Allie makes comics!

Queer Thrills #1: “Smash & Grab”

For your reading pleasure: a goofy erotic comic about a sexy mad scientist lady and a suspiciously over-enthusiastic genderqueer superhero, which debuted in print at MICE 2014! Contains BDSM themes, including bondage and mild consent play/teasing. This content is EXPLICITLY SEXUAL in nature; definitely not safe for work! Please proceed at your own risk.

Also on Tumblr: Part One and Part Two

( No real laboratory equipment or robots were harmed in the creation of this erotica. )

Drawing this was some of the most fun I had all year, so I very much hope you enjoy! I’m hoping to bring back the Queer Thrills title on occasion (probably every fall?) with more queer, speculative fiction-themed one-shot erotic comics. Stay tuned. ;)

Well, hello there. I live!

I didn't mean to leave this blog languishing for such a long time. The past four months have been a time of creative recuperation and quiet planning, of stepping away from the pressures of trying to always garner attention and put work on display. Also, I moved, found a temp job, became unemployed, and dealt with various other personal ups and downs. Trying to settle into life outside of grad school is tricky, and so too is trying to navigate a creative life and build your own definition of success (and pertaining goals). I realize I'm rambling without making much sense! But yeah. I've had to make some decisions about how and where to direct my creative energy.

The next post I make will be about exciting plans for the year and previews and the like! But here is a round-up of a few things I've made while I've been quiet. (As always, for up-to-the-minute doodlings and such, feel free to check out my tumblr. I've also started another one for reblogging awesome comics and other fun things ... and the occasional rant about social justice & representation. Well, okay, more than occasional. But comics!)

( Story concepts & character designs )

( A little creative nostalgia ... )

( A cup of Turtle Soup )


Anyway, enough rambling about last year. I'll post again soon (no seriously) about what's coming up!

I won't share the illustration I did for holiday cards this year, because while I failed miserably at mailing them out, well ... I have a plan ...

Um, so hello! I apologize for once again disappearing for so long ... finishing school is always a very disorienting experience, and I've needed time to recuperate, reorient, and relocate. However, I've managed to keep up my art-making momentum, which is great. So I'm not empty-handed by any means, as you can see!

The above is a pile of my newest (and physically tiniest - it's CD booklet size!) minicomic, Tiny Dynamo: DEMOS, which will debut THIS WEEKEND at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD. It collects a couple of short, fluffy stories about an all-queer rock band that I've been playing around with in the background for awhile. These are introductory tales: there are many more stories to tell about the TD queers (some of them rather more serious), and I think I'll bring them out intermittently as a break from my more concentrated projects.

( Here are a couple preview pages and such! )

I'm excited for the convention weekend! It's a gigantic cartoonist convergence/family reunion sort of deal, with most of the people I know in the field all in one place ... including most of my former schoolmates (who I already miss dearly), several CCS faculty members, and even old friends like my much-beloved Elle Skinner. I'll be tabling with my talented former classmate Joyana McDiarmid!( Come find us at table K4B if you're coming! )

This is especially exciting because I have ANOTHER fantastic debut to announce ... for the last year plus, several of my classmates and I have been working hard to organize, edit, and publish an anthology of smart, gorgeous, varied QUEER EROTIC COMICS, and it's finally time for us to share it with the world. I've mostly kept my Adult materials off this blog thus far, but guys, I am so proud of this thing: ( The Queerotica Anthology! Erotica, people: don't click if that's not your thing. ;) )

If you're local to the Boston area, you can also find me, and these books, at MICE in Cambridge in a couple weeks! (I'll try and post a reminder!) And that's it for conventions for me this year ... I'm ready to take a breath and get focused on my longer-term plans, which are mostly focused on turning Asylum into an ongoing, long-term online graphic novel ... so stay tuned.

I'll leave you with a few odds and ends that I drew this summer. Oof, I have to stop doing these giant round-up posts, right? For one thing, those of you who follow me elsewhere must find it very redundant.

( A couple illustrations (one contains bare breasts) and a ... restaurant review? )

The other day I got an email from an awesome CCS alum friend of mine that opened with "HI KLEEBS! DON'T DIE OF THESIS!" (And if you know her you can probably guess who would call me that. ♥) It's a pretty serious condition to be in, I can't lie. I'm surviving ... I've basically become a comics hermit (or maybe an anchorite, for that extra devotional feel), but if that makes me a bit strange, well. I'm writing about fairly strange circumstances?

( So hey, have a couple sample pages! )

( Hourly comics and a few doodles )

More previews and doodles soonish, no doubt! And maybe even the beginnings of a convention schedule!

Talk about inconsistent posting, I know! But, today, I am giving my thesis presentation, which in my mind really kicks off the senior thesis portion of my grad school career. I don't much like public speaking, but I can't say how much I'm looking forward to that opportunity to focus. (Although, to prevent myself from focusing too hard and getting stuck, I'll be attempting to alternate between the two rather different flavors of storytelling referenced above - from eerie dream-inspired exploration into the unknown to goofy interpersonal antics with a Heavenly twist, and back.)

