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MIni-comics artist Joe Lambert talks about mini-comics

Joe Lambert talks about the Center for Cartoon Studies, in Vermont, USA, and about some mini-comics sites for people interested in investigating mini-comics further...

READERSVOICE.COM: If you lived in a town or city that knew nothing about mini-comics, where there were no small press expos, no Center for Cartoon Studies, maybe just an art college, and say the most people knew about comics were childhood memories or newspaper strips, what steps might you take to start a mini-comics tradition?

JOE LAMBERT: That’s a really good question. I actually grew up in a small town that fits that description perfectly. No comic shops even. Back then the best I could do was with whatever the grocery store magazine rack and local library carried.

And even when I lived in New York and Denver I was never really that aware of comic cons or shops that carried mini-comics.

It’s a lot like music. How do you get exposed to certain bands or genres of music? Sometimes it’s where you live, if you go to a lot of concerts. It used to be about shops and radio stations and magazines. Now it’s still some of those things, and a lot of internet sites and blogs and whatever.

I’m not saying that you have to live in Portland or Brooklyn to be exposed to sweet mini-comics (it would probably help), but I think if you don’t live in an area with lots of comic events and shops and cartoonists like those cities you have to do some digging around.

And it’s not that hard. It’s not like music in that you can’t download comics like you can download music, but I think cartoonists are becoming more internet-responsible with putting up samples and maybe even a few whole-stories that you can read online, and there is a ton of stuff out there that you can find once you have a foot in the door.

Often that foot in the door comes from a friend with a recommendation. So if you read a great comic tell a friend! I often have people come to me at a con and tell me that a buddy of theirs showed them one of my mini’s, and that is a very cool thing.

Here are some good sites for getting started with a mini-comics library: Secret Acres; One Percent Press; Tugboat Press; Partyka; Quimby’s Bookstore; I Know Joe Kimpel; Sparkplug Comics; Atomic Books; Microcosm; Alternative Comics.

I think those are all pretty standard and obvious for people who know about them, but I hope they’re helpful to everyone else.

RV: When did you make your first mini-comic and what was it about? How did you manufacture and distribute it?

JL: After my first few weeks at The Center for Cartoon Studies I was in the production lab (the studio space the students shared, complete with drawing tables, paper-cutters and photocopiers) drawing with my buddy JP Coovert. I showed him some comics I drew for my website.

Just for fun he made photocopies of them and showed me how to lay them out so that I could make a twelve page booklet out of them. We printed up a few of copies and I had my first mini-comic.

The comics were a handful of pseudo-journal strips and jokes, autobiographical for the most part. I gave it to a few of my friends at the school.

A few weeks later I produced my first original mini-comic called I Will Bite You!. It was about an angry monster-boy who went around biting people and eventually taking it too far. I drew it with a pen, laid the pages out in Photoshop and printed the interior pages on a photocopier on regular copy paper. The cover was a two-color screen print on 80lb cover paper (we have a screen-printing lab at CCS).

I distributed it at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda Maryland, and take it to every convention I’ve been to since. I keep in print and have probably printed at least 500 copies over the last four years. It’s also available at Secret Acres.com and One Percent Press.com and I Know Joe Kimpel.com and a few shops that carry mini-comics.

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