Don’t give up on me. I’m alive. Things have been hectic and I haven’t been able to focus on comics too much.

The website came back online sometime early yesterday evening and seems to be back for good.  Mail orders that we’ve received so far are going out today (sorry for the delay!) and will be available all weekend thanks to my helpful and resourceful wife Gwen, who will be handling the orders.  She set up the book on ebay during the “blackout” so that we could continue to offer the book to you.  Now that the site’s back up, you can either pick up the book there or on this page where I originally set up the paypal ordering button.

Getting ready to hit the road this morning.   I thought I’d point you guys to my wife’s photostream on Flickr which features some pictures from the book release party.  There’s also a few photos here on Radical Warren’s Facebook page.  If anyone else has photos, please feel free to link them in the comments section!

Crazy times.  Next time you hear from me, I should be posting from NYC!  If you’re coming out to MoCCA, come on by table C27 and say “hi!” and pick up your copy of SECRETS & LIES!!!!

So apparently magicinkwell.com was down all weekend because of an explosion!  For reals!

And right in the middle of all the hype on Secrets & Lies!

Of course, I wasn’t going to be aware of this until earlier yesterday morning at work.   You see, I was in the middle of moving to a beautiful new apartment all weekend and was without internet service or the time to attend to such matters.  And so I write to you in the midst of boxes in my lovely new home in my proto-studio-corner of the room to tell you the book signing was lovely and all i could’ve hoped for.  I was surrounded by friends and my family and I actually put a 180 page book together for MoCCA.  I still can’t believe I did it.  It feels amazing!

And I’m so exhausted!

Still a lot to do as I prepare for my trip down to NYC for the weekend and MoCCA ‘08.  I haven’t been to a convention in a while, much less with something so comic-y to sell (I was doing paintings, sketchbooks and drawings the last few times).  Whee!!

Our table will have a lot of interesting stuff on it.  Hope to see you there!!

There’s a lot I’m forgetting to say right now.  My brain is mush!  More later…

I’m now taking pre-orders for SECRETS & LIES.  The book is $19.95 (plus shipping and handling).  Anyone want a copy?

The anthology is being featured in Issuu’s member’s area as a Popular Document.  Exciting!  It’s gotten 2, 252 views as of this typing thanks to you silent peeps out there peepin’ this right now.  Thanks for making my last 24 hours.

I can’t seem to get it to embed (even though I spent most of the day today with Dan Archer, another one of those talented CCS students from this past freshman year embed some successfully on his own site earlier today…) so you’ll have to click on this button:

It’s a 53 page digital preview of the Secrets & Lies anthology.

Online ordering info coming sooner rather than later…

Printing goes well on the anthology. When all was said and done and the last submission hit my inbox, the book topped out at 180 pages! Here’s the complete list of contributors:

Dan Archer
Dan Barlow
Marek Bennett
SR Bissette
Box Brown
Colleen Frakes
AP Furtado
Penina Gal
Shaenon K. Garrity
Cayetano Garza Jr.
Rick Geary
Tymothi Godek
Dan Hernandez
Matt King
Lucy Knisley
Joe Lambert
Jeff Lok
Jose Luis Olivares
Dennis Pacheco
Caitlin Plovnick
Dave Roman
Corey Eno Ruffin
Denis St. John
Charles Schneeflock Snow
Bryan Stone
Betsey Swardlick
Colin Tedford
Radical Warren
Paul H. Way
Chuck Whelon

Whew! Above is a sample of the cover I came up with after three nights of no sleep and a dozen different cover designs and attempts. It may not look like anything special, but it’s what’s between the covers that really counts after all, right?

The book went to press today after a few hiccups and bumps around noontime.

The paper order came in yesterday here at work and what a haul it was! Twelve cases of 70# Accent Opaque Text (for interiors) and a case of 80# Hammermill Color Copy Cover (for the covers). I raised the print run to 500 copies, which may be small potatoes to some publishers out there, but for me this is an unfathomable amount of paper/books. I’m wondering how I’m going to haul all of it down to New York in two weeks!

I totally skipped out on sleep last night to finish up edits, scanning and placing comics into the final layout. I’m running on pure adrenaline right now as I type a bit here then step into the next room to make sure the print run is going smoothly. If all goes as planned we should have printing done by sometime Monday morning/afternoon and then we’ll be taking the books to Marus Printing in Hartland, Vermont to get bound next week. The books should be back from the bindery just in time for Saturday night’s book release party at the Main Street Museum in White River Junction.

If you’ve emailed me or tried to get a hold of me in the past few days and haven’t heard from me it’s probably because I’ve been busy putting this book together and getting to press on time. Things will slow down (sort of) in the next week (except for the whole moving into a new place thing next weekend after the book release party) or two then they’ll get hectic again as I venture down to NYC for the festival.

I’ll be posting info on how to order a copy online in the next few days as well as posting again over at the blog for the next couple weeks before the festival.

More soon, stay tuned!

So much going on…

I was able to complete my submission for Sundays2 after a stall that literally went on for four weeks!

Just in time to rehearse for my gigs CCS commencement week. (photo evidences courtesy of the mighty mighty Colleen Frakes)

and now, the big news…

The Anthology is Almost Here!! There’s gonna be a book release party!! Whoo Hoo!!! If you are anywhere remotely close to White River Junction, Vermont the book release party will be at The Main Street Museum on Saturday, May 31st at 8 p.m.

Colleen Frakes will have copies of her new Xeric Book Tragic Relief on hand! The Center for Cartoon Studies is generously donating sodas for the event.

The image above is a digital proof of an amazing 5 color silk screened poster by Alex Kim, resident silk screening genius and recent graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies. Here’s some photos from Chuck Forsman, another recent grad, of Alex busting out the posters till the wee hours of the night during Commencement Week. The A-Train Never Stops!!!

The anthology has a confirmed MoCCA table as well: C27

The book is most likely going to be around 150+ pages. I’ll have more details once the books get to the printer as well as a final list of contributors this coming weekend.

******************************************
Edit:  Tuesday, May 20, 2008:

More CCS graduation photos here (courtesy of Joe Lambert) and here (courtesy of Denis St. John)

I’m using some images by SR Bissette that I colored last year to test a new (at least to me) image gallery browsing implementation that i may/may not use in future posts/pages. anyway, let me know if it’s working on your interwubs browzorz…

Lolcat da Wzzrd VS Hump Jones…

yet another Humpasaur remix joint…
::Lolcat deconstructs “Best Show Ever” with teh EVAH EVAH REMIX::
Remember: this is NOT a work safe song, and it’s not for younger listeners

Best Show Ever (Evah Evah Remix)

Enjoy! And as always let me know what you think!

I had an amazingly busy weekend.  I taught my first class at the Center for Cartoon Studies on Friday and I think it went well! Spent most of Friday night/Saturday morning getting the srbissette.com archives in order. I worked on today’s strip a bit yesterday but didn’t get to finish it (nope, i don’t have a buffer, unfortunately) and was too tired to pull yet another Sunday all-nighter to do it. I’ll work on it some more during the next couple evenings and see if I can get it posted before Thursday. Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone.

Ok, I’m off to work…