Minneapolis will soon have its first independent comics festival! It’s called the Minneapolis Indie Xpo and it’s happening on Saturday, August 21, from 9am-5pm at the Soap Factory. We’re offering free admission, prizes, radical donuts and access to independent exhibitors and publishers from across the nation. Hope you can join the fun! For more information please visit our website: http://mplsindiexpo.com

And don’t forget about the awesome SCOTT PILGRIM screening!

And don’t forget about the awesome pre-party!

And don’t forget about the awesome after party!

You’ll never forget how great the inaugural MIX was if you attend any and all of these events!!!

The Lutefisk Sushi Volume D bento boxes include work by over 50 Minnesota cartoonists, have a hand-silkscreened 3D cover by featured artist Danno Klonowski, are limited to 150 copies, and sell for only $25. Hard to believe we have put together four of these monsters already.

3D and dinosaurs are like chocolate and peanut butter to me.

Here is a version with the art moving to give a glasses-free 3D effect.

I’ll also have a 2′x3′ digital print of the piece hanging on the wall at the gallery (there will be plenty of 3D glasses around to view it with, and there are glasses included in the boxes). In the event anyone wants to own one, I’ll be selling them for $40 (frame not included).

In addition to this, I printed six issues of little funny up for the show, which will be in the small boxes from the vending machine along with comics by many other artists (I’ll have a gallery of photos of all of them up sometime soon). The ones I printed include one by my oldest daughter, two I made with my good friend, Lutefisk Sushi featured artist Danno Klonowski, and three that are solo books. The little funny boxes each include a dozen or more micro-comics by different artists, and sell for $4 each… there are around a hundred of them this time around, and they will go very fast, I think.

Hope to see you there! Please tell your friends!

I have work in the Lutefisk Sushi Volume D show opening up this weekend (on the walls, in the Sushi bento box, and in the little funny boxes)… more information about the show below. It was just written up in City Pages here… I was excited to see the print edition included the above image from my Sushi comic, EEK! DINOSAURS! Hope to see you there!

Lutefisk Sushi Volume D opens this Friday! The show features a limited-edition (150), hand silkscreened, 3D bento box full of mini-comics by over 50 Minnesota cartoonists for only $25! See original art and other work by the cartoonists all over the walls of the gallery, including a bunch of work by featured artist Danno Klonowski (Manly Tales of Cowardice). Also, don’t miss little funny Series II, small boxes of micro-comics sold out of an old cigarette vending machine.

The show has been included in the A-List in this week’s City Pages.

Please tell your friends, blog readers, social networking website compadres, co-workers, parents, cousins, casual associates, and random people on the street of the opening this Friday, August 6th from 7 – 10 PM at Altered Esthetics!

Altered Esthetics • 1224 Quincy St NE, Mpls MN 55413 • 612.378.8888

Promotional materials below.

Postcard Resources!

Postcard front, small jpg

Postcard front, large pdf

Postcard back, small jpg

Postcard back, large pdf

Misc Show Sites

Sushi Website

Facebook Event

LSD – Facebook website

Click the above image to embiggen.

If you like this stuff and want to read the previous strips without going back post by post through the blog, they are easily browsed in THE ARCHIVE here.

Click the above image to embiggen.

If you like this stuff and want to read the previous strips without going back post by post through the blog, they are easily browsed in THE ARCHIVE here.

In the long time I didn’t update this strip, Soapy made at least one appearance elsewhere… it is likely I may be forgetting others (if you know of any others, please remind me so I can post them here).

Here she is making a guest appearance in my extremely prolific friend Lance Ward’s fantastic Tater Tot Diaper Man strip… click the below image to go and see the full strip.

Lance is among the least predictable cartoonists I am aware of. His strip veers from autobiography to goofy humor to horror to underground smut to whatever tickles or irritates his fancy on a particular day. He draws all of these strips tiny and straight up in ink with no pencils, if you can believe that. I’m working on a guest strip for him that I am required to work in the same format, small and straight in ink… and it is a very fun experiment. I’ll let you know when it is posted.

