turtlesoup: a blushing girl plays keyboard while her lead singer leans over and sings to her (rock - pretty girls in love)
a pile of tiny dynamos, fresh off the presses!

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? )
turtlesoup: a nude girl appears to be swimming up from dark depths (surfacing - immersion)
three panels; Ash eats near the mirror where a nun is reflected, looks up shocked at her own reflection, and turns back to her food, troubled

Just a little update today. I'm on the home stretch with my thesis project (and only beginning the journey of this book, which has a title now: Asylum, as in seeking) ... and probably I'll wait to share more peeks at it until things are handed in.

However! Today we hung an art show of CCS student work at the Hotel Coolidge in downtown White River Junction (if you're in the area for some reason, come check it out!), and for that I needed to finish a two-page spread from the second chapter a little head of schedule. I can't resist posting this thing.

Welcome to the marketplace. )

Also, while most of my life plans are severely up in the air at present (CCS commencement is on May 18: after that ... we'll see), I'm starting to compile a 2013 convention schedule! Keeping it relatively light this year, given all the upheaval I'm expecting, but still quite excited about it. I'll be tabling with the indomitable Betsey Swardlick at MECAF in Portland, Maine on May 19! A super fun show, right on gorgeous Casco Bay, with some amazing guests lined up this year ... and I'll be debuting minicomic versions of the first two chapters of Asylum. :)

I'm hoping to attend CAKE in Chicago on June 15 & 16, but things are a little up in the air, so I'll update on that later. And I've just submitted my application to MICE (September 28-29, Cambridge, Mass), so we'll see about that as well! However, I will be tabling at SPX in Bethesda on September 14 & 15, with my deeply talented classmate Joyana McDiarmid and the Queerotica Anthology! By which point I hope to be debuting at least the third chapter of Asylum, although we'll see.

It's an exciting year any way you cut it! I must get back to my pencils, but here are a couple of miscellaneous little strips I've doodled of late! )

I hope you're enjoying spring (if you're in this hemisphere)! It's a beautiful sunny day in Vermont today (which, contrary to the opinions of some of my colleagues, is what I would call perfect cartooning weather). And hey, maybe keep my former city in your thoughts, as well as the other places in the world that are experiencing such trauma and destruction this week ... I remain shaken by the bombing at the Boston Marathon, grateful that my own friends are safe and sound, and sad and angry on behalf of a place I love and the people who are suffering there.
turtlesoup: turtle (a bespecacled, short-haired cartoonist) clutches her head in dismay (oh my head - wtf)
a girl with her hair half-short and half-long looks sidelong, with a quirky smile and a pigeon on her head

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!
turtlesoup: A girl leans forward to speak past a curtain, looking friendly but kind of intense. (greetings and salutations!)
a black girl in a tank top and underpants and a white angel in a robe both fall out of the sky on opposite sides of 'Tumbling Down: a patchwork thesis project featuring two gravitationally challenged young ladies'


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 ...

a girl wanders through a room of huge pillars of what appear to be drawers, stretching away out of the frame


Another setting & preliminary character brainstorming ... )
turtlesoup: a green-haired girl in a collared shirt & vest holds her fingers up to her head like devil horns (Default)
tattooed angel illustrations for a business card and letterhead
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.

Mysterious rockstar characters?


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!

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