#will dinski

2dcloud comics are getting lots of honours as end-of-the-year lists are coming!

👑 Someone Please Have Sex With Me by Gina Wynbrandt

Paste’s Sean Edgar

Someone Please Have Sex With Me ventures into uncharted territory. The title is also the most apt description of this collection— Gina Wyndrant’s autobiography diagrams her unflinchingly honest quest for carnal pleasure and Justin Bieber. How, exactly, the reader is supposed to digest these narratives is an experiment within itself. Should we assume that Wynbrandt’s quest is an unhealthy attempt to patch emotional fissures, or are we projecting our own insecurities and “values” on someone with the confidence to articulate her needs, tears and all? I don’t know. Any book that can make its reader ask this many questions deserves more attention. I do know that this filterless self-reflection, full of humor and abrasive color schemes, contains shades of brilliance that my post-Catholic-school psychology is still unraveling. Also: a colony of creepy cats with Nicolas Cage’s face.

The Seattle Public Library

They are also really, really funny.

Serietekets (Sweden)

The book is in pink, purple and blue, and is far too clever (and stylish) to miss. And the funniest of 2016!

The Comics Journal’s Katie Skelly

Gina Wynbrandt serves up soul-murder with her humor compilation Someone Please Have Sex with Me, most impressively, resisting the self-affirmations most of the mills crave.

The Comics Journal’s Rob Clough

The Comics Journal’s Jessica Campbell

Powell’s Books

Someone Please Have Sex With Me jabs at sex, society, gender roles, and dating norms of the digital age abound in Wynbrandt's snarky, hilarious comic. Get off of Tinder and pick up this book.

40 Reasons to Love Comics in 2016

FaLaLaLaLaLafel

Rob Kirby (Notable)

Publishers Weekly (Honorable Mention)

👑 Gulag Casual by Austin English

BOMB Magazine

Strangers, creeps, and loners stalk the pages of English's latest stories, rendered in vivid, expressive pencil and brushwork. Dirty erasures, tense scrawls, and compulsive stretches of pattern seethe with intensity and urgency and rub up against profound bewilderment.

The Comics Journal’s Tahneer Oksman

English calls this book his “first real stab at making art in comics,” and it is quite a tour de force. Reading through Gulag Casual is something like a cross between flipping through an exceptional artist’s private, experimental sketchbook and looking at pieces of art hung up in a Chelsea gallery. The colors, shapes, textures, and narrative snippets are unexpected, and the images and moods depicted throughout somehow appeal through their gruesomeness.

Just Indie Comics (Italy)

Gulag Casual is another coup of the excellent 2dcloud, one of the most interesting publishing houses of the moment.

TIK TOK Comics (Spain)

Rob Clough

👑 Turning Japanese by MariNaomi

The Comics Journal’s Rob Kirby

I think Turning Japanese is her best work to date, with a gorgeous production job from 2dcloud

The Seattle Public Library

MariNaomi (founder of the Cartoonists of Color Database) chronicles moments of her life both exciting and banal. As a 20-something in the mid-1990s, MariNoami worked in hostess bars in San Jose and Tokyo while attempting to connect with her Japanese heritage.

Rob Clough

Kevin Budnick 

FaLaLaLaLaLafel

👑 Virus Tropical by PowerPaola

Rob Kirby

Powerpaola’s densely patterned, obsessively detailed, slightly naïve—and wholly wonderful —drawings captivated me from beginning to end–breathing as they do with life and feeling. Apparently there’s a forthcoming animated feature based on this and I’m really looking forward to it.

Librairie D&Q’s Helen

Powerpaola, who currently lives and works in Buenos Aires, brings us the story of her childhood and adolescence in Peru and Colombia, starting with her mother’s pregnancy, which was mistaken by several doctors for a “tropical virus.” The youngest of three sisters, she grows up surrounded mainly by women, blossoming from a timid child into an adventurous teen. Powerpaola’s drawings are gorgeous, particularly the title pages for each chapter, which perfectly convey the uproar and hilarity of her young life. 

Librairie D&Q’s Kate

Already widely published across the globe, this autobiographical comic was released in English this year in a beautiful edition by 2dcloud. It recounts Powerpaola's youth spent in 1980s Ecuador and Columbia living with her Mom and sisters. Her telling is full of charm and dark humour and each chapter, organized by themes such as religion, women, and money, is commemorated by a vivacious full-page drawing. Essential reading for fans of Julie Doucet Marjane Satrapi, AND it's going to be a movie!

The Comics Journal’s MariNaomi

👑 ITDN by Andrew Burkholder

Comics Bulletin’s Daniel Elkin

If you haven’t read this book, you need to read this book. If you are unfamiliar with the work of Andrew Burkholder, get familiar with it. In all of 2016, no other comic affected me so viscerally and intellectually as ITDN. It may be one of those books that’s “not for everyone” — but, believe me, it is for you. As the year progressed, I went back to ITDN again and again, each time discovering something new that Burkholder had done within its pages, each time discovering something new about my thoughts and feelings about what I was experiencing.

… quite possibly one of the most profound aesthetic experiences I’ve had in the medium in a long time.

👑 Perfect Hair by Tommi Parrish

The Comics Journal’s Anya Davidson

RJ Casey

👑 Trying Not to Notice by Will Dinski

Rob Kirby (Notable)

👑 Sec by Sarrah Ferrick

Comics Bulletin’s Ray Sonne

It’s impossible to not have a reaction to “Sec” as disturbingly visceral as it is; reading it is no different than standing in front of a canvas at a museum and trying to process every choice the artist makes. “Sec” taught me the important lesson of the abstract and how an artist provokes a reaction inside the reader that neither actor has any full control. We talk a lot in more plot-heavy comics about “relatability” and how that leads to “universality,” but true universality comes from this kind of work–how the reader inserts their own unique life experience in order to relate to what the comics creator puts on the page.

