BUDDIES

The Rhode Island Independent Publishing Expo (RIPE or RIPExpo) is just over a week away, so it's probably time to start talking about BUDDIES! Walker and I were both honored to be Special Guests of the show, and decided to show our appreciation to the RIPExpo and the Providence comics community by collaborating on an ENORMOUS anthology that would serve as a Providence "scene report" in book form. That book is called BUDDIES (or, more accurately BUDDIES 2015. we're hoping it will be a yearly census), and it contains comics from close to 50 artists living and working in Providence, RI.

Luke Boggia designed the hypnotic cover:

Featuring some beautiful new work from Heather Benjamin:

Puke Force makes an appearance, courtesy of Brian Chippendale:

The return of USA TRUCK from Mickey Zacchilli:

And some Doofus pages from Rick Altergott:

The printing and folding is (mostly) done, now we just have to put the dang things together...

Look for BUDDIES at the RIPExpo, March 28-29, right here in Providence, RI!

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!

TCAF

Last weekend, the Hidden Fortress descended upon Toronto, Ontario, Canada for TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and brought some copies of the freshly printed second volume of the three-part MONSTER comic. This volume features the work of Sam Dollenmayer, Michael DeForge, Keith Jones, Mickey Zacchilli, Marc Bell, Molly O'Connell, Seth Cooper and Devin Flynn, and once again has a beautifully printed letterpress cover by Heather Benjamin:

here's one of Marc Bell's pages, painstakingly reproduced on the Ryobi:

TCAF and Toronto were wonderful. Every chance I got to walk away from the table, I found a different nook or cranny where more tables were set up, with more people selling more comics. It was both overwhelming and awe-inspiring. 

here's a picture of Cheryl Kaminsky commandeering the table while I wandered off on one of my forays:

Mickey Z

well, dear reader, i have good news and i have bad. the bad news is that Mickey Zacchilli has pulled her comic from this current Monster. but fear not! i don't know how she did it, but somehow in the last week she's produced eleven new pages to replace the old strip. she is putting us all to shame... 

now go look at her tumblr!

SPX 2012

This weekend, Hidden Fortress Press manifested at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD. We brought the first volume of the Monster 2012 anthology with us, with a super limited edition SPX exclusive dust jacket. Monster 2012 is just under 200 pages long and will be collected in three volumes, each with a beautiful letterpress cover printed by Roby Newton and designed by Heather Benjamin, who is also designing the slipcase that contains the three books.

That's Roby Newton and Ignatz award nominee Mickey Zacchilli representing at the Hidden Fortress Press table. We were psyched to also have Ignatz winner Lale Westvind parked at our table; Hot Dog Beach is well deserving of it's accolades, and Lale is pure badass. 

It was an incredible weekend, we met a ton of wonderful people, saw some dear old friends, met a lot of our heroes, discovered some new heroes, and brought home suitcases full of beautiful books.