @ 3:00pm in the The Creative Space. Aaron Renier and I will be running this workshop for kids. Come draw some dragons with me!!!

If you are in the Denver area, do not miss this show! There are going to be hundreds of amazing indie cartoonists all in one spot. It's gonna be an absolute blast.

The Isle of Elsi Book One Kickstarter is LIVE!

For the last three years I have been working super hard on my free fantasy adventure webcomic for kids, Isle of Elsi.

Today I launched a Kickstarter campaign to collect the first three stories into a 144-page hardback book.

I'm so excited to finally get these comics into book form so that it's easier to share them with my intended audience... kids!

The stories are in the same vein as Basewood, but lighthearted, with more jokes and a much nicer dragon :) There's also wizards, magic, talking wolves and lots of silly wordplay.

I'm just one person trying to reach this big goal, so I appreciate any and all help spreading the word about this project. Thanks for checking it out!

The LANDLUBBER Tour!

My old pal Aaron Renier and I are both special guests at this year's Denver Independent Comics and Art Expo (aka DiNK), so we thought it would be fun to put together a little tour in New Mexico before we head on up to Denver.

Aaron will be promoting his new graphic novel The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon and I'll be promoting Shorts, the seventh collection of my minicomic Phase 7, which is hot off the press.

Since I colored both of Aaron's Walker Bean books, we're going to kick off our signings with a short presentation about how we collaborated in the creation and coloring of Aaron's swashbuckling, high-seas adventure series. We'll then hang out, answer questions and sign books.

On Wednesday April 10th we'll be at Big Adventure Comics
in Santa Fe, NM from 5-7pm.
On Thursday April 11th we'll be at Lobo Comics
in Albuquerque, NM from 5-7pm.
On April 13th and 14th, we'll be at DiNK all weekend long. We're going to be leading a "Pirates Vs. Dragons" workshop, and I'm slated to be on a panel about all-ages comics and to host a CCS alumni panel.

If you live close to one of these events, please swing by and say hello! They are going to super fun. See you out there on the road...

The Don Rosa Library

My new year's resolutions were to read more and to write more. I've been making some progress on my "to read" pile and have been writing at least one blog post a week, so far mostly for my resurrected illustration blog. I guess this post will kill two birds with one stone!

Since 2014 I have been dutifully buying the beautifully-produced box sets of The Don Rosa Library that Fantagraphics has been reprinting. Last year the tenth and final volume of the series was released, thus bringing all of Rosa's duck comics into print in bound form, in America, for the first time ever (these comics have been widely available in collected form all across Europe for many years now). It has been one of the great reading experiences of my life going through this body of work.

Phase 7 readers may remember the moment in Phase 7 #010 when my Dad found a copy of Uncle $crooge #219 at a comic shop in New York. To this day it is my most cherished individual issue of any comic book - Don Rosa's first story, "The Son of the Sun." As detailed in Phase 7 #010, I stopped reading Disney comics in my teen years to briefly dabble in super hero comics before focusing intently on Bone by Jeff Smith.

So as I read through this chronological reprinting of Rosa's entire run of duck comics, an amazing thing happened. Around Volume 6, I hit the point in time where I had stopped reading Rosa's work. Suddenly, there were NEW Don Rosa stories - some of them amongst the best stories he ever crafted! Before now the only way to access this work would be to go back and buy individual issues of the comics from the early 2000s, and even then, I wouldn't have access to many of the bonus materials listed in the back of the collections, which were only ever published in Europe.

Reading volumes 6-10 and savoring these new comics was such an incredible experience for me. It was akin to the time in college when my girlfriend put on the album Let It Be by the Beatles which I had somehow never heard before. Suddenly, magically, at the age of 22, I got to experience 12 new songs from one of my favorite bands. Only this time it was hundreds and hundreds of unread pages by one of my favorite cartoonists.

I hope someday I'll get a chance to meet the series editor, David Gerstein, to thank him in person for all his hard work putting these collections together. Fantagraphics, of course, has my utmost respect and admiration for their continued impeccable editorial taste.

I have met Don Rosa a number of times now and have had a chance to communicate to him the importance of his work in my life, and its influence in me becoming a cartoonist. I give an annual lecture about Carl Barks and Don Rosa at The Center for Cartoon Studies, and Mr. Rosa has actually gone through my slideshow to make a few corrections! Previously, I would educate students (99.99% of which had never heard of Rosa) about his career, but then I would only be able to point them to one or two collections of his work which barely skimmed the surface of his accomplishments, so it feels amazing to finally be able to point them to his entire body of work. I look forward to the day when I will not need to give a Barks/Rosa lecture to American cartoonists, because they will know and respect their work as other cartoonists do around the world.

Anyway, all ten volumes of Don Rosa's work have a place of honor on my "best" bookshelf, right next to the thirty volumes of Carl Barks's life work. Like most kids who collected comics, I used to have the thought, "What if I owned a copy of every comic book ever made?" For me, the only comics worth collecting were those by Barks and Rosa, so it really feels like I'm now living that childhood dream!

2018 was a BLUR

Well, somehow 2018 is already over. I shattered my previous low-blogging record of last year's 12 entries by only writing five this year, including this post! Yeesh.

This has been a year of frantic treading, just trying to keep my head above water. My time has never been more limited, so I've really had to focus on essential tasks: take care of my kids, work my day job, hit freelance deadlines, do chores around the house, sleep when possible.

I used what little time was left over to chip away at personal projects and for stress-relieving activities such as reading and making music.

