The Question, then, is “what”—

(This post was for the class I’m in right now, but I feel like it’s a good summation, so I’m putting it up in this section, as a primer fro stumblers [hello, stumblers!])

It is good to spread out, I feel.

What I mean by that is that it is nice to have many different areas of practice, so that if you’re blocked on one, you can focus on another for a while (naturally sometimes all of them are blocked, but that’s life. bear eats you).

So, of the things I do (and I am considering myself to do three things, Comics, Writing, Music), the thing I am the most focused on doing right now is making comics. It sometimes feels a thankless job, as the bristol piles up and your hands are, like, sooo dirty, but once you see it on the reduced-size page and can turn the page with ease, it’s infinitely rewarding. So making the book is the best part, for me. The finished product, when you make it by yourself, can be amazing, and you can be very proud of it. I mean, it seems obvious that you could be proud of something you made, but really, the sky (dollaz) is the limit.

I feel like I’m talking nonsense. It’s just exciting to read a book you made.

So, I’ve made four mini-comics (which, for those unaware of semantics [?] is what you refer to self-published comics as, they are not actually microscopic). Three of which I will now describe:

Good-Bye, The Pig:

This (click that link for examples) was the first I made, and as such I have mixed feelings about it. The cover, I feel, looks like a New Mexican Trail Guide, that pale orange is sooo pastel (or something), and I had much to learn about layout and how to more accurately maximize the space you fill up on a page. Copy machines are very tricky that way. However, this was the first time I discovered the “pamphlet” function on the copy machine, which is a magic button that does all the collating and layout and resizing by itself. It’s amazing and time saving, but slightly limited with it’s options. A finicky beast indeed.

Life in The Cyber Winter:

Life in The Cyber Winter (named after the last winter we had, which was so terrible it could only be purely digital in nature, and also best said in Tom Baker’s voice) was a comic I made for my Offset Productions class, and as such made Four Billion copies (150) of it. I will probably never run out of them. But, also, it meant I made a sweet glossy (see the glare?) cover with multiple colors. The inside, too, done on a nice cream stock, had much more options for doing full-bleed pages (which is when the image runs off the page). Here’s a spread:

Bob Dylan’s 115th Hat:

This is the most recent mini-comic of mine (I am currently working on a really long story. Like, really really long). It is a great little adventure involving a young girl, a hairless (mostly) dog, a poncho, Bob Dylan’s hat, and Mac Tonight. It’s notable because I made color covers with a magic secret free-xerox machine, and that I cropped it down so that there wasn’t a whole lot of space around the images. Here’s a spread:

So nice.

Writing:

I’ve done, every now and then, a few pieces of writing (i also, most of the time, keep a pretty fair journal). Most of the time, they stay confined to the class room that they are written for, like this story about two people, alone on the earth (now covered with a Sea of Blood), sailing on a Ship of Bone:

Ship Of Bone (word document)

I’m fairly fascinated by the idea of putting word documents up on a site for download. I suppose that .pdf’s are easier for a lot of people, but they strike me as irritating for a reason I can’t yet comprehend.

Anyways, that’s just what I did though with a piece of writing I did that dealt with my uncomfortable relationship with Philip Roth’s “Letting Go.” The blog “real normal” put it up on their site for .doc download, which I thought was a great idea, yes I did. I also did make two physical copies of this, but I have since given them all away. They looked great though, I swear.

Here’s the blog post about it.

The idea of advertising the work with a screenshot of Word is pleasing to me and my eye.

Music:

Of the things I do, Music, I suppose, is the oldest of them, and as such is close to me as holding some forgotten and (maybe maybe not) unattainable dream of fame and touring the universe playing off-kilter pop songs for billionz of people. Anyways, I have a band called Violet Mice, and I’ve made a few albums by that name. Occasionally, I make physical copies of my CDs for which to sell at shows (usually I give them away because nobody has no money anywhere).

O, Zeppelin!:

My second album, O, Zeppelin! I printed out Xeroxes of my color cover and glued them to a premade CD slipcover. It is probably the worst way to go about making a CD cover. Glue gets everywhere and it looks poor and sticky. But hey, I was young.

Girlz EP:

This is an EP I worked on from 2007-2008 (it’s a long time for four songs, but there was just so much gestation!). Earlier this year, I found a way, using a crafty and incredibly janky method of cutting, folding, and gluing, made little pockets to put the CD in (you can see the CD poking out. The CD is simply a white, blank CD-R, which I find great, because you can write directly on them (I generally use a little glyph that represents each album). I hear that you can also screenprint directly on these with no prob.

Here’s the back cover:

Honeybear:

Honeybear was my 4th (gosh so many) album, and for which I used the Offset Productions class at school to print a phat cover for.

The cover folds open twice, revealing a pocket for the CD. If you turn it around after it’s folded all the way, revealed is this:

It’s an image of a street in my hometown with a snappy Violet Mice logo on it. I’m pretty proud of how it came out. And since I did it offset, I got 200 copies of it. Now I only have to cut the shape out and glue them all! WOO! :D

So, there are examples of my main vocations. It’s tough sometimes, when making them, to continue to make them, when you are unsure if anyone will ever see them. I suppose it is an unfair train of thought to allow yourself to go through, but I feel like the possibility that your work will remain pressed back against a shelf or in a dumpster is one of the dangers (?thrills) of self-publishing.