Two Halloween Minis

I'm happy to announce that we have not one but two small minicomics ready to celebrate the Halloween season.

The first, "Make Me a Bat," has already been the subject of a few posts while it was in progress. Here are a few photos of the finished product, which will also give you a hint or two about the plot of the little comic:





Of course, this simple desire on the part of the little boy is thwarted through a variety of misunderstandings (possibly deliberate misprisions) about what he wants. Eventually, the wrong costumes get both ridiculous and frustrating.



... But the book does have a happy (and cute) ending.



This isn't actually the last panel; there's also an appropriate denouement, not pictured here.

And "Make Me a Bat" isn't the only new little book that we've got this autumn. My colleague Allegra Bishop also worked up a little book—as much an illustrated poem as a comic—about the peculiar headwear of the actress Sarah Bernhardt.



You can click these images to enlarge them and get a sense of both the cartooning and the doggerel in "A Hat, a Bat, Manhattan."




And here's the back cover, featuring the Divine Ms. Bernhardt in all her chiroptero-sartorial glory.



I'm still folding and stapling to fill Halloween bulk pre-orders, so I can't promise to get large orders to anyone else in time for Halloween. But if you just want one copy of each book, I can pop them in the mail (first-class) on the same day you order, so you might still be able to read both micro-minicomics on All Hallow's Eve (or on Dia de Los Muertos, at least).

$1.50 will cover my publishing costs, the postage, and Paypal's fees. Here's a button to make the transaction easy:

Of course, you could also get these books by ordering a three-for-five bargain deal. They'd count together as a single book, for those purposes.

I Like Lagniappes

Some kind soul just ordered the Satisfactory Comics "Everything" combo—one copy of every minicomic Mike and I have made (except for the Mapjam, which is out of stock)—and I felt like I needed to do a little something extra for the envelope.

Onto the envelope, I doodled this little guy, whom I'd never see again if I hadn't scanned him.



I also tossed a few random postcards into the envelope, since they weren't going to affect the shipping costs. Hopefully, when the envelope arrives, it'll seem like a treasure trove of goodies, chock full of dorky fun. I know that when I get a package in the mail, I'm always psyched to get a little random bonus, even if it's something I'd never have paid for. I like the little lagniappes, so I try to put them into (or onto) every package I send.

SUMMER BACK ISSUE SALE

We've been getting a fair amount of traffic lately, and in order to make some room in my closet I've decided to offer a big silly sale on back issues of our minicomics.

Here's the deal: with a few exceptions,* and as long as they remain in stock, you can have any three issues of our minicomics for just $5.00, postpaid. This is a pretty big bargain. It's actually a little below cost for me in almost every configuration. But the comics will make me happier in your hands than in my closet, so please don't worry about the small cost to me.

(*I can't include the elaborate Satisfactory Comics #6 or the Mapjam in the sale because the stock of those comics is so low and I know I'm never going to reprint them, but I'm still willing to sell them at regular price or as part of the "Complete Package" deal if you want to go all out.)

Feel free to browse through the selection of back issues over in the sidebar, or consider some of the three-issue value packs I describe below. I don't think you'll be disappointed, and you won't be able to get these comics cheaper anywhere. (I'm not going to bring most of the back issues to MoCCA this year.) Click on this button (or the one at the bottom of the post) and let me know which issues (or which "value pack") you want, and I'll get them in the mail to you speedily.

Which issues or value pack?

If you'd just like a sample of our best work, you can't go wrong with the issues in the Story Sale Pack. These three issues have some of our best writing, and some of our most satisfying world-building work.



If you've got a small comics-reader in your life, we commend the Kids' Sale Pack to you. Every issue of Satisfactory Comics is kid-safe (though that's not true for Elm City Jams), but these three stories are particularly good for kids — they're the ones we hand to parents who pass our table at MoCCA.



If you want to see how we do jam comics, order all three issues of Elm City Jams in the Jam Sale Pack, and get a free copy of our Treatise Upon the Jam as a bonus.



If you just want to see how bizarre our imaginations can get, try the Crazy Sale Pack: there's some weirdness in these issues that will put any week's Doodle Penance to shame.



