Thanks Rob!

A review of Freddy and the mini I did for SPX called Birthday!

Rob Clough has been doing lots of great reviews of CCS alumni and current students for th

e Comics Journal. Here he reviews me along with two of my talented classmates, Jose-Luis Olivares and Garry-Paul Bonesteel. I've been reading Rob's reviews since before he was doing them for TCJ, and I've always appreciated how closely he reads everything he writes about, and how attentive he is to things that work and don't work. So thanks

Rob!

WHOLESALING!

Freddy and Warmth are now available to order wholesale through Tony Shenton! If you have a store and would like to sell my comics, please contact Tony at Shenton4Sales@aol.com.

If you live in Baltimore, check out Atomic Books. They have some of my books for sale already, and they also sell them online. They are also one of the greatest comic stores ever.

Freddy and Warmth will soon also be available at Jim Hanley's Universe in NYC, Cosmic Monkey in Portland, OR, and at my old friend Ada Books in Providence, RI.

And here's something weird! As Freddy first appeared in my thesis project at Hampshire College in 2005. So much has changed.

'Tis the Season

Love,
Melissa

Art Auction for my Buddy

My friend John Ward had a terrible fall a few months ago on Halloween, and some amazing people have set up an art auction online to help out with funding his recovery and ability to live independently in the future. There's some really great stuff up there, great for Christmas presents, and for a good cause. (I didn't get my act together to donate anything yet, but might be able to still...). The auction is up online here, and there's a fundraiser and live auction on Dec. 20th.

Like check out this sweet rollerskate by Mollie Lief!

Today

More Monsters.

A STORE TO BUY THINGS IN!!!!

Chuck is starting to put more comics and things in his online store, The Oily Boutique, and my comics are for sale there! So now you can buy Freddy and Warmth and Snake Oil and Sundays ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!!! Click on the images on the right to go to the store.

Check it out!

New Old Stuff

I've been working on putting up more comics on my Flickr, so here is a story I did last year for anthology of silent comics called "Quiet, Please" with Jose-Luis Olivares, Mo Oh, and Mark Bilokur. We have no copies of it left, but hopefully someday we'll have more!

Good Times

Uhhhh huuuuuh. I really love Brooklyn. Mostly because my best friends live there. We'd probably move there if we had a million dollars.

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival was aaawweeesooommeee. Reasons why:

It was in a little basement of a Polish Church with sparkly party decorations, there was a fake fireplace on the stage, I got to hang out with Jessica Campbell from D&Q, my Sundays buddies, and Barry and Leon from Secret Acres, I got to sing along to Michael Jackson in a little car with Joe and Sam and Chuck, Gary Panter was just walking around the show like any other dude, I got some Ryan Cecil Smith minis (seriously, he's amazing), I finally went to Desert Island (which I loved, go there now), and I met Carrie who is awesome and writes the Try Harder blog.

On a side note, we ate at an incredible place in Williamsburg on Sunday morning called Diner. I am not kidding, it was delicious. Pumpkin butter. That's all I'm saying.

Brooklyn and Belgians

THIS WEEKEND

Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest. I have a really good feeling already about this.

At a table with the Sundays crew as usual, Chuck, Alex, Joe, and Sean, and we're driving down with Sam Gascan, who I thiiink has a new comic, and Chuck has SNAKE OIL FIIIIVVVVEEEEE

plus he and I made a tiny little comic

here's a preview:

Also I got to meet David Libens, another artist at L'Employe du Moi, and he gave me a comic, called Badaboom Twist, and it is awesome. Really honest and heartfelt, and scribbly, and I loved it. His comics are all on his blog: http://badaboumtwist.blogspot.com/

Monsters and Changes

Lately I can't stop drawing these monsters that have no bodies.

Those are words of wisdom from James Sturm, who came into our Professional Practices class today and spouted some gems about business and art and life.

