Tomorrow at Craftershock in Worcester, MA, our holiday tour rolls on with Colin Tedford at the Trees & Hills table and Anne Thalheimer (comics, hats) and Matt Young at their own tables.

Visit the Trees & Hills table at these upcoming events:

• 12/1 in Northampton, MA: Stars & Skulls Crafty Craft Fair
• 12/7 in Worcester, MA: Craftershock
• 12/14 in Easthampton, MA: Return of Lowbrow

We’ll even have holiday cards — put on your tuque and come have a look!

http://www.mainecomicsfestival.com/2013/2014-exhibitor-application

A list of wintery things to stimulate your brain into producing a comic for our rapidly-approaching Winter Special anthology: [Read more →]

Trees & Hills wants to see your winter-themed comics for a special seasonal anthology!

THEME:

The theme for this anthology is WINTER. The working title is Trees & Hills Winter Special 2013 (we’re open to something catchier).

CONTENT:

As usual, community-minded & regionally-oriented pieces get extra consideration. We will accept pre-existing stories. We may post a list of wintery things soon to This list of wintery stuff may help spark story ideas, or at least get you in the right frame of mind.

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 with LZW compression (300 dpi OK if you need to use grayscale and don’t worry about the compression if you don’t know how to do it) 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 — but be careful not to cut it too close; we don’t have any slack in the deadline (if you’re running out of time, email us & we may be able to send the T&H Mobile Scanning Unit to meet you).
• 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: November 17, 2013 (sorry, no extensions — we’re only leaving a week for production). [Read more →]

This is quite a week!

You have about a day to get in on Isaac Cates’ Kickstarter campaign for Cartozia Tales. It’s already funded, but you don’t want to miss out on an all-ages shared-world fantasy anthology, do you?

Scott McCloud gives a talk at Mount Holyoke College’s Gamble Auditorium in South Hadley, MA this Thursday 9/26 at 5:30 PM, free to the public. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/artmuseum/events

Granite State Comicon expands to two days this year: September 28-29 in Manchester, NH. No doubt many of the exhibitors are from our area and I will try to learn them all, but the ones I know for sure are Blair Shedd, Matt Talbot, Jennifer Omand, Jesse DuRona, Randall Drew, and the Fat Squad.

MICE (the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo) also expends to two days this year (the same ones as GraniteCon): September 28-29 in Cambridge, MA. Trees & Hills will have a table staffed by Marek Bennett and Colin Tedford (who’s also on the “Comics and Journalism” panel at 3:30 Saturday); other T&H folk I recognize who have tables are Jon Chad, Mysterious Transmissions (Colin Panetta and/or Mark Velard), Sean Wang, and Tom Pappalardo.

Apologies to any T&H-area exhibitors at either show whose names I didn’t recognize — drop us a line!

In anthology news:

We’re aiming to crank out another set of Trick or Treat Comics shortly after MICE — which doesn’t give us a lot of time (maybe a week or two), but we’re not asking for a lot of pages. Use the submission guidelines from last year and I’ll put up a new post soon.

We’re still looking for submissions for Share. We’ll set a new deadline in the next few weeks after Dan & I have a chance to discuss it.

We’re working with a peace activism group on an anthology of comics about militarism to be released early-ish next year — we’re doing it a little differently from our usual anthologies, but email us at organize@treesandhills.org if you’re interested in participating.

Sorry we’ve been so quiet lately — Dan has been consumed by work (and cemetery photography), and I’ve just been having trouble getting anything at all done. I’m partway through a redesign of the site that we hope will make it easier for us all (instead of us two) to collaborate; in the meantime, drop us a line at organize@treesandhills.org if you’d like to get more involved in Trees & Hills.

Graphic novelist, political cartoonist and painter Sabrina Jones will be giving a public talk on her career tomorrow (Wednesday July 3) at Fayerweather Hall room 113, Amherst College, Amherst, MA at 1:00 PM, followed by a signing at Modern Myths, 34 Bridge St., in Northampton, MA from 4:00-6:00 PM.

Trees & Hills (and many cartoonists from our area) will be tabling at MeCAF in Portland, ME this coming Sunday May 19. Come see us by the seaside!

Since 2009, MeCAF has been Portland’s annual showcase for comic arts bringing creators to the public. Over 100 comic writers and artists will be on hand for this event — everyone from mini comics publishers to seasoned professionals. There will be comic book writers and artists, gag cartoonists, newspaper cartoonists, web comics creators and more. The guests will have their own work available for sale. Some people will be doing sketches and selling original artwork. Others will have t-shirts, buttons and posters. All of them have one thing in common… a love of comics.

Special guests this year include Jeff Smith, Brian Wood, and Raina Telgemeier. Trees & Hills and the Boston Comics Roundtable (and numerous artists from both groups’ areas) will be there. To the best of our knowledge, the T&H-area exhibitors are: Center for Cartoon Studies, Colin Tedford, Corey Hodgdon, Dani Jones, Daniel Barlow, How I Made the World (Liz Plourde & Randy Michaels), Jennifer Omand, Marek Bennett, Matt Talbot, Matt Young, Megan Baehr, Mike Lynch, and Trees & Hills.

Free Comic Book Day comes around again this Saturday, May 4. Join Trees & Hills and numerous cartoonists at the Rochester, NH FCBD Festival, meet a bunch more cartoonists at Double Midnight’s FCBD event in Manchester, NH, or find the nearest participating shop to get some free comics.

The Boston Roundtable continues to bring us one of our favorite comics events — The Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo! Apply online by April 26. Here’s what they have to say about this year’s event:

MICE 2013 has big plans! First of all, we’re extending the show to TWO DAYS with exhibitor space and programming running all weekend (September 28-29, 2013). Secondly, we’ve revamped and polished our exhibitor registration process, which begins next week!  Here’s what you need to know to be a part of MICE 2013:

• We will be accepting exhibitor applications April 14th through April 26th at our Exhibitor Registration page. No need to storm the gates, crash our site, and miss your chance. This is not a first-come, first-serve process. You’ll have a good window of opportunity. [...]

• 75% of tables will be “curated” by our planning committee and 25% will be determined by lottery. [...]

• If you only have 1 or 2 comics to sell, MICE will also be offering shared space. We want as much new talent as possible, so if you’re just getting started this is a great way to get your work out to the public.

If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to send an email our way.