our blog

Over the weekend at Stumptown I decided that to fill some of the little spare moments I had doing something useful I would make little watercolor postcards.  Deciding on what to draw when you’re doing drawing after drawing can be daunting and I quickly embraced the idea of just drawing whatever food I (and the rest of the collective) was eating.  Observe.

Surprisingly (at least to me) not only did I find making these really, really fun but everyone who saw them spent a lot of time telling me how much they loved them. So I’ve decided to keep making them.  I’ll be sharing them via my flickr account lizconley and through my new Tumblr.

In honor of our triumphant return from Stumptown, we’ve uploaded an entire story from our FOREST collection. You can read Andrew Farago’s hilarious Paul Bunyan yarn here.

We’ll be uploading one free story from each of our collections, as well as sampler pages or panels from every story. The samples will go up in the days leading up to the big reveal at either APE or Stumptown, and the free story will go up after the debut. Just this once (since we only recently decided to do this) you’ll get two free stories in a row! Be on the look-out for the SPACE story next month. It’s out of this world…

The Couscous group had a great time in Stumptown. We ate a lot of interesting Portland cuisine, Leia discovered that you can get people to buy comics by threatening to punch them in the balls, and I made progress on a couple of graphic-novel projects I’ve been mulling over since the dawn of time. One is way too embryonic to talk about yet. The other is a pitch I’m putting together with the gifted and amazingly affable Jesse Hamm, upstanding member of Periscope Studios and artist on Derek Kirk Kim’s Good as Lily.

We are doing a sci-fi story. Check out some of Jesse’s concept art.

Yes, the spaceship is called the Forks and Hope. What?

See more concept art and many other things at Jesse’s blog.

Jeff and I have started writing and drawing bonus comic strips for Dirk Tiede’s awesome werewolf cop comic Paradigm Shift. For me, it’s a chance to play with the aesthetic of Japanese comic strips, something I’ve wanted to do for a while. We call it “P.S. I Love You.”

Here’s the first one:

http://www.paradigmshiftmanga.com/gift-art/ps-love01.html

And strip #2:

http://www.paradigmshiftmanga.com/gift-art/ps-love02.html

Last weekend I refreshed the 2D Comics home page. It’s been a long time coming, but I kept devising really elaborate designs that never got anywhere because they were hard. This design was inspired by an embroidered cloth that I have, but morphed into paper cuts instead because faked embroidery textures don’t look that great.  There’s still a little tweaking I want to do, but overall I’m satisfied with it.

Pretty flowers

It’s real!

In addition to our upcoming trip to Portland, Oregon for the Stumptown Comics Fest (the fifth time the Couscous Collective will be exhibiting, if I’m not mistaken), we’re also traveling to all four corners of the globe to spread the Couscous gospel.

If you’re lucky enough to be in Athens, Greece this weekend, swing by the Comicdom Festival and see a special Batman exhibition curated by me, and programming including presentations by me and Shaenon Garrity, who will also be on a special panel discussion about women in comics (called Girl Geeks, I think. Maybe Girl Greeks).

Go Team Couscous!