Together and Apart

I’m excited to say that I have a new book coming out with Fieldmouse Press. Together & Apart  is a 296 page hardcover that includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Each biography stands alone but they also talk to each other and say something cumulative about art and life and love. So it was always my hope that these three stories might be published in a shared format or a single volume. I’m thrilled that’s actually going to happen. The Crowdfundr launched today, and I hope you’ll consider supporting it.

Maybe you’re coming across my comics for the first time because of this book. If so, thanks for taking a look. My ongoing series of Italo Calvino adaptations, also notionally a biography, might give you an idea of what to expect from Together & Apart. You can subscribe to my newsletter and get new comics from the Calvino project on a monthly basis.

Conversely, if you’re a fan of my work you might have read some or all of the Together & Apart material already. The Stein comic originally appeared in my Ley Lines issue and two subsequent comics (the Together & Apart version contains some revisions and a new epilogue); the Woolf and O’Keeffe material originally appeared in Yearly 2021 (both are, beyond some small tweaks and relettering, essentially unchanged in T&A). In fact, you can still buy those comics!

I’m really proud of Together & Apart. I think it’s a great format and presentation for this work. That said, I do want to show my appreciation for anyone kind enough to buy this comic in multiple formats. If that’s you, email me (whitecomics at gmail) with proof of your contribution to the Fieldmouse crowdfundr and your previous purchase of Yearly 2021 or any Gertrude Stein comic – I’ll send you a 106 page pdf of drawings, process talk, and unused pages from this project. I’m not picky about proof for the latter, totally happy with an honor system. I’ll probably recognize your name anyways. One benefit of a small audience.

Our goal is $12,500 for a season of four books. I’ll admit I have a bit of ambivalance about crowdfunding, but it supports printing books at a larger scale, which in turn makes it easier to get the books in front of more people. Self-publishing has long been and will remain very important to me, but it’s also a huge relief to not worry about where I’ll store these books, to have help with promotion, and to have my work presented in a different context alongside other great cartoonists. I’ve long admired Fieldmouse’s decision to approach publishing with a bit of rigor and formality – setting themselves up as a nonprofit, maintaining a Board of Directors, being transparent about finances. This isn’t the only approach that makes sense; comics is filled with scrappy one or two-person publishers, who seem to stumble into publishing because of work they feel compelled to print and who make it work by keeping costs as low as possible. I love many of those publishers. But I’ve also seen many of them fold, often because the person behind them runs out of money or energy or time. I think we need a range of approaches as we work together to figure out how to make, print, distribute, and sell comics sustainably.

I’m so thankful to Fieldmouse Press to publishing this book; to Alex Hoffman for his patience and attention to detail with design and production; to Rob Clough for incisive edits including the now-obvious decision that Woolf/Stein/O’Keeffe was the correct sequencing for these stories; to L Nichols and K Czap for publishing my Ley Lines comic that was the seed for this project; to Warren Craghead and Dash Shaw for their incredibly kind blurbs; and to anyone who read these comics in their original, self-published form.