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? )

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!