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Druid: There’s under a week left on the Kickstarter ‘Screams Heard ‘Round the World’, the latest horror comics anthology from @hellcatpress!

Hello hello, Alchemist here, bringing you a mid-year round up of what we’ve been involved with so far in 2018!

First off, the Kickstarter for Awesome ‘Possum 4 was a success, so the books should be coming out later this year; we’ll give you the heads up when they drop! We did a comic about salt tolerance in fish, and we’re excited to see it next to all of the other undoubtedly great educational comics about natural science. Take a look at @itsopossum for updates on volume 4, or to pick up copies of volumes 1-3! We also contributed to Volume 3, and it’s an excellent book as well.

We’re currently working on two horror comics: a just-completed fantasy noir for @reconditehill and a grim fairytale set in the Faroe Islands for @hellcatpress. We’re really excited to show both of these off (both of these scripts are revamps of some of the earliest pitches we made as a team), and we’ll have more to share when the books move further into production.

We’ve also been accepted into @swimonzine‘s upcoming fourth volume. I hope you’re all ready to learn facts about some of the world’s fastest sharks!

Meanwhile, the Druid’s been hard at work on the illustration side of things. A tender sunset moment between a washerwoman and a ghostly banshee was recently featured in the fourth volume from @liliesanthology, Spider Lily, and an excellent (and steamy!) story was written about Druid’s pair of swing dancers featured in @shousetsubangbang’s Sadie Hawkins volume. 

That’s not all though! She also has illustrations coming out in several other upcoming zines: a honey dryad and her bees pose for a pin-up in The Art Apiary; Raleigh and Mako take a spin in front of Gypsy Danger in Pacific Rim Zine, and not one, not two, but three different werewolves were submitted for the upcoming Werewolves Versus Fashion from @werewolvesversus. She’s also working on a climactic underwater battle for @a-destiny-forged, and the Wheel of Fortune card for @pacificarcana! When does she sleep? I certainly don’t know!

Looking forward, we’re hoping to start tabling at local conventions in the fall! In addition to some of the illustrations and comics we’ve shown off here, we’re going to have all new things for sale as well, including illustrated short stories, new comics, and perhaps some hand crafts as well.

Well, here we are, at the end of our first full year making comics, and a successful year it was! We thought we’d take a minute to look at everything we accomplished in 2017. Join us down memory lane, won’t you?

The first thing we published in the year was the short comic A Fine Catch, a silent story about an Inuk woman and her selkie love. It got passed about Tumblr about a thousand times more than we expected :) It can be found in Chubby Anthology 2 here:

https://gumroad.com/natalieparker#

Next up was a rather personal story about religion and female sexuality that was featured in the lovely Dirty Diamonds #8. The book is about to launch; get it here:

http://dirtydiamonds.storenvy.com/

Our longest (and personal favorite) story to date is the creepy The Loyal Heart Conquers, published in Hellcat Press’ Tales from the Public Domain. It’s a re-imagining of E.A. Poe’s Ligeia, and features Scottish highlanders, queer themes and love overcoming death in a disturbingly literal fashion. It marks our first real foray into horror-romance, the genre dearest to both of our hearts.

http://hellcatpress.com/hellcat/store/

We submitted two pieces to the charity zine Swim On 3: an illustration featuring hammerhead sharks and a plane wreck, and an short informational comic about the life stages of the zebra shark. Money contributed to this zine goes to sharksavers.org, so if you haven’t already, get a copy to help out a shark in need!

https://gumroad.com/jpawlik

Another anthology featuring an illustration of ours is Lilies Anthology 4, soon to be available at the following link. This collection of women’s romance was themed around spooky characters and settings, and our picture of an Irish washerwoman and her ghostly banshee girlfriend fits right in.

http://liliesanthology.tumblr.com/download-buy

We also made a few other personal pieces, as well as a short comic for an upcoming publication from Carnation Press. But what will 2018 hold?

Well! We’re already in the process of making an educational comic for Awesome ‘Possum 4 to be released next year (we contributed to vol. 3 as well; find it here: http://angelabcomics.storenvy.com/products/18945388-awesome-possum-volume-3)

We’ve already got a piece ready for the next volume of Love is Blue, a Bayonetta fan-zine. The first volume is available for pre-order now: https://tictail.com/momotarousagiarts?utm_campaign=je6NUbpObpQ_SH_US&utm_medium=00&utm_source=ls_aff&ranMID=42212&ranEAID=je6NUbpObpQ&ranSiteID=je6NUbpObpQ-Jhiy_g3Ef5wYTRs09DMlxQ

(Tonight is the last night, actually, so hop over there quick, if you’re interested!)

Further, we’ve already been accepted into two other horror anthologies for 2018, so stay tuned for unsettling stories about a woman and her possessive aquatic “friend”, and two noir detectives who stick their noses into the wrong sewer. We’ve got more illustrations in the pipeline featuring monsters, sappy couples, and both at the same time, and if all goes well, our first foray into long-form comics!