True Swamp by Jon Lewis

A creator among us!

Jon, how come you never went to one of the larger indie houses? Has no one asked you into the fold?

maybe i should start a true swamp thread here, but i always wondered why you didn't sign on with fanta or d&q or first second... can't imagine there hasn't been an offer?

― (Name Withheld to Avoid Hassle) (forksclovetofu), Thursday, May 10, 2012 12:27 PM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Imagine a little harder! Never ever. Never even got a print review in TCJ. I'm mega stoked about my new publisher Uncivilized Books though. He thinks big and smart and is doing everything right so far.

(also current TCJ regime are avid supporters, i just meant the print era).

that's crazy; your work is engaging and nuanced very much in the way those guys demand.
i'm glad to hear you're working with a publisher who can do the heavy PR/marketing lifting for you; i'd like to see a big ol' 500 page true swamp telephone book. I love the characters and the mythology and the sprawling continuity rich world; i just want more!

You have to consider that when the first series was coming out there were no publishers in the First Second mold, and D and Q was ONLY Seth/Vellekoop style stuff. That left Fanta-- I went after Kim Thompson early on due to his ~KNOWN WEAKNESS FOR TALKING ANIMALS~ but he didn't bite.

So this is what's coming this year: a deluxe HC of all the 90s material.

http://www.cbsd.com/inventory.aspx?id=1722734

Apparently, landing Consortium to distribute us is a p big coup on Tom's part, I guess they're a big gun and they promote hard.

Gabrielle Bell's book will come out a few months before mine, that's the debut of Tom's hardcover line basically.

Brubaker forward! Congrats!
Can you talk about what your plans are moving forward? Is True Swamp your full time job?

;_;

My full time job is writing Quality Assurance specifications for the housewares company (sorry for googleproofing) 0 x 0.

i love their qa specs. did you do the potato peeler? that shit is brilliant

seriously, i hope that gives you the time you need to write your own work on the side. How's your true swamp/work balance?

That's our oldest product (early 90s I think?) so naw. I started in '04. That's like our only product that never gets quality problems so I can p much just sit back and admire it.

A fully finished (pencil/ink/tones) page per week if I behave myself. Job is stressful and I get home at 8pm a lot (LOL nyc)

But right now I'm not getting any new pages done because I'm going through every page of old art for the hardcover in photoshop and removing dirt, fixing faded lines, neatening lettering a little, etc. It takes about the same amount of time per page as drawing a page, so grueling.

That's why no stuff on my blog lately.

i was joshing about the potato peeler.
lolNYC indeed, i get it.
glad that you've got a major new project in the works; sorry it's a slog.

Slogging through a new project is exciting! Slogging through old material for a new presentation is more like drudgery. Also it makes me remember drawing the panels back in '92-93 which is such a surreal feeling.

man, i don't wanna think about ANYTHING i did in 92-93

dang, i missed this when it started up! anyway, hey jon, glad to hear about the forthcoming collection. loved the web series, which seems to have wound up now that you've got a print comic coming out again?

That's why no stuff on my blog lately.

ope, goddit

the webcomic stuff you were doing between 09 and late 11 is some of my favorite true swamp ever. so great. want to know what happens to lil eft!

http://trueswamp.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/tsv3p4gbig.jpg

hope you don't mind i posted that...

No I can't wait to get back to more new pages! My hard deadline for finishing the restoration/print-ready work on the hardcover is end of June so def by then I will start posting new swamp.

Contenderizer I dunno if you have seen the two 24 page print issues Uncivilized has put out of the new stuff, but for those I have been converting the two tones of green to two densities of dot-screen. I like that look a lot but it's totally something new for me as I've never used zip or wash at all before.

i've only read the web stuff but this is awesome jon!

so ... they use city names as currency? is there a strip where you explain this habit?

yeah, that's a great detail

If you look in my blog archives you'll see two posts where I presented the first 8 pages of the original issue 1, including the first couple of times you see the cities transactions. I have deliberately refrained from anatomizing how this works in too much detail; in general it's been a credo of the series to leave things a little speculative. I know how the city transactions work in my gut/lizard brain and hopefully the reader gets a similar feeling in their gut/lizard brain.

Basically the idea of a 'swamp' is supposed to extend beyond the setting and be a trait of the storytelling itself, if that makes sense. I have this sci-fi world-building tendency where before I know it I have maps and charts and notes on how everything works and for True Swamp I have always tried to stop myself from going all the way to that. Which is why I've never made a map of the Swamp even for myself, and why I let there be all this dissonance in what kinds of animals live there (like how the hell could a kiwi and a burrowing owl be in a north american wetland?).

i sort of figured that the names of cities gave the swampies information about cities or that they otherwise transferred city info to one another, and that they found this useful or pleasurable somehow. part of the subordination of human activity to animal world agendas, like the rocket crashing as the result of a mispronounced chestnut-heating spell (and looking to lil eft like a hatchling star).

