I’m going to post reviews for at least a few of these over the coming weeks, but for now, here’s a list of all the zines we acquired through purchase or (mostly) trade. Thank you, creators! I’ve already been enjoying this year’s collection quite a bit, and I hope you’ve enjoyed a publication of mine (whether as Geminica or with Mike in The Soft Sciences.)

• it’s not what it looks like – La Nina
• what we comics about when we comics about comics - La Nina
• Dingaling Bros! Fakum and Failey! Three-Ring Wircus! – Skylaar Amann
• The Dreaming Crucible - Joel Shempert
• Milkyboots #11 - Virginia Payne
• Food Stamp Foodie #1 -Virginia Payne
• Papercutter #13 and #14 – Tugboat Press
• Be More Awesome – E. E. Dumas
• How To Share The Joy or Getting Others Enthused About What You Do - E. E. Dumas
• Unemployment for Fun and Profit - E. E. Dumas
• My Friends – Gabby Holden
• The Life and Death of the X-Ray Cafe  (Oregon History Comics) –  Dill Pickle Club, Sarah Mirk/John Isaacson
• Never Knows Best #1 and #2 – Trey Reis
• Sagittarius Manifesto, Two Weeks in Berlin #1 – The Blue Grapefruit Press
• Clutch #22/Invincible Summer #19 – Clutch McBastard, Nicole Georges
• Double Knots – Golden Spun
• (Untitled) – Jessica and Michael
• Awesomness! – Jonah Underwood, Nickle Garden MEDIA & 60 Tons of Battle
• All Things Ordinary #2 and #3 -Derek Neuland
• 10 Years of the Portland Zine Symposium – Portland Zine Symposium
• Growing Wings – Faith McKay
• Zine World #29 – Underground Press
• I Wipe My Butt with the Bible – Sam at The Blue Grapefruit Press
• Letters from Liars #1 and #2 -Androo Robinson
• Weekly Blackbird – Corvus Distribution
• Sex Zine – Julia Gfrorer, Brodie Kelly
• Ariadne Auf Naxos #1, 2 and 3 - Julia Gfrorer
• Flesh and Bone - Julia Gfrorer
• King-Cat Comics & Stories #71 – John Porcellino
• Emily Dickinson was a Fucking Ninja #249 – Mara Williams
• Make Your Own Darn Game, Fantasy Edition - Buttersword
• Free Society Libary No.6 –  Essays on the Social Problem by Henry Addis, June 1898 (Corvus Distribution)
• I Love Soda – Rebecca B.
• Piscataway Philadelphia Portland, a zine about friends – Sarah, Rebeccca, and Shelley
• Little God of Make-Good – Michael Whittier
• You Are Here – Carolee Gilligan Wheeler, Maureen Forys, Michael Whittier, Michael Wertz, Marissa Falco
• A New Declaration of Independence and Other Writings by Emma Goldman Anarchist – Corvus Distribution

Also, I will count among this batch a zine I received in the mail shortly before the symposium: The Pamphleteer from the excellent Wonderella Printed.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our table at the Portland Zine Symposium! I was happy to receive continued interest in Ancestors of Hair Metal and am working on my Etsy shop with the intention of adding related items including t-shirts. What a great stack of traded zines I brought home, too!

As part of The Soft Sciences, I’ll be launching a new webcomic in about a month, and will announce that here when it takes off.

There are other new projects, as well.  Dangerous Aromas was our project all summer; now that that’s printed (and will be available online shortly), expect to see a lot of action here and at The Soft Sciences as Mike and I turn our attention to online projects, and as my urban sketching frequency kicks back into high gear.

During May 2010, I committed to making a comic (ostensibly a “journal comic”) for each day of the month.  Some fabulous comics-making friends joined in. The month was a success – lots of great work got done, and Mike and I both made it to the end!

How I managed to keep going:

• Being part of a group was half the job.  I got excited about seeing new work come up in the flickr pool, and felt like keeping that going was important enough to bust through the dry spells.  Support from friends was also sometimes enough to reverse my mood right when it needed it.
• My partner participated, so on nights when I was lazy,  seeing him working on his comic made me grudgingly pick up the pen as well.
• We kept our social calendar fairly sparse for the month.   Whenever we did go out after work, it was quite challenging to get the comic done, so we didn’t do it often.  This project was a top priority!  Hopefully our friends still like us a little.

What I learned about comics-making and my own creative habits:

• That dull, depleted  feeling I get by the end of the work day is hard to resist, and if I don’t fight it, the rest of the evening will consist of snacking and watching X-Files reruns.  However, it only takes a little bit of fight to reverse the tide – just a first step towards trying to stay active makes all the difference.  The results might not be great every time, but it’ll always be better than mindless nothingness.  After fighting back my dullness each night just long enough to get a comic done, I never woke up the next morning and thought “if only I didn’t make that comic last night.” Even when the results were not good, nothing was lost for it, and the occasional payoffs made the gamble feel worthwhile. I still managed to watch plenty of X-Files.
• Artmaking has a payoff percentage.  For me, it’s maybe at around 30% – it takes 7 embarrassing drawings for me to generate 3 that feel somewhat rewarding.  So the crappy 70%? Totally necessary.  This fact feels much more tangible and manageable now, after The Month in Comics.
• The content of your life is what you make it.  Both Mike and I occasionally wished we’d done something more remarkable during the day, to spice up our comics.   Occasionally it was actually the deciding factor when we couldn’t decide between laziness and action.  I found myself following trails of interestingness in my own head very purposefully, looking for the juicy middle in days that often were dominated by a beige work cubicle, the gym, and the need to get the dishes done before the jungle of dirty dishes made approach to the kitchen sink impossible. Turns out even though my walk to work is a relatively small portion of the day, if I kept my eyes open, something would always be there to be found & drawn.
• When you look for beauty, you find it.  When you can’t even get yourself to look for beauty, well, there’s the struggle, and that’s worth something too.

The image above links to a flickr set of my 31 comics.  These will be published as a zine which will be for sale at the upcoming PDX Zine Symposium in late August.

Man, am I glad to have done that, and am I glad to be done!

The Month in Comic #24

Originally uploaded by geminica

For the last 20 years I’ve been interested in Mayan glyphs and wanted to find some angle for playing with them, but all I’d done so far was to occasionally copy a few shapes to try to get used to the forms.

Mayan glyphs are solid blocks comprised of 1-5 separate words, so my initial idea was that each block would have a main scene but also a few qualifiers – for instance, the coffee mugs in the first panel, indicating that I was in fact drinking coffee as I fixed bugs at work. But these are daily comics, and I had to go fast. Next time!

The Month in Comics #19

Originally uploaded by geminica

The Month in Comics #18

Originally uploaded by geminica

Seriously, I’m hitting a block right now & it’s been very hard to get myself to sit down and draw.

The Month in Comics #17

Originally uploaded by geminica

The Month in Comics #16

Originally uploaded by geminica

Mike’s sick. I may be fighting it off? Anyway, I hope this conveys the feeling.

The Month in Comics #15

Originally uploaded by geminica

The Month in Comics #14

Originally uploaded by geminica