Zinefest + New Reviews for Yearbooks + GMN changes

So first things first-- this weekend-- ZINEFEST! It's this bloody weekend! Saturday 11am-5pm (the poster has the incorrect start time for Saturday), with an afterparty at ARISE! books!. Sunday 11am-4pm

Justin Skarhus, Sean Lynch and their ladies will be holding down the 2D Cloud/Good Minnesotan fort. Luke Holden and his zine machine will possibly make an appearance as well.

In addition, Sean will be premiering Zine Supreme at said event. It's going to be a mouthful of mouth-wateringly Jawsome zines and comics, so please swing on by the event (and pick up yerself a copy of ZINE SUPREME)!


In other news, we have several new reviews of our latest comic, Yearbooks recently thrown-up on the internets. Huzzah! Up first is one performed by Mr. Shawn Nyland-Hoke of Size Matters. And while you really should read the whole review (and the comic!) here is a snippet "what really makes this project crackle with energy is the vibrancy of Raighne Hogan's colors." Ahh shucks, I turns me head and bats my eyes. Seriously, I do. I have tried really hard to complement Nic's amazing line work with the colours, and after spending me and Maggie's honey moon money on the book, it's nice to hear that.

Up next is a review by Kevin Bramer of Optical Sloth. "Nicholas uses the silences of his characters beautifully to convey emotions that would take him pages of exposition and Raighne nails the drabness of high school while still managing the vibrancy of the students and the general high school art world". Kevin ends the review with "I wouldn’t have guessed Minnesota to be one of the places that could legitimately be called the future of comics, but if these people keep this up they might well get there". Wow! Very grand, thanks Kevin!

"From the jarring psychedelic dream sequence that opens the book, to its closing apocalyptic meditation on the intrusion of the adult world, Yearbooks presents a realistic, sometimes darkly skewed vision of high school life". The above comes curtesy of Matt Dick's review on Exquisite Things. Another wonderful review, thanks Matt!

The last topic to cover in this blog post is that yes, we are having some changes in how we run Good Minnesotan. GMN#4 is going to be delayed until early 2010. The reason for this is pretty simple, Yearbooks was expensive and we wish to focus on pushing that book. The deadline is still roughly in place... Although pushed back several months. We would still ideally like something by folks by mid-August, even if it is only 2 pages of progress as we plan to be applying for grants and what-not to get funding for the project.

Justin Skarhus is the new lead editor going forward as well. We will talk more about this in a very near future blog post. Thanks for reading!
Read more | Post a comment

Yearbooks Launched into the Basket!

When Shaun, Raighne and I were setting up the Launch Party we met a woman who summed up the night's events perfectly:"I have like 600 people's numbers on my phone but only 6 I could call to pick me up at the airport."

We threw our party on Sunday night, on Father's Day, in the rain! Most folks who would normally attend an outdoor summer party stayed home. However, the friends who would pick us up at the airport, wait, let me ammend that, the friends who have picked us up at the airport, formed the bulk of the party. We enjoyed the intimate gathering, and it was fun to meet our friends' friends that had braved the poor weather.

We attempted to project Basket Case on the big screen, but phantom technology problems prevailed despite all efforts by Amanda of Arise and a friendly Walker Arts guard. We ended up hovering around a laptop! It was better suited to the smaller turn out!

We had a lengthy discussion about our shared dislike of Holy Land's hummus's new packaging (more paper, less food) and receipe (way over-whipped). The garlic flavor, which used to be my fav, is now inedible. Luckily Raighne and I baked some cookies which Shaun photographed. They tasted delicious but look like poop in the photo. Sort of fitting?

Thank you to Arise Books, Big Time Attic, Ed Choy Moorman, Dirk Deppey of Journalista, Twin Cities Daily Planet, Dan Olson of the International Cartoonist Conspiracy, and Minneapolis's Comic Examiner Ted Anderson for promoting the Yearbooks launch. For anyone who has Minneapolis and/or Minnesota comics events coming up in the future: contact Ted!

Finally a big thank you to Shaun, co-birther of Yearbooks. He helped us copy our flyers, get our stuff and selves to and from the event, bought lots of sweet yuppie treats for our guests, and he was so nice and funny the whole time. He even remembered to take pictures at the party...which once again, we did not. Friends! Airports! Yearbooks!
Read more | Post a comment

Publisher's Weekly previews Yearbooks

Ada Price was kind enough to preview Yearbooks in Publisher's Weekly's newsletter of comics and graphic novel publishing last week. Ours was one of three books featured in her Panelmania: Comics from the MoCCA Art Festival.
Read more | Post a comment

Launch Party at Arise this Sunday + Yearbooks Preview

Open publication - Free publishing - More shaun feltz

Kinda neat? Maybe? In any case that was just a snack to give you a taste of what you will be seeing this Sunday, should you stop on by for the launch party.
Read more | Post a comment

Yearbooks reviewed on High-Low

We got our first review of Yearbooks in Rob Clough's High-Low blog on Friday. In the review, Yearbooks: The Betrayal of Dreams, he says, "Breutzman's visuals tell the story effortlessly. His character design, body language, use of gesture and unusual placement of panels give the reader subtext and a richer understanding of the story's ultimate emotional resolution." Whoo-hoo! Go read it!

