Staying Awake to the World

Big News: Book Cover Reveal!

I’ve been working on a new book called Making Nonfiction Comics: A Guide for Graphic Narrative with my friend Eleri Harris over the past three years. This book is a tool for making your own comics, it includes many things we’ve learned about creating comics and features interviews with 40 artists. 

People who start working on memoir comics or reported stories often feel like they’re reinventing the wheel, trying to solve storytelling challenges all on their own. This book collects a lot of wisdom and makes it accessible; our goal is to give people a strong foundation to start telling their stories in comics. The book is divided into 10 chapters, each of which focus on a different aspect of comics-making, such as writing, doing interviews, research, publishing, and building community. Eleri and I collaboratively wrote the book, then we swapped off drawing the rough-draft thumbnails of each chapter. When that was done, Eleri spent an entire year inking and coloring the book. And now it’s here! The book debuts from Abrams ComicArts in November 2025. If you preorder it now, it really helps the publisher market the book and shows there’s an audience for it. So if you think you might want to read it, put in a preorder. Thanks!!

Stuff I Made

Digital security zine: In preparing to leave for this trip to Germany, I did as much research as I could about how border patrol can and can’t search your electronics, including attending a CUNY Clear online workshop. I put that info plus other basic digital security tips into this free zine. I’m honestly surprised that this zine has been extremely popular on Instagram because, like the cover says, this is just basic starter advice and I didn’t think people would care that much! 

Gangster Party zine: A group called Fair Future Lab asked me to adapt an essay about Trump’s governing style by Hamilton Nolan into a zine. I like how the zine came out and it’s been helpful for explaining my perspective on the current reality in the U.S. to everyone asking me while I’m traveling. You can download and print copies for free here. 

Teaching: Most of my time this past month has been spent prepping for teaching a week-long comics journalism class at a college in Wiesbaden, Germany, and then teaching the class. I was feeling uncertain about showing up in a random city and running a class for just nine people who I don’t know, but the students were incredibly down to make comics and share about their lives. They made me this very sweet zine on the last day.  

Three Funny Sights While Traveling

Trash Cans: I will never get over how the little trash cans in Berlin are designed to look like cute things, including butlers! 

Dogs in Cafes: There’s much more of a culture of off-leash dogs here in Berlin than in the United States. New York has bodega cats and Berlin has shop dogs. Usually these shop dogs are pretty small dogs who keep out of the way, but I was delighted by the enormous dog who resided in this cafe and greeted patrons enthusiastically. 

Street-cleaners: I passed through Prague on my way to Vienna Fanzineist. Everyone else in Prague is taking photos of the historic buildings, I’m obsessed with these street cleaners who wander around everywhere, vacuuming up trash constantly to keep the city picture-perfect. I love that the machine is called ✨Glutton.✨

Three International Zine-Makers to Know 

I mentioned in the top of the newsletter that I tabled during the past month at ComicInvasion Berlin and at Vienna Fanzineist, which are two festival that I really wanted to attend because artists show up from all over the world! Zines are a global art and I want to get beyond my little U.S. bubble and see the work of artists from all over. So here are several artists I met this month whose work I love: 

• Tehran Zine is a small group organizing zine workshops and publishing zines by creators in Iran. Their work is beautiful and I absolutely want to recruit them to run a workshop for Crucial someday soon! 

• Joanna Poupaki is the artist I was seated directly across from at Vienna Fanzinest, which means I sat and stared at her work all day for two solid days. She’s a zine-maker from the island of Crete and made zines about the effects of the tourism industry that really resonated with me, as someone who also grew up in a place dependent on tourism. 

• Ami Bogin is someone I met because she out-of-the-blue pitched a gorgeous comic to Crucial and I was like, “Who is this?!” She then created a truly stellar comic about her Kalmyk heritage and that group’s difficult history in the Soviet Union. Ami has been nice enough to introduce me to pretty much everyone in Berlin, it feels like, and I’m just excited to cheer on whatever comic she creates next. 

Special shout-out to dreamy Berlin risograph studio Drucken 3000, who printed a big stack of prints for me. It’s a very cool space and a hub for risograph in Berlin, check it out if you want to find out about many more artists working in Berlin today.   

Where to Next? 

I’m tabling at Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) during the first weekend in June and am desperately hoping the three boxes of books I mailed there actually arrive! Then I’m heading back home to Portland and will be tabling at Summer Story Fest on June 22nd.

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to tell me some ways you’re staying awake to the world!