Also, the way my blog looks changed again, obviously. I'm working on making it look more professional for professional practices (which is taught by my friend and personal hero, Alec Longstreth.) So the way this looks might keep changing. Let me know if it looks like crap!

love

melissa

Just 'Cause

Amy and Me

Thesis Synopsis Posters

Oh my gosh!

A shout out from one of my favorite artists working today! Thanks, Richard Thompson! Cul de Sac continues to inspire me every day!

Houses

Fan Art

This is Alice, from one of my favorite comic strips of all time, Cul de Sac, by Richard Thompson. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It's absolutely beautiful, and also hilarious.

Tyler's Tattoo

My buddy Tyler got one of these drawings that I did tattooed on himself in some form recently, but I don't know what it actually looks like because HE HAS NOT SENT ME A PICTURE YET (get on that, ty ty)

Here's all of it

Expozine and L'employe du Moi

Canada!

This weekend I traveled with four of my favorite guys: Chuck, Jose, Gabby, and Max to Montreal for Expozine! It was my first time at this convention, and I really hope it won't be the last. I loooooove this show. It's cheap as heck to get a table, people are really nice and into trading and excited about other people's work, there are no name-tags, it's free to get in...etc etc. The only bad part was when it started to smell like old gym shorts.

The other thing that made this weekend so great was getting to hang out with some people from L' Employe du Moi, a collective of comic artists in Brussels that Max (de Radigues, who is the current fellow at CCS), is a part of. In Brussels they share a studio and collaborate on comics, and publish beautiful books as well. Most of them also have day jobs, and they are funding these projects themselves out of pure love for comics. It's so inspiring so see what they do, especially because they are always thinking about what good storytelling is, and because they are so supportive of each other. Sacha Goerg spoke with Max in our class about Employe du Moi, and I got to see some of his comics this weekend, they are absolutely beautiful, as are Max's.

All the people on the Grand Papier website, where they get a lot of submissions for the massive anthologies they've been putting out, are amazing (most of it's in french, but what I understand looks amazing!) We also got to hang out with some cartoonists who live in Montreal and work in a studio together, where last week they all drew and printed an entire newspaper comic to give out at Expozine! And it's beautiful! (See cover above, drawn by Sacha and Max).

That's all.

Inspiration.

*For a way better post about Expozine, read this!

Fern Hole

also on Joyteeth

Freddy's Birthday

As part of a campaign to have more art on the internet, here is a comic. Click here to read the story in order (if you click on the image, it goes in the wrong order)

YESSSSS!!!

GO NEW URBAN ARTS!!!!

Today NUA (Above, two of my favorite people respresenting for NUA: Jason Yoon, the executive director, and Rosalia Velis, alumni student and Studio Team Advisory Board Chair) received a Coming Up Taller Award, in Washington D.C., in PERSON from first lady MICHELLE OBAMA!!!! From NUA:

"A project of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), the Coming Up Taller award is the nation's highest honor for the field of out-of-school time arts and humanities programs."

And only 15 programs in the whole country receive the award each year!

New Urban Arts deserves every ounce of recognition it gets and more. Being a part of that program has completely influenced the direction I'm taking in my life. It's incredible!

For more information about NUA and about the award they received, click here.

And SO MUCH LOVE AND CONGRATULATIONS to all of the New Urban Arts community!!! I've got chills.

Here's a picture of one of the workshops they did as part of an Art Ambush on the National Mall while in D.C. (Hope you guys don't mind I swiped this photo from your flickr)

Warmth and Glowing Dinosaur Head Music

From a 4 page comic I just did based on a dream I had, with bleeding baby animals and dark forests and monsters. I think I will prooooobably have copies at Expozine...and hopefully for sale soon!

For Alec's Professional Practices Class, which kicks my lazy brain in the ass once a week (in the best way!) we have to do a final project, and mine will focus on getting my comics out there and also making my blog not look so lame. I don't know what's wrong with this template, but it freaking sucks to use.

P.S. My friend Devlin is in a frikin AWESOME band called Nuclear Power Pants, and they're on tour right now with Dan Deacon! So go!!! They are about to start the Canadian/New England leg of the tour. We still haven't decided which one to go to yet...

