Hot off the press: a one-sheet war!

“This is the story … of seven monsters … picked to be in a comic together … find out what happens … when monsters stop being polite … and start killing each other: Monster Melee!”

After a soft debut at September’s Memphis Zine Fest 6 (my first IRL event in nearly two years, where I demo’d the folding/trimming on this book to its socially-distanced attendees), Monster Melee is getting its wide release as part of October’s Monster Market, which I think will be a good fit for it. Or at least as good as can be in a virtual shop where people can’t pick it up and play with it…

See, this minicomic is a little different than my usual Smeary Soapbox Press-ents minicomics: while this is also made from a single sheet of paper, it’s a sheet that’s not bound, but rather folded to achieve its book-ness. This summer I took an online RISO workshop from the fine folks at Outlet PDX where I was reminded of this folding format and decided to give it a try. I’ve never used it before because it’s generally done with a letter size piece of paper, yielding what to me feels like a too-small finished book, but their example started with an 11×17” sheet (as mine does), which folds down to the familiar minicomic size, and I was off and running…

Interested in your own copy? You can get Monster Melee (8 two-color pages on blue stock; trim size 5.5 x 4.25″; unfolds into 11 x 17 poster) by mail via my Square store for $3.00 postpaid in the US. You can also get a copy by becoming one of my Patreon patrons during October 2021 at the Correspondent or Art Lover level (plus, joining (at any level) gives you immediate access to other online bonus comics, including a full-color Human Spring adventure)!

[January 2023 UPDATE: I’ve closed my Patreon page.]

Oh, what could have been…

So, earlier this summer I took an online RISO zine-making class from OutletPDX in Portland. They were the same group that taught the RISO print-making class I took last summer, and I wanted to play around a little more with the technology & get published in one of their publications.

The theme was “Things we love about where we live”, and in June I was pretty optimistic about what my summer might look like. Alas, that window was only briefly open before Delta took hold here in the Mid-South, and I was back to mandated masking and pretty much sheltering in place before I got the chance to enjoy any of these things I love about Memphis…

An odd thing (well, odd to me) about Outlet’s Let’s Make a Zine! Volume 6 is that they didn’t want to make any extra copies available, either for contributors to purchase or even for them to sell in their own store! I’d hoped to have some copies of this multi-colored extravaganza to sell once I could get back to doing shows again, but I guess the vision of easily printed and distributed media they touted in the class wasn’t something they actually believe in practicing…

So, since I have no other way to share this cartoon (or the story behind it), here it is now (rather than my customary year after publication), in as close to its dayglo glory as is possible to scan!

It’s actually a shame I wasn’t able to have extra copies, because I did make my first tentative steps back towards doing shows at Memphis Zine Fest 6 over Labor Day weekend. It would have been an appealing item for that crowd. Instead, I took the opportunity to show off the books I’d finished over the nearly two years since I’ve last done a show. There wasn’t a crush of crowds (which was good, given where our numbers were earlier this month), and it felt okay. So okay that I’ve signed up to do another (larger) event in November…

One of the new books I showcased at Zine Fest was Monster Melee!, inspired by a format I saw in the Outlet virtual class. It was really a soft debut, as I was saving it for October’s Monster Market! I was happy with how it turned out, and was able to use some of what I learned in the RISO class to try out a new kind of coloring for me…

[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]