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.)

This week we printed another 100 copies of SEEDS and SHELTER, bringing the total number of copies of SEEDS to 700.

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