I’ve been in Kansas, living with my family, working odd jobs and visiting my high school friends for the past two months. Today I start the journey back to Vermont, where I’ll spend the second half of the summer. It’s been a great visit, and I will miss all of my wonderful friends here (wish we’d gotten in more tea & art days and mafia games, and found time for an rpg session or two), my family, and all the animals around my parents’s homes and the family farm (there are kittens), but it will be good to be back in the land of cartoon school.
I’ll arrive in Vermont Thursday night, and have a couple of busy days with a workshop and some other activities, and then I’ll be cracking down on this wearable art project. The research I’ve done into wholesale and tax laws and so forth that I’ll need to understand before I manufacture and sell these has just begun, and I was wondering–If I’m going to spend so much time researching legal/business stuff for my cartooning business, would anyone be interested in a minicomic that compiled my findings into an entertaining/easy to read format?
Being back in Vermont also means it’s time to go swimming in the river. So excited. Last summer I didn’t arrive until a few weeks before classes started, and I was ill prepared for swimming (I have no idea what happened to my swimsuit during last summer’s move–I have yet to find it). THIS summer I’ll have a month and a half before school, and I will not be caught without swimwear. The river was beautiful just for sitting by and sticking one’s feet in, and I am super excited to actually swim in it.
And it means I can do a new print run of Simpler and Barriers! I may also reprint Allergic in a new edition, but that will take more work and experimentation. I don’t mind screen printing a cover for Simpler even though it’s very short because I feel that it has just enough meat to merit a cardstock cover, and the screenprint adds to the feel and the value of the book. Allergic is entertaining, but doesn’t have as much reread value. It feels more disposable to me. Four-page minicomics too often feel flimsy and insubstantial, and I need to rethink the packaging and design on this one. If I reprint it, I want to have an end product that can be produced with less time and cost (and which I can sell for a lower price) and feel more satisfying.
On a completely different note, I just had a craving for wasabi. That’s weird, right? I’m not craving sushi, I’m craving the use of sushi as a vehicle to deliver wasabi and soy sauce. Whatever. I may have have my chance tonight on the first stop of the Vermont bound journey, and if we do indeed stop for sushi, I will enjoy every part of the meal.