Sunday May 17: Maine Comics Arts Festival in Portland, ME. T&H-area exhibitors will include: “official” T&H table (staffed by Colin Tedford), Marek Bennett, Center For Cartoon Studies, Colleen Frakes, Hector Rodriguez, Jennifer Omand, Mark Gonyea, Mike Lynch, Robyn Chapman, Stephanie Piro, Matt Tallbot (creator of the snazzy MECAF poster above), and undoubtedly more, not to mention the Maine and Boston comics contingents and those from farther afield. Panels! Special guests! It’s going to be a great time!

The show will run from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM at the Ocean Gateway, and is organized by longtime T&H supporter Casablanca Comics.

The Center for Cartoon Studies Commencement Ceremony & Thesis Exhibition Opening

White River Junction, Vermont – The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) Commencement Ceremony takes place on Saturday, May 16 at 11am at Northern Stage Theater (at the Briggs Opera House) in White River Junction, Vermont. This year’s Commencement speaker is Jeff Smith, critically acclaimed author of the spectacular graphic novel, BONE. TIME Magazine lauds BONE as “the best all-ages graphic novel yet published.” A special opening reception for the CCS Thesis Exhibition, featuring the graduating students’ original artwork, takes place immediately following the ceremony. Exhibition runs Monday-Saturday, 11am-4pm, through Saturday, June 27.

All events are free and open to the public. Please join us in celebrating our 3rd ever graduation ceremony!

For directions and/or questions: cartoonstudies.org, (802) 295-3319.

1. The Keene Sentinel recently published a nice article about Trees & Hills, which has apparently been picked up by some other New Hampshire papers as well. EDIT: Arg, it’s behind a subscription wall now! I’ll see if i can get a copy to post.

2. Center For Cartoon Studies Fellow Alec Longstreth describes his current business model and the rationale behind it.

2a. Friend of T&H Matthew Reidsma discusses Alec’s post and his own experience.

3. Matt Reidsma posts the first part of his interview with T&H dynamo Marek Bennett. EDIT: Part 2 is up.

Enjoy!

Members of the Trees & Hills comic group will be at Jetpack Comics in Rochester, NH on Saturday to celebrate Free Comic Book Day. Come on by and get a free comic from the group and buy some of our new comics, including the SEEDS anthology.

We hear there may also be Storm Troopers there. Watch out!

April 27, 2009

Trees & Hills comic group announce new fall anthology

Contributions wanted for SHELTER comic anthology

The Trees & Hills comic group is proud to announce a new anthology of regional comics called SHELTER, which will debut this fall.

SHELTER features comics inspired by the themes of housing and home, including aspects such as affordability, cohousing, gentrification, green building, housing cooperatives and homelessness.

This is the second anthology themed around social topics released by the Trees & Hills group and is a follow-up to 2008’s SEEDS anthology, which focused on food.

Trees & Hills is looking for comic creators and cartoonists from Vermont, New Hampshire and western Massachusetts to contribute to the all-ages anthology. The deadline for submissions is Aug. 15 and the comic will debut at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland in late September.

“Our last anthology, SEEDS, focused on food,” said Colin Tedford, a New Hampshire cartoonist and the co-founder of the Trees & Hills group. “Shelter looks at another basic human necessity and, like SEEDS, allows us to address social issues and connect with our communities.”

Contributions that tackle local or regional issues on this theme are strongly encouraged.

“SHELTER is the next evolutionary step in connecting comics and communities,” explained Dan Barlow, a Vermont writer and co-founder of Trees & Hills. “Our creators are very interested in working with local builders, shelter workers and advocates who have expertise in housing issues.”

SHELTER will be the sixth comic anthology from the Trees & Hills group since it formed in 2006. Last year’s SEEDS anthology broke new ground by focusing on the timely and engaging topic of food, tackling issues such as sustainability, eating organics and the vegetarian lifestyle.

Trees & Hills is an all-ages community comic organization for creators in Vermont, New Hampshire and western Massachusetts. Creators of all styles are encouraged to join.

Submission details:

The deadline for submissions is Aug. 15 and comics should be appropriate for all age groups.

Size of the comic will be 5.5 x 8.5 inches, so please draw to those proportions.

Submissions should be between 1-6 pages long, although we can make some exceptions.

Files should be 300 dpi greyscale or 600 dpi B&W tif.

Please also send a sentence or two about yourself (with website or other contact info if you like) for the contributor notes section.

Comics can be sent to organize@treesandhills.org

Any questions can be directed to Trees & Hills co-founders Colin Tedford and Dan Barlow. They can be reached at organize@treesandhills.org.

For project updates, check out www.treesandhills.org.

I had a blast earlier this month at the Boston Comic Con. Trees & Hills comics didn’t have a new book of its own to sell, but we did have popular new releases by Marek Bennett, Cat Garza and Colleen Frakes. SEEDS, our 2008 anthology of comics about food, was also a hit and this show was the official debut of our second printing.

There were also superheroes there!

50 more photographs of the Boston Comic Con 2009 can be found here at my Facebook page.

50 more photos over at my Facebook page.

Cat Garza, Megan Baehr, Colin Tedford and I dashed down to Easthampton, Mass. Saturday morning for the first annual Webcomics Weekend.

Despite some predictions of doom (will they let us in?), everything seemed to work out fine. We saw lots of old friends and met some new ones. Hopefully, by next year this event will blossom into a real Web comics convention and summit … Trees & Hills would have loved to get a table to sell our comics, but only a select handful of creators were allowed to this year. Still, it was great to peak into the western Massachusetts Web comics empire, all hunkered down in a gorgeous and inspiring old industrial building renovated into studio space.

SEEDS, the fan favorite Trees & Hills comics anthology about food, has been reprinted!

This new edition of the 2008 anthology contains more than 50 pages of comics, a recipe book of cartoonists’ food favorites and a packet of organic seeds from a Vermont farm. It’s actually pretty much like the first edition - but that one sold out months ago!

The $5 book is available through the Trees & Hills Distro and at comic conventions in New York City, Boston and Maine this spring.

EAST MONTPELIER – The fictional world of “Watchmen”– set in a 1985 where Richard Nixon is still president and the threat of nuclear war looms over the United States – doesn’t have much in common with the idyllic, laid-back Vermont.

But the writer of that comic, which sees its film version debut nationally today, enjoyed a special working relationship with two Vermont comic artists for years – Stephen R. Bissette of Windsor and Rick Veitch of West Townshend.

“I first met Alan Moore as most of you did: as a reader,” Bissette wrote in his chapter for the book, “Alan Moore: Portrait of An Extraordinary Gentleman.” “And upon first reading, I knew: this was magic.”

Read the rest of the story here.