True Swamp by Jon Lewis

Waiting on a very nerve wracking reply today. Diamond deciding whether or not to go ahead and fuck my publisher and I in the eyehole. Arrrghh.

gd luck jon

are diamond p much the only game in town, these days, comic shop distribution-wise?

yep, a virtual monopoly. One thing I'm curious abt is whether a lot of comix stores these days supplement their Diamond orders with orders from book trade distributors. Because we have a great book trade distro lined up.

good luck Jon. Fingers crossed and all that.

knock em out man

they just confirmed they will not take the book. Our potential sales just got slashed by 50%. Fucking god damn hell balls.

What's fkin genuinely ironic about this is that Diamond refused my work just one time before-- almost 20 years ago, the very first issue of TS I published with the Xeric grant (they rejected it for being too rough). (And I got comics mags to write news stories on it 'Diamond shits on young award winner' basically) which turned TS into a cause celebre and was ultimately great for the title (Diamond reversed their decision and took TS with #3).

This time it's due to their new 'threshold' policy. Basically they don't think they can sell 200 copies. Meanwhile we've already shifted 200 copies through the book trade distributor and we haven't even started promoting yet!

This fkin bites because a huge portion of my readership are comics people. People who buy their graphic novels at comics stores. You know what I mean.

That sucks Jon. Fuck Diamond.

I'm leaning more towards kill them, burn the body, bury the ashes and salt the ground with salt.

That works too.

Sorry man. Have you tried hitting up the strand to do an event? Maybe you could present thatas evidence that tour work has sell thru capability?

Official announcement time is here. Time for me to turn into a brazenly self promoting asshole!

https://trueswamp.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/swamp-call/

AWESOME!

just preordered

feest bomp to yoo

got to see the galley proof of the TS book this weekend at a comics fest, and it looks totally great.

Yay!

at APE, I guess? Uncivilized was there w/Gabrielle Bell.

That galley doesn't even have the art corrections or the bonus stories.

Only a couple weeks to go til Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Fest!

yeah, i met tom at APE - great guy, and definitely ambitious as a publisher. he only had one galley there, but it was enough to get me excited about the hardcover version.

Let me spam u deeply

http://trueswamp.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/confirmed-sighting-in-minneapolis/

http://trueswamp.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/ts-just-in-11.jpg

can't wait! i like the new title font as compared to the galley version.

Book release party/signing this Friday at Desert Island in Williamsburg, also with James Romberger and his awesome new book Post-York. Should be a much more manageable crowd than BCGF, to say the least. Would love to meet any of y'all.

http://www.facebook.com/events/455316491191871/

Finally got my copy! So excited:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A925ohJCAAA7vIW.jpg

Yay!

The signing on Friday was really nice. Good turnout, great vibe.

I made an ipod playlist beforehand for gabe to play in the store during the signing, then over the weekend I decided to do a Spotify version of it. Consider this the True Swamp soundtrack for now:

http://open.spotify.com/user/1213493496/playlist/7lU2Z6yQ8HoRZpMIt5waQ4

Neat. Thanks for the playlist. I will listen while I read.

If I bring this with me on my next trip to NYC can I get it signed?

But of course! Where do you live, anyway?

Dallas at the moment. Planning a tour?

I wish. I have a full time day job unlike my more successful labelmate Gabrielle with her epic tours.

Some day. Even a short one would be cool. Have you made it down to SPX or anything?

Oh of course, I almost always do SPX. APE once in a while. Stumptown last year, would do again.

cool. I wonder if I met you at SPX back in the day; I went in 97, 98 & 99, when I was living in Baltimore.

Probably yes, then. I was there all three of those years (was living in Gainesville FL at the time). The Chris Oarr era. Loved those shows.

I loved it too. Intimate and friendly. It's very cool to have this collected hardcover, Jon. I lost the few issues I had way back when in a flooded basement in the late 90s and never replaced them.

Yeah I haven't fully gotten over the sheer niceness of the edition yet, myself!

true swamp soundtrack rules btw -- i'm glad to know that someone else thinks cluster sounds like animal noises.

^_^

Yeah for some reason vintage Cluster and its imitators (Eno instros off Another Green World, etc) are THE sound of a swamp for me. Anything sort of innocently tuneful played on cheap or defective-sounding electronics...

The playlist for the signing had several bits of T Dream's The Keep score, sadly it does not exist on spotify or anywhere besides weird bootlegs...

Nice interview at CBR. I look forward to a second hardcover for the 200-2001 series.

Oh, it's up! I've barely been online the last couple of days. Cool!

If anybody's coming to the Mocca festival in manhattan this weekend, come see me at the Uncivilized Books table! I'll be hanging out there with Gabrielle Bell and James Romberger, and of course all our respective books.

gonna try to come by and continue to quietly crush on gaby and loudly talk shit with you
i should make you a lenny or hale cup sometime

tree stump cup!

