Pictured above: The 2012 Stapler Award for the Best Minnesota Mini-Comics Day Mini-Comic

You’re encouraged to use the hash tag #minicomicsday2012 for whatever you may want to use a hashtag for.

Cartoonists around the world will be drawing and printing a mini-comic in a day. Any cartoonist anywhere can participate.

There are event sites this year in:
Sacramento, CA
San Francisco, CA
Baltimore, MD
Minneapolis, MN
Keene, NH
Albuquerque, NM
Norfolk, VA
and McCleary, WA
(and we had a site in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK participate last month)

If you live near one of those locations, go here for the details of your local event.

The Minneapolis Cell of the Conspiracy was just featured on TPT’s Minnesota Originals website. You can view the video here.

(Above image by Dan Murphy)

May 26th, 2012 is the date for the second annual Mini-Comics Day, celebrating the art of cartooning and creating hand-made comic books (the first event was held April 9th, 2011).

On Mini-Comics Day, participating cartoonists from around the world will write, draw, and print copies of a mini-comic, completing the entire process from start to finish in a day or less. Anyone in the world can participate.

Mini-comics have been democratizing the art of making comic books since the 70′s or earlier… with the popularization of photocopiers, it became apparent that anyone with an inclination and some spare change could print a little comic book. Wildly varying in both form and content, mini-comics are a wonderful synthesis of cartooning and hand-made art objects.

Guidelines: To participate, create a mini-comic from start to finish on May 26th, 2012 (including writing, drawing and printing it). You can make your mini-comic by yourself or with other artists.

Format: Your mini-comic can be any size, length and format you desire. A standard mini-comics size would be eight 4.25″x5.5″ pages (which can be made from one 8.5×11 sheet of paper printed on both sides).

Help: For more information on how to make a mini-comic, see the Cartoonist Conspiracy’s mini-comic tutorial How to Make Mini-Comics. More resources can be found here.

Submit: Optionally, you can post information and/or images from your comic on this blog. Contact for an account to post here.

Bonus points: If you are working with a group of cartoonists, you may want to consider collecting your mini-comics together to distribute as a set. Bags, rubber bands, or boxes all work great for this purpose.

Also, you may want to consider trading copies by submitting some to the Mini-comix Co-op.

Events: Mini-Comics Day events will be organized at different locations around the world. You can read more about how to organize an event in our FAQ. The purpose of Mini-Comics Day events is to provide a place for cartoonists to draw and/or print their comics, and possibly to trade or sell their minis if they choose to. In 2011, we had 17 event locations participate internationally.

If you would like to organize an event, contact us at so we can promote your event and add it to our event listing.

About The International Cartoonist Conspiracy: Founded in Minneapolis in 2002, The International Cartoonist Conspiracy is a loosely organized group of cartoonists with cells all over the world. The Conspiracy has been responsible for many collaborative projects, including anthologies, gallery shows, and numerous jams every month. Any cartoonist anywhere can start a cell, and anyone with a desire to draw comics is encouraged to participate.

This morning I was sent a link to an huge quantity of interviews with exhibitors at last month’s delightful MIX convention by Fancy Pants Gangsters. You can check them out here.

That made me realize I don’t believe I have yet posted a link to Tom Spurgeon’s amazing and enormous MIX link roundup at the Comics Reporter. You can check that out here.

Get your mini-comics ready… only 23 months until the next MIX!

!!!

Jon Sloan is going to be the Comic Book Guest of Honor at MarsCon 2012!!!

Tom Kaczynski was just featured on TCJ talkies, the new Comics Journal podcast!!! His Trans-Utopia mini-comic was recently nominated for an Ignatz award for outstanding mini-comic!!!

Sarah Morean was just featured in and article on her and MIX in the City Pages!!!

Bill Prendergast and his anti-Michelle Bachmann comics were just prominently featured on an Australian news site!!! Bill was featured on CNN recently as well!!!

Danno Klonowski’s art was just featured on the delightful Ink Panthers Podcast (yours could be as well… see the site for details)!!!

!!!

Apparently, XLARGE, a company that makes poorly-designed t-shirts and other fashion atrocities for the dim-witted and/or aesthetically-challenged, recently made a good looking t-shirt by ripping off artwork by Minneapolis’ own Roger Lootine. You can read about it here.

You can contact the perpetrators here if you are inclined to tell them what you think about this. Or maybe you’ll want to just check out their site and see if they have decided to use some of your artwork without your permission! Spreading the word that these people are blatant plagiarists by passing this story around seems like a good idea.

April 9th, 2011 is the date for the first annual Mini-Comics Day, celebrating the art of cartooning and creating hand-made comic books.

