Trees & Hills comics has teamed up with the Kellogg-Hubbard Library to host an official 24-Hour Comics challenge location at their building in beautiful downtown Montpelier, Vt.

The challenge is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 2nd at 11 a.m. and will end on Sunday, Oct. 3rd at 11 a.m.

24-Hour comics is a unique artistic challenge that calls on artists to write and draw a 24-page comic in 24 consecutive hours. For more information on the challenge, visit this website.

The library will open up at 10 a.m. that morning to kick off the event (the challenge begins an hour later) and we’ll have a special guest speaker - and repeat 24-hour comic veteran - to give participants some words of encouragement and advice.

Because of the extreme nature of the challenge, 24-Hour comics will be restricted to people 16 years and older. We also ask that you preregister by e-mailing organize@treesandhills.org with “24-Hour Comics” in the header.

Younger comic fans and artists will be treated to a three-hour comic workshop hosted by Marek Bennett, the creator of the popular newspaper strip, Mimi’s Doughnuts. Participants will learn about all aspects of comic book storytelling and end the session with their own comic book!

Both events are free and open to the public.

We hope to see you there!

Comics continues to sprout special holidays: did you know that today is International Read Comics In Public Day? I didn’t either until now, which is why I have plans to stay home and draw all day. But if I venture out into public, i will surely bring a comic!

Tickets go on sale at noon today for the second edition of last year’s wildly popular New England Webcomics Weekend. A plethora of popular pixel-pushers will make themselves available to the public November 6-7 at Eastworks in Easthampton, MA.

Australian cartoonist Anthony Woodward has written a short but worthwhile piece on the use of contrast and tone in comics.

Monday, August 16th at 6pm, free and open to the public
Center For Cartoon Studies, 94 South Main Street in White River Junction, VT

Comics artist and professor Ryan Claytor will be in town for an artist’s lecture and book signing as part of his 15-state (and 5-province) summer tour.

As a creator, Claytor is most widely known for his self-published, autobiographical comic book series And Then One Day. Although the series has undergone several format changes and incarnations since its inception in 2004, And Then One Day readers are consistently treated with Claytor’s thoughtful and entertaining personal anecdotes immaculately packaged with a designer’s eye for production detail. In the summer of 2008, he released a republication of his Master’s Thesis on autobiography in comics entitled Concatenations.

Here is your guide to White River Junction’s First Friday events on August 6th, 2010.

First Friday Double Reception! 5-8pm
Cartooning Studio Exhibition
This Friday marks the end of Cartooning Studio, our annual 5-day cartooning workshop.  Join us for a closing reception, and see the comics our students have produced.
CABOOSE: An Exhibition of Comics About White River Junction
An exhibition featuring original artwork from the local comics newspaper Caboose.

Join us this Friday, from 5-8pm, for our First Friday Open House.  Browse our unique collection of over 8,000 comics and graphic novels.  Comics by our students and alumni will be available for sale, as will our fetching Schulz Library tote bags.

Hotel Coolidge
39 South Main Street in White River Junction, Vermont

The Wild Silence
Paintings by CCS alum Penina Gal
“All are welcome to attend The Wild Silence: Paintings of nature, of people who may or may not exist, and abstractions. All express something, but all are silent. See if they might mean something to you.”
- Penina Gal

Opening Reception 5-7pm

The Windham Solid Waste Management District in Brattleboro, VT is looking for someone to illustrate some recycling awareness strips based on pre-existing descriptions & scripts.  The deadline for applications is May 30; the full call for submissions is here.

May 1 is Free Comic Book Day, and in addition to re-launching TWIG, we plan to distribute a Trees & Hills Free Comic Book Day collection. To participate, print up 100 copies of a comic (dimensions no larger than 5.5″ x 8.5″) and either mail it to us at PO Box 645, Winchester, NH 03470 or email us at organize@treesandhills.org to meet in person. We’ll assemble all the contributions into a single packet with a special T&H cover and give it away! Use any color paper you like. Please leave a little extra room at the left edge for binding, and remember to include your name & web address (or other preferred contact info), preferably on the comic itself. 4-8 pages would be nice, but we’ll take single sheets, too.  Some of these will go to kids, so submissions should be suitable for a “general audience”.

If for whatever reason you don’t want to print 100 copies of something, we’ll still be happy to distribute a FCBD comic for you.

Related: If you’d like to table at the Free Comic Day Festival in Rochester, NH, either email organize@treesandhills.org to ask about joining the Trees & Hills table, or see here to get your own half-table for $10.

Starting on May 1, 2010 (Free Comic Book Day), Trees & Hills will relaunch its free comic TWIG in a new format. While still a single sheet printed in B&W on both sides, it will now be folded in half to make four 5.5″ x 8.5″ pages and released bimonthly rather than monthly. As before, we will also publish TWIG online as image files to read, with the current issue available as a pdf for anyone to print and distribute.

Our first deadline is April 15, with subsequent deadlines at two-month intervals (June 15, August 15, etc.). We will accept strips from under a page in size (they should ideally fit the width of the page) up to 3 pages long (the front page has less space available because of the title); we can also accommodate a single 8.5″ x 11″ page. Previously published material is fine. All submissions should be suitable for a “general audience”, as we’ll be leaving them around in restaurants & etc. Email 600 dpi B&W or 300dpi greyscale TIFs to organize@treesandhills.org, or mail clean photocopies to us at PO Box 645, Winchester NH 03470.

I’ve neglected our poor web shop basically since Seeds came out (busy, wanted to redesign it, etc.) - but no more! I’ve set up the shop on a new, easy to use platform and put up our anthologies and comics by myself, Colleen Frakes, and Sam Leveillee. In the coming week I’ll add comics by Marek Bennett, Anne Thalheimer, and others.  Check it out!

As you may have gathered from the title, I particularly want to showcase two items in the shop:

SHELTER! You can finally buy it online from us, not just from Microcosm!

PLAY! For a brief time (we plan to print at the beginning of April) you can preorder our forthcoming anthology PLAY. Don’t miss out! All preorders will come decorated with at least one artist sketch, and will ship mid-April. (We plan to start preorders much earlier for the next anthology, with multiple levels of support and special bonuses.)