Lance’s autobiographical stuff I think is particularly outstanding. Lance has had a difficult life including a near-death heart attack, mental illness, and relationship issues (delivered “live” in the strip), so his auto-bio stuff is not just a bunch of navel gazing, to say the least. He’s collecting the entire strip in a book soon, which should be quite a document… don’t miss it.

Time flies, huh? Anyone still reading this thing?

Click the above image to embiggen.

If you like this stuff and want to read the previous strips without going back post by post through the blog, they are easily browsed in THE ARCHIVE here.

It was ridiculous how long he had been in the otherwise-empty waiting room. His tooth hurt like hell.

Nothing to read but an old Cosmo and an issue of Highlights. What child likes the Timbertoes, anyhow?

He felt mild pity for the receptionist as she chased him into the office, but really she was as culpable as anyone in wasting his afternoon. As he went to work on the dentist, he marveled at the array of tools at his disposal. Extraction was easy.

Still, it looked like a doorknob and a piece of string was in his immediate future.

Note: I wrote this today for a contest. The theme is “found in space.” Wish me luck! I’ll need it.

Fallcon, The Twin Cities biggest and best comic convention is this weekend! Come and join me in the “Cartoonist Conspiracy Lounge” to doodle and shoot the breeze.

FALLCON
October 10 & 11, 2009 – 10AM to 5PM Both Days
Minnesota State Fairgrounds
IN THE GRANDSTAND

Guest List

Hope to see you all there!

Comicopolis, a gallery show featuring the work of a number of Minneapolis cartoonists (including me) opens this Friday… hope you can make it!

Please join us Friday, August 28th for food, drinks and music!

Comicopolis:
Low life, high art

Opening reception:
Friday, August 28th from 6-9pm

Location:
FrameUps Minneapolis
4325 Nicollet Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55409
(612) 870-1292

Featuring comic art by:
Kirk Anderson
Ken Avidor
Shannon Brady
Kevin Cannon
Will Dinski
Roger Lootine
Brittney Sabo
Andy Singer
David Steinlicht
Steven Stwalley

Wanna help promote the event? Have a chicklet!

COMICOPOLIS Facebook Page

If you enjoy this site and you live near the Twin Cities, you won’t want to miss the BIG FUNNY show my friends and I have been putting together over the last number of months. It opens this weekend, and it is going to be spectacular.

The show premieres BIG FUNNY, an oversized 48-page newspaper of comics by 45 different artists, inspired by the funnies sections of yesteryear. The gallery show features original art from the publication, numerous antique comic strips (some over 100 years old), a retrospective of unknown cartoonist William Ede, and an old cigarette vending machine rigged up to sell small boxes of little funny mini-comics. Hope to see you there!

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY IS COUGHING blood and gasping on its deathbed. Newspapers lost their relevance a long time ago, and with internet media blossoming they can no longer compete. Readers and advertisers have moved on.

Unfortunately, newspapers are taking their beautiful bastard child, the newspaper comic strip, with them.

Today’s newspaper comics are much-maligned… and deservedly so. Today’s small strips, with mostly predictable, safe themes and bland characters are a pale shadow of what newspaper comics were in their wild and colorful youth.

110-or-so years from their birth, it’s been a good run. Let us not mourn the death of the

newspaper comics… rather, let us have a wake to celebrate what they once were, and to build something new.

The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, Big Time Attic, and Altered Esthetics gallery are collaborating to produce an oversized newspaper comics section like they would do it today if they still did it like they did it in the old days.

It will be called BIG FUNNY, and it will be both.

The paper will premiere at a show at Altered Esthetics in August, featuring some of the original art from the paper, along with historical comics pages from the dawn of the last century.

BIG FUNNY Website.

City Pages A-List Review

Optical Sloth review

Poopsheet Foundation review

Newsarama review

Drawn Review

Amy Crehore’s Little Hokum Rag review

Photo gallery of the little funny sideshow

Can’t make the gallery show? You can buy copies of BIG FUNNY here.

Opening Reception
August 7, 2009 7pm-11pm
ALTERED ESTHETICS
1224 Quincy St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413

SHOW RUNS AUGUST 7-29, 2009

GALLERY HOURS:
TUESDAY & THURSDAY 1pm-7pm, SATURDAY 1pm-5pm