2009 Goals

It feels like there are 2,009 things I want to do in 2009, so I had better add “learn to prioritize” to the list!

My personal goals for the coming year are to take better care of myself (better eating & sleeping habits, more physical activity), improve my relationship with time, hone my intuition, and speak from the heart even when it’s scary.

I want to make more comics, so a big goal for me is to draw them every day, in the morning. I also plan to set aside specific time every week for other things that are important to me: Trees & Hills duties, website stuff, engaged citizenship / activism, etc. I need to regulate my computer usage so I can spend less time in front of the screen.

Naturally I will continue devoting a lot of energy to Trees & Hills (there is a LOT to do), but I need to devote more to my personal comics work than I did this year. My main focus here will be resurrecting my minicomic series Square Dance (a 5.5″ x 8.5″ catch-all for my comics work). I hate to risk jinxing myself by announcing plans like this, but I intend to produce three 32-page issues of Square Dance a year: one each for the spring, fall, and holiday touring seasons. I have some other comic & zine ideas in mind, but they will be prioritized behind Square Dance. I hope to place work in some more anthologies.

In 2009 I expect to be a more engaged citizen. From the get-go I will be working with one or more anti-nuke groups to produce a comic for late winter / early spring as part of the effort to prevent the relicensing of Vermont Yankee, and may help out in some other ways. Throughout the year I will be working with The Sustainability Project on the Monadnock Community Gardening Initiative in a variety of ways: making comics about food and gardening, but also the less familiar tasks of trying to lay groundwork for tool banks, community gardens, and skill-share networks. Yowza! More reasons to budget my time better.

In the fall, I look forward to officiating a wedding in Minneapolis!

That isn’t even everything, but I would hate to drain the coming year of any sense of wonder and surprise for you. It’s going to be quite a year!

Whirlwind of the present

Well, things have been so crazy lately that I’ve lost track of what day it is! Somehow I thought Friday was Thursday, and then I had a weekend houseguest, so here I am making the sort of post I’d intended to have up on Thursday.

Although it looks like the onset of winter has slowed things down somewhat, the end of this busy year has been nuts. In mid-November I attended a friend’s wedding and to my surprise ended up reuniting with an estranged friend. Not long after that I lost one of my jobs, and at about the same time had some intense positive dating experiences & other shifts in my personal life. My other job, in which I work from home for my newly-married friend, had scaled back hours, but through the power of coincidence, picked up the pace just after I lost the first job.

In trying to figure out how to actually accomplish all the things I hope to do next year (a subject for later), I contacted one of the groups working to ensure Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant closes on time, and much faster than I expected got a comics project OK’ed in their 2009 rough budget!

So, I have been experiencing a lot of upheaval. Some of it has been stressful, but looking past that it mostly seems to be just the sort of bubbling ferment that produces good things. It has also fired me up again on the simplifying project I started last August (to make all my possessions fit comfortably in a roughly 10′ x 15′ space)! Once again I am winnowing and organizing, and it feels good. I made a lot of progress before, then let things get slovenly, and have pushed back the piles again and hope to finally get this place into a pleasing, functional order. Related, I am working harder at improving my relationship with time.

Winter is a good time for this sort of inward-focused work. I had my last public event of the year a week ago, tabling for Trees & Hills at the Stars & Skulls Craft Fair, which went well for us. The day before that I brought some comics to Rebecca Migdal‘s Tidings Of Joy event to help raise money for Doctors Without Borders, and the day before that I bravely passengered through the aftermath of an ice storm to attend Howard Cruse‘s release party for the North County Perp #2 (in which I have a few strips).

Speaking of anthologies, I am working on submissions for two different ones that both have their deadlines on December 31. We’ll see what happens! If I spend New Year’s Eve drawing comics, I suppose it will at least be appropriately symbolic.

After that, it’s a whole new year, chock full of possibilities!

Looking back at 2008 already

sethheartfist.gifIt may be a little early for this sort of thing, but the mass of things I hope to somehow accomplish in the coming year have set me to thinking. So – what did I do this year?

Well, I kicked off the year with a nasty cold, and just as I was recovering from that, the person I was apparently going to settle down with dumped me with little explanation. By mid-January I had had enough of 2008 and was ready for next year.

Fortunately, comics treated me much better.

I did not print a single new comic of my own, except a small giveaway for Halloween, but I did place comics in several anthologies. I co-edited & contributed to this year’s Trees & Hills anthologies Swingin’ Hits and Seeds; I also had comics in Matt Reidsma‘s 600th-strip celebrating High Maintenance Machine #20, Candy Or Medicine Free Comic Book Day Special 2008, Candy Or Medicine #3, Secrets & Lies, Always Comix #4: Activity, and Izzy Challenge #5: 50 State Jam. I initiated, edited & contributed to Trees & Hills’ free comics sheet Twig, then stopped when I got too busy. My strip Spinning World continued to appear in monthly Vermont newspaper The Commons.

