Serbian Anthologies, Stolen Art & Other Stories

The poster I designed for Seattle Busker Week. 
Check out their full schedule Here.

If you hadn't noticed, Gone Girl Comics has been....gone, for a late summer hiatus.

Much of is has had to do with the unusually sunny weather here in the Pacific Northwest coinciding with being given access to an honest-to-god log cabin to renovate in a huge forest on Whidbey Island.  This is amazing, because I am a below-poverty-level artist right now and the gift of a rugged but amazing place to escape to is beyond surreal.  I have spent weeks cleaning and repairing the cabin, and harvesting huckleberries and wild chanterelle mushrooms.  Which leads to extensive, long baking and cooking sessions.

Then there is paid work.  The poster for Seattle Busker Week was part of that, and--if you are in Seattle, you can see artwork in The Seattle Weekly and also attend the festivities.  Combine that with drawing on intense deadlines for comics anthology submissions, and my blog schedule got thrown off a bit.

Image of "Chicago Picasso" in the SKULPTURA? anthology.

But behold!  The submissions have been paying off!  Not only have I been accepted for publications in seven new projects this year, but some of them are actually in print now, including SKULPTURA?, a comics anthology centered on Sculpture that I wrote about last month HERE.  My story "Chicago Picasso" is in it.

I was just informed that only 300 books were printed, and they were distributed to attendees of the 16th Biennial of Art Pančevo in Serbia.  So, it looks like my one contributors copy is all I'll have...and I'm going to cherish it and guard it with my life.

This image, which launched my
comics career, was among
those in my missing portfolio.

Unfortunately, I should have had the thought "guard it with my life" stuck in my head much earlier, as I foolishly left one of my portfolios at a restaurant in Downtown Seattle after a client meeting.  Though I noticed it missing just a few minutes later, when I went back to the restaurant (Tulios) it was GONE.  I filed a police report and have been checking online, where people sell art...in it was the original first page of "Chicago Picasso" along with some work that was very dear to my heart.

I created a Facebook album for the stolen images.  You can view it HERE.  If anyone comes across something--my style is fairly recognizable--do let me know!  But I fear these are gone.  Live and learn.

RETURNING TO THE POSITIVE, I look forward to posting more about new creative pursuits and anthology publications.  The next publications to come out will be Indie Ladies Comics 2014 - Blush, as well as an illustration I did for Outre #4 and then Blood Root! 




C-log posts on comics, publication and community that publishes on Tuesdays.

Sweet! Celebrate! (Get To Work!)

I don't think I could call myself a comics blogger without mentioning the San Diego Comic-Con that happened over the weekend.  Though I hear stories that it's become a playground for video game releases and blockbuster movie swag, it is still the spot where they hand out the coveted Eisner Awards.

This book won the 2013 Eisner for "Best Reality-Based Comic."
If you don't own it already, you should!

The Eisners!  They are the Oscars of the comics creating world.  And this is the second year I've been able to bask in hometown pride.  Last year, Seattle cartoonists David Lasky and Frank Young brought home the Eisner for "Best Reality-Based Comic" for their graphic novel The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song.   I highly recommend it, and you can read more about it at Carter Family Comics:  Don't Forget This Blog!  

THIS year,  Fantagraphic swept the Eisners!

Artists and stories published by the Seattle-based comics company took home three top awards.  The Fantagraphics wins are particularly poignant not only because of the passing of Fantagraphics publisher, Kim Thompson, this year but also because many believe recognition of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez - the creators of Love and Rockets - is long overdue.

I copped this image of Gilbert and
Jaime Hernandez from the
Fantagraphics blog, here!

Fantagraphics has an excellent write up about it on their own blog, here.

I am personally very excited that Jaime Hernandez was awarded "Best Artist of the Year."  He created the character Maggie for the series "Music for Mechanics."  She was a teenage female latino punk mechanic, and I related to her a great deal as a teenage female mixed-Native goth arc welder. 

If the character correlations weren't strong enough, I'll let you in on a secret.  I currently go by my middle name, Noel, but my first name is actually Margaret.  No really, Maggie and I share the same first name.  So, there you go.  I often felt like Jaime was somehow eerily ghosting my life is some of Maggie's stories.

