#shortbox

[birbyarts]

My new comic LAPIS BLUE 🪞✨ is available for the entire month of October on the ShortBox Comics Fair website!!!

"Something weird has been happening to me lately. My reflection in the mirror is too perfect. It has no defects, no flaws. I think it's watching me."

(64 pages, sci-fi horror)

A story about: the fear of change. Being alone. And an imperfect face, repeated infinite times in the vastness of space.

READ IT HERE! 💙

[sajanrai]

A Grey, a Gnome and a Shakespeare escape from jail. You can grab my 2024 shortbox fair comic 'Alas' here. 20 pages of idiocy

[saint-vagrant]

jack and nour from my comic, THE S☉LAR SYSTEM (available until Oct 31st)

⛓️🩸🖤🩸⛓️

[cowardlyworm]

Osric and Daegal from @theoplum ‘s Blade of the Fane

I can’t believe ShortBox end tomorrow I still have shopping to do haha

[fox-teeth]

It's Worldbuilding Week! All this week I am sharing worldbuilding notes and sketches for my sci-fi comic "The Maker of Grave-Goods" available October '24 through @shortboxcomicsfair

First, let's learn about Mazu's species' anatomy.

[alexsiple]

cover reveal for my 57 pg comic for this year's @shortboxcomicsfair called PANDORA OPENS THE BOX OF CATASTROPHES. it has cars! fear of fate! flowers! weird visual allegory! read it this october!

[turndecassette2]

ok the shortbox comic is actually, for real, done. 60 pages. idk if it makes sense to anyone but me but some people are into that sort of thing. stay tuned

[lauren-adassovsky]

Some early Thistles from my comic « Hibernation Guide for Rabbits and Hares », available at the ShortBox Comics Fair only until the end of October! Have you read it yet?

(Also, to everyone who commented on the comic since the beginning of the month: just know I’m screenshotting all your lovely messages and putting them in a special Serotonin folder for the winter 🤍🐰)

[juangeedraws]

shortbox comic soon!

exciting announcement -- my 50+ page comic A THREE BODY PROBLEM will be on sale during October's Shortbox Fair 2023! it's a science fiction murder mystery nested within another murder mystery. here's a little preview...

[theoplum]

As the last of a once-rich dynasty of cloistered mystics, embittered Osric inherits stewardship of the Illecebra Fane — an enchanted temple that had served as the realm’s greatest weapon against monsters. Living evil has surely long since left the world… But he is unexpectedly under siege in what has been a lengthy age of peace. Reunited with a mysterious childhood friend, Daegal, the two must prepare to face the arrival of a new wickedness spoken of in prophecy: an evil above all evils, titled Dragon.

Here's the full 14-page preview for my new medieval fantasy romance comic, Blade of the Fane. It's available now at the ShortBox Comics Fair, for the duration of October, alongside scores of amazing works by a wide variety of artists. There truly are so many wonderful stories at the fair this year, I hope you'll consider checking them out. Thank you for reading.

[sajanrai]

process gif for first page of 'Alas' - available as part of the shortbox comic fair until Nov 1st

[saint-vagrant]

thought i'd share the central cast of my new 🔞 trans sci-fi/military intrigue story, set in 196X-199X. you'll also find them in my entry for the Shortbox Comic Fair in the fall :^)

much to say but it'll have to wait... so i'll toss in a couple sketches too. i've been focused on this since december, and have done more work than is natural or normal, so i'm getting very excited to unveil it. only a bit longer now. in the meantime, go and read SUPERPOSE. if you like that... there's some thematic crossover!

[cartoonistcoop]

ShortBox Comics Member Interview: Sloane Hong

Throughout the month of October, the Cartoonist Cooperative will be sharing interviews with members of the Co-op who have a new comic available at the ShortBox Comics Fair 2024! 

NOTE: The Cartoonist Cooperative is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way formally connected with ShortBox.  

Today’s spotlight is Sloane Hong ( @plaest2k ) and their new comic for ShortBox, Expiry Date.

We’d love it if you could introduce yourself and tell us about your background in comics.

Sloane Hong: Kia ora, my name is Sloane Hong (she/her), I’m a Korean-tauiwi illustrator, comic artist and tattooer based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I only started making comics professionally about five years ago but they’ve always been a significant part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Tell us more about your new comic?