Contenderizer I dunno if you have seen the two 24 page print issues Uncivilized has put out of the new stuff, but for those I have been converting the two tones of green to two densities of dot-screen. I like that look a lot but it's totally something new for me as I've never used zip or wash at all before.

no, i haven't seen those. was gonna ask my comic shop (xanadu in seattle) to order them, but i keep forgetting. think i'll just order them from your site. so are the new issues screen-printed?

I have this sci-fi world-building tendency where before I know it I have maps and charts and notes on how everything works

HA me too which is why i asked, good to see i'm not "missing" something

i'd like to see a big ol' 500 page true swamp telephone book

yes me too

xpost the new series of floppies can be ordered from here:

http://uncivilizedbooks.com/index.html

(Along with my horror short Klagen and the True Swamp T-Shirt)

And yeah the covers are screen printed.

OMG contendo i have been ~CAUGHT IN A LIE~.

Asked tom and TS 1 and 2 are offset printed color covers, not screen printed.

Offset printed on the printer Zak Sally has in his basement, though, if that adds value.

it does

Waiting on a very nerve wracking reply today. Diamond deciding whether or not to go ahead and fuck my publisher and I in the eyehole. Arrrghh.

gd luck jon

are diamond p much the only game in town, these days, comic shop distribution-wise?

yep, a virtual monopoly. One thing I'm curious abt is whether a lot of comix stores these days supplement their Diamond orders with orders from book trade distributors. Because we have a great book trade distro lined up.

good luck Jon. Fingers crossed and all that.

knock em out man

they just confirmed they will not take the book. Our potential sales just got slashed by 50%. Fucking god damn hell balls.

What's fkin genuinely ironic about this is that Diamond refused my work just one time before-- almost 20 years ago, the very first issue of TS I published with the Xeric grant (they rejected it for being too rough). (And I got comics mags to write news stories on it 'Diamond shits on young award winner' basically) which turned TS into a cause celebre and was ultimately great for the title (Diamond reversed their decision and took TS with #3).

This time it's due to their new 'threshold' policy. Basically they don't think they can sell 200 copies. Meanwhile we've already shifted 200 copies through the book trade distributor and we haven't even started promoting yet!

This fkin bites because a huge portion of my readership are comics people. People who buy their graphic novels at comics stores. You know what I mean.

That sucks Jon. Fuck Diamond.

I'm leaning more towards kill them, burn the body, bury the ashes and salt the ground with salt.

That works too.

Sorry man. Have you tried hitting up the strand to do an event? Maybe you could present thatas evidence that tour work has sell thru capability?

Official announcement time is here. Time for me to turn into a brazenly self promoting asshole!

https://trueswamp.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/swamp-call/

AWESOME!

just preordered

feest bomp to yoo

got to see the galley proof of the TS book this weekend at a comics fest, and it looks totally great.

Yay!

at APE, I guess? Uncivilized was there w/Gabrielle Bell.

That galley doesn't even have the art corrections or the bonus stories.

Only a couple weeks to go til Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Fest!

yeah, i met tom at APE - great guy, and definitely ambitious as a publisher. he only had one galley there, but it was enough to get me excited about the hardcover version.

Let me spam u deeply

http://trueswamp.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/confirmed-sighting-in-minneapolis/

http://trueswamp.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/ts-just-in-11.jpg

can't wait! i like the new title font as compared to the galley version.

Book release party/signing this Friday at Desert Island in Williamsburg, also with James Romberger and his awesome new book Post-York. Should be a much more manageable crowd than BCGF, to say the least. Would love to meet any of y'all.

http://www.facebook.com/events/455316491191871/

Finally got my copy! So excited:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A925ohJCAAA7vIW.jpg

Yay!

The signing on Friday was really nice. Good turnout, great vibe.

I made an ipod playlist beforehand for gabe to play in the store during the signing, then over the weekend I decided to do a Spotify version of it. Consider this the True Swamp soundtrack for now:

http://open.spotify.com/user/1213493496/playlist/7lU2Z6yQ8HoRZpMIt5waQ4

Neat. Thanks for the playlist. I will listen while I read.

If I bring this with me on my next trip to NYC can I get it signed?

But of course! Where do you live, anyway?

Dallas at the moment. Planning a tour?

I wish. I have a full time day job unlike my more successful labelmate Gabrielle with her epic tours.

Some day. Even a short one would be cool. Have you made it down to SPX or anything?

Oh of course, I almost always do SPX. APE once in a while. Stumptown last year, would do again.

cool. I wonder if I met you at SPX back in the day; I went in 97, 98 & 99, when I was living in Baltimore.