( Some more thesis talk and a few goofy illustrations from the slide show. )

I'm incredibly excited to sink my teeth into all this now that I have a proper plan, and I'm intending to leave here with two major stories well underway ... carrying me out into post-school life with a good store of momentum. I hope!

Here are a mishmash of conceptual sketches for Ash's (still untitled) story, to give a taste of what a lot of future posts are likely to consist of ...



( Another setting & preliminary character brainstorming ... )

Illustrations from (the front of) a business card, and personalized letterhead!

Ah, so, hello there! I know I dropped off the radar for awhile, but I promise, I'm still alive. I had a bit of internal struggle this summer, to tell the truth; these things happen, but I got through it and I'm back. And let me tell you, I have been working on plenty of projects in the meantime.

I'm now in my second and final year as an MFA student at the Center for Cartoon Studies ... my thesis year, if you can believe it (I can't always). A pretty intense time, but to balance that I've been trying to dial back my approach a bit and experiment a bit. Also, I've been attending a bunch of conventions! You might have seen me at SPX in Bethesda (shilling away at the CCS table), MICE in Cambridge, Mass, or most recently, Paint & Pixel in my own hometown of Northampton! These days I am tabling with Quintuple Ruffle, an awesome collective of classmates comprised of myself, April Malig, Sasha Steinberg, Laurel Lynn Leake, and Joyana McDiarmid.

Check out this photo to see Laurel, Joyana and myself at the very first official Quintuple Ruffle table at MICE! Thanks to the always lovely crew at We Got Comic Issues for sharing their pics.

Anyway, to start off the thesis year on a productive note, the esteemed faculty here at CCS tasked us with producing sixteen finished pages of comics by this week; it didn't matter what they were, so long as they were comics. I decided to combine an experiment of my own with an assignment from my advisor and artistic idol, the esteemed Carla Speed McNeil. As per Carla's instructions, I attempted to complete each of these pages in one day (and for the most part, I succeeded); as per my own, I didn't do a whole lot of advance planning. The settings and events in what follows were loosely inspired by dreams I've had, but I wrote them on the fly. Now that I've made my deadline, I'm planning to sit down and see if a larger story will emerge, because the bits and pieces that have come to me so far are very intriguing! But at this point, it's a mystery to me ... and I find that oddly inspiring.



( Continued under here! )

Now that I've completed that wild ride, I'll be making some important decisions about which projects to focus on for the rest of the year! I think my thesis will take the form of an anthology, so there will be several ongoing stories (and probably some shorts), most likely including Goodness Knows (stay tuned for that first chapter that I promised way back in May). But will I continue to mess around with dystopian cities and refugee societies of young people living in abandoned buildings? I had some plans to develop something involving this pair of characters as well ... we'll see.



I'll be back next week with some spooky material to share, and soon after that with a rather salacious announcement. Speaking of which, I can now be found on tumblr as well, but please be warned: there there be adult material. Not safe for work, and probably not for family members!

Hey kids! So I wanted to post a quick little update over here, even though I haven't really been creating a whole lot of finished art of late. Everything I have is currently being thrown into my first semester final project. As I mentioned last post, it's going to be the introductory chapter of Goodness Knows, a graphic novel I've been messing around with conceptually for awhile now. Essentially, it's a coming-of-age story about a slightly wayward angel who is assigned to do community service on earth, and the young (human) woman she befriends there.

Getting the vague set of ideas and half-developed characters that I've been kicking around for years nailed down into workable concepts and a concrete script was a challenge, as I expected; I haven't really sunk my teeth into writing longer fiction since I graduated from college (and decided I needed to spend some time on learning to work with comics as a medium, without taking so much time on research, character development or worldbuilding). I freaked out a little and plagued people with a lot of questions and conceptual rambling. But! I'm well on track with a full script, thumbnails, and several penciled pages ... the finished chapter will be twenty-four (plus covers), and I'm hoping to debut it at MoCCA, the last weekend of April.

So for the timebeing I'm deep into a lot of stuff that isn't ready to show, but I have a couple of sneak peeks I can share! ( A model sheet, a page preview, and FANART OMG. )

I should get back to the grindstone (less than five weeks to go, yikes), but I'll leave you with one more little preview of a short piece starring the Goodness Knows characters ... drawn for an anthology I'm waiting to hear back about! I'd feel bad about leaving Mickey out of this post entirely, honestly, and besides - I finished this thing in February, and I'm kind of dying to show it to people. Thanks for reading, darlings, it's always appreciated!

Oh hey! Sorry, I know I disappeared off the face of the earth for awhile there ... I was really pretty burnt out after last semester. Needed some time to recuperate with the family and such. Now I'm back at CCS, where they believe in starting off your second semester with a bang, by dumping we poor first-years right into the infamous SILVER AGE PROJECT!

Why am I speaking in histrionics and all-caps? I guess I must still be a little bit in this mode:

Cover designs by various of my classmates, including Cole Closser, Sasha Steinberg/Sophie Goldstein, and Joyana McDiarmid/Romey Bensen/Vinnie Ferris/Adam Whittier.

