hello, england! thought bubble is this weekend!
I'm off to England for Thought Bubble! Also: new washi tape & resources for fighting fascism.
Dear newsletter subscribers,
I’m off to the UK today for Thought Bubble Comic Festival! I’m stopping in Edinburgh for a couple days first, then heading to Harrogate for the convention. This isn’t my first international con (I’ve done TCAF in Toronto twice), but it is my first overseas convention, and I’m very nervous and very excited.
If you’re in the area, grab your tickets over on the Thought Bubble website!
I’ve made myself a brand new sketchbook for the trip, and I’m hoping to do some proper travel journaling while I’m away. Once I’m home, I’ll scan whatever sketches I do while traveling and toss them on my Patreon! (You can find some old sketchbook uploads on there as well!)
If you’ve got any recommendations for cool stuff I should check out in Edinburgh, Harrogate, Leeds, or York, please let me know - you should be able to reply directly to this email!)
I have a new washi tape design out in The Washi Station’s forest friends collection! I had so much fun drawing cute little fairies for this!
I also got a buttonmaker for my birthday, so I riso-printed a bunch of button designs I’ll be bringing to Thought Bubble with me!
Not gonna lie - it feels weird to be doing convention prep & advertising my art a week after the election. I don’t have any super deep thoughts about that that haven’t already been said a billion times, and I assume anyone signed up for my newsletter already knows where I stand on things, but just in case it needs to be said outright: I’m a gay leftist, and I’m gonna keep making gay leftist art for as long as I’m alive. (For more on my thoughts about communism, see this zine I made last year.)
If you voted for Trump, unsubscribe from this newsletter right now. My art is not for fascists. If you’re a “keep politics out of art” person: all art is political, and my art isn’t for you, either.
Some things to read/listen to:
It Could Happen Here podcast - “Still Don’t Panic: An Election Response”
ICHH is a great podcast in general, done by the team at Cool Zone Media (which you might recognize from Behind The Bastards, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, and other podcasts I’m a huge fan of), and they’re doing a series of episodes now analyzing Trump’s policy plans and what people can do to protect our communities through it all.I’m relistening to some old episodes of Margaret Killjoy’s Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff too right now, as a bit of “even in terrible times there’s people doing the work” inspiration. Here’s some faves:
The Haymarket Affair: The Bomb & the Eight-Hour Workday
(Highly recommend reading up on the Haymarket Martyrs as well, just generally.)
Israeli & International Solidarity with Palestinian Struggle
Birth Control Pioneers
The Jane Collective: Direct Action Abortion Access WorksOn Making Art in the Bad Times from DongWon Song’s newsletter
Places to donate:
Gonna close out this newsletter with a quote from Lucy Parsons (1851-1942), a Black indigenous labor organizer and anarchist, from The Principles of Anarchism.
I came to understand how organized governments used their concentrated power to retard progress by their ever-ready means of silencing the voice of discontent if raised in vigorous protest against the machinations of the scheming few, who always did, always will and always must rule in the councils of nations where majority rule is recognized as the only means of adjusting the affairs of people. I came to understand that such concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.
… Anyways! Off to the airport! See you in England! Take care of each other! Love you!
<3 - Kaylee Rowena