Probably yes, then. I was there all three of those years (was living in Gainesville FL at the time). The Chris Oarr era. Loved those shows.

I loved it too. Intimate and friendly. It's very cool to have this collected hardcover, Jon. I lost the few issues I had way back when in a flooded basement in the late 90s and never replaced them.

Yeah I haven't fully gotten over the sheer niceness of the edition yet, myself!

true swamp soundtrack rules btw -- i'm glad to know that someone else thinks cluster sounds like animal noises.

^_^

Yeah for some reason vintage Cluster and its imitators (Eno instros off Another Green World, etc) are THE sound of a swamp for me. Anything sort of innocently tuneful played on cheap or defective-sounding electronics...

The playlist for the signing had several bits of T Dream's The Keep score, sadly it does not exist on spotify or anywhere besides weird bootlegs...

Nice interview at CBR. I look forward to a second hardcover for the 200-2001 series.

Oh, it's up! I've barely been online the last couple of days. Cool!

If anybody's coming to the Mocca festival in manhattan this weekend, come see me at the Uncivilized Books table! I'll be hanging out there with Gabrielle Bell and James Romberger, and of course all our respective books.

gonna try to come by and continue to quietly crush on gaby and loudly talk shit with you
i should make you a lenny or hale cup sometime

tree stump cup!

I wish I could make it but not this year. But I'm totally brining my snazzy hard cover for personalization on my next trip to New York.

Lemme know! WKIW.

I'm also gonna be at TCAF next month.

I hope to hit New York before the end of the year. Will definitely drop you a line when it happens.

super posi review in TCJ
http://www.tcj.com/reviews/true-swamp-choose-your-poison/

i got that! it's great. also saw it prominently placed, face-out, at a barnes & noble in harvey, louisiana.

That is a very solid review. Kudos.

I saw it at Malaprops in Asheville last weekend.

Yeah that review was good for my heart b/c tcj never reviewed True Swamp back in the print mag era.

Btw, not gonna make it to TCAF after all :( but there's a good chance I'll be going to CAKE in Chicago in June.

tcj never reviewed True Swamp back in the print mag era.

surely this isn't correct

I would be happy to be proved wrong about that but I'm pretty certain... Definitely not during the original run.

I think I read at least a columnated review if not a feature. UFL's index only goes up to #142 though (Arnold Roth ish, 1991)...

Got my copy of Choose Your Poison last week -- this thing is cool as hell! Diving into this world is like a straight injection of O_O.

:)

Working on two stories for two anthologies right now. Both of them are process-driven anthologies with 'play' between the contributors built in. Dense and fun. Back to TS after this.

Super bummed about the demise of Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Fest.

sounds like it's messy
http://www.tcj.com/the-brooklyn-comics-and-graphics-festival-ends/
i get the sense someone with money is gonna figure out how to make this work. clearly, there's an audience. Maybe fanta will invest?

that would be insane, they are on the other side of the continent and in no position to commit

there are plenty of other indie-ish conventions in NYC these days; if MOCCA continues to improve and thrive under its new ownership then there may be no notable gap in the market - is billyk still doing programming for SPX too?

I can't remember if he's still working with spx or not.

Bill and Gabe are both friends and both capable of plenty stubbornness. I dunno any more detail than what's in that tcj article. I feel like Gabe should just keep doing the exact same show, change the name to Desert Island Comics Festival to obviate this conflict, the end.

i haven't been to MOCCA before, but just looking at the guests, exhibitors, and post-show reactions, it is waaaaay off of where it was a few years ago. maybe new yorkers disagree with this perception? it seems like it isn't just new york that's contributing to this new crop of outstanding indie festivals - minneapolis, chicago, LA, portland, and seattle all have them. (and bethesda, MD of course.) the only city with a high density of cartoonists that is incapable of putting on a good festival is san francisco.

gabe hinted on facebook that he might just start another show from scratch. it's a shame, since i have a lot of respect for all three of those guys, and no one came out of that article looking good.

This year's Mocca felt much more professional and worth it than the previous... three or so? years. The Society of Illustrators has taken it over and they did a good job. BUT the table price was yet again more expensive than the previous year, which was already ridic expensive. I heard chatter that they were already locked into the Armory for this year's show and that they will switch venues for next year. Maybe that will enable a reduction in table price, I dunno. Anyway it's never gonna be a replacement for BCGF.

On the posi side, Gabe just signed a new 5 year lease on the store, which was something that was up in the air/touch and go for months.

Is it okay that I'm disappointed that you aren't doing the graphic novel with John Lewis? Not that your style would be exactly what the civil rights legend is looking for, but the continual John/Jon mixups would have been fun.

Ha! I have a book signed by John Lewis (and I met him! He's very nice) so clearly I should be trying harder to get a signed Jon Lewis on my shelf?!

Clearly!

Now only the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet and the British retail titan lack graphic novels!

