Gulp! The Regular Edition

Gulp! a monster comics anthology for KIDS! Regular Edition

River Bird Comics

by The Boston Comics Roundtable

Bob Flynn & Dan Moynihan Editors

52 pages ~ $10 | Two Color Risograph | 5x6.5 inches

GULP! features eleven funny and spooky stories geared towards children of all ages. Tales are by some of New England’s best artists and writers featuring co-editor Dan Moynihan, Rachel Dukes, Owen Heitmann, Clay McCormack, John Lechner, Ansis Purins, Jef Czekaj, Michael Lee Harris, Greg Cook, Eric Boeker with Dirk Tiede, and Hellbound III editor Jerel Dye. Collectively, they have created over a dozen children’s books such as A Froggy Fable, The Clever Stick, A Call for a New Alphabet, and Cat Secrets. In addition, their work has appeared in Nickelodeon Magazine, SpongeBob Comics, Candlewick Press, BOOM! Studios, First Second Books, ARGH! Comics, the Boston Children’s Museum, FableVision Studios, Walt Disney Television, and Cartoon Network.

Buy Online | Preview Printed Book

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Reviews

• Jas Faukner via Sequential Tart
• Andy Rench via Printed Matters
• Rob Clough via High-Low
• Katy England The Maine Edge

Hellbound V: The End of Comics | Submission Guidelines

THE END IS HERE!

Hellbound V will be the final horror anthology from River Bird Comics and this year’s theme is The End. Submit your stories exploring what The End means to you. Don’t give us any prequels, first chapters, or stories that close with the following: “The End?” We don’t want them! Hellbound V will be a return to “grown-up stories”. We’re upping the intensity level to eleven! You have up to 8 pages to be as disturbing and fear-inducing as you can bear! Don’t submit torture porn (or the traditional kind). We’re not seeking gratuitous gore or violence so make sure the use of either is justified by the story. Be imaginative! Push the envelope!! Think outside the box!!! Add a fourth cliché here!!!! This is your last chance! There won’t be a Hellbound VI, It ends with Hellbound V: End of Comics!

The size of the book will be 5 inches by 9 inches, Portrait (so tall and skinny). With some special fold-out pages. Each story gets one fold out page and it's NOT mandatory. See illustration for details.

Color wise we are looking for dark lines (think solid black) and one solid color tones (think about it working as gray but keep it on a separate layer if doing it digitally). We will be probably printing the book via Risograph.  * Below is an example of what we are looking for, the color or tone should be solid, and used on non essential parts of the art, no dialogue, etc. Treat it as if it was a grey tone. If you are creating this tone directly on the paper use a solid color that is different than the ink color so it's easy to separate to be printed.  If doing digitally we need two grayscale Tiff files, one with the line work/blacks and the other one with the tone color. Here is an example of a simple way to approach the process:

This issue will be story edited by Stephen Cartisano and Published by Roho. If you are interested on being part of the process of creating the book lets us know we are always looking to help Boston Comics Roundtable members learn how to put a book together. *  We will be accepting submissions for illustrations as well.

Page Limit: 8 pages, fold outs count as 2.
Deadline: September 4th, 2014.

March 2014
Roho

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For general questions that please post a comment here or email us at Hellboundboston (at) gmail.com * updates

Hellbound III DARKNESS!

Click to See Larger version of the Cover Art.

Boston Comics Roundtable Unleashes Hellbound III: Darkness Anthology of Horror Comics

BOSTON, September 24—The Boston Comics Roundtable, in partnership with River Bird Comics, is pleased to announce the publication of “Hellbound III: Darkness,” an anthology of all-new horror comics by artists and writers from greater Boston.

The Art Edition of Hellbound III: Darkness will debut on September 29 at the third annual Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE), and be available at selected comics shops in the region and online. The Art Edition, at 8.5 x 11 inches, features black and white art with a wraparound full color cover nearly a yard long, designed by Roho and featuring art by Jerel Dye. Following this initial printing, a regular edition will be available at local comic stores, shows, and online.

The Boston Comics Roundtable’s annual Hellbound collections have won the praise of many comics critics. Roz Young at Sequential Tart called last year’s edition “a wonderful set of frighteningly fiendish stories.” Brigid Alverson at Robot 6 wrote, “The craftsmanship in this volume is impressive.” Jen Vaughn of the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont called the collection “perfect for the horror fan.” That edition, Hellbound II, was nominated for a New England Art Award in the category of best book.

Hellbound III: Darkness continues in the same horrifying tradition with eleven chilling tales that examine the darkness that lies within all of us. These gruesome narratives feature some of New England’s best artists and writers. Tak Toyoshima, creative director at Dig Publishing, offers a quick taste of zombies. Poet and “horror burlesque” impresario Janaka Stucky teams with tattoo artist Josh Wallis for a story set in a mortuary. Lindsay Moore, Donna Martinez, and Joey Peters explore the dark side of high-school overachievers. Even baseball gets the horror treatment in “America’s Pastime” by Stephen Cartisano and Ellen T. Crenshaw.

The creators work in a variety of styles. Kimball Anderson’s “No, He Can Come” uses totally black backgrounds while James the Vampire’s art may look light and airy but hides terror underneath. Jacob Oley and Gregery Miller collaborate on a nightmarish character sketch named “Vimshaw.” Alison Burke and Tara Harris of Arrocomic.com explore the woods at night. Joshua D. Hoaglund’s “Vengeance” and Adrian Rodriguez’s “Pedestrian” are both nearly wordless, with one story taking place on a whaling ship and the other in a modern city. Jon Clark’s “Void” closes out the volume with the chilling words of a love too far.