If you like comics but aren't too sure about me and Mike, try our Guests Sale Pack. In those issues, you'll see contributions from people ranging from Jon Lewis to Scott C., from Tom Hart to Bishakh Som, from Tom Neely to Lark Pien, from Sam Henderson to Joey Sayers. Seriously: we've been lucky enough to work alongside a real cavalcade of minicomics stars.

Update: Desert Island Paradise is no longer in stock, so I guess this particular sale pack is a no go. But look at the other goodies you can get:



If you're a fan of Matt Madden, or if you came here from Derik Badman's site, you might want to check out our Constraints Sale Pack, in which we find dozens upon dozens of ways to make comics more difficult for ourselves.



If you're Scott McCloud, you might want to try our 24-Hour Comics Sale Pack, in which we try on three separate occasions to finish a comic in a single day. Did we make it? $5.00 gets you an answer.



If you came here from the Got Medieval blog, you might like the Medieval Sale Pack, which features a faux-Medieval fantasy setting, a Middle-English alphabet poem, and the Death Song of the Venerable Bede.

You can also put your own value pack together. Just name the three comics you want, and if I've still got 'em, they'll be on their way. If you want more than three comics, just send me an email (isaac dot cates at aya dot yale dot edu will ring me up) to work out a deal.

Three comics for five bucks, postpaid. I think you'll agree it's a good value.

Which issues or value pack?

Please note: although this post is more than a year old, I will still honor these prices. I'm happy to get comics into your hands and out of my storage space.

Skele-Tut's Trip in Space

I've made a little more progress on that promotional image. It's going slowly, but the work is mostly pretty fun.

This afternoon, I daubed a few digital shades onto our old pal Skele-Tut, who is still lost in space...



To find out what Skele-Tut is staring at, consult your copy of Elm City Jams #2.

All Hail the King of Fleas!

I've been working on some color portraits of some of our old characters, for a piece of promotional material—nothing fancy, but sort of a fun way to spend some procrastination time.

I'm particularly happy with this image of the King of Fleas.



To find out more about the King of Fleas, you can consult your copy of Satisfactory Comics #5.

Happy Presidents' Day

Admittedly, in my house, this is no contest. These two estimable nineteenth-century minds shared a birthday in 1809, and between them they made the world a very different place. My personal fondness is sort of obviously with the scientist who utterly altered the way we understand the natural world and the power of unguided processes to generate order over long periods of time, but I'm still pretty impressed with our sixteenth American president.

To wit, it's worth noting that the recently evicted malfeasant isn't the only president to have appeared in a Satisfactory Comics production. (Lincoln is in that book several times, in fact.)

Indeed, my "fun" drawing of Lincoln has appeared in more than one of our publications.



In honor of Abraham Lincoln's two hundredth birthday, here's a color version of that panel, in which he takes to the waters and risks electrocution for the sake of our nation's unity.

Moreover, if you feel like some Lincoln linkin', here's Chris Sims's latest nomination for Greatest Comic Book of All Time.

Darwin Cartoons for Darwin's 200th Birthday

Today's the two-hundredth birthday of one of the people I admire most, the author of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin. I admire Darwin for the contributions he made to our understanding of the natural world and its history, for his insight and reasoning and courage, and for the thoroughness with which he documented the evidence for each step of the thinking in his masterpiece.

But I also admire him because he was a bumbler and a procrastinator, like me; because he was aimless and unemployed after he graduated from college; because he undertook an around-the-world naval voyage even though he suffered severely from seasickness. It's wonderful when you get to know a "great mind" through his or her writing and find that genius to be amiable, self-deprecating, and humorous, while also brilliant and aware of the tragic struggle that drives us (and all life) to succeed.

So today, on Darwin's bicentennial, I am marking the occasion by drawing a couple of doodles in his honor, depicting two of my favorite moments in his autobiographical writing.

First, from his university days as a zealous beetle collector:

I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

That's a passage from Darwin's Autobiography.

By the way, Darwin's coleopterophilia was so well known that one of his contemporaries, Albert Way, drew this cartoon of him in 1832, when Darwin was off on the Beagle voyage.



The caption reads, "Go it, Charlie!"—as in "Go get those beetles!"

Here's one of my favorite moments from The Voyage of the Beagle.

Darwin describes the Galápagos tortoises:

I was always amused, when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound, as if struck dead. I frequently got on their backs, and then, upon giving a few raps on the hinder part of the shell, they would rise up and walk away; but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.