On Mini-Comics Day, participating cartoonists from around the world will write, draw, and print copies of a mini-comic, completing the entire process from start to finish in a day or less. Anyone in the world can participate.

Mini-comics have been democratizing the art of making comic books since the 70′s or earlier… with the popularization of photocopiers, it became apparent that anyone with an inclination and some spare change could print a little comic book. Wildly varying in both form and content, mini-comics are a wonderful synthesis of cartooning and hand-made art objects.

Guidelines: To participate, create a mini-comic from start to finish on April 9th, 2011 (including writing, drawing and printing it). You can make your mini-comic by yourself or with other artists.

Format: Your mini-comic can be any size, length and format you desire. A standard mini-comics size would be eight 4.25″x5.5″ pages (which can be made from one 8.5×11 sheet of paper printed on both sides).

Help: For more information on how to make a mini-comic, see the Cartoonist Conspiracy’s mini-comic tutorial How to Make Mini-Comics. More resources can be found here.

Submit: Optionally, you can post information and/or images from your comic on the Mini-Comics Day blog. Contact for an account to post here.

Bonus points: If you are working with a group of cartoonists, you may want to consider collecting your mini-comics together to distribute as a set. Bags, rubber bands, or boxes all work great for this purpose.

Also, you may want to consider trading copies by submitting some to the Mini-comix Co-op.

Events: There will be two kinds of events related to Mini-Comics Day:

Cartooning Events, where cartoonists meet to work on their mini-comics around their peers.

Mini-comic Swap Events, where cartoonists can trade and sell their minis.

If you would like to organize an event, contact us at so we can promote your event and add it to our event listing.

About The International Cartoonist Conspiracy: Founded in Minneapolis in 2002, The International Cartoonist Conspiracy is a loosely organized group of cartoonists with cells all over the world. The Conspiracy has been responsible for many collaborative projects, including anthologies, gallery shows, and numerous jams every month. Any cartoonist anywhere can start a cell, and anyone with a desire to draw comics is encouraged to participate.

Hey, everybody!

This message (below) comes from a dear pal-o-mine, Jon Collins. He’s edits the Southwest Minneapolis Patch and is looking for cartoonists to develop stories for his site. Patch is an AOL initiative specializing in hyper-localized online news writing. It’s pretty cool! And there might be some money in it for you. Which is also cool!

Southwest Minneapolis neighborhoods include: Armatage, East Harriet, Fulton, Kennedy, King Field, Linden Hills, Lynnhurst, Tangletown and Windom. I don’t think you need to live in one of those neighborhoods to contribute, but it couldn’t hurt!

Anyway, read his little all-call and get in touch with Jon if you have any questions.

+ Sarah M.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –

Hello,
So I’m the editor of a new online community newspaper covering Southwest Minneapolis (typically anything south of 36th street). I’m looking for creative ways to cover the news (local politics, nbrd issues, development). Comics would be awesome!

Not sure if it’s something that appeals to folks, but a sort of Ted Rall or Joe Sacco look at neighborhood issues could be great and unique. We just spent a lot of coverage on this dog park that some folks thought disrespected a MLK memorial. Could we tell part of that story in comic form? As editor, I could clue you in on an issue and help you find the angle (like I would with a normal reporter).

As you can tell, I don’t have anything definitive in mind, it could be opinionated or straight (comic) journalism, but I would love to hear any proposals or pitches. Not sure what normal compensation is for comic artists, but we could talk.
Thanks,
Jon

–
Jon Collins
Editor, Southwest Minneapolis
southwestminneapolis.patch.com,
Jon.Collins@patch.com
612-208-8479

See it here.

The Cartoonist Conspiracy message board had never been all that active, but in recent years it has become a real ghost town. With other forms of communications being popularized, message boards in general have become less active parts of the conversation on the internet. I think this is unfortunate… more and more conversation on the internet is going into corporate-controlled “gated-communities” like facebook, where one can only see and participate in the conversation if one chooses to be a member.

So, I’m attempting something that hopefully may make our board a little livelier.

Our message board has always suffered from “topic bloat.” When I first put it up, I figured that it made sense to organize the conversation into different conversational buckets… I now think this was an error. While in theory this made sense for browsing what you are interested in, in reality it just fragmented the conversation so you had to dig for what interested you.

The community button on the site now links directly into the new section of the message board for community driven-discussion. This is the first area people will see when they go to look at the message board. You can post on any topic you wish to there.

You can still access all the old topics and content here… and all of our cells still have their own sections there… but now the conversation on the board will hopefully be driven by users rather than topic buckets.