The editorial team for Hellbound III included Jerel Dye as story editor and Kyle Anderson as art editor with supplied additional illustrations by Gregery Miller and Roho. This volume was designed and produced by Uruguay born Roho, owner/publisher of River Bird Comics and creator of Hellbound.

The Art Edition of “Hellbound III: Darkness” costs $25.00 and it’s available for preorder here.
Please contact the publisher to receive an advance preview/ review copy.

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Binding Session

The last step (or next to last) on the assembly of our annual horror anthology was the binding. We reserved the familiar grounds of the Rosa Parks room at the Democracy Center on a Tuesday evening and proceeded to put the book together on an assembly line style.

Roho, Jesse, and Steve

Today we're joined by the creative minds behind Hellbound 2, Roho and Jesse Lonergan and Hellbound blogger Steve Cartisano. Unfortunately screen printer, Joel Gill, wasn't available because he's busy terrorizing the local inhabitants of the New Hampshire Institute of Art. Someone has to do it.

Hellbound MICE Preview!

We will be showing around a proof preview of the Hellbound 2 books with our handmade box this weekend at MICE it's a free show full of great creators and comics, look for me or Jesse Lonergan to get an exclusive sneak peak of the book and a flyer about our Halloween Party!

Paper Session N° 2

As promised in the Paper Session N° 1 post, the BCR and BPC teamed up a second time. On August 18th, we gathered to create paper for the Hellbound II Art Edition boxes. Once again we were joined by BPC founding member, Zoe Culbertson, and for the first time, director, Melinda Cross. Bear with us for this brief PSA:

The Boston Paper Collective to create paper for the covers of the Hellbound II Art Edition. The Boston Paper Collective provides studio access for paper artists and is located at 523 Medford Street in Charlestown, MA. In addition to having a beater, mixer, 20 ton press, and drying system, along with a vacuum table, vats, and moulds, they also offer workshops, custom classes, pulp beating, one on one instruction and studio rental.

Paper Session N° 1

On August 9^th, members of the Boston Comic Roundtable enlisted the aid of the Boston Paper Collective to create paper for the covers of the Hellbound II Art Edition. The Boston Paper Collective provides studio access for paper artists and is located at 523 Medford Street in Charlestown, MA. In addition to having a beater, mixer, 20 ton press, and drying system, along with a vacuum table, vats, and moulds, they also offer workshops, custom classes, pulp beating, one on one instruction and studio rental. Founding member, Zoe Culbertson, was our guide.

In order to make the pulp, Zoe adds bags of shredded cloth to a large bucket of water.
Click on Picture to see more pictures of the paper making process.

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning:
Original pencils by Roho. Inked by me. This may be the cover to Hellbound #2.
Everything was done in Corel Painter 12 using the the pen tools. Scratchboard tool for the majority of the line work, scratchboard rake for mass cross hatching, and flat colors for spot blacks. These pens are also available in Painter 11 (and probably further back then that). Since the original pencils were sent to me at 600ppi I had to increase my brush sizes (Scratchboard tool: 24px; Scratchboard rake: 8px). Scratchboard rake takes some practice to yield lines that are the right thickness for the resolution. I favour decreasing the pressure sensitivity on the wacom tablet even though it means I'll have to do that many more strokes to get dark areas.
Note that the rake doesn't yield pure blacks. Since all lines are anti-aliased unless you're using a 1-bit bitmap (which I never do) it's not a huge problem unless you're one of those inkers that want every stroke to be pure black ink or have a very precise printing requirement. It's easy to over do it, but that's what layers and erasers are for.

This Hellbound piece and the one before it marks a return to a style that experimented with in my early 1990s B&W work. Back then I was an inexperienced artist and I did not have digital tools. A piece inked this way with real ink is very susceptible to over rendering. Alternately, it required such careful planning that it was just too time consuming. In truth, I also spent a lot of time adding lines where there need not be to hide underlying weaknesses in the drawings themselves.
When I got back into comics and illustration seriously again I ditched my old habits that weren't producing work of a quality I wanted. I explored simplified and super clean styles with varying levels of success. You can still see I there. There's not yet a uniformity to line work as I bring in several different schools of thought in inking at once. More practice needed.
I wouldn't say that I'm in love with the cross hatched style of the last few pieces I've done, but it's interesting that I'm exploring my 'roots' again and finding new ways of applying an old technique. Over the last year I've spent a greater portion of my art time experimenting with different looks and techniques than ever before. It's funny how despite all that I still find it very natural to draw this way even though I never had a real body of work that used this technique for aforementioned reasons. One of the reasons I looked around to cleaner styles was an effort to speed production times, but the ironic thing about that is that it usually took more effort to ensure clean lines and strip details then for my brain to go on auto-pilot and spew forth tone. I wonder if this is how other artists find and settle on their styles. Only time and another hundred drawings or so will tell I guess.
via Carl Tsui

HELLBOUND 2

Not Final Art.

Hellbound 2's deadline for story submission it's less than a month away, we are really excited about what we are seeing and we think the next issue of Hellbound will be the best Horror Anthology to come out of the Boston Comics Roundtable. More more information or to ask any questions go to our Submissions page.