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Hello friends,

This is a post to let all members of the Monthly Minicomic Club know that the newest comic ought to be arriving back at my house from the printer’s by Monday or Tuesday, so will be headed out to you before the end of the week. This mailing will include a brand new mini as well as a postcard print of my “Self-Publishing is a Power” cartoon. Incidentally, I did a career-retrospective type talk at a local comics fest this past weekend which included a reading of that comic and I found myself getting very verklempt during. This is the flipside to my “Sad-Boy” type cartoons about small-press DIY, my actual for-real sincere manifesto. You can’t self-publish as much as I do and not feel it in your bones.

Kind of a funky bunch of days over here for me recently. I was away almost all of last week as one of the parent chaperones on a four-day long school trip my son’s 7th grade class goes on. I was given the job of overseeing the painting of a big 4ftx10ft mural with all the kids. They were broken up into groups who’d each spend 90 minutes doing art with me over the course of the week. Here’s a photo from the final day, where the lucky kids who showed up towards the end got to have more fun painting little details into it. I feel bad for the kids who showed up on day 1 and had to spend all their time just putting down blue and green patches of sky, leaves, and water, but that work has to be done.

I didn’t get a great pic of the final product, this is the best I have:

This thing both plagued me all week (I got a lot of other parents kindly commenting on “how good it was going to be” on account of me being a cartoonist, which weirdly filled me up with sleepless nights pressure about maintaining my professional reputation) and also made me proud. It’s messy, but I feel like I did a good job getting everybody to do a little part. It’ll be up on the walls at school for a year now, and I love the thought of the kids who were there being able to walk past it and always spot the small bit that was them. I am big on stuff like that.

A pic somebody took of their kids, where you can see me working away in the background. I spent the whole week crouched down like that, my legs are still feeling it.

Small detail of a kid who’s been stung by bees in the infirmary. Unfortunately this was my son, his hands swelled up like baseballs, but he was a trooper about it and stuck things out.

Finally, later this week I’m planning on launching my ‘Zine Storage Box Kickstarter,

I didn’t quite manage to put the amount of time into organizing a “pre-launch” for this on account of the aforementioned science trip, but am hoping the funding goal is modest enough that I’ll achieve it. If you haven’t yet, please visit the link above and click the Notify Me button to get an alert when this goes live.

Thanks for reading along!

Mike