Allie makes comics!

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? )

Hey kids! So it looks like Boston Comics Roundtable's Inbound 5 anthology (the food issue) is now available online. Features five pages of goofy noodle hijinks by yours truly, as well as a plethora of great work by other local cartoonists. (I met a whole bunch of them last week, and they are pretty rad! Having read their work, I was not surprised.)

If, however, you're local to the Boston area yourself, please consider patronizing one of our fantastic local comic shops - of which there are many. My own most local of shops, Hub Comics, just happens to be having an enormous sale this weekend. I'm not sure if they'll have the anthology in stock yet, but drop in anyway and pick up that graphic novel you've been meaning to add to your library! (I finally have copies of Maus, to my great relief. I don't think I've read it since high school!)

Seriously, they've had kind of a rough year, and they really deserve some support. Hub is one of the friendliest comic shops I've ever stepped into (which is saying something; I have a knack for finding good ones). They not only have a huge selection of quality sequential art; they're a community, well, hub (and practically my home not-so-far-away from home at this point). And they have an adorable dog. What more can you want?

Since I'm on the subject of selling you things ... I'm planning to have my first couple minicomics done and ready to go within about a month. I have a list of great stores I'm hoping to send them to, and I may start looking into conventions for next year(?!), but I'm pondering setting up an etsy store as well. None of the cartoonists I know personally use this method, but I've seen minis for sale there before. If anyone had thoughts (think this would/n't work? would/n't like the opportunity to give me money? etc), please share? ♥

Sorry for the huge artless post! The next one will at least include doodles or teaser panels, I promise.

So first of all, remember that anthology submission I posted about in July? Today I found out that I got in, which is pretty awesome. It's called Inbound 5, the fifth volume of a biannual publication put out by the Boston Comics Roundtable. I'm told it'll probably be out by the end of the month. :)

Anyway, here's a new Turtle strip (getting really close to filling out that mini, now!):



( A little more blather than usual. )