Essentially: my class was divided into three small groups, each with a faculty "editor" (overlord might be more like it) and assigned a genre to work in. We then had two weeks to create a full-color 32-page (plus covers) comic book that remained true to the styles and conventions of mid-60s American comics. My group, headed up by the rather incredible Jason Lutes, created a superhero team which is a fairly obvious homage to the Fantastic Four, and attempted to emulate the classic stylings of Jack Kirby. (Not the least bit ambitious, us.)

I've never done anything like that before: the anthology project was a thoroughly solo endeavor by comparison. We worked around the clock, spread out over classroom tables passing pages back and forth so that different people could accomplish their various individual tasks (Penciling characters, or backgrounds, or technology! Inking along similar lines! Organizing the computer files! Designing ads! Coloring alotted excerpts!) It was in many ways a strange experience--I've never inked another person's pencils before, or worked within the traditional four-color palette), and exhausting, but it's kind of amazing to have the finished book in my hands. Several of the faculty have commented that it's designed to make us feel as though we can accomplish everything. It also makes me relieved to live in the era I do, I must confess; I would not want to live by that working model.

( A one-page excerpt, an ad, and a preliminary character design. )

Now that we're through that particular gauntlet, the rest of the semester is looking very bright, with many more opportunities to really play with my own ideas, outside the confines of strict assignments. (At least, in part.) I can't wait to get started. In the meantime, ( have a little more art! )

I leave you with some silly doodles I drew yesterday at a local cafe ... I've discovered that the best way to get me to sketch spontaneously is to hand me a bunch of colored pencils and some scrap paper. Note to self for future conventions. (The octopus is my quick re-creation of the splash page of Agents of A.T.O.M., as it happens ...)



Excelsior!

So one of these days, I'm going to use this blog to talk a little, as well as share images. I'm writing this at kind of an ungodly hour, however, so ... well, this isn't the time. Just had the kind of evening you go to comics grad school for: sitting up to the wee hours in the classroom with a few friends, working feverishly on final projects while loudly singing along to musical soundtracks you loved in your high school days. (There was a break to climb up on tables during "La Vie Boheme." Hi, it's essentially finals week.)

Here's a preview of my main contribution to the project:

I finished it tonight, but I'm going to wait to post the whole thing until I have the entire printed, bound retrofuturistic comics anthology sitting in my hand (and photographable for your viewing pleasure). I'll leave the explanation 'til then as well.

In the meantime, I've also decided to post, belatedly, my first longer comic assignment for class ... drawn back in mid-October. A combination of difficult circumstances (foremost being a sudden and severe case of art-block) led to me scrapping and rewriting this piece two-thirds of the way through the two weeks we had to work on it, pulling a really horrible all-nighter, and generally not getting the result I wanted. It was my biggest struggle of the semester.

That said, I might rework it sometime, because simple as it is, I did rather like the concept. (I'm starting to see a lot of my projects here as first drafts, since we don't actually have time for much revision.) We were asked to retell one of several of Aesop's fables. I chose The Birds, The Beasts and the Bat (Jacobs' translation), mostly because I hated the moral and wanted to challenge it.


( Cam, continued )

Before I go, one last little tidbit! Following a heavily nostalgia-inducing field trip to the adorable toy museum in Quechee, we were assigned to create toy designs and pitch them to the class. There were some really brilliant parodic examples and seriously original ideas, but I basically went right back to the things I loved as a child: fantasy, cartoons, kickass female leads, and dress-up/roleplay. You might recognize Dionne from "The Swamp Bride" - I figure that, as with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, her cartoon show is a bit more kid-friendly than the ongoing comic adventures that have clearly inspired it:

Okay, time to crash and hit "post" in a few hours - goodnight (good morning)!

So this was kind of the weirdest Halloween ever. Growing up, I remember getting a dusting of snow around this time of year once or twice, but nothing like ... stepping outside the American Legion building in White River Junction for a breather during the Dust Ball and watching the world filling with white. We were really fortunate up here; back home in Western Massachusetts, some of my friends are still without heat or electricity (my parents just got theirs back today) ... courtesy of huge amounts of unseasonable wet snow being dumped on leaf-laden branches. Which was clearly entirely awful. :( Here in Vermont, the few inches we got just made things a little extra weird.

Actually, it was pretty fabulous time; toonies know how to do the holiday right, and the costumes were all amazing. I was pretty proud of ( mine. )

Here are a few more odds and ends for you! We're working on some longer comic projects at the moment, so content here's probably going to slow down again while I'm focused on producing all that. However.



We were assigned to draw a romance comic cover in the style of various decades; mine was the 1970s. I wanted to do something a little ... different, while still fitting the rather skewed sort of style employed by the genre at the time.

( Here's a little process talk about that. )

Also, one more quick oddity: last week we put together some ( composite creatures )

Well, that's all she drew for now! Practically a drive-by sort of post. I need to go play with androids, fifties hairstyles, swords and swamp creatures ... it's an odd balance of stress and sheer fun around these parts.