Comic Arts Brooklyn 2015

Well I'm just about to hop in the car, trunk overflowing with comic books, and drive down to Brooklyn, NY for the 2015 edition of CAB, the Comic Arts Brooklyn. It looks like they've put together a hell of a show, once again. We'll be downstairs at the Mt Carmel Gymnasium, tabling next to Mickey Z, Mike T and Walker M!

CAKE 2015

SCREWJOB 2 back cover by Jimmy Giegerich

This weekend we'll be at CAKE in Chicago! You can find us at table 63, right next to dear friends Jo Dery, Walker Mettling and Michael DeForge. Here's a handy map to find your way:

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!

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!