A Working City

Bride of Innsmouth

Bride of Innsmouth

The Best Slide Ever

Anecdote (a very late Thanksgiving presentation)

H'lo.

It's been way too long since I came around here. Looks like I've got a lot of catching up to do. Too awesome.

In any case, I wanted to put this here thang out there----it just about killed me but I finally got it done last night.....about a month after Thanksgiving. Mmmmyeah.

Check out the rest of "Anecdote" at www.drunkduck.com/anecdote

The Making of The Cigarette Comic (Attempted Not Known 9)

The Cigarette Comic is a set of 20 micro-comics about smoking, packaged in a box to look like a pack of cigarettes. It was the first issue of Attempted Not Known to take the form of what I now call a comic/object. I had already published eight issues as booklets, and learned a lot—mainly, that people do indeed judge a book by its cover. Issues 5-7 had some very interesting work inside, but they were printed in black ink on newsprint and no one bought them. They didn't look exciting. With issue 8, I tried a hand-cut window in the cover. It worked! People really showed interest in the book, because it was clear that I had put some work into it.

So, for Attempted Not Known #9, I decided to go a step further and build a comic in a format that would really stand out.

I noticed other artists starting to do interesting things with their packaging. I had been interested in the design of the cigarette box for years, and I thought a set of comics about smoking would be a provocative subject.

Drawing the comics, of course, turned out to be the easy part.

The tolerances for the box are very precise, which makes sense in a production environment where the boxes are die-cut by the thousands. It took a certain amount of effort to create my own box design using the Linux tools that were available at the time. It was difficult to find paper thick enough to stand up as a box, but thin enough to run through a printer; shiny enough to look realistic, but matte enough to take ink. I struggled with a number of prototypes which gradually got better and better. Some of the early ones that I sold were salmon-colored, because I hadn't yet found a paper and printer combination that worked.


At one point, I decided it would be nifty to package some of them in plastic, complete with California tax stamps. I placed an ad on Craigslist, specifying the brand with the correct box size, and pretty soon a guy got in touch with me. I gave him instructions for removing the plastic without damaging the pull tab, and a week or two later I purchased 20 empty wrappers from him. They fit perfectly, and really rounded off the look of the package--but of course once you open the box and read the contents, you can never re-wrap it again.

Hand-cutting and gluing each box, cutting, folding, and stapling the 20 booklets for the inside, and putting everything together takes about 20 minutes per copy. In this way, the Cigarette Comic ended up as an unintentional commentary on consumer culture. Cigarettes are not just something disposable, they are the most disposable thing of all. People who don't need them burn them just for the smoke produced in their destruction--and then throw away the butts and the boxes by the side of the road. The Cigarette Comic is the opposite of this throwaway culture, and a tribute to it at the same time.

You can see the Cigarette Comic and other work at Attempted Not Known and Vidrio Cafe.

From December 18 through March 13, you can see more of Peter Conrad's work at the Cartoon Art Museum.

Bride of Innsmouth

To Share Is To Divide

This is my second post here, and I thought I'd share a couple of pages from my most recent work. Having started doing the comic thing for my web-comic, my latest effort has been for a 12 page mini-comic drawn to be printed (A5 booklet). Its been a very different venture for me, but I've enjoyed it so much that I've started another.

(Below are pages 1 and 7 respectively, from the story To Share Is To Divide).

What I Learned at the Fancy Rat Show

This ran on the Willamette Week website a while ago. It's like "auto-bio journalism comics" or something. You can learn how to make a rat pinata for your pet rats.

Escape Pod Alpha

ECTOPIARY, Page 50

LATEST PAGE IS UP NOW.

Having reached 50 pages feels a little like a milestone (or a millstone). It means in a couple of weeks, this site will be one year old! Considering the weekly update schedule, and the estimated length of the book, ECTOPIARY will be finished sometime in 2020. (Truthfully, I hope to increase the updates to twice a week before long, thereby shortening that span.)

It's been an interesting week for the site. After meeting the talented and lovely Spike (responsible for Templar, AZ) at the New England Webcomics Weekend shindig, she graciously plugged my comic on her own site. It was extremely gratifying to see the spike in the readership. My thanks to her and everybody who takes the time to read my efforts.

Also, some of you may have noticed that I gave the website a much-needed sprucing up. I replace the hideous logo, added a couple more links and gave it new buttons. The "About" page is still a bit dry, and when I finally get the inspiration, I'll spice up the text a bit.

As always, I'm grateful to all who write in their thoughts. I am also extremely grateful to people who kindly donate $$ to help my cause. If you wish to join their illustrious ranks, you can do so HERE.

Peoplings - autism, education, and the Savage of Aveyron

Hi, Jeff Benham here. I've been part of PRO-Comics from the start, but this is my first post. I've been toiling away with 7000 BC, making comics, teaching, organizing events, as well as working on my many jobs outside of the comics world. Hi, y'all.

This post is about my main comic project for the past couple years - a graphic novel about autism called Peoplings that I'm making with Courtney Angermeier. Peoplings weaves the stories of two children - Max, a contemporary kindergartner, and Victor, also known as the Savage of Aveyron, a feral child found in the woods of France in 1800. Both are based on real children.

Many of Victor's symptoms were related to autism. Young doctor Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard worked with Victor for five years, and through it he developed what became the basis of not only modern treatment for autism, but special education and many other educational approaches, including Montessori teaching.  Through Max's story, we get to see where all of this has led, as well as those things outside of the formal treatment structure that come into play - family, friends, social support structures, and so forth.

Below I've got a short section - Victor's story leading into Max's, in the very different styles that I'm using for their stories and their perspectives. We have the first section (about 70 pages) completed and posted as a pdf on our website, peoplings.com, and we also just got the project posted on kickstarter.com to do some fundraising towards completion.  We always love feedback of any kind.  Comment or send us an email through the website.

Thanks for looking, and thanks to Mike for making the blog.

Jeff

Escape Pod Alpha

Sparrow and Crowe

Sparrow and Crowe cover

An Escape Pod Alpha adventure