I sense a team-up.

sorry about your CTS diagnosis Jon. would love to get you out to see a show in the park and buy you a slice of pizza, a scoopa icecream and a beer. just let me know.

Thanks forks. I may just take you up on that.

Great interview with Jon here:

http://therumpus.net/2013/09/the-new-york-comics-symposium-interview-with-jon-lewis/

I am at my publisher's table at Brooklyn Book Festival. I am here to tell you that indie book publishers and authors are every bit as horrible and depressing and bile-wringing as indie comics ppl. The table next to us is two guys, one w long ponytail, one w small fedora, who write and publish novels about Blues bands. "All of our books have their own free streaming soundtracks" (&$&-]Y)723^<>]>

The guy across the aisle puts out Shakespeare things and is juggling to attract attention to his table.

http://www.uncivilizedbooks.com/comics/true-swamp-book-02.html

Woohoo!

yeah I have to be digitally nit-picking the artwork files for the 2000-2001 stuff for this. On the bright side, those pages are much more crisp/print-ready than the 90s stuff was, so it's not like a 6 hour per page ordeal. On the less bright side, this makes the task super boring.

As for brand-new work, it's really seeming like my inking days are over because of my elbow. New stuff is likely to be taken straight from my pencils/levels fucked with and solid blacks added in digital, like I did for the Klagen minicomic. I THINK I can still pencil if I don't press too hard.

that's not so great, but this book is great! how exciting!

Just preordered as I wanted a copy of "Carl Barks Duck" from Uncivilized. Don't push back the release date!

As far as I know everything is on track! I turned in my author's afterword 2 weeks ago; it's a pretentious one even by my standards.

We didn't have anything obscure and cool like the original minicomic version of TS#1 to include in this volume, so I am doing something different for the bonus material, something which exists outside of and complements the book. More soon.

sooooo, is this still getting finalized or... ?
I will ink your work very very cheap btw.

Uncivilized is reorganizing (in a good way-- augmenting its personnel-- I don't see any announcements online so I guess I shouldn't say more) but my book is delayed a bit as a result

Forks I was just thinking of you today, I wanna ask you about some stuff

drop me a line. sorry the book is delayed.

Seattle area ilxors -- I will be in attendance for the opening of this 5-way show at my friend's gallery on cap hill which I more or less coordinated:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlearts/2016/03/01/in-the-story-room-5-seattle-cartoonists-opening-march-10-at-dendroica-gallery/

Thanks forks. I may just take you up on that.

― Thelema & Louise (Jon Lewis), Monday, July 22, 2013

I will! I'm trying to cut out this dumb hermit bullshit this year!

So back in 2007, when Dark Horse was publishing an anthology series of comics derived from the imaginary Escapist comics embedded in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay, I sold a 21 page script for it to Diana Schutz which was then drawn colored & lettered by Marc Hempel; by the time the story was finished though, DH had cancelled the antho series and the 21-pager went into inventory. I saw it as digital files on marc’s laptop at a show that year - it looked gorgeous. Di said she hoped she could place it somewhere or other at some point (we got paid our page rates obv despite the piece getting inventoried).

Was at a couple friends’ signing event at desert island last night and poking around and noticed a new squarebound collection of that Escapist stuff. Thought hm what if, and was a bit floored to see me and marc’s story is included.

This came out in June - “Michael Chabon’s The Escapist: Pulse-pounding Thrills”.

It was really the tail end of me trying to making a living in the industry after my two year stint scripting at DC and then four or five years of floating lots of pitches all over the place to varying degrees of almost-but-not success. The good thing was by 2007 my scripting was in a pretty good place and the piece was personal enough and pro enough and probably the best commercial script I ever sold, much more in control than my DC stuff. I rammed classical music in there - the story revolves around a performance of one of Szymanowski’s violin concertos.

So it’s weird but nice that that’s finally in print. Does not look like the TPB has garnered any attention to speak of but it exists!

The main thing that happened with new work this year was the Sunday funnies page at Popula.com - I was one of 5 cartoonists doing a page a week there (full color). (Me, Karen sneider, Tom hart, Megan kelso, Steven weissmann). I was really into this project and they were paying a legit page rate! Sadly no one was clicking the Sunday funnies page so after 8 weeks when popula started having their blockchain funding reversals and had to halve their comics budget, they killed Sunday funnies and just retained the self contained specially commissioned comics that run during the weekdays. I’m trying to divert the resulting thwarted creative momentum into getting some steam building up on new true swamp material which is probably what everyone (~20 ppl) would rather I be doing anyway, but JFC it is so goddamn nice to get paid for ones work (obviously an outmoded publishing model but it was great to have a nostalgic glimpse for a sec there!)

That’s the news. Gonna try’n draw this weekend.

ha, congrats on the escapist thing!