Back in January I joined the Santa Fe Concert Band. For the last year I have attended weekly rehearsals and performed in a dozen concerts at various public venues around Santa Fe. It's been about 16 years since I played my trumpet seriously, and I've enjoyed getting back into it. I also met a lot of great people in the band.

Unfortunately, the time band has taken away from my work/personal duties has been adding stress to my life the last few months, so I made the hard decision to not join up again next year. I fully plan on rejoining again in the future when things feel less stressful, but for now it's just one commitment too many.

Yesterday I completed my 18th 24-Hour Comic. I once again used it as an opportunity to quickly dump out a first draft of a new picture book. Again, someday when time is more abundant, I'll have a nice little stack of books to draw.

I'm hesitant to set new goals for 2019.... I've put up signs all over my studio and office that just say, "SIMPLIFY." Instead of trying to take on new projects and getting spread too thin, I'm trying to focus on the projects that are still lingering from previous lists, or things I have been neglecting, or the day job and freelance obligations that are already confirmed. With that and my parenting duties, there should be plenty of stuff going on to keep me out of trouble next year.

Well, I hope everyone had a happy holidays and that all of your 2019s get off to a good start!

Seattle, Here I Come!

This week I am heading back to the land of my birth... Seattle! I will be accompanied on this trip by my wife Claire and our two daughters. It is going to be a whirlwind week, not only visiting family and friends in the area, but also participating in two big events:

#1) On Saturday, November 3rd from 11am-6pm I will be exhibiting at the Short Run Comix and Arts Festival. I'll be at table Q-95 with some of my own comics, but also a ton of cool free stuff for The Center for Cartoon Studies. I will be conducting portfolio reviews, and giving away free sketchbooks to reviewees while supplies last. There will be so many amazing cartoonists in this one big room. If you are in the Seattle area, don't miss it!

#2) On Sunday, November 4th from 4-5:30pm my sister Galen and I will be signing copies of our new picture book Night is Nigh at the local bookstore from our childhood, Island Books. We will be reading the book, and signing copies. All are welcome!

At the end of the week, Galen is going to follow me back to Santa Fe so we can do another reading/signing at my local kids bookstore, Bee Hive Books. That will be on Saturday, November 10th, from 1-3pm, if anyone wants to join us!

After all the excitement listed above, I am going to settle down for my long winter's nap.

My Amazing Friends!

Yeesh! This summer has just flown by. I had a great trip out to Vermont, and since I got back I've enjoyed just being at home, chipping away at my projects and spending a lot of time with my family.

It's going to be a while before I have anything new to share, so in the meantime, I thought I would alert everyone to some awesome books that my amazing friends made, which are all coming out this year. Some of these have been in the works for many years, so it is a super big deal that they are finally coming out! Please support these books in any way you can -- ask your library to carry them, order a copy, tell your friends!

1) Look Back and Laugh by Liz Prince! For the last few years I have been a subscriber to Liz's Patreon, where she creates a daily dairy comic. At the end of every month she puts together an awesome little minicomic and mails it out to folks who support her campaign at a certain tier. Now the first year of those comics have been collected into a 416-page TOME, published by Top Shelf, which is currently available! If you've never read Liz's diary strips before, she does such an awesome job of documenting her life, finding funny and poignant moments while she tries to balance life, work, travel, friendships AND HER CATS.

2) The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon by Aaron Renier! (colored by me!). Oh man, Aaron and I worked on this book for a long time, and it's gonna be worth the wait! It comes out October 23rd, 2018 and it picks up where the first book left off. It's almost 100 pages longer than the first book, so it really covers a lot of ground. Aaron's skill as an artist and storyteller have continued to grow - there are jaw-dropping two-page spreads, plot twists aplenty and adventure bursting out of every page turn. I'm obviously biased, because I spent many years working on this book, but I think that it is really going to blow people away. Reread book 1 before October, so you're ready to jump into book two!!

3) Upgrade Soul by Ezra Claytan Daniels! Ezra is one of my oldest comics friends, and ever since I met him he has inspired me with his amazing talent, entrepreneurial spirit and combination of comics with other media. For years he has been working on a mind-bending science fiction story, Upgrade Soul, which has been picked up by Lion Forge, and comes out in comic shops September 5th and in books stores September 18th. I know there are going to be all these articles and reviews that say Ezra "came out of nowhere" or that this book as his "debut" but many of us know that Ezra has been working hard for years, and I hope that this book launches his career to a whole new level. He is one of the smartest writers I know, and his stories are always thought-provoking and a bit haunting. I know he's got some more amazing stuff in the pipeline, so keep an eye on his work!

ALLLSO: This is already a long post, but I wanted to quickly mention some other friends who have work coming out this year!

Bastard by Max de Radiguès! Max is having a big year here in North America! His book Weegee: Serial Photographer was released in May from Conundrum Press and now Fantagraphics is releasing an English translation of Bastard, which won a prize at Angoulême in January (a super big deal!!). He'll be at SPX, which sadly I am going to miss this year, so pick up his book and give him a big hug for me!
Mr. Wolf's Class by Aron Nels Steinke! I loved these funny stories of Aron's teaching experiences when they were self-published minicomics, and now they have been picked up by Scholastic! There are more volumes on the way, so jump into this series!
Space Boy: Volume 1 by Stephen McCrainie! Stephen is a new friend that I've made since moving to New Mexico. He has a wildly popular online comic called Space Boy which has just been signed as a four-book series with Dark Horse. Volume 1 just came out this summer and Volume 2 is on the way. It's a great YA teen/high school story but set in the future with a sci-fi spin on it. Super fun!

All this stuff is highly recommended. I'm probably even missing some others, sorry if I'm leaving anyone out!!