We also noticed that Rob's review got a nice mention by Dirk Deppey in Journalista (in the Literary Comics section).
Read more | Post a comment

Our Goods and Our Bads at MoCCA

Whew! MoCCA 2009 is over and we are back in MN. It's time to reflect on our goods (high-five) and our bads (oops!) at NYC's small press convention. We'll also talk about a change we're making at 2d Cloud based on how we fared.

ps. thank you to Shawn Nyland-Hoke for taking this pic of us at MoCCA. There were six of us at this table and not one of us had a camera!

Without further ado, the Good and the Bad:


Table Display

• Our Bad: A cardboard cutout of a pink lactating moonbat was poor advertising.

• How we made Good: We removed the moonbat and used the space to leave copies of our mini-comics and Yearbooks opened up on the table. Customers flipped through books they barely glanced at before!

Sales

• Our Bad: Sales were slooooow on Saturday. Raighne, Nic, and I watched in heat-exhausted awe as Sean Lynch charmed con-goers with his friendly demenour: "Even with ketchup-stained fingers you can flip through my sketchbooks." Meanwhile, we drank water and tried not to faint.
  

• How we made Good: Sunday was a .05% cooler. After a day of observing Sean, the undefeated master of customer service, and a pep talk from Ed, the great self-promotion guru, I gathered my wits. I opened my mouth and people bought comics.
  

Marketing

• Our Bad: 1) Aesthetically, we make comics that are grey matter. They are neither light and happy nor dark and homicidal. 2) We publish an anthology about Minnesota. Limited appeal...anyone?
  

• How we made Good: 1) Ed Choy Moorman. His comics are universally loved by all people and press. We were able to pass our comics on to all of the reviewers that stopped to check out his books. 2) We decided that after GMN #4 Good Minnesotan will become an online-only anthology. This will give us a chance to start creating more of our own books whose audiences are not limited by geography.
  

Networking

• Our Bad: Not meeting up with Julia Rothman from Book-by-Its-Cover.

• Double Bad: Failing to give review copies to Matt Phelan from Anthem Magazine.

• How we Made Good: We're mailing Julia and Matt their review copies.
  

• How we made Double-Good: We were overjoyed to hear Jose Villarubia say he was so glad we made it. We got to meet our sales rep, Tony Shenton, in person, and chat with Tom Neely about self-publishing. We gave a distribution sample to Dylan Williams of Sparkplug comics and promo copies of Yearbooks to our favs Charles Burns, Al Columbia, Dan Nadel, Matt Madden & Jessica Abel. We met Shawn Nyland-Hoke of Size Matters: the Mini-Comics Blog (he's vegetarian!) and Ada Price of Publishers Weekly who loved Yearbooks.
  

Panels

• Our Bad-est Bad: 1) We missed yet another one of Tom K.'s panels. 2) Going to the Making Comics panel that Heidi MacDonald of Publisher's Weekly's The Beat moderated and not getting her a copy of Yearbooks.
  

• Our Good-est Good: 1) Nic was a panelist in a talk with successful School of Visual Arts graduates. This panel included Nate Powell and Dash Shaw. He mentioned Yearbooks. 2) The Comics vs. Art panel with Frank Santoro, Gary Panter, and Raymond Sohn ("the swingin' 80's"). I thought I was going to pass out. I didn't know anyone else was melded across the divide like me.

After-parties

• Our Bad: Missing the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art's opening night for David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp because we hadn't eaten dinner. Not hanging out with Matt Madden & Jessica Abel...because we were too tired...? WTF.
  

• Our Good: Nothing good. We sucked the big one here, folks. Too much hot air, not enough liquids, foodstuff or sleep to make wise decisions.

Comic Books Shops:

• Our Bad: Not visiting Forbidden Planet.

• Our Good: Dropping off Yearbooks at Jim Hanley's Universe. They have the best organized mini-comics section we've ever seen. Our comics were placed at eye level with our shelf-talker. Unbelievable!

Conclusion
At MoCCA 2010 we resolve to eat breakfast, talk to con-goers instead of hiding behind cardboard moonbats, attend after-parties with or without our dinners, and to avoid flights that are likely to be delayed. See you at MoCCA 2010...when we plan to commit more Good deeds than Bad!

Links:

• Here's our table-mates Sean Lynch and Ed Choy Moorman's take on MoCCA.
• Jog the Blog: MoCCA '09: The Tourist
  
• Publisher's Weekly: MoCCA's Heated Success
• Newsarama: MoCCA
• Comic Book Resources: MoCCA Hits Manhattan
  

Read more | Post a comment

2d Cloud gearing up for MoCCA

At first, we were going to the MoCCA comic convention, then we were not. Raighne submitted the forms within the first week of registration BUT THEN we learned that tables were sold out. That canceled our NY trip.

While tabling at TCAF in Toronto, we met Jose Villarrubia. I'm not exaggerating when I write that if you read comics you've read his. Raighne read interviews when he was young in which Jose talked about how he first painted things by hand and then scanned them into the computer and reworked them digitally. In other words, his opinion means a lot to us, and he's a wonderful man. Jose told us in the airport on the way back to Minnesota that we needed to go to MoCCA, even if we didn't have a table. We decided to go.

We booked our flight, and then a couple of weeks later, we were taken off the waiting list and given a table. Whew! Nic Breutzman, Ed Choy Moorman, and Sean Lynch decided (again, thank goodness) to share a table with us.

If you are in New York City on June 6 & 7, please stop by our table at MoCCA.

Thank you, Jose! Thank you Richard Krauss for posting Yearbooks info on Midnight Fiction. Thank you Brian Heater for including us in the MoCCa Festival 2009 Preview on the Daily Cross Hatch.
Read more | Post a comment