I participated in the Comic Rehab Ripoff, Hourly Comic Day, and the 99 Doodles Project. I started a Comics By Request project, which I will draw next year (meaning you could still submit a request!). I also reprinted Before Sleep #3, 4 & 5.

I tabled at Granite State Comic Con, Broke: an affordable art fair, MoCCA, Arts Alive, Boston Zine Fair, Winchester Pickle Festival, Philly Zine Fest, and Broke (again).

I shut down my prematurely-started sustainability journal Downpower, and started a sketch & illustration blog. Unfortunately January’s events threw me off the regular sketching I was doing, and I haven’t yet regained the habit, nor have I found the time to keep scanning sketches. I committed to updating this website twice a week, and have mostly stuck to that. More recently I have decided at least half the posts should be comics. I also added a store, shortened up the header, and some other webby stuff.

I worked 2 part-time day jobs, for which among other things I built 3 websites. I’ve been pretty happy with both jobs.

I’ve made new friends and entered into new correspondences. One of my best friends moved back within driving distance. I have been subject to weird coincidences, omens, and the hand of fate.

All of this (and more!) brings us up to a couple weeks ago, when things got crazy!

But that’s another story, for another time (namely next week).

(ps. the sketch above is by Seth Tobocman, whose comics I’ve really gotten into & who I briefly met a couple times this year).

Purchase SEEDS online!

I am making a slight change to the way I update this site. For a while now, I have been posting comics and/or news on Mondays, and installments of 99 Doodles on Thursdays. This worked pretty nicely, but I now hope to take the slightly harder path of posting comics every Monday, and news or Doodles on Thursdays, to give the comics the priority they deserve – starting next week. Today we have news!

At long last, Seeds is in stock at Trees & Hills Comics Distro! Themed around FOOD with an emphasis on its social aspects, the latest Trees & Hills anthology comes with a booklet of cartoonists’ favorite recipes and a packet of organic lettuce seeds from High Mowing Farm in Vermont, all wrapped in an earthy brown cover with a red apple print (an organic heirloom apple from a local farmer’s market, of course). I co-edited, contributed a 4-page comic (sample here), and wrote the afterword. We’re especially proud of this one, and it has been selling like hotcakes (appropriately enough). We are pretty sure the initial printing will be sold out by year’s end (!), so get your copy while the getting is good! Makes an excellent gift.

Before Sleep #3

Before Sleep #3 by Colin Tedford Before Sleep #3 - More of the doggerel, abstractitude, silliness, & surreality you’ve come to love in these sketchbook comics. “There are a lot of really original ideas … plus a lot of LIFE!”Alec Longstreth. “I love BS#3!”Marek Bennett.


5.5″ x 4.25″, 32 pgs. Out of Print

Thanksgiving Through The Years

Spinning World: Thanksgiving Through the Years

Transcript

Thanksgiving Through the Years

A Wamponaog adult tells a child, “We give thanks to these plants and animals who gave their lives so we may live…” Unnoticed in the background, Pilgrims appear on the horizon.

A white American man says Thankgiving grace: “We give thanks for this food to the Big Sky-Daddy who so kindly depopulated this great land for us…” Their eyes closed, none of the family yet sees the giant flying saucers in the sky outside the window.

A huge potbellied alien with spindly limbs plucks a human from a jar and says, “We give thanks to Zlarx for these delectable beings (who are also such versatile slaves)…” (“Help!” cries the human in its tiny voice.)

Notes

This month I was so busy and tired that I couldn’t bring myself to do a strip that required research, so I redrew a seasonal strip from the Keene Free Comics days. I think the new strip is clearer, but I still drew the human too small in the last panel! C’est la vie. I will have to fill in November’s Great Moments In Nuclear History at a later date.

Get this strip as part of Square Dance #4.

Ask Jack

Ask Jack

Ask Jack front coverGet copies of “Ask Jack” formatted as a minicomic with puzzle to give to trick-or-treaters, Halloween party-goers, goblins, etc.! Buy packs of “Ask Jack” and other Halloween comics, or right-click & download the PDF of “Ask Jack” to print. All I ask if you download is that you email or leave a comment to let me know you downloaded it and how many you printed & where they went (for example, “30 copies to trick-or-treaters in Putney, VT”).

It’s easy! The PDF has 2 pages which should be printed as one double-sided sheet in “landscape” format, preferably on orange paper. There are 2 copies of the comic on the sheet, so cut the sheet in half (if using scissors instead of a papercutter, you may want to cut after folding). Fold the comic in half so you can’t see the covers, then on each side fold the edge next to the opening back to meet the edge with the fold, producing a little booklet with covers where you read the comic, then flip over & open the back for a puzzle! It should look like this. Put them under a heavy book for a while so they stay closed better.

Have a fun & spooky Halloween!