Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 9

Using Art to Resist Trump!

The night that Trump's first Muslim ban went into effect, many of my fellow cartoonists sent out offers over Twitter to make original drawings for people that donated a certain amount (usually around $50) to the ACLU.

This was so cool and inspiring, but I didn't join in because I knew that I wouldn't be able to create a bunch of new art for folks. I am barely keeping up with my current drawing obligations (and actually falling behind on many projects) because of my new parenting duties.

Then, the other day, one of my favorite cartoonists, Eleanor Davis, auctioned off the original art for an amazing poster she drew for this year's TCAF:

THANK YOU FOR BIDDING & RETWEETING, FOLKS!!!! The piece has sold, raising $4,050 for the invaluable Southern Poverty Law Center! @splcenter pic.twitter.com/NvInqHjpeU

— Eleanor Davis (@squinkyelo) March 17, 2017

Again, I was inspired, but this time I realized that I also have some original art that I could sell! Namely, the remaining original watercolor paintings from my 100 Watercolors project.

So! Starting today, 50% of every watercolor sold will be donated to one of the organizations listed below:

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center)
Planned Parenthood
Human Rights Campaign

The watercolors cost between $50 and $100. When someone purchases a painting, I will confirm the order via email and then in their reply they can select from one of the organizations listed above. I will lump donations together and donate them at the end of each month!

Since that might be out of many people's price range, I will also donate 100% of the profits made from sales of the 100 Watercolors eBook to the ACLU. It starts at $0.99, but you can pay anything you want above that!

This deal will last for the rest of the Trump presidency, so keep it in mind for later, if you are trying to think of birthday or holiday gifts for friends and family members, etc.

Claire and I are already making monthly donations to the ACLU, NAACP and Planned Parenthood, but hopefully this will allow me to support these important organizations even more, beyond what our limited budget allows. Thanks in advance for anyone who chips in!

Phase 7 #023... FINALLY!

Phase 7 #023 is available for online ordering! This issue follows the same format as issue #022, collecting many of my old anthology comics, as well as a new 12-page comic about my love of Harry Potter. You can read an excerpt from that story over on the Phase Seven Comics website.

Originally my goal was to get this issue done back in December, but I am learning that everything takes about 2-3 times longer now that I am providing nine hours a day of childcare for Suzanne. For instance, I can usually mail out an issue of Phase 7 to the subscribers in a week - this time it took me three weeks. I'm fine with the tradeoff - I love spending time with my daughter - but it is a learning process, recalibrating my project estimates.

My trip to Wisconsin was a success! I used my time during the 24-Hour Comic challenge to script out another picture book. It ended up being 52 pages, which I fully wrote out and roughly drew, but I only finished eight pages of inks. It still needs some work...

As with last year's 24-Hour Comic, I don't really know if that "counts" as a 24-Hour Comic, but I'm also at a point where I don't really care. To be perfectly honest, I sat down for this one - my seventeenth! - and had the thought: "I'm getting to old for this." Maybe I will do 24 of them and then call it quits? Or 20? I am placing a higher premium on sleep these days...

Anyway, there was a pretty good turnout at the CCS event as well (thanks to everyone who came out!) and I even got to briefly hang out with my old pals Frunch and Gwyn earlier in the day. I also managed to get out of town before that huge snowstorm slammed the east coast, canceling hundreds of flights! Phew.

Next week I'm heading out to the northeast for a couple of events. First I will be a visiting artist at The Center for Cartoon Studies on March 30th and then on March 31st from Noon to 1pm I'll be giving a talk at the New Hampshire Institute of Art about the creation of my book Basewood. That one is free and open to the public, so if you're in the area, please swing on by!

I'll be home for just a few days after that and then I'm off to the Denver Independent Comic and Art Expo (DiNK) to exhibit the weekend of April 8th and 9th.

Things are getting busy...I guess Spring has sprung!

Wisconsin, Here I Come... Again!

On Thursday I'm flying out to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for a couple of comics events.

The first will be a trip to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee where I will be drawing a 24-Hour Comic (my 17th!) with the members of their student comics club from noon on Friday the 10th to noon on Saturday the 11th. I did this at UWM back in 2015, and it was a lot of fun. Maybe I'll get to see my life-size cartoon self again!

Also, THERE IS A FULL SIZE CARDBOARD CUT OUT OF ME!!?! #24HourComic @UWM pic.twitter.com/0hT1gATJRe

— Alec Longstreth (@AlecLongstreth) February 14, 2015

Then, on Sunday the 12th from 6-8pm, I am going run an information session and portfolio day event for The Center for Cartoon Studies as part of my new job as their Director of Academic Outreach. It is free and open to the public, and takes place at Roast Coffee Company. There will be free coffee for attendees!

