blog: stuff I made

History of the Wondermark Calendar

TEN YEARS AGO

Some of you have been around a very long time and remember the first Wondermark calendar (above), offered lo these many years ago!

Others of you have picked up a calendar in one or more of the intervening years; or perhaps never at all!

Well, for ALL OF YOU, here is a photo-filled history of the Wondermark calendar, featuring thrills, spills, and some BEHIND THE SCENES on how the process has evolved over the years.

The notion of a loose-leaf desk calendar, in which a stack of individual cards rest in an easel, is one I’m surprised we don’t see more often. I stole the concept from a calendar a co-worker had on her desk, back when I worked at an advertising agency…

Each calendar page required three different prints from the Gocco (black ink on left side, black on right side, and gold title).

Making a calendar in a limited edition makes it special, but also in a practical sense it saves you from having unsold inventory that grows progressively more useless as the year marches on. I made 100 copies of this first calendar and managed to sell them all, thanks in part surely to the slick, persuasive video I linked above.

I continued in this manner the following year, careful to seek out and use artwork I hadn’t already used in Wondermark, and composing dark little stories in verse for each month.

Read the whole thing right over here!

A Wee Announcement

Not many of my comics are autobiographical — I’d be very afraid, if they were — but a few do indeed comprise a category that might be called “verbatim transcripts of conversations with my wife.”

Are a few that I recall just off the top of my head. And, most recently, this week’s comic, #1269.

Indeed! We’re having a baby! In May! This doesn’t really affect you much, but I just wanted to share this cool image we made (my wife makes puppets for the TV show Robot Chicken):

this is scientifically accurate

Haven’t decided on a name for our baby boy yet, but I think “Quaid” is totally in the running.

Here’s my Election Day Bingo Card

I suspect we'll see 25 for 25 before 6pm Eastern

(Click for a closer look.)

Here’s where to verify the location of your polling place. You don’t need me to remind you, but just for that one dude who forgot, please go vote, Jeremy.

Here’s some Wondermark comics about voting from years past:

Participants in Democracy
In which Progress looks likely
In which Politics exhilarate
In which a Dog wants a Sticker
In which it’s All Over

…And a palate-cleanser about Daylight Savings:
In which the Time changes

 

I did a Wondermark-style page for the latest Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comic!

I was very pleased to be invited to make a Wondermark-style page for the latest issue (#9, in comic stores now) of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, written by my buddy Ryan North!

I’m really proud of how it turned out, so I wrote out a whole BEHIND THE SCENES breakdown over on Tumblr:

In the story, Squirrel Girl encounters the character Mole Man, who is super old. So, for a page where he’s recounting a flashback, Ryan and Erica thought it’d be fun if it had a correspondingly old-timey look…

With an assignment like this, I try to keep the conceit that the image is an authentic Victorian-style engraving – which means, rather than draw any image I want from scratch, I have to find a bunch of Victorian engravings that contain pieces of what I need, and then build the needed images from them.

It’s kind of like playing with LEGO® brand building bricks, except the LEGO® brand building bricks are drawings created by people who are now dead.

[ Read more at: The Making of an Old-Timey Squirrel Girl ]

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