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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.)