I'm going to talk about CCS for a bit, answer any questions and then give a lecture about the creation of my book Basewood. At the end I will be doing some portfolio reviews for anyone who is interested in someday attending CCS. There are a limited number of slots, so if you think you want one please RSVP on the event's webpage.

If anyone is in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area, it would be great to see you there!

Phase Eight Publishing

Today I'm officially launching a new imprint of Phase Seven Comics called Phase Eight Publishing, which I will use to publish the work of other people.

Over the last 15 years of self-publishing I have learned a lot about putting books together, in terms of design, layout, printing and distribution. My idea with Phase Eight is to put those skills to use for other people and to hopefully bring some books into the world that might not otherwise exist. I've already got three books lined up, but I think I'll only be able to manage one a year, so I'm not currently accepting submissions. Maybe someday I will though.

The first Phase Eight Publishing book is a 392-page collection of diary comics by Gabby Schulz called A Process of Drastically Reducing One's Expectations. You can watch a video preview of the book, read an excerpt and find ordering information over on the APODROE webpage.

Gabby is one of my favorite cartoonists. His diary comics are sharp and funny and depressing and poignant. Gabby often says things in his comics that I also think and feel, but would never have the guts to put in my own work. I loved reading these strips as he posted them on his website from 2013-2016, and I'm very proud to help these comics reach a wider audience in book form.

Gabby's book was one of the many projects I thought I would easily finish back in 2016, but is only now seeing completion. Now that I am providing nine hours a day of childcare for my daughter, I find I am about half as productive as I used to be. I'm fine with this trade-off, but it means that I have a big backlog of projects from 2016 that are only now, finally nearing completion.

Next up is Phase 7 #023 which I recently finished. It has actually already been printed, I just need to find some time to sign them and send them out to the Phase 7 subscribers. After that I have a couple of big freelance projects that are wrapping up, so I will have less on my plate beginning in March, which will be a welcome change of pace. Hopefully this will give me more energy to tackle new projects!

2016

Right at the eleventh hour, I finished my blog archive image for 2016. While pretty much everyone agrees that 2016 was a train-wreck of a year, I won't be able to join in with calling it the "worst ever." My daughter Suzanne was born early in 2016, so it was a special year for me, with a lot of new experiences and many special memories.

I make a list of projects each year and in 2016 I only got about half of my list completed. I'm basically going to just scratch out "2016" at the top of it and write "2017" and hope that I can finally finish off the rest of the list this year.

My loose New Year's Resolutions are:

Spend less time on social media.
Try to finish off projects working for other people so that I can free up more time for my own creative projects in 2018.
Keep abreast of real news and do my small part to fight against injustice.
Work hard enough to afford (and hopefully increase) the monthly donations my wife and I are making to the NAACP, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.
Spend as much time as possible with Suzanne.

A year ago today I launched my webcomic for kids, Isle of Elsi. I successfully posted a new page every Thursday this year (53 in all!). I am proud of myself for not missing an update. As I head into year two, I am trying out some new, smaller goals for my Isle of Elsi Patreon campaign. It was a quiet year for this blog, but only because I was busy writing two posts a week (Tuesday and Saturday) for the Backer Blog. I'm as proud of the content I'm generating in there as I am of the comic itself. Check it out!

I'm very close to being done with three different projects, including the next issue of Phase 7, so hopefully I'll have something new to blog about soon. In the meantime, Happy New Year, everyone! Have fun tonight because tomorrow 2017 begins and we all have a lot of work to do, to turn things around!

24-Hour Comic #16

This year for my Christmas present, Claire agreed to watch Suzanne for an entire day so that I could draw my 16th 24-Hour Comic. When I was 20, I swore that I would draw one 24-Hour Comic a year for the rest of my life. We'll see how much longer I can keep that up...

I have already lost more sleep this year than any other year of my life, hands down. For the two weeks leading up to this, Claire and I were trying to get Suzanne on a new sleep schedule, which was pretty brutal. When I started at 12:01am on Saturday, December 17th, I was already very tired. By the time it was done, I was utterly exhausted. Two days later and I'm still trying to recover. It's a lot harder at 37 than it was at 20! :P

Instead of drawing an improvised comic, I decided to use this opportunity to make a dummy of a children's book that I have been thinking about a lot for the last few months. I spent the first hour thumbnailing it out. It ended up at 40 pages, but I tried to just focus on the first 24, which I successfully finished (25 actually) at 10:37pm on Saturday, December 17th.

I'm not going to post the pages online for a few reasons: 1) They are not very good. My whole life I have wanted to make picture books, and I have had many false starts over the years. Only now, as a parent who is reading a lot of picture books day in and day out, do I feel like I'm finally ready to make my own. But I'm new to this. And so, like most things that one tries out for the first time, it's not very good. It is a rough draft that still needs a lot of work. 2) I want to do the work that it needs, to make it a better book, and someday draw it for real and release it. So I don't really feel like posting a super rough draft online.

