Tuesday, June 01, 2010

PRISON FOR BITCHES

Hope everyone is enjoying the full-on appearance of Summer (in the Norther Hemisphere, at least). I just got back from a work trip to New York, followed by a short but rad weekend of hanging out. The theme of this trip ended up being "The Internet... COMES ALIVE!" as I got to meet and convert 4 different online friends into IRL friends; It's always a weird experience at first, but a total pleasure when it goes smoothly... Thanks to newly-IRL folks Moni, y16o, Matt, and gea* for the great times hanging out!

So, what else have I been up to lately? Aside from slacking on Same Hat posts, and working on some promo materials for Last Gasp's Comic-Con booth, you may have heard that I put out a new zine with a (ahem) particular focus. That's right, cartoonist Michael DeForge and I collaborated on a 64 page Lady Gaga fanzine called PRISON FOR BITCHES!




The idea for the zine came about the day after the video for Telephone debuted, and the entire book went from drunken (Was I drunk? I must have been drunk.) email thread with Michael to printed book in under 7 weeks. The zine went on sale at Toronto Comics Art Festival last month, and is AVAILABLE NOW via our site: http://prisonforbitches.com. Kudos go to contributor Tony T for having the foresight to buy that domain (and http://letsmakeasandwich.com) while we were watching Telephone that night, haha.

You may be scratching your head, and if so that's fine and understandable. The new zine is a one-time deal, a proper fanzine in the style of fanzines I used to read in the 90s. The whole thing is the size of a 7" record, and was xeroxed and hand-stapled. It features over 35 contributors(!!) and 64 pages (including a 12pg color insert) of fan art, a Hegellian deconstruction of Gaga;s lyrics, comic strips, a live report, photos of Gaga cosplay in Kobe, and other nonsense.




The artists included are an amazing batch of most all of our current favorite working cartoonists and printmakers, including Johnny Ryan, Michael Kupperman, Hellen Jo, Lisa Hanawalt, the Wowee Zonk crew, Saicoink, Makkinoso, Nick Gazin, Elio, Derek Yu, Angie Wang, HARVEYJAMES, Lala Albert, and tons more!




If you wanna see more, check out this 25 page free preview:


And if you really wanna see our zine in its proper form, you can buy it using Paypal/Checkout through the site. It was recently written up on Robot6 and the SF Weekly, which were big surprises and quite flattering for me & Michael.



Anyway, that same weekend in Toronto, I was on a TCAF panel titled, "Indie Comics Japan: Manga Outside of the Mainstream". The other panel members included About.com's manga maven Deb Aoki, PictureBox's head honcho Dan Nadel, D&Q translator for Tatsumi Jocelyne Allen, and Udon's Erik Ko-- and was moderated by The Beguiling/Comic212.net's Chris Butcher.

I don't remember feeling like I said anything super-insightful that day, but if you want to read a great recap of the conversation please see Deb's great report on About.com.

Another "Early Manga Days" essay (and pics from Tokyo) coming in the next day or two!

7 comments:

Andrew said...

super cool! my girlfriend and i saw lady gaga at the acc centre and loved it. i will have to get that zine for her.

Ryan S said...

@Andrew :) Thanks dude! I wonder how your experience will match up with Hellen & Calvin's, who did a series of strips about the crazy spectacle that was a Gaga live show.

alexmercado said...

how does one get their work submitted to your zine?

Anonymous said...

cool stuff

Ryan S said...

@Alex: We through the contributors for this one together in just a week, so we didnt do any open submissions or extend it beyond our EAZ circle / Toronto people... that said, I'll be looking at the end of Summer for submissions for EAZ#3 and posting details then!!! thanks dude!

@gary: thanks :)

myrto said...

I received PFB along with EAZ a few days ago. They are both rad! Congrats!

Ryan S said...

@myrto: Awesome!! Glad it arrived safely :)