SH: Expiry Date is an erotic, body horror, sci-fi short story about coming home from a long day at your shitty, minimum-wage job, crashing on your couch and fantasizing about how fucking good it would feel to just die.

I mean, it’s also about transness, labour rights, our relationship with our bodies and death under capitalism, etc but it’s mostly about shitty jobs.

My friend described it as “what if David Cronenberg was a transsexual dyke who grew up reading ero-guro”.

What are some early experiences as a cartoonist that shaped you or your process?

SH: My brother’s also an artist, probably better than I could ever be, and I basically owe any good taste I might have to him. Growing up, I always got home from school first so I’d sneak into his room to admire his drawings and read his comics. He had most of the usual stuff you’d find on any Korean kid’s shelf in the 90’s: Akira Toriyama, Masamune Shirow, Yoshito Usui, etc, and a couple of Korean manhwa that are all now damn-near impossible to find. As he got older, he started getting into American comics and brought home stuff like R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Fletcher Hanks, etc from the library.

But it’s not just that I had someone to introduce me to all this stuff, it’s the fact I’m six years younger than him and he was already reading this stuff earlier than most. So I think I started looking at all those misanthropic underground comics by horny white men when I was, like, what… about 10 years old?

Besides my brother, the trauma of working shitty jobs for years on end, The Terrible Boredom of Paradise, and this weird and fucked up miracle we call life are probably the wellsprings of both my inspiration and ceaseless burnout. 

Tell us about your creative process; how did you develop this comic and what are the steps you took to bring it to the final stage?

SH: I did something really stupid for the 2023 ShortBox Comics Fair. I have ADHD and one of the many ways it manifests is that I have a debilitating habit of overthinking my stories. “Are the themes too obvious? Is it too heavy handed? Are the motivations for this character clear enough? Is this the right way to phrase this? Is this the right word? Is this the right letter? Is this the right punctuation?” etc, etc.

On paper, it probably sounds like something every writer goes through but when I say debilitating, I mean interferes-with-my-ability-to-live-a-normal-life-kind of debilitating. It’s kind of impossible to articulate how bad it was but it got to a point where I was so sick of myself and all the stories I never finished that I said fuck it–maybe if I just jump into a comic with nothing but a stupid premise, no planning and an impending deadline, I won’t have time to think about all these inconsequential details. So I sat down and forced myself to write, pencil and ink a comic, page-by-page.

It was essentially an exercise in automatism: I was still thinking about draftsmanship, composition, flow and everything but I kinda just let the story tell itself by writing/ drawing whatever felt like a natural progression for the narrative.

That was how I ended up with Marrow, which was kinda funny because the whole point was to make a goofy, low-stakes comic about nothing to circumvent the pressure of having to write anything good. Instead I’d inadvertently made something that was layered and deeply intimate and won the sci-fi category in the 2024 Minicomic Awards. But, more importantly, the whole process helped bring everything together. It reminded me of something I used to tell young artists: developing a style isn’t something you really set out to do, it’s something that just happens. You don’t practice drawing to get better at drawing; you do it to better channel your voice. It’s only when you can stop thinking about how to move your hand that your heart can take the lead.

I’d forgotten my own advice. I was so concerned about the technical details of how to write a story that I was basically assembling components rather than writing anything at all. Marrow helped me realize I’d already internalized everything I needed to write long ago. I just needed to stop thinking.

Expiry Date was a continuation of that process and made in basically the same way. There was just significantly less stress involved now that I knew I could trust myself.

Mostly.

Read the rest of the interview HERE! And dont forget to check out the Shortbox Comics Fair to support these lovely creators!!

[fox-teeth]

It's Worldbuilding Week! All this week I am sharing worldbuilding notes and sketches for my sci-fi comic "The Maker of Grave-Goods" available October '24 through @shortboxcomicsfair

For the third entry, we're learning about Mazu's people's names and how they are related to divinatory practices.

[laweyd]

About 10 days left to grab my new Sapphic romantic Thriller from ShortBox Comics Fair!

[shazleen]

You are what you eat ; “My Unhinged Food Diary” is a collection of one page, autobiographical comics exploring the deeply personal ties food can have to one’s identity and the way we move about the world.

"MY UNHINGED FOOD DIARY" is available for only 5 more days at Short Box Comics Fair!

Content warning: Discussion of eating, dietary restrictions (medical and cultural), depiction of animal slaughter, depictions of animal products, depiction of sick, depiction of mould, depiction insects