Now, drawing rough drafts of 25 pages of a 40-page picture book is stretching the definition of a 24-Hour Comic to the extreme. I do believe, that to a well-orgaized mind, picture books are comics. But I only drew 18 images, and I didn't even ink them. Furthermore, I decided to try and write it in verse (which was probably a mistake, given how tired and sluggish my mind was) so I also just printed out the text and pasted it in.

Given all that, was this thing even a 24-Hour Comic? Probably not, but I don't care. I'm still counting it. I still got to that place creatively, where I was so deep into it that the project seemed to be coming together of its own accord and I was just channeling it. I'm probably going to use this same approach for my next 24-Hour Comic, which is already scheduled for March (I'll be running a 24-Hour Comic event at UWM, like I did back in 2015). I don't have time these days to spend weeks and/or months working on the first draft of a picture book, but I can use this challenge to knock out a dummy in a day. I've got a lot of picture book ideas bouncing around in the back of my mind, so this seems like a great way to get them down on paper.

Anyway, above you can see the one spread I was most pleased with. The story takes place in the mid-50s and is about beatniks. I hope that I'll be able to share it all with you someday!

Academic Outreach & CCS Summer Workshops

This fall I started a new job at The Center for Cartoon Studies; I am now their Director of Academic Outreach.

The goal of this new position is to connect with graphic novel reading classes in English departments, comics classes in art departments, and extracurricular comics clubs at colleges and universities around the country. The idea is to share some of the comics expertise that we have built up at CCS over the last ten years while also letting undergraduate students who are passionate about comics know about the various opportunities at CCS, including our Master of Fine Arts degree. Basically, I'm trying to find students like me, at age 20: obsessed with comics, but with not a lot of available resources at my current school. I know they're out there...

If you, or anyone you know is interested in having me speak with their college-level comics class or club, we are offering free 30-minute video conference lectures, and I'm available to fly out to your school to lead 1-3 day workshops for a fee. More information is available on the CCS Academic Outreach webpage.

I'm also busy right now getting ready for the 2017 CCS Summer Workshops. As usual, I'll be co-teaching Create Comics from June 19-23 with my old buddy Jon Chad and then from June 26-30 I will be teaching an all new workshop: Beginning Animation!

Over the past few years I have been hired to do a number of small animations. Afterwards, I found that the creation of those animations really influenced my cartooning in a positive way. My hope for the workshop is to explore this point of intersection between comics and animation. We are going to draw lots of flipbook experiments, and then create a hand-drawn walk cycle and a looping animated GIF, all using pencils and paper (and Photoshop). We're also going to watch a lot of cartoons! It should be a ton of fun, and I hope lots of people will sign up to join me for a week in Vermont this summer!

More info is available on the CCS Summer Workshop webpage.

I'm super busy right now, trying to wrap up some big projects before the end of the year. If I can get one or more of them done, I'll post about it here. If not, I'll likely do so early in the new year. Either way I hope that everyone has a relaxing, peaceful winter break. Rest up, because we all have a lot of work to do in 2017!!!

Waking Nightmare

Somehow, a lying, racist, misogynist, xenophobic monster won the election for the highest public office in The United States last night. It's horrifying.

I was hoping from ages 2-5 Suzanne would grow up knowing that a woman, just like her, held the highest office in the land. Instead she will grow up with a president who I wouldn't even trust to be in the same room with her.

For the first time in a long time, I am scared of what the future may hold. As a cancer survivor, my wife Claire has one of the biggest "prexisting conditions" out there and if/when the Affordable Care Act is repealed, I don't know if we will be able to find health insurance, which we really, really need.

But as a white, straight, cis, abled man, my fear of the future no doubt pales in comparison to that which is felt by my friends, loved ones, coworkers, fellow cartoonists and students who are people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+, disabled and/or female.

Growing up, I was taught that it was impolite to talk about politics or religion with people you've just met. Over the years, I have seen the wisdom in this. These beliefs are so deeply held that they are very unlikely to be changed simply by discussing them briefly in passing, or even over a lengthy meal. Many an awkward interaction has been adverted by following this advice.

As I've built my career, I have continued to follow this "no politics/religion" advice. I have not been outspoken about the things that I deeply believe. My thought process was that by making my comics available and enjoyable to people from all different backgrounds, people who might disagree with my beliefs up front could potentially come around by being exposed to my beliefs slowly through my work. I don't know if this has ever worked, but my privilege has allowed me to think it has been a fine strategy for quite some time now.

