It's SUMMER VACATION!!!!

Although the weather is doing its best to put a damper on things. I don't mind the rain, but if it must it could at least be in the form of thunderstorms. Enough of this drizzling! HARRUMPH.

Since last we chatted, I figured out how to turn on the backlighting for my keyboard, helped out at the Center for Cartoon Studies graduation ceremony (which can be viewed here!), packed up all my stuff, put a deposit down on my first apartment for the fall, moved back home, and printed out a bunch of extra comics*.

*not necessarily in that order, but mostly in that order.

How many comics, you ask?

ALL OF THE COMICS.

What you can't see beneath ROCKALL are copies of AVAST, my group's Golden Age assignment from Spring Semester, and Holy Shit, the comics anthology I was a part of for our Fall Semester final project; neither of which I ever blogged about. Would you like to see a sample from Holy Shit? Of course you would:

Why can't I get these to line up? Weird.

Anyone going to Heroes Con next month? Because I will be down there in Charlotte from June 3-5 panhandling these works of art and you KNOW you want your very own copies. This offer is too good to pass up!

Also: business cards!

Thus ends the product placement, I swear! I'm still in the process of unpacking my car and trying to Tetris all my belongings into my old bedroom (there is a distinct shortage of bookshelf space to handle my exponentially increased comic and zine collections) and I still need a 3-prong to 2-prong power adapter before I can set up my home office so unfortunately there won't be a Wunderkammer update this week. In positive news, however, I've been hanging out with my bffl Amy of [citation_needed] fame a lot over the past couple days and my family's boat went in the water today!

F*** trees, I climb buoys, Motherf***er

There is so much headroom down in that cabin and it makes me so happy. Totally makes up for getting my good pair of jeans all mucked up with harbor slime while helping to launch the dinghy.

NEXT WEEK: WUNDERKAMMER.

All The Pages. ALL of Them!

Today was the last day of classes for my first year at Graduate School. For comics. I'm livin' the dream! But where has the time gone?! I'll tell ya: it's gone into making this final project! And now probably a lot of this upcoming week until the Seniors graduate will be spent hanging out at parties; today's, the first of a presumed many, was a reading party so us First Years could check out the Seniors' stuff and vice-versa. It was awesome! I got to trade for a couple of amazing comics and even sold a copy of ROCKALL like a real professional, haha; thanks, Carl!

Three whole dollars, and suddenly I'm a legitimate cartoonist, haha! Back in my day, that would have bought 300 Swedish fish at the local corner store, or 60 Bazooka Joes. I'm rich! RICH, I TELL YA!

Speaking of ROCKALL, here are the last pages of Part I:









TO BE CONTINUED! Unfortunately not until next fall since I'm going to finish the story for my Senior Thesis :( But! I have a couple summer projects in the works and, of course, Wunderkammer is back in business!

Even MORE Pages!

For those of you not subscribing to my Twitter account (I'd encourage you to, but most of my tweets are nonsensical real-time comments about terrible movies I've found to watch on TV), The Center for Cartoon Studies trivia team beat the pants off of the Dartmouth teams! So what if trivia happens in a pizza place where lots of beer is consumed, and it's Ivy League finals week? I got a Sam Adams shirt! And I'm selling us short, since we usually do better than many of the accredited school's teams and we come up with better team names every week. SO THERE, Dartmouth!

There are FIVE pages up tonight, since otherwise I would have had to split up a two-page spread. Time for some juicy gossip and geography!









Last three pages up tomorrow night, as well as the back cover!

More Pages!

I'm off to Hanover to pit my trivia knowledge against those stuck-up rich snobs at Dartmouth, but here's a quick update for pages five through eight of ROCKALL! Meet the neighbors:









It's sort of disheartening that in two blog posts we're already halfway through something that I spent months making, haha. Check back tomorrow for the next four pages, and wish me luck for tonight! It's the Toonies vs. The Ivy League--place yer bets!

I LIIIIIIIIIIVE!

Oh hey, everyone! Remember how, about nine months ago, I was excitedly yapping about how I got accepted to Cartoon School and would be making comics all of the time? And then I didn't update for the ensuing, aforementioned, nine months? WELL I DIDN'T DIE, I'VE BEEN MAKING COMICS. SO MANY COMICS. And you will be hearing all about it soon, since we just handed in our final projects and I suddenly have free time to do things like write verbose blog posts to make up for lost time--but you've all been waiting long enough to see new stuff! Am I right, or am I right? Or amirite.

