where
do i send submissions ?
first send your proposals to me, at this eMail address.just send me
a loose sketch of the story you want to do.
for example, tell me if it'll be about April and May as lovers, talking while in the bath, and it'll be about eight pages worth of black&white line-art.
for prose, the same parameters apply, except for that last bit about it being eight pages worth of black&white line-art. for poetry, just send them to me. if you want someone to do illustrations for your poetry and prose, well then, we'll see if any of the artists'll be willing to do your stuff (but if you already have an artist for that, well then drag her-him in, then!!).
what
dimensions for the art do you require?
keep in mind that it'll be released as a minicomic. one page of the
book'll be 5.5" X 8" (or half a short bond paper, landscape-wise).
same goes for the poetry and prose contributors (before you print your stuff, lay it out in landscape mode, with two columns. 1.5 spaced, font size is ten (preferred, but if you want, play around with the font size).
play around with your works, keeping in mind the paper size of the book.
for the comic strips, PLEASE, do not give me the original art, as i will cut and paste the completed pages when we have all of the stories in. send me photocopies of your pages, instead.
oh, and the delivery bit. i guess we'd have to meet face-to-face so you can give me the strips personally. the prose and poetry contributors can send their stuff through eMail.
when's
the deadline?
end of june at the latest, i think. if we have all of the works in by,
say, mid-April, we can have the book finished by first week of May.
so, as early as possible, but end of june at the latest.
what
media etc.?
for the art? well, again, keep in mind that the pages'll be photocopied,
so they'll be in black&white.
so what media? you can do it in watercolour if you want (it'll be in grey when photocopied, giving the strip a bit of an ethereal feel throughout). you can do it in paint, or mouse-drawn in photoshop, or with those black-ink gel pens you can buy for twenty pesos apiece (what i prefer to use, actually). you can do it in mixed-media, pasting lacy stuff and dried leaves and whatnot into the pages if you want.
what
about copyrights?
the rights for your contributions, of course, will be yours until
the end of the world, and you'll be acknowledged as contributor.
oh yeah, and here's the nice part, i think: as soon as it's finished, i will give you unstapled copies of the minicomic so you can make countless copies of the minicomic for yourself (and if you want to make money out of the publication, well, why not? just don't alter the finished product (i.e., deleting parts, obscuring names and whatnot)) and for friends!!
for
how much again?
photocopying is VERY cheap. 40 centavos at the cheapest, 1.25 at the
most expensive (powder, i think, which is great with the grey-scaling
bits, if your strips have those).
i'm aiming the price at around twenty pesos (for twenty pages worth of stories, and we add about five pesos for every ten additional pages. which means, if the end product'll be fifty pages, the price would be thirty-five pesos. if the end product'll be a hundred pages, the price would be sixty pesos). all of the proceeds from the copies that i'll be making will go on to printing more of these guys (and whatever subsequent issues that'd follow April and May).
on
a more personal note, i'd like to shake your hands for showing interest
in doing the 'zine.
i've been reading some papers about how some artists (robert crumb,
megan kelso, art
spiegelman, jason
lutes, adrian
tomine) first came out in minicomics and anthologies (and in megan
kelso's case, still uses the zine format for her
comics), and got to wondering why alamat hasn't continued doing their
stuff in this format.
it's cheap and it's easy to do, and it's so bloody beautiful to look at the end product!!
and this is just the first of (what i hope would be) a series of anthologies doing the same sort of thing, only with the subjects changing from issue to issue. the second subject i have in mind is (tentatively, but i think aptly) called Womb to Tomb, which will be a collection of eight- to ten-pagers about the entire lifetime of a girl named Barbara, from conception to death. each creative team (or artist) will handle one chapter in Barbara's life. for example, one guy would do her conception and birth, and one girl would do her toddler years, and then two guys (as a team) would do her adolescence...
jesus christ, i'm excited. oh, and i'm thinking about releasing the book under the name Loony Aunt Press, with the title April and May. what do you people think? if you have anything better than Loony Aunt Press, then toss it towards us here and let's vote for it, yeah?
tell me what you think. if you think i'm being unfair with these terms (especially the financial bit), tell me so we can fix it. i'm new at the financial bit of these things, so i'm pretty much taking stabs at the dark, here.
again, thanks for showing interest, and i hope we'll be doing this book together.