All "WOW-that-character-is-just-like-me!" stories aside, though, Jaime's artwork is incredibly well-executed.  It's rare to find that great of a story-teller and artist in the same human being.

I'm celebrating my own small win, this weekend.  No Eisners, but my story Shipyard Espionage has been accepted for publication by the Indie Ladies Comic Anthology for 2014.  It rounds out this year's projects nicely and will give me another publication I can offer at my table at Short Run in November. 

(Public Service Announcement:  BOTH Short Run applications and Indie Ladies Comic submissions close on July 31st.  If you read this on the Tuesday I publish it, get thee to their application sites!)

A portrait of my former self drawn into Shipyard Espionage (right)  as
Maggie the Mechanic from Love and Rockets (left, by Jaime Hernandez).

I put a lot into the story Shipyard Espionage.  It's a 7-page autobiographical story about working in a large shipyard in Bellingham.  It's a story about work and art.  I'm hoping it will serve as a calling card for what I want to do with my graphic novel.  And because it's about my days as a welder, I drew an homage to Maggie the Mechanic on the 2nd page.  To be truthful, I feel like I'm going to have to give Jaime Hernandez a visual nod at some point, so why not now, early on in my comics making life?

Now that Shipyard Espionage is done, I'm busy creating a short story on the history of the Chicago Picasso, a 50-Foot sculpture that Picasso donated to the City of Chicago when they built Daley Plaza in the 1960s.  I'll be writing about next week.  Not only is it an interesting story, but I'm telling it for an interesting project.


So back to it!

C-log posts on comics, publication and community every Tuesday.

The Anthology Game

Welcome to the one-month anniversary of C-Log.  (I've decided that blogs are like babies.  Cute in their infancy but probably won't make that big of an impact or pay their own rent until they are old enough to go to college.) 

NEXT WEEK I'll have a guest blog by Meredith Li-Vollmer, a risk communication specialist for Public Health - Seattle & King County who spearheaded the project Comics 4 Health Coverage.

Title page in-process for an anthology
submission due later this month.

THIS WEEK is about my experienced with seeking publication in comics anthologies.

I'm excited to report that it can be done.  Since the cold Seattle night that I decided to Google "Comics Anthology Submissions," I've had five stories selected for publication, with two more under consideration.

I feel good about the chances of the pending submissions because I researched the anthologies thoroughly and feel my art fits well with what the editors are trying to do.

Which is the sweet spot - the fit.

There are not a lot of open calls for comic book anthologies, period.  Of those, a high percentage of them are for genre fiction, mainstream horror and/or manga themed publications.  That's great, if that's the kind of work you're making, but my stuff is more in the autobiographical vein.


So, I did A LOT OF RESEARCH.  And this is what I've found:

• Again, there's not a ton of open calls for submission out there.
• Some of the best ones I found were buried deep in the editor's blog (so keep digging!)
• Many calls for submission are out-of-date.  I have an embarrassing story about making a comic for an anthology that was already published.  The story has a happy ending, because the comic is being printed in another journal, but you can bet I triple-check dates, now.
• There are at least two lists of open calls that seem to be current and relatively accurate.  They are kept by Cloudscape Comics out of BC and Indie Ladies Comics.  

My super-secret weapon for taking over comics by 2015.

After a few months of submitting to anthologies, I began keeping a spreadsheet.

This is a practice I started after missing the call for inclusion in Dirty Diamonds #5, which I really REALLY wanted to be in, but am not, because there was just so much time left until the deadline.  And then I forgot about it.  And then the deadline passed.

There is actually a second page to the spreadsheet, which lists stories after they get published, so that I have a record of my publication history.  Why so organized, you ask?  Because in my past life, as a poet, I got grants, publication, residencies and the like, but never did anything with all that good stuff.  My peers were getting book deals and performance tours and I was working as an arts administrator and not making a case for myself as an artist.  I feel that I squandered a lot of creative capital. 

I don't know how many shots you get at doing what you love, but I'm not going to waste it this time around.  Both the research and the spreadsheets have been helpful in getting my stories out there and have even led to inclusion in invitation-only anthologies.

I'll keep posting about this topic as I learn more and come across new developments.  If you are aware of any other resources that would be useful in the quest for publication, and care to share them, feel free to email me or post in the comments below.