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.

Montpelier, Vt. – The SWINGIN’ HITS are here!

The Trees and Hills comics group – a three-year-old collective of comic creators from Vermont, New Hampshire and western Massachusetts – released its fourth anthology of comics this month. SWINGIN’ HITS features comics about music by more than a dozen regional creators.

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MoCCA 2008 started with an injury Saturday morning, delaying the start of the show. It ended with a mid-afternoon building evacuation Sunday that threatened to deflate the rest of the day.

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The first thing I saw when arriving at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, NH last Sunday morning was a giant Jabba the Hut puppet in the lobby. The second thing I saw was Storm Troopers getting dressed in the men’s room.

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The next Pioneer Valley Comic & Cartoon Schmooze will be Tuesday May 13, 7pm @ Bub’s Bar-B-Q, 676 Amherst Rd, Sunderland MA. It’s a monthly informal gathering of cartoonists & other comics-interested folk, so come out to eat, drink, chat, draw, and (this month) try Bub’s deep-fried Twinkie – if you dare! For more info, contact E.J. Barnes: art at ejbarnes dot com.

On Saturday, May 17 at 2pm, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge MA will host a screening & panel discussion of Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist. The Museum has some video clips on YouTube: click here and check out the clips labeled “Comic Arts Festival” (including four clips of Howard Cruse discussing his work), “Will Eisner Documentary”, and “Peter Kuper meets Norman Rockwell”. This is yet another event in conjunction with the stunning “Litgraphic” exhibit of comics art, closing May 26.

The long-awaited reconstruction of the Trees & Hills website is now in progress, so please pardon our appearance. There are a few things that will take a while to get to, but everything should be pretty functional soon, and I’ll post about the new features.

Goodbye, Blogger – Hello, WordPress!

I hope everyone is having a nice 2008 so far. Marek Bennett has redesigned his website around the popular WordPress blogging platform, and now has individual feeds for Mimi’s Doughnuts and his comics workshops. You may notice several of those entries in the trusty T&H Blogwatch Box right here; that’s because sometimes when you add a new feed to Google Reader, it treats all the existing posts as brand new. C’est la vie…

The Trees & Hills website is due for a makeover as well. I’ll be working on this, also using WordPress, and hope to have it done this month. I think I am going to convert the distro first, then the rest of the site. As with any construction project, things may go wonky for a little while, so please bear with us. It’ll be much nicer in the end, though!

Daniel Barlow has called in to report the good vibes so far at SPX – I imagine he’ll have a full report when he returns. In the meantime, here’s a look at the cover and table of contents of the NEW STARS anthology:

That eye-popping cover is by Gregory Giordano of Burlington, VT. If you’re near Bethesda, drop in and pick up a copy at SPX! Otherwise it’ll be available online next week, and at finer local retailers as we get it to them.

In honor of the new anthology, plans are afoot to revamp this site to make it easier to use and maintain, so we can keep it updated better; click here for a preview.

Page two of “The Cosmic Cocktail Conundrum” by Dan Barlow, Keith Moriarty and Tim Hulsizer. This is just one of more than a dozen comics that will appear in NEW STARS, a new mini-comics anthology published by the Trees & Hills comics group that will debut at SPX.