Aretha

From the "Lady Soul" TV Special, 1968.

So Awesome!

Just saw this on Drawn, from Anatomy of Japanese Folk Monsters by Shigeru Mizuki. Amazing!

The Junc

For my thesis project this year at The Center for Cartoon Studies, I'm working on a bunch of short comics journalism type pieces about White River Junction, VT, the town that I have lived in for the past year and a half, where CCS is located in the old Colodny Surprise Department Store. I lived in this town four years ago as well, when I interned for CCS.

There's something special about this town. I'm still working on getting at what that really is. In the end I think I'm going to have some stories of my interactions with local people at the Gift Shop/ Convenience Store where I work, selling a lot of lottery tickets, cigarettes, and coffee. I've also recorded a couple of interviews with people who live here. I'm really influenced by Studs Terkel's work. I've also been reading a lot of Duplex Planet, and listening to Radio Diaries. (You should definitely hear this one.)

I'm still in the process of figuring out how this is going to come together. Now that I've done a lot of observing and interviewing (though I'm not nearly done), I'm getting antsy to start drawing. So here's a page a drew, to get down on paper some of the things I've found out, and what my focus is going to be. It's not just about WRJ as a town, but about the people in it, and the specific stories and details that make them all unique.

Tom Hart is my advisor. He is AWESOME. Check out his comics on Act-i-vate!

New Urban Arts, Zines on a Bus, a Love Letter

When I lived in Providence year before last, a place called New Urban Arts was a huge part of my life. It still is! Even though I am further away and holed up in a little town drawing little comics.

New Urban Arts is a lot of (amazing) things, and it is mostly a space for high school age people and older artist people to be together and be creative. It changes lives. But anyway, the main reason I am writing this post is to call attention to:

a) my friend Andrew Oesch who is about to embark on a trip on a bus powered by grease, which also happens to have a photocopier in it, and

b) a group at New Urban Arts who is very near to my heart called the Zine Team, who used said bus-copier to make multiple copies of a collaborative zine in 4.5 hours, for which they got 64 submissions that same day. If that doesn't make any sense, read this blog post, and here you can also read about Andrew's Imminent Amazing Adventure.

I am continually inspired by all these amazing people around me. I am so lucky to know them. Lately I've been feeling like I've only been thinking about dollars and how to make them, and I want that to change. Soon get ready for a long winded post about John Porcellino, who visited CCS this week and blew my mind to pieces.

Violin Drawing!

Commissioned drawing for Peter Bingen, a violin-maker in Portland, OR.

Let me know if you want to commission a drawing! I like to draw.

Ten Tigers Poster!

Screenprinted and drawn by me, for the band Ten Tigers!

P.S. SPX was awesome!

ESS PEE EXXX!

Small Press eXpo 2009 is this weekend! Yee haaa! I will be there at a table with Chuck Forsman (SNAKE OIL 4!!!) Sean Ford (ONLY SKIN 4!!!) and Joe Lambert(awesome!!!) !!! and Sundays Three!!!! I'll have Freddy, and some little tinier new Freddy minis. Also some little paintings (including the ones below), and prints.

So many friends and comics and fun! I'm super excited!

paintings

I Still Cannot Believe I Got to Do This

I made this print (designed by Tom Devlin at Drawn and Quarterly, screenprinted by me) for John Porcellino's book tour this fall! JOHN FREAKING PORCELLINO!

If you don't know who he is, you should. He has been making his mini-comic, King Cat, since 1989, and is a huge inspiration to me. He is coming to White River Junction and I am SO excited. He will also be at SPX!

That print I did a while ago but never scanned

Screenprint.

Chuck McBeans

Chuck "Mcbuck" Forsman, award-winning author of Snake Oil has a new website! It's so faaancy.

He is amazing, p.s.

He's currently working on Snake Oil 4 (!) and a graphic novella, Gerry and Olga, which you can read on his site. It's wonderful!

And I'm not just saying that because he's my special friend.

More Little Paintings