Issue 34: Live Event TODAY at 1 PM ET!!
Graphic Design by Toby Fan | @astrovvitch
Hello hello, friends and good folk!
Dropping a rare third newsletter into your inboxes this month to remind you that I’ll be moderating “Beginning to End: A Creative Process Conversation” TODAY at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET!! I’ll be speaking with an amazing group of panelists who I feel very lucky and excited to speak with for this event: Ashanti Fortson, Jasmine Walls, Kody Okamoto, and Blue Delliquanti.
We’ll be delving into one of my favorite topics: how each of these fantastic cartoonists approaches the process of making their comics, from beginning to end. Forgive me, but I’m going to gush about them a bit now! I’ve been holding it in for months, and now you get to hear all about these cool people I get to talk with!!
Here’s a little bit about each of them, some of whom you may recognize from my comic recommendations in the past:
ASHANTI FORTSON
Fun fact: Ashanti is the creator of one of my favorite comics of all times: Leaf Lace, which is also available in the NIF Marketplace until the end of this month!
They also have one other title with the NIF Marketplace that I highly recommend: The Broken Heart at the Center of Comics (which was originally published as part of Black Josei Press’s wonderful Gladiolus Magazine)— a 28-page collaborative essay about burnout in comics by Ashanti with contributions from Sunmi, Shannon Wright, and Lillie J. Harris. I also recommend checking out their piece A Visit to Popham Beach, a 13-page zine about the ocean, belonging, and drifting away.
I also can’t recommend Shades of Fear strongly enough to you, which is a gorgeously illustrated horror comics anthology they edited and that they included a fantastic disability horror comic of their own in, too.
Ashanti has been a regular attendee of one of our comics critique groups in the Co-op, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to get to know them on a more personal level as well as through their phenomenal comics!
KODY OKAMOTO
Kody and I work together on the NIF Committee in the Co-op, and I gotta say, he is an absolute and utter delight! Not only is he incredibly kind and dedicated to community, they’re also a super skilled artist and storyteller who I feel lucky to call a friend.
Kody, too, has a couple of comics in the NIF Marketplace and Sampler! His widely beloved webcomic Keeping Time is one of the comics I have a weekly reading date set aside for (Webcomic Wednesdays), and it is SO good! Keeping Time is in the NIF Sampler, and they also have another great comic dEMOn BOY available in the Marketplace through the end of this month, too!
Kody’s work never fails to leave me in awe; he’s so skilled at subtle body language and expressions and— especially— QUEER PINING! Keeping Time recently celebrated its one year anniversary, and there was a fun event hosted online to celebrate if you’d like to check out all the fan art that got spotlighted to mark the occasion.
JASMINE WALLS
Jasmine is the writer behind another one of my favorite comics: Brooms! Brooms is dear to my heart— its characters are charming and funny and determined, and I love that they represent marginalized people in ways that are so often erased in both history and magic. The story has broom races; illegal magic; found family; queer and disabled, Black, Latine, Chinese American, and Indigenous witches— it all comes together SO GOOD!!
This one isn’t in the NIF Marketplace, but you can find a physical copy on Bookshop! It’s such an amazing comic, illustrated by the wonderful Teo Hernandez DuVall, who you may remember I interviewed way back when my blog was up the first time.
Jasmine also wrote The Last Session, one of my other top favorite comics of all time! It was beautifully illustrated by Dozerdraws, and the cast is absolutely delightful. Jasmine truly has a way of making her characters endearing as hell, which makes me super excited for her and Rowan McColl’s upcoming story The Traitor & the Wretch!
Jasmine is the founder and owner of Bonedust Press, a new small press publisher with a focus on “original, fun, and unapologetic illustrated novels and novellas (a little literary hedonism, if you will).” Definitely recommend checking it out, and I’m eager to watch as Bonedust Press continues to grow!
BLUE DELLIQUANTI
I’ve long admired Blue’s art and their worldbuilding and character design skills. They have such an eye for those small details that really make a story and art pop off the page, inviting you to linger for a bit before continuing on.
It also feels like they’re always working on half a dozen projects at once, which is in addition to their job teaching comics at Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minnesota. They’ve got a variety of fun recent titles such as Bleed Any % and Adversary, in addition to Love Triangulation, their title with us the NIF Marketplace this year!
Blue is also one of the managing editors of the Cartoonist Co-op Journal! We collaborated to put together a ton of NIF Interviews together for the Journal, and you can check those out now, too!
I hope you’ll join us today for our event! We all met up earlier this week to do a quick dry run and finalize some details here and there, and we were all VERY excited to be coming together today. They have all been very kind and patient during this process, and I can’t wait to talk more with these amazing creators. I hope you’ll come and enjoy it with us, too!
If you’d like to be able to ask questions during the event, be sure to click on the Zoom link on the event page at the start time, or, if you’d prefer to just watch, you can stream it on YouTube (which is also where you can check it out later if you can’t make it live) 💖
CHECK OUT THE EVENT DETAILS! —>
NIF CLOSING CEREMONY
I also have the honor of being part of NIF’s Closing Ceremonies next weekend on May 31 at 2 PM PT / 5 PM ET! We’ll be talking about our favorite parts of NIF, discussing some upcoming events and news, and sharing a really cool big announcement we’re excited to tell y’all about!
I’m really looking forward to this event, too; Kody and I will be hanging out again, this time with a couple of other NIF Committee members, which is always a good time. I hope to see you there!
CHECK OUT THE EVENT DETAILS! —>
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re having a lovely weekend! 💖
