Trees & Hills will have a table this coming Sunday at the fourth annual Maine Comics Arts Festival (MECAF) on the waterfront in Portland, ME. Daniel Barlow and Colin Tedford will staff the table, with Marek Bennett setting up shop next door and Anne Thalheimer roving the floor.

Other cartoonists from our region at the show will include:

• Carl Mefferd
• Center For Cartoon Studies
• Jen Vaughn
• Jesse DuRona
• Melissa Mendes
• Mike Lynch
• Randall Drew
• Tina Pratt

Mike Lynch has compiled a great visual list of all the exhibitors; see also the official exhibitor list.

Trees & Hills returns to Broke! Broke is a multidisciplinary arts event with a simple philosophy: art is for everybody. All Broke events are free to the public, and Broke vendors commit to presenting their wares for less than $50.

Broke is just one event during the annual “Thing in the Spring.” Other events during this weekend include:  performances from world-renowned musicians, film screenings, and a local farm breakfast/cartoon cereal party at Harlow’s Pub. Some events are ticketed and some are free.

Pre-order our new food-themed anthology Sprouts by May 13 to get it signed, sketched in, and shipped for free! Tell your friends! (seriously, it’s a big help)

Pre-order our new food-themed anthology Sprouts by May 13 to get it signed, sketched, and shipped for free! Tell your friends! (seriously, it’s a big help)

Transcript of comic:

While wandering in the Judean desert (during work on the excavations at Tel Yaffir near Hebron in July 1989), [Glynnis approaches a pod-bearing tree thinking, "I'm hungry. What's that tree?"] I discovered [she reaches for a pod and puts it in her mouth] “Um? Yum! I’ll bet this is…”

carob.

Also called St. John’s bread because in the Bible, Matt 3:4, “John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness of Judea … and his food was Locusts and wild honey.” The Greek word translated “locusts” is taken by some to mean “carobs” rather than grasshoppers.

[St. John, eating pods from a tree:] “That’s good, because I’d prefer to eat these big sweet chewy pods than grasshoppers any day. & they sure beat those veggie schnitzel back at the Kibbutz.”

Pre-order our new food-themed anthology Sprouts by May 13 to get it signed, sketched, and shipped for free! Pre-orders increase our first print run – get your copy now and help us cut down on trips to the printer! Tell your friends! (seriously, it’s a big help)

Transcript of comic:

Jen: What’s that … I smell CHOCOLATE!!!

Matt: There’s no chocolate in here.

Jen: But I smell it.

Matt: You must be hallucineating!

Pre-order our new food-themed anthology Sprouts by May 13 to get it signed, sketched, and shipped for free! Tell your friends! (seriously, it’s a big help)

Transcript of comic:

Into the last of the Soviet housing projects – middle-class Slovak suburbs of the 1980s – each house like a little chunk of apartment tower -

And here it’s the tiny gaps between the houses that draw my attention… [growing in the gaps: apples, grapes, raspberries, cabbage. Pears?]

Even the bigger yards packed full of onion, cabbage, poppy.

Trees & Hills will have a table at the fourth annual Maine Comics Arts Festival (MECAF) on the waterfront in Portland, ME. Daniel Barlow and Colin Tedford will staff the table, with Marek Bennett setting up shop next door and Anne Thalheimer roving the floor.

Other cartoonists from our region at the show will include:

• Carl Mefferd
• Center For Cartoon Studies
• Jen Vaughn
• Jesse DuRona
• Melissa Mendes
• Mike Lynch
• Randall Drew
• Tina Pratt

Mike Lynch has compiled a great visual list of all the exhibitors; see also the official exhibitor list.

Pre-order our new food-themed anthology Sprouts by May 13 to get it signed, sketched, and shipped for free! Pre-orders increase our first print run – get your copy now and help us cut down on trips to the printer! Tell your friends! (seriously, it’s a big help)

Transcript of comic:

HARVEST TIME. Even though you want to draw, you know piles of ripe tomatoes await! And more, lots more, need to be picked! BLIGHT. You have a short window of opportunity to save as many tomatoes as you can before blight, that creeping evil, kicks in. There’s nothing left but to bring them and and do battle.

Start by cutting up a huge amount… and turn them into beautiful sauce… or cut some up and dry them in the oven! Oven dried are fabulous & tasty!

The theme for the Fall 2012 Trees & Hills anthology is SHARING and COOPERATION. Titled SHARE, it will help celebrate the International Year of Cooperatives.

CONTENT:

As with all our anthologies, we are most interested in both fiction and nonfiction comics with a community-minded orientation – comics that show an awareness of connection to the world around them and aim to make some sort of contribution to it, ideally with direct relevance to our region.

We will post some possible story ideas and links to resources soon.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Contributors should, of course, live in Vermont, New Hampshire, or western Massachusetts.
• Comics should be suitable for a general audience.
• Please let us know your story idea & approximate length as soon as possible (& let us know if you change your mind).
• Length: 1-6 pages. The printed page size will be 5.5” x 8.5”, image area around 5” x 8” – please proportion your comic accordingly.
• Send 600 dpi B&W .tif files (300 dpi OK if you need to use grayscale) to organize@treesandhills.org. Please use the format [last name]-[page number] for the filenames – for example Tedford-01.tif. You may also send clean photocopies to Trees & Hills, PO Box 645, Winchester, NH 03470.
• Please include in your email:
• a 1-3 sentence blurb about yourself;
• website or other preferred contact info (if any);
• a mailing address for your contributor copies.
• Deadline: September 6, 2012.

OTHER INFORMATION:

• Each contributor will receive one copy of SHARE for each page of their work that appears in it. Contributors may purchase additional copies at wholesale (50% of cover price).
• We prefer new comics, but may consider existing work that is a good fit. If accepted, we ask that you not print your submission elsewhere (except an online excerpt) for at least six months from the anthology’s release date.
• SHARE will eventually be compiled with other T&H anthologies into a book collection; we also plan to release digital versions of our anthologies at some point. Contributors will receive one copy of the book for each piece they have in it, and may purchase additional copies at wholesale (50% of cover price). They will also receive a copy of the digital version.
• We are also looking for theme-appropriate designs for the contents page and back cover. The contents page will need to have room for us to type in the title, table of contents, and indicia. The back cover needs room for us to type in the list of contributors. Email organize@treesandhills.org if you are interested.
• Past anthologies

Download this call for submissions as a PDF.

“Beauty and the Geek” is a musical by NH cartoonist Allison Barrows based on a storyline from her syndicated strip PreTeena, with music by NH cartoonist Michael Cohen. Jeri, Teena and Stick go to Grandma’s farm, where things formerly reliably dull are in for a big shake up!