Now, on the off chance that you've come to this post looking for a comic that engages Darwin or Darwin's thinking a little more seriously, or just for more competently drawn pictures, let me recommend Jay Hosler's kid-friendly synopsis of evolutionary theory, Sandwalk Adventures.




Hosler is a professor of biology, a practicing research biologist, and nice guy, as well as being a fine cartoonist. If you know a kid who's of reading age and curious about the natural world, Sandwalk Adventures would be a great way to set him or her on a good path of inquiry and reasoning.

If, on the other hand, you're just wondering where I got that image of Darwin with his fancy pigeons at the top of this post, well, it's an enlarged and colored version of his appearance on the cover of Satisfactory Comics #7. And why is Darwin on our cover? Because one of the hastily improvised strips in that issue features yours truly, ranting about a couple of common misconceptions about evolutionary theory.

Please click these pages to enlarge them, and you can read "...And Another Thing" totally for free, as part of your Darwin Bicentennial celebration.




(That's script by me, thumbnails by Mike, pencils by me, inks and letters by Mike, from a prompt by our pal Tom Motley, roughly halfway through our crazy thirty-plus-hour drawing marathon.)

Au Revoir, Lame Canard

I have been rooting for regime change, or anyone who could keep Bush out of office, since before George W. was "elected" the first time. But despite the many calumnies and criminal charges that deserve to be heaped upon the mass of tissue he uses for a head, there is one point of acclaim that cannot be denied to our current Decider: he's the only American President yet to appear on the cover of an issue of Satisfactory Comics. Why, here he is, in Mike's version of my doodle of him, in the two o'clock position on the cover of our fifth issue.



Despite the brief presence of an abominable cretin, the book is kid-friendly.

You see, we asked a dozen people to provide "a frightening character" to use in this comic, and from our pal Adam Rosenblatt we received, as a submission, George W. Bush attaining a second term. (We made this comic back in April of 2004, you see. We had no way of knowing then how bad things would get.) Most of the other characters became figures in the story's actual plot, but Bush was brushed off quickly in a sort of a cameo appearance.



(You'd better click and enlarge.)

I put Bush and Paris Hilton (another submission) into an exhibit in the Museum of the Horrible, a corridor dedicated to the Most Horrible American Presidents, including Grant and H. M. Singeberry (who apparently gets elected some time after 2020). I had meant that guy's name to be "Singleberry," but I had a lettering lapse at the last minute...

Anyway, I've always been pretty happy with that cartoon of Bush. I think I managed to translate him recognizably into my clumsy cartooning idiom without caricaturing him too much. In honor of Mike's post from yesterday (and using just a little bit of it), I have colored that old cartoon.



And so I say sayonara to the monster. Here's hoping that the next time he's in the news, it's in the context of his trial and conviction.

Satisfactory Comics #8 (June 2008)

At long last, I am happy to offer you a way to buy the story that Mike and I were working on all last fall and winter, now in full color and easily portable:



This story will debut at the MoCCA Festival this weekend, and after the convention it may turn out to be in short supply, but I can always print more if I need to.

We've dubbed this story "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible," and we're also calling it Satisfactory Comics #8. At ten pages, it might seem short for an issue of Satisfactory, but they're dense pages, and I think it's really the best story we've told yet.

As you can see, that tidy little packet contains a lot of color and a lot of incident:



(You can click that to enlarge it.)

For more information about the story -- for all of its elaborate constraints and conditions, for the alternatives we considered, for the thumbnails and the pencils, and, indeed, for the black-and-white version of each page in turn -- you can read the posts in this category in reverse order. But wouldn't it be more fun to read it in your hands instead of here in your web browser?

This version of the story comes on ten unbound postcards, each of them ready to read or to send.

Yes, we've left room for your message on the reverse of the postcard: if you buy a set to send to a friend, you'll also be able to put in some correspondence. (I recommend spacing them out, about a week apart. The end of each page is designed as a point of narrative suspense, so the reader who receives the cards slowly should get plenty of twists and surprises. If you've got several friends and you'd like to order several sets, please read the post on ordering multiple comics.)



As I said, the cards are in full color. I think they've really turned out nicely. They come wrapped in a little band (printed in two colors and sealed with a sticker of one of the characters from the story -- not necessarily this guy).



