Allie makes comics!

So hey, here's a quick SPX roundup post! Quite late, but I lingered in Bethesda an extra day and then nearly immediately headed up to Maine for my best friend's wedding (and extended activities), so ... what can you do. :) But oh man, I had a fantastic time at the show. Check out my haul, above! Mostly trades, plus a few extremely worthwhile purchases, hooray.

( Hereby hangs a ramble. )

Hee, sorry, I feel like I don't have the time to be concise right now, if that makes any sense at all. (Honestly, that's how it is.) I have books and such to prep, because this coming weekend I'm back behind the table for another Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo; my first convention and always a favorite! If you're in the Boston area you should really come check it out. I'll have copies of Queerotica (hurry, that first printing's going fast!), as well as Asylum, Tiny Dynamo: DEMOS, my Heartburn anthology (which may go permanently out of print when I sell my stock), and Fruitless. And I'll be tabling completely on my own for the very first time!

News about upcoming projects, as well as online sales for both Queerotica and my solo work, coming soon! In the meantime, as this is also wedding season, apparently ... here's an invitation I designed for my other closest friend, who's getting married soon as well! I don't do this sort of illustration work often, and ( I'm rather proud of it. )

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!

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!

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.

I love my (new) journaling service.

Someone with a grudge keeps reporting Dreamwidth to their online payment processors. They are unable to use Paypal and now Google Checkout because they refuse to alter their TOS to fit those services' demands. (Google is actually insisting that they should ban all adult content.)

I must remember to write up a check for a paid account this week. I love Dreamwidth's principles, and I'm grateful that they're standing up for them against this kind of pressure. I really want to see this site survive.

I don't have any erotica of my own to post, alas (maybe I'll try that sometime - non-Turtle related!), but in the spirit of things, a recommendation: Jess Fink's Chester 5000 XYV is some beautifully drawn comic steampunk robot porn. (That link is VERY NSFW!) Enjoy.