But I'm sitting here this morning asking myself, "Could I have done more?" and the answer is an unequivocal "Yes." I absolutely could have done more. I want to start doing more, today. And I feel like the first step of that process is trying to be a better ally, and for being a bit more upfront about what I believe in.

So let me be perfectly clear: I believe that love is love and that any two consenting adults should be able to marry each other, raise kids and live without fear, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity or any other personal trait. I believe that every woman has the right to choose what happens with her body. I believe that Black Lives Matter. I believe taxes should be drastically raised to improve our society by focusing on education and helping the less fortunate. I would gladly hand over 50% of the money I make to never again have a corporation play the odds with my health and well-being, or that of the people I love. I believe that unless you are an American Indian, you are an immigrant to the United States, and should therefore welcome other immigrants. I believe that religion has done more harm than good throughout history and that the world would be a better place if people focused more on the problems that are facing us right here and now instead of on a supposed afterlife. "God" is not going to fix the problems that face us now. It's up to us, the human beings that are currently living on earth.

If any (or all) of this is offensive to you and you are suddenly disappointed that you have supported my work in the past, I am happy to offer a full refund. Go ahead and tally up every minicomic you've ever bought from me, any money you donated to the Basewood Kickstarter, or to my Patreon campaign and send me the total, along with your mailing address:

Alec Longstreth

P.O. Box 8907

Santa Fe, NM 87504

I will write you a check. If you are glad that Trump is going to be president, then I don't want your money.

To be honest, I still don't really want to talk about this stuff. Doing so (especially on the internet) opens oneself up to a lot of confrontation, and personally I'd rather focus on the safe topics comics and creativity. But you know what? I can handle some awkward interactions. I've been comfortable for long enough. Suzanne is growing and learning every day by watching the world around her. The least I can do is try to give her one positive male role model to look up to, because she certainly isn't going to find one in this nation's leadership.

My only regret is that by stating these beliefs I am contributing to the further polarization of America. I do believe that change happens in the middle, with compromise, and I refuse to believe that half of the population of America is evil. As things get more and more dire over the next four years (as I'm sadly sure they will) my hope is that Trump's supporters will see the huge mistake they have made, and adjust their beliefs accordingly.

One-Week Cartooning Workout!

This fall, I started a new job at The Center for Cartoon Studies, as their Director of Academic Outreach.

Next week we're launching the first big project that I developed, with the help of CCS co-founder, James Sturm. It's called the One-Week Cartooning Workout and it's a free, self-directed comics course that is all done through email. When you sign up you get one email a day for the next week which includes: a daily challenge, some tips and tricks, links to examples and recommended reading, a fun fact, and an inspirational quote.

I've been working pretty hard on this for the last few months and the emails are loaded with little illustrations and animations that I drew. Check it out! It doesn't launch until next week, but since you are reading my blog, you are obviously a cool person, so you can check it out early. Please let me know if you have any feedback! The idea for this course was planted in my head by my former student David Humphreys, so thanks to him for being full of good ideas.

One of my other duties as Director of Academic Outreach is to do free video streaming sessions with comics classes and clubs at colleges around the country. The idea is to share some of CCS's comics expertise while also letting students know about CCS's MFA program and summer workshops. If you are attending a school (or teaching at one!) and would like to have me beamed into your class, drop me a line. I'm also available to lead workshops in person. More information is available on the Academic Outreach page on the CCS website!

Another Big Bottle of Ink

Back in 2007 I finished off a 32 oz. bottle of ink that I bought back in 2002 when I first started drawing comics seriously. I drew about 600 pages of comics with that ink. The last couple of months with that bottle were a real slog, because the ink had become very thick and sludge-like. When it finally ran out I bought a 16 oz. bottle of ink, thinking that I would use it up more quickly and therefore not have to deal with the same problem.

Well, nine years later, I finally finished up that 16 oz. bottle of ink! By my estimates, somehow, I still drew more than 600 pages of comics with half as much ink. My guess is that the completion of Basewood had something to do with this (smaller pages, less ink) and also the ink going a bit further (not turning into sludge towards the end). Anyway, the math broke down to about .02 oz. per page of comics!

All my hectic summer travel wrapped up and I have been enjoying my time at home with Claire and Suzanne. As freelancers, we traditionally work seven days a week, but we have been trying to set aside some time on Sundays to work on projects around the house. I started a new Flickr album to document some of these undertakings. This weekend my father-in-law and I are going to put a skylight in the kitchen which should brighten things up considerably.

I'm 37 today, hurtling towards 40 at the speed of time. This year has gone by faster than any I can remember. 36 was a big one! Suzanne arrived and we bought this house. I'm looking forward to what will hopefully be a calmer year, putting some roots down here in Santa Fe.

I'm working on a bunch of cool stuff right now, but I'll wait until some of it is finished so that I can share it with a proper post. I hope everyone is having a good fall so far!