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.

"Make Me a Bat": Pre-Orders

I'm pleased to announce that all the drawing for my Halloween micro-minicomic is finished.

Here's a glimpse of the cover of the "dummy" I printed here at home. The color is not final.



The comic features a little boy who wants to dress up as a bat for Halloween. Unfortunately, his parent (who is only ever an off-panel voice) seems to have a perverse sense of hearing:



Most of the comic consists of the boy finding himself in costumes that almost sound like "bat" costumes. I think the results are pretty cute.



And I don't think I'm spoiling much by telling you that the comic has a happy ending: the little boy gets a great bat costume on the last page, and a fold-out inside back cover lets him go out trick-or-treating in it.



The idea is that I'll hand these out to trick-or-treaters along with candy this year.

I'm planning to go down to Kinko's to print a bunch of these this weekend, so I can send them to the Trees & Hills Halloween Comic Swap with plenty of time to spare. UPDATE: I have taken the book to Kinko's, so I'm closing up the pre-orders for the time being. I'll make a new post when I get copies back.

The book has sixteen interior pages, and the vocabulary in it is deliberately pitched at kids who are still learning to read.

Satisfactory Comics #5 (Apr. 2004)

The fifth issue of Satisfactory Comics was our second attempt at a 24-hour comic, and it turned out to be both the longest and the shortest issue up to that point. (It was the longest, at 24 pages, and the shortest, at only five and a half inches tall.)

The story in this one concerns a schoolgirl named Cassia who has been summoned to the Museum of the Horrible to help some of the creatures who live there. It turns out that the King of Fleas is making progress in his plan to take over the world, and Cassia has to stop him.

First, she'll have to get past two of his goons -- a creature in karate pants and a stovepipe hat with blades for hands, and a German-speaking cobra-headed dachshund in a wheeled harness. (That sentence should give the search engines something to chew on!) Here they are now:

Where did these crazy entities come from? Well, for this issue we asked a dozen of our friends and readers to submit a frightening character, and all twelve of those frightening characters appear in this issue. (Yes, even Paris Hilton and the re-elected George W. Bush make appearances, though they only appear as portraits in the Hall of the Most Horrible American Presidents, along with U. S. Grant and H. M. Singeberry. Apparently the story is set some time after the year 2025.)

When Cassia does finally confront the King of Fleas, his plan — and his infernal device — sound a little improbable...



... But will that keep Cassia from stopping him? What kind of a comic would end with the bad guy victorious? (How satisfactory would that be?)

(As usual, you can click on those pictures to bring them up to legible size.)

Satisfactory Comics #5 is 24 kid-friendly pages, and you can have it for a mere $1.75 by Paypal, a scant $1.50 by check, or a measly dollar if you get it from me in person. Here's the Paypal button, to make buying easier:

The twelve frightening characters in this issue were submitted by Scott Koblish, Melody Lu, Jenny Blair, Liza Graham, Linnea Duvall, Bill Kartalopoulos, Tom O'Donnell, Jeff Seymour, Dan Zettwoch, Adam Rosenblatt, Jesse Reklaw, and Jon Lewis.

Satisfactory Comics #4 (Jun. 2003)

In some ways, #4 might be my favorite issue of Satisfactory Comics, at least for sentimental reasons. We had a lot of fun writing it, and I think it's the first issue where we really felt happy with our cartooning and storytelling. It's even more kid-friendly than our first three issues, and at the MoCCA festival I often suggest it as a purchase for parents who have brought their children to the show. (There's precious little at most small-press comics shows that's suitable for young kids, and I think comics-loving parents are often grateful for a suggestion.)

The story follows a boy named Sam, who runs away from home because his parents don't share his love of strong odors. He meets up with a tophat-wearing skunk and a bescarfed opossum ... ah, yes: here they all are:

Together, they run into a few different troubles, but the main threat is a group of horned ogres who have a machine that turns people into more ogres. This army of monsters seems ready to swarm over the whole world, so the Parliament of Owls instructs the trio to stop them by destroying the machine.

The skunk has a real way with words, and as a character he was extremely fun to write. If you click on this image to see the page a little larger, you'll see a tongue-twister that we wrote especially for the occasion, as Sam and his friends get caught in a thicket of thistles:


The real high point of this issue, I think, is the center splash / spread, in which our three heroes meander through a large swampscape. I'm not sure whether you'll be able to make them out in this image (you can click on it to make it bigger), but there are lots of fun details here, including cameos by Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, and the Thing, numerous fun swamp critters, and even one of the cannibal mermaids.

