Short Run 2014

Tomorrow I'll be flying west for the Short Run fest in Seattle, WA. I've been to Seattle once before, but literally breezed through on my tour of the mountain ranges of the Pacific NW earlier this year. I'm looking forward to taking the time to get acquainted this time around!

It's my first time at Short Run, but I've heard it's a wonderful show, and the folks who put it on are top notch! If you're in town, come out and visit me at table E-21

The main exhibit space is at Washington Hall, 153 14th Ave in Seattle, WA, but there are events happening all over the city over the course of the week! I'll only be there for the weekend though, so plan accordingly

Comic Arts Brooklyn 2014

We'll be touching down at Mount Carmel church in Brooklyn this weekend for COMIC ARTS BROOKLYN, our second to last show of the year!  

We'll be back in the church basement again, it's a pretty sweet spot... Mickey Z made this handy map for locating all of our dear friends downstairs:

We'll see you there, Brooklyn!

MICExpo 2014

This weekend, October 4-5, the Hidden Fortress will be setting down in nearby Cambridge, MA for the 5th annual MICExpo (Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo). Look for us at table C-125, in the Crumb room, with all the other crumbums!

We'll have all the MONSTERS, wrestling comics, t-shirts and stickers you could ever possibly want!

New Additions to the Hidden Fortress Catalog

We've added two new items to the Hidden Fortress Storenvy store:

the mighty SCREWJOB anthology is available for purchase! Featuring 64 pages of pulse pounding, intestinal fortitude building, four color offset printed comics by: Matt Leines, Box Brown, Pat Aulisio, Lale Westvind, Josh Bayer, Blake Sims, Brian Ralph, Paul Lyons, Mickey Zacchilli, Walker Mettling and featuring a grotesque cover by James "Gunsho" Quigley!

and this new gross-out Hidden Fortress shirt, three color silkscreen on black Anvil T. comes in all the most popular sizes!

James "GUNSHO" Quigley: SCREWJOB Cover Artist

I'm thrilled to be able to show off the cover art for our forthcoming anthology, SCREWJOB:

You've probably seen that sickening style before, it's the handiwork of good friend and local legend James Quigely, alternately known as GUNSHO! For years he's been producing some of the most wonderfully hideous prints, posters, record covers, shirts, etc and etc that have ever graced our fair city. He has an interview in the new issue of PORK Magazine that you should probably read, and if you're in Brooklyn on Friday, September 19, you should go to the opening of his Origins of Ooze show, presented by Scumbags and Superstars. It's at 16 Wilson Ave. Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the show will be up until October 5!

So exciting to see this book come together!

RIPExpo 2014

This weekend we'll be downtown at the Providence Public Library for the first ever Rhode Island Independent Publishing Expo (RIPExpo). It should be a great time, and events have probably already started by the time you read this; check out some of the amazing programming they have planned! And gaze upon this beautiful poster by Leif Goldberg:

Matthew Lawrence wrote a sweet piece about it in this week's Phoenix, you should all come down and visit!

SCREWJOB

I think maybe it's finally time to start talking about SCREWJOB, our new comics anthology devoted to those glorious combatants within the squared circle: the professional wrestler! Over the past couple of months I've leaked some previews of Box Brown's Abudllah the Butcher comic, Pat Aulisio's Goldust and Lale Westvind's Wild Wanda, and here are a few more:

Josh Bayer was the first person I asked to work on this book, within minutes of having the idea for it pop into my head last year at Comic Arts Brooklyn. Of course I had to ask him, he's a brilliant cartoonist and a connoisseur of the wrestling arts, the perfect blend for creating something as beautiful as this Classy Freddie Blassie comic:

As a wrestler and a manager, Freddie Blassie was one of the greatest heels the wrestling world has ever seen, and had been known to take a nail file to his teeth, sharpening them so that they could more easily penetrate the tough skin around his opponent's skull

About a week ago, Pat Aulisio sent me a link to some of Blake Sims' rad wrestling comics, suggesting that I contact him to work on the book. Of course I did, because his stuff is so sweet, but with the art deadline looming I felt pangs of guilt about not having asked him months ago... but somehow this dude cranked out an epic Hulk Hogan vs Kevin Sullivan and his Dungeon of Doom comic in a weekend! What a badass

I'm really excited about how this book is coming together! There are more comics coming in every day, all of which I'll be previewing soon, James Quigely (aka GUNSHO) is hard at work on the cover, and I just got some amazing Tigermask and Mr Fudo pinups from Matt Leines. This book is looking beautiful!

If all goes according to plan, SCREWJOB will be available at the Hidden Fortress table at SPX in September!

