we're all gonna die

Above are a couple panels from the minicomic I'm working on.  I'm expecting it'll be about the same length as Spitting Pennies.  I'm about half-way through the thumbnails for the first of five issues.  I really want to have it done by SPX this year (which is about 100 days away), but I'm not going to sacrifice the comic's quality to have it done in time.  I do plan on having new stuff at SPX, though.  New free comics, a brand new Sock-Monster comic on a button, hopefully a split minicomic with a good friend we've been working on for months and months...

  In other news, we've been digging a rain garden at my house, and today we finished the digging!  Now we just gotta lay some compost and seeds, and hope it rains.  If the weather keeps going the way it's been going the past couple months, that last part should not be a problem.

Jacked on caffeine,
neil.

free comics! ...in the past. new comics! ...eventually.

Last Saturday was Free Comic Book Day (FCBD (pronounced fick-bud, for you uninitiated (not really))).  Sam Sharpe, Erik Schneider and I put together a free minicomic we put around comic book stores in Chicago (Quimby's, Chicago Comics, Thirdcoast Comics, Challengers). We named it Handout Comics.  We made a stencil cover, for it.  Here are a couple pictures from the process:

 Erik folding the comic's guts!

 Finished copies of the comic (we made 200)!

 Sam cutting the image stencil!

Sam printing the image stencil!

The whole process was a lot of fun, and I hope folks enjoyed the comics!

A while ago, you might have noticed me mentioning the Minicomic of the Month Club.  I won't go into its details, because I've decided to scrap the plan (which was going to commence in June).  There was very little interest (probably due to very little promotion by me), and I myself -while looking forward to the project- was not excited about it.

But on the way back from Stumptown Comics Fest (which will receive a review soon), I started coming up with imagery that was pretty exciting, and slowly -over the course of a few weeks- a story grew, and has stolen most of my free time and wandering mind.  So I'm excited to mention (which I'm sure will back-fire later down the road), I've started working on a minicomic series that will be a lot of fun to draw, and hopefully a lot of fun to read.  It will probably be 5 issues long, and I will hopefully have the first issue done by SPX in September.  Below is one of the initial sparks of the story, the working title of which is the Plot.