Antlers

There’s a list I began in a notebook a while ago that I thought would be short, but it turned out to be long. It’s full of people I know who’ve decided to move, or who’ve made the shift to building shared lives with their relatives, or who are able to support themselves in a creative career somewhere relatively rural.

Looking over it, I realize I’ve been tracking this for a long while. Not interrogating people, mind you, but nosing around. Peering through windows. That kind of thing.

Isabella’s on that list.

We met at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo in 2014. I still have the copy of her thesis project that I bought there—a gorgeous, oversized accordion book full of fluid aquatic illustrations set to the text of a sea shanty.1 We were clearly destined to be friends, but we lived in different places, so we stuck to garden variety mutual cartoonist admiration—the kind that simmers over social media and receives the occasional top-up from tabling at the same shows. She’s got a magnificent eye for production and packaging design, makes lovely, unusual things, and every so often comes out with something that just wraps up everything hiding in my heart and makes it visible and known.

Do you need to know all of that? Probably not. The important thing is that she just released a new comic and I think it’s glorious.

1. Turns out she originally exhibited it as a series of hanging tapestries and I think that’s just so fucking cool.

CAKE this Weekend!

Banner by Chicago's own Jo Dery.
Banner by Chicago’s own Jo Dery.

Convention alert! I’m spreading my wings and heading to Chicago this weekend for the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo. Come say hello! The show is FREE and open to the public Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm at Center on Halsted (3656 N Halsted). I’ll be with my best comics bro Sam Alden at Table 90, but I couldn’t stop there on this doofy map so I just threw in icons for most of the folks I’m excited to see on the floor. Find the whole gang here.

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As always, I’ll have Baggywrinkles galore, copies of True Believer, a previous few Tales from the Fragment, buttons, ladies’ shirts, and watercolor birds! Oh, and the squeaky walrus. Of course.

Wild walrus photography by Kai Hayashi.
Wild walrus photography by Kai Hayashi.

See you there, friends!