Those two pages took a long time to draw, as you might expect, and a long time to ink. They were the last two pages we inked, in fact, and after Mike finished pencilling his last page, we turned the swampscape sideways so we could both ink on it at the same time. (We were working on a card table that was elevated on a few platforms made of dictionaries and phonebooks, in the living room of my funky, dusty old apartment.) Once the un-inked area was down to a certain size, we brought a piano bench into the room so we could sit side by side and ink in the same area simultaneously. Now that's collaboration!

In fact, the swampscape has one of our favorite "inside" jokes in it: a moment where Walt and Skonk greet five frogs on a log:

The first person who correctly identifies each of those five frogs in the comments section will get a free Satisfactory Comic of his or her choosing! They're all comics frogs (swiped from other cartoonists and not some other medium), but that's the only hint you'll get. Plus: the first person who explains why the frogs' speech balloons (and Walt's) also count as an inside joke (or reference) will ALSO get a free Satisfactory Comic of his or her choosing. It's a contest!

Here's another post about a couple of the other fun features of Satisfactory Comics #4.

This issue, like the other early issues, costs $1.75 postpaid via Paypal, $1.50 by check, or $1.00 in person. Unlike the first three issues, however, it's twenty pages long! Here's the button:

Contributors to this issue were asked to give us a noun or a noun phrase that they would enjoy seeing in a fable or an adventure story. We worked all twenty nouns (which ranged from "possum" and "grandfather clock" to "a selfish and tired life") into the story, as dutifully as we could. The friends who gave us these nouns were Jesse Reklaw, Jeff Seymour, Josephine Yun, Forrester Hammer, Jacob Edwards, Rabbi Jim Ponet, Grace Meng, Lisa and Steve Bagley, Erica Merchant and Jon Lewis, Steve Newman, Tom O'Donnell, Susan Cates, Rich Berman, Dave Gortler, Avery Foster, Chris Cessac, Catherine Rockwood, Liza Graham, and the Honorable Danny Boggs.

Satisfactory Comics #3 (Dec. 2002)

The third issue of Satisfactory Comics is a goony maritime adventure starring a harpooneer, his boatswain, a cook, a candy salesman, a kraken, a magpie, and a few cannibal mermaids. It's probably the silliest issue of Satisfactory Comics, and in some ways also one of the simplest.

Of course, you might not think it's so simple when you hear how we made it. The project started with sixteen people (including Mike and me) working together on the story that would become the script, using Nick Beauchamp's amazing Democratic Writing website. Every chunk of the story could be voted up, voted down, revised, or expanded, and everyone got an equal voice in the final draft. (You can view the final draft, and link through to the project page with all its voting, from here.)

From there, of course, Mike and I tried to tell the story in twenty-fours hours, in the time-honored tradition of the 24-hour Comic invented by Scott McCloud. (This is the first of our three attempts at a 24-hour comic so far, and it's also the shortest: we drew sixteen pages in sixteen hours, then called it finished. I think this had something to do with the premiere of The Two Towers that evening. Well, and also the story was finished by the end of page 16.)

Most of that process is pretty much invisible if you're reading the comic, which is by turns silly, stupid, violent, and punny. Here's a glimpse of the story's climax, which occurs after Herman the Harpooneer and his companions are swallowed by the Kraken:

(You can click on that image to see it a little larger.)

This issue also marked the first appearance of the cannibal mermaids, who quickly took on a life of their own, and have made cameos in a number of our subsequent comics. Here's one, buying out Autolycus's Bratwurst & Pilsner stand, leaving nothing for the two of us (in our own cameo appearance):

As I said, it's a pretty silly comic. But it can be yours, if you want it, for the low price of $1.75 (postpaid) by Paypal (using the button below), $1.50 by check, or $1.00 if you pry it from my paws in person. Here's the button:

Contributors to the story for this issue included Laura Bajor, Rachel Trousdale, Tara Prescott, Catherine Rockwood, Zina Deretsky, Jacob Edwards, Shawn Cheng, Erica Merchant, John Leslie, Becca Boggs, Shawna Ryan, Liza Graham, Sarah Cates, and Scott Koblish. Don't blame them for the fact that we have never used this collaborative method again -- writing the story with them this way was really a blast!