New mini-comic in progress

Vacation? What vacation? The philosophy here at Monkey-Rope Press is one of upbeat tirelessness! That is to say, I tried taking a few days off after the "Sounds and Seas" marathon and then again after the 3 custom projects and it just felt weird, so back to work for me. I'm scheduled to start In the Sounds and Seas: Volume III after the Chicago Alternative Press Expo in mid June, and until then I'm using the time to try my hand at new smaller projects.

Above are the first two rough scans of pages for a mini-comic set to debut at SPACE (Columbus Ohio's Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo) in two weeks. The book is about Ranger 7, an unmanned rocket that was the first to take close-up pictures of the moon. It was a kamakaze flight: the reason they were so close up is because it was an impact mission. I've been wanting to do a project about space for a while, and I think the allure is similar to the draw of the ocean/nautical narratives I've been working on recently: extreme isolation, extreme feats of technology and craftsmanship and fragility, at an almost inconceivable scale where all of those feats of technology and craftsmanship are ultimately insignificant. I love that Ranger 7 is such a sophisticated, ambitious and world-changing piece of technology that is designed to crash.

While I'm working on this, I'm also collaborating with friend and poet Jessey Nickells on an illustrated chapbook for her poem Things that are Like Baptism. I'm still working out the structure of that book project, but am looking forward to pushing myself with color in my illustrations.

Back to work!