SO! Over the next week or so I'll be uploading the 16 pages of my first year mini-thesis project, which covers the first part of what will be a longer story that will probably be my senior thesis for next year. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the cover and first four pages of ROCKALL:











ROCKALL's a spin on the traditional Irish and Scottish selkie folktales, entirely drawn by hand on smooth Bristol board using a Pentel Brush pen and an ink wash. Oh, and all the characters speak in Brogue! 8D

But what about Wunderkammer?! I hear you say; because, really, that's the only reason you've all been so patient and stuck around through my terrible internet etiquette. If all goes according to plan, Wunderkammer updates will be resuming by the end of the month! Those pages will be uploaded to the main site, nolens-volens.net, and I'll be taking down everything non-Wunderkammer related over there and repost it here, along with new stuff. It's time to get my act together! HONESTLY! I need you all to collectively slap me through the intertubes.

Duh-duh-duh-DETAILS~

You know, I often feel like my line art looks much better before I color it; which is always a bummer after spending hours laboriously coloring each and every orange or dome detail, and WOW THEY LOOK DIFFERENT NOW .v. Continuity fail.

Lately, though, I've been making panels that compositionally I am very pleased with, but then have to cover up with speech bubbles. Life is so hard, that this is the worst thing I can up up with to complain about, haha! But seriously, this close-up of page 44 actually proves that I took an anatomy class--lookit them joints!



...actually, this picture is kind of obscene out of context, haha. But it illustrates another problem, that I will sometimes breeze over important details (like the fact that Kristina is wearing clothes) if I know they'll be covered by a great swatch of white covered in words :\ Something to work on.

BUT I STILL REALLY LIKE THIS FRAME DD:

Because My Life Is So Terribly Interesting (?!)

I have resolved to be better about updating this blog, since I want to get better about marketing .v.

Actually, my life has actually been pretty interesting lately! Often this is not the case; it's difficult to write about my archiving career and make it interesting and appealing to "normal people." I mean, do you really want to hear about how the price of bronze casting has increased exponentially over the past six decades, based on invoices? Because...I could go on for days :\

Two weeks ago, I went (briefly!) to MoCCA! Really, I was in NY to visit 1/3 of the Regis College Museum Studies Department (Hi, April!), and I convinced her it would be fun times to check it out! And it was :D She was very patient while I ran around saying "hi" to everyone I knew (and still I missed a bunch of people from my new school AND Kate Beaton. WRYYYYYYYY T^T); she even bought a book for herself! So that was exciting, but we had to leave early to attend a 50th Anniversary Antiquarian Book Fair :OOOO So it was hard to be too bummed.

Imagine, if you will, a big-ass room. A big-ass room full of old, leather-bound books and the smell of vellum. Also, April's boyfriend's friend worked for one of the businesses represented, and snuck us in. And THEN! He snuck away from his post and took us on a tour of all the booths, and just started opening glass cases to show us, and let us touch, things! Things like a second-edition EVER printing of the Koran, and first-editions of The Hobbit and, weirdly, A Clockwork Orange. I don't much understand the allure of that particular piece of work. And it is certainly a piece of work :\ Other things of note were hysterical Age of Exploration Era maps, where South America is sideways, and a Geography Game about the Departments of France apparently written by a resident of Loire because that county was this game's equivalent of "Boardwalk." Jesus. Everyone knows that Gironde is better!

Then we went to a candy store that must have taken up an entire city block!
Yessssssss.

Also that weekend, I visited a family friend's art studio in Harlem, along with my aunt. He's a second-year Master's student at Columbia, and just finished his senior thesis: it is a clock, rolling on the track of a treadmill. I'm not going to lie; my understanding of contemporary art is negligible at best. I think it's an allegory about time v. the rat race, but I felt too stupid to actually come out and ask DD: Either way, I can appreciate the work and physics that went into engineering a rig to keep the clock from rolling off, yet rolling smoothly in place (magnets and pendulums!). Sorry, Sam .v.

Then all last week at work I was conscripted from the archives to help put together the Senior Art Show; so instead of being home working on Wunderkammer, I was running around yelling at students to give me their information and working reception on Opening Night. But it was totally worth it; below are two of my favorite pieces (please excuse the bad quality of my camera phone):

This...really reminds me of the Silent Hill nurses, only going to Prom! 8D
They are made out of papier-mache, used tea bags, and wax.

It's like a bad fairy tale! It doesn't help that I've been re-reading all of Angela Carter's weirdo, bestiality-themed reinterpretations of famous fairy tales, haha. I have to walk past this fireplace several times per day, and every time I get freaked out.

Last weekend a bunch of old friends were in town, and were treated to the grand, Home Town Tour (whether they liked it or not, haha!). And yesterday I went to the dentist and had a cavity filled without Novocaine, because I am a total badass.

That is a lie. I am such a baby; the cavity was so small it hadn't gotten past the enamel, so no pain-killer was necessary. I cried anyway T^T

This volcano is really taking away from the allure of going to France next week. Well, maybe going to France. I dislike flying at the best of times, let alone when there's an increased chance of a painful, fiery death. Eyjafjallajokull, why you gotta do me like that?