UPDATE (NOVEMBER 2012):
I'm afraid that this issue is, at least temporarily sold out. You can still read the comic (in black and white) here on the blog, but for now all the in-print copies of SC8 belong to other people.

Two Little Abecedarii (June 2008)

With this year's MoCCA Festival just a couple of days away, I'm happy to say that Mike and I will have a handful of new comics at our table (although Mike himself will not be there; instead I'll be joined by our pal Tom Motley). The new stuff is also available to you, our website reader, for just a pittance. Here's a pair of our newest publications, both of which are small books containing illustrated ABC poems:


My "An Alphabet That's Fun to Draw" is a republication of my page from the perennial favorite (and nearly out-of-print forever) "_____ Are Always Fun to Draw." I had always meant to republish that poem at a larger size, because many of the drawings have details (or fun) that don't show up well in their original (reduced) context.

The book will look a little bigger than that if it's not being held in a huge, hammy meathook of a paw.

Here's a couple of pairs of pages:


Who doesn't like to see fantasy dragon-bashing melee on one page and our sixteenth president in danger of electrocution on the facing page?


And although the absence of a beard in this self-portrait dates it a bit, who hasn't felt that same need for a nap? And who hasn't imagined the same dialogue between Hello Kitty and Squirtle?

If you want more explanation of that project, or a list of the fun-to-draw things that appear in the book, click here for further details.


Our other little ABC book, aptly titled "Abecedarium," is written and drawn by Mike (as you can see on this cover):

(Again, if your paws are more petite, the book may appear larger.)

This little gem of a book picks out twenty-six of Mike's "Fantasy Folk" illustrations (originally created to decorate the margin of our submission to the second volume of Elfworld) and describes these twenty-six folk with a poem in rhyming couplets of Middle English. (Mike has posted a glossary of the more obscure Middle English words in the poem, but really it's not at all difficult if you read it aloud.)

Among the folk thus described are a Hermit, a Nymph, a Wodewose, a Fairy, and an Undertaker; also appearing are a Pedant and a Scribe who may look a bit familiar...



These two happy little books are available at our Storenvy shop.

What I Drew That Was "Fun to Draw"

By the time this year's MoCCA Festival is over, I hope that a few people will have copies of the republication of my "Alphabet That's Fun to Draw" -- this little booklet:



It originally appeared in our multi-author sketchbook project, "_____ Are Always Fun to Draw", in which each of twenty-two cartoonists tried to cram forty or more items from a master list into a single 8" x 7" page.


I like the results a lot, but I only have a few more copies of that book, so I'm bringing out a larger reprint of my illustrated ABC poem from it as a little 28-page booklet. Since I didn't have room in the micro-mini to explain the project or list the fun things that I drew, here's some more information.

You can follow the link above (or in the sidebar) to get a more thorough explanation of the project as a whole, but here's the list of things that I fit into my twenty-six panels:

accordions, apples, bats (or other things with bat wings), birds, bones (loose bones), bugs (especially beetles), cats, chickens, chimeras or other hybrid animals (if you count Squirtle as a squirrel-turtle hybrid, which I do), cigarettes, clouds, cowboys (especially drunk ones), demons, dinosaurs, dogs, dorks (if I count as a dork, and this post would indicate that I do), dragons, ducks, earthworms, ancient Egyptians, explosions (especially mushroom clouds), eyes or eyeballs, fire or flames, fish (especially in goldfish bowls), flies (to indicate bad odor), Frankenstein monsters, girls (especially pretty girls), glasses (for reading), goths, guns, (especially rifles or ray guns, and I got both), helmets, Kirby krackle, knights, letters, lightning bolts, Abe Lincoln, mermaids or merpeople, monkeys or apes, the moon, mountains, ninjas, octopi or squid (including giant squid), Olmec heads, pirates or pirate hats, pizzas (especially with pepperoni), plaid flannel shirts, Pokemon, pterodactyls, robots, rockets or spaceships, ancient Romans (well, I got Carthaginians), samurai, Saturn or other planets, self-portraits, skulls or skeletons, smoke (little whiffs and big puffs, and I got both), snakes, space aliens, swords, the undead (especially zombies), treasure chests, trees, turtles and tortoises (if Squirtle counts), umbrellas, vampires, vikings, wiwaxia, x-ray specs, and zeppelins

Is that sixty-nine different items? Anyway, it's more than forty.