I wish I could make it but not this year. But I'm totally brining my snazzy hard cover for personalization on my next trip to New York.

Lemme know! WKIW.

I'm also gonna be at TCAF next month.

I hope to hit New York before the end of the year. Will definitely drop you a line when it happens.

super posi review in TCJ
http://www.tcj.com/reviews/true-swamp-choose-your-poison/

i got that! it's great. also saw it prominently placed, face-out, at a barnes & noble in harvey, louisiana.

That is a very solid review. Kudos.

I saw it at Malaprops in Asheville last weekend.

Yeah that review was good for my heart b/c tcj never reviewed True Swamp back in the print mag era.

Btw, not gonna make it to TCAF after all :( but there's a good chance I'll be going to CAKE in Chicago in June.

The guy across the aisle puts out Shakespeare things and is juggling to attract attention to his table.

http://www.uncivilizedbooks.com/comics/true-swamp-book-02.html

Woohoo!

yeah I have to be digitally nit-picking the artwork files for the 2000-2001 stuff for this. On the bright side, those pages are much more crisp/print-ready than the 90s stuff was, so it's not like a 6 hour per page ordeal. On the less bright side, this makes the task super boring.

As for brand-new work, it's really seeming like my inking days are over because of my elbow. New stuff is likely to be taken straight from my pencils/levels fucked with and solid blacks added in digital, like I did for the Klagen minicomic. I THINK I can still pencil if I don't press too hard.

that's not so great, but this book is great! how exciting!

Just preordered as I wanted a copy of "Carl Barks Duck" from Uncivilized. Don't push back the release date!

As far as I know everything is on track! I turned in my author's afterword 2 weeks ago; it's a pretentious one even by my standards.

We didn't have anything obscure and cool like the original minicomic version of TS#1 to include in this volume, so I am doing something different for the bonus material, something which exists outside of and complements the book. More soon.

sooooo, is this still getting finalized or... ?
I will ink your work very very cheap btw.

Uncivilized is reorganizing (in a good way-- augmenting its personnel-- I don't see any announcements online so I guess I shouldn't say more) but my book is delayed a bit as a result

Forks I was just thinking of you today, I wanna ask you about some stuff

drop me a line. sorry the book is delayed.

Seattle area ilxors -- I will be in attendance for the opening of this 5-way show at my friend's gallery on cap hill which I more or less coordinated:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlearts/2016/03/01/in-the-story-room-5-seattle-cartoonists-opening-march-10-at-dendroica-gallery/

Thanks forks. I may just take you up on that.

― Thelema & Louise (Jon Lewis), Monday, July 22, 2013

I will! I'm trying to cut out this dumb hermit bullshit this year!

So back in 2007, when Dark Horse was publishing an anthology series of comics derived from the imaginary Escapist comics embedded in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay, I sold a 21 page script for it to Diana Schutz which was then drawn colored & lettered by Marc Hempel; by the time the story was finished though, DH had cancelled the antho series and the 21-pager went into inventory. I saw it as digital files on marc’s laptop at a show that year - it looked gorgeous. Di said she hoped she could place it somewhere or other at some point (we got paid our page rates obv despite the piece getting inventoried).

Was at a couple friends’ signing event at desert island last night and poking around and noticed a new squarebound collection of that Escapist stuff. Thought hm what if, and was a bit floored to see me and marc’s story is included.

This came out in June - “Michael Chabon’s The Escapist: Pulse-pounding Thrills”.

It was really the tail end of me trying to making a living in the industry after my two year stint scripting at DC and then four or five years of floating lots of pitches all over the place to varying degrees of almost-but-not success. The good thing was by 2007 my scripting was in a pretty good place and the piece was personal enough and pro enough and probably the best commercial script I ever sold, much more in control than my DC stuff. I rammed classical music in there - the story revolves around a performance of one of Szymanowski’s violin concertos.

So it’s weird but nice that that’s finally in print. Does not look like the TPB has garnered any attention to speak of but it exists!

The main thing that happened with new work this year was the Sunday funnies page at Popula.com - I was one of 5 cartoonists doing a page a week there (full color). (Me, Karen sneider, Tom hart, Megan kelso, Steven weissmann). I was really into this project and they were paying a legit page rate! Sadly no one was clicking the Sunday funnies page so after 8 weeks when popula started having their blockchain funding reversals and had to halve their comics budget, they killed Sunday funnies and just retained the self contained specially commissioned comics that run during the weekdays. I’m trying to divert the resulting thwarted creative momentum into getting some steam building up on new true swamp material which is probably what everyone (~20 ppl) would rather I be doing anyway, but JFC it is so goddamn nice to get paid for ones work (obviously an outmoded publishing model but it was great to have a nostalgic glimpse for a sec there!)

That’s the news. Gonna try’n draw this weekend.

ha, congrats on the escapist thing!