Laurie Pina

It floored me, so beautiful and intimate and visceral. reading it was like being submerged in an ocean of blood, listening to a heart beating and organs pumping and squelching.

Aaron Turner (Sumac, ex-lsis vocalist)

Oliver Ristau

👑 Secure Connect by Carta Monir

Sophia Foster-Dimino 

Will Dinski

2dcloud is going to SPX
 Table C1  5 debuts FRIDAY 
 Altcomics 6 Carta Monir • Tommi Parrish • Gina Wynbrandt • MariNaomi • Anya Davidson • Will Dinski • Raighne Hogan • +surprise performance 

SATURDAY 
 11:30-1:30 Carta Monir, Tommi Parrish, Gina Wynbrandt
 1:30-3:30 MariNaomi, Gina Wynbrandt 
3:30-5:30 Will Dinski, Tommi Parrish
 5:30-7 Tommi Parrish, Gina Wynbrandt 

SUNDAY 
 12-2 Will Dinski, Gina Wynbrandt 
 2-5 Gina Wynbrandt, Tommi Parrish 
 5-6 Carta Monir, Tommi Parrish 

PANEL
S Saturday 1:30-2:30 Indie Publishing: Make The Comics You Want To See Spike Trotman (Iron Circus) • Raighne Hogan (2dcloud) • Annie Koyama (Koyama Press) • Rob Clough (moderator)

What a perfect word to describe who we are. As artists and as an earnest little publishing operation — I think you have to have some misguided, naive sense of belief in yourself to succeed. Maybe?

And what is success? Money? Or just being able, somehow, through hard work to be able to keep doing what you love?

Well, we certainly don’t have money. All the same we’ve been very fortunate. We work hard — every day, all of our energy, all of our time, and whatever little amount of money we do have — it all gets subsumed by this vehicle.

I am tired. I am emotional. I am drained.

But I love it. I love the artists we work with — I love them so fucking much. They give me purpose. To rise everyday, to work hard every night. To continue whatever it is I am doing with this life. To learn from them, to laugh with them. To just be.

And that’s a kind of success. For me, I just want to keep doing this with them forever and ever. I hope I am able to do so.

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, for us to continue that type of success, we need a minimum amount of capital. For the time being, that means having our current Kickstarter reach its goal. We have 2 days… and we need your help.

What are our Collections?

To keep our label running, we’ve moved to offering small seasonal, finely curated book bundles. We offer these at a deep discount and include a lot of extras. We call these bundles Collections.

Yes, our Collections are a way to raise funds, to keep the lights on — but they are also a way for us to highlight the authors we love. Alone, their works could be lost in the sea of releases coming and going. But by placing them in our collections, sometimes alongside authors with a larger following, they’re in a tiny peer group giving them higher visibility, and allowing for new audiences to discover them together.

So even if we get to a point of greater stability, we will continue to run our collections. The reason being is that raising capital alone is not the point of our collections. The other piece is raising awareness of not only our authors, their titles, but also of this industry — to show the necessity of this vibrant creative community and the works coming out of it to the larger world.

What does the future hold?

I’d like to take a second to pull back the curtain — to show you what we have coming down the pike for with our next couple of collections. Please keep in mind that some of these covers are not final.

Fall Collection ‘16 Altcomics Magazine #4, Perfect Hair by Tommi Parrish, Secure Connect by Carta Monir, Sprawling Heart by Sab Meynert, and a new mini by Vincent Stall

Winter Collection '16 Altcomics Magazine #5, Extended Play by Jake Terrell, Mirror Mirror 2 edited by Julia Gfrörer & Sean T. Collins, Sound of Snow Falling by Maggie Umber, Yours by Sarah Ferrick

Spring Collection '17 Altcomics Magazine #6, Architecture of an Atom by Juliacks, Life in the Fun Zone by Leif Goldberg, Retreat by Jaakko Pallasvuo, and a new mini by Brie Moreno

As you can see, we have a very exciting slate lined up. And there is so much more we have planned. But to make it there, we first need to succeed with our current collection. If you value the type of work we are doing, the authors we publish, we need your help — please show your support by becoming a backer and talking about the work we are doing on social media.

Thank you!

All our love, everything we got

Will Dinski’s Trying Not to Notice is a part of our Spring Collection!

It has been very long (7 years) since your last book-length work.

I’ve been working on different comic projects the last few years. During that time, I spent a while expanding my bookmaking/printmaking experience and creating letterpress comics.

Also, I’ve found that writing novel length works takes a different mindset than short stories. I’m almost exclusively working on longer stories now, but it took me a while to get confident enough to work in that mode.

Trying Not to Notice is less experimental/formal than your minicomics published by 2dcloud. But it still has some formal inventions.

I love to read and love to be fully immersed in a narrative. In my own work, specifically when writing a longer narrative, I try to use techniques that are appropriate for the moment emotionally, and aim not to pull the reader out of the story too often.

Short stories I treat differently, and find their limitations more encouraging of a frequency of certain type of visual risk.

Which one’s more important? Form or narrative?

My favorite stories use both equally. When I work, the form drives the narrative.

Trying Not to Notice is drawn in brown color.

I thought it would look pretty.

(...)