CAKE 2014

The car is packed, and I'm preparing to take the long way to CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo. CAKE has been around now for 3 glorious years, and we've been there since it's inception. It's a great show, so many talented and wonderful people gathered together under one roof!

We'll be setting up shop at table 25, surrounded by some of the best people in the biz: Jo Dery will be holding down the Pegacorn Press table to our right, and Walker and Julia will have the full power of the Providence Comics Consortium on display to our left.

Come visit us, Chicago!

TCAF 2014

This weekend, the Hidden Fortress Press will be heading north of the border to visit our friends in Toronto! The Toronto Comic Arts Festival is a "week long celebration of comics and graphic novels and their creators" that has been ongoing for 11 years now. We will have a table set up at the vendor fair on Saturday and Sunday on the first floor of the Toronto Reference Library; come visit us at Table 128, which we'll be sharing with Walker Mettling and his PCC, Michael Deforge, and Leslie Stein, and sitting in between Tom Devlin and his Drawn and Quarterly crew and the Pigeon Press table. It's a pretty sweet gig! Here's a map if you'd like to visit:

TCAF will be hosting a ton of fantastic programming all week, but if you're in town and feeling adventurous, on Saturday night the Ted Reeve Arena in Toronto will be playing host to an epic showdown between Ring of Honor and New Japan Pro Wrestling, a "Global War", if you will. It's a stacked card, featuring some of the best in the indy/international wrestling scene. I'm psyched about the matchup between "Unbreakable" Michael Elgin and Taakaki Watanabe!

On that note, it seems appropriate to show off a couple more preview pages from SCREWJOB, the Pro Wrestling anthology we are putting together. Here's a page from Pat Aulisio's fantastic Goldust comic:

and a page from Lale Westvind's epic tale, the Return of Wild Wanda!

Thirteen Sided Die #2

The Hidden Fortress is packed up and ready to embark on a journey to LineworkNW in Portland, OR this weekend. In addition to the regular staples of our catalog, I just finished printing the latest installment of my sketchbook series Thirteen Sided Die.

I'm still pretty new to this offset printing process, and Thirteen Sided Die is where I try to work the bugs out. The first issue was literally the first thing I attempted printing on the Hidden Fortress Press, and it was a mess; as should be expected, I had no idea what I was doing. This second issue is my attempt at printing four color CMYK color separations on the press, with mixed success:

If you want this book but can't make it out to Portland for the show, I'll be adding it to the Hidden Fortress webstore when I return from the west coast. 

Thanks to Walker for helping me Riso those covers in a pinch! He and the Providence Comics Consortium will be joining me at the Hidden Fortress table at LineworkNW, and I think he's going to be on a panel too. Come say hi to us if you're there!

Showtimes

I'm starting to fill out the Hidden Fortress travel plan for 2014, and it's shaping up to be a pretty exciting year...

April 12th we'll be making our west coast debut at Linework NW in Portland, OR. I think this is the inaugural year for this show; it's being organized by Zack Soto and Francois Vigneault, and I get the sense that it's going to be one of the really good ones. Plus I've never been to Portland! I've heard that I will dine like a vegan prince while there...

On the weekend of May 10-11 we'll be making our triumphant return to TCAF in Toronto ON. Last year was my first visit to TCAF, and I was blown away! Such a good show, with fantastic programming, and a huge turnout. And Toronto is absolutely beautiful.

We'll be traveling to Chicago on the weekend of May 31 - June 1 for CAKE. This will be CAKE's 3rd year, and I'm proud to say that we've been with them from the beginning. It's always one of the most fun shows of the year; so many good, talented folks in Chicago!

September 13-14 is SPX weekend. Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD is the premier indy comics show on the east coast, maybe in the whole country, and I'm psyched that we'll be participating in it once again. SPX is so important to our scene, on so many levels, it's hard to imagine a world without it... I'm looking forward to being a part of this show for a long, long time.

There are a couple more shows on the horizon that I'm hoping to add to my calendar, like the Rhode Island Indy Publishing Expo this summer and Comic Arts Brooklyn in the fall, but they both seem to be in a developmental stage right now. I'll have more information about them in the future.

The Hidden Fortress is working on a number of projects for release in 2014, which we'll be rolling out over the course of the year at these shows. Here's a preview of one of those new books, an anthology honoring those glorious combatants of the squared circle:

Box Brown has been slaving away on a highly anticipated Andre the Giant biography which will finally be seeing the light of day sometime this year. I'm thrilled that he drew this harrowing tale of Abdullah the Butcher (the greatest blader in wrestling history) for our book! He has a number of beautiful portraits of wrestling superstars for sale at his store, go check em out