Theo Ellsworth Comes East for SPX

SECRET ACRES IS OFF TO SPX, the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD, this weekend. It’ll be your first chance to get copies of Theo Ellsworth’s epic Capacity, along with a limited edition, signed, full-color poster. It may also be your only chance to get Theo to sign and doodle on your book! Ordinarily, Theo is in Portland, Oregon, so this will be a special opportunity for his East Coast fans to say hello. For those of you who can’t make it to SPX, take heart: Theo’s Capacity and poster will shortly be shipping with a special bundle deal for both.

Secret artist Ken Dahl will also be at SPX debuting the third issue of his Ignatz Award winning Monsters series. If you haven’t yet purchased his awesome collection of early comics, Welcome to the Dahlhouse, SPX would be an excellent time to do so.

This Friday night, on SPX eve, we’ll be at Atomic Books in Baltimore with Sparkplug Comic Books, Bodega, Dark Horse Comics and Picturebox for an all-star “SPXplosion” celebrating Atomic Books’ sweet sixteen. There will be refreshments. There will be wall-to-wall comics people. There Will be Blood. You will submit. Read more here.

Speaking of Sparkplug, Secret Acres congratulates our friends at Sparkplug Comic Books on their six Ignatz nominations! Wooooooo!

Meanwhile, there have been many additions to the Emporium: Theo’s Thought Cloud Shrines is back in stock, Secret Acres’ own Rob Jackson shipped us his new comic, On the Banks of the Mighty Croal and we are now carrying several comics by Leslie Anne Mackenzie Stein, including the latest issue of her Eye of the Majestic Creature, plus an untitled comic by Blaise Larmee. Speaking of Blaise Larmee, we’re serializing his haunting new story, Ghosts, in Small Plates.

Lastly, but mostly, Secret Acres is pleased to announce that our comics will be carried by Diamond Distribution. If your favorite comic shop isn’t carrying our books, tell ’em to order them through Diamond!

Your Pals-at-Arms,

Barry and Leon

Secret Acres is Hot and Sweaty!

SECRET ACRES IS HOT and sweaty. It may be summer vacation, but we’re keeping plenty busy in the sweltering New York heat.

First off, the Emporium has been resuscitated! It is in fine working order now and the prognosis is good. Just remember to send an email to info@secretacres.com if you encounter any problems at all. Thanks again for your collective patience.

Speaking of the Emporium, we have Minty Lewis’s P.S. Comics #4 in stock and ready to ship. Minty’s newest installment is a full-length story featuring Otis and Ruffles. And yes, it’s on your summer reading list. We are still awaiting more copies of Theo Ellsworth’s Thought Cloud Shrines.

Speaking of Theo Ellsworth, here’s a sneak peek at the cover of Theo’s book, Capacity, which will be first available for purchase at SPX 2008 in October.

Wormdye just got a glowing notice from Sequart. You can read it here.

Just for the record, Secret Acres loves cats and vegetarians and does not advocate nor desire the molestation of either species.

Most sincerely yours,

Leon & Barry

The Emporium Has Been Closed for Repairs

SECRET ACRES IS BACK (alright!) from MoCCA. Big thanks to the very many of you who came to see us at the Desert Island Comics Party – and especially the too-hot-to-handle MoCCA art festival! We had a swell, sweltering time and enjoyed our first-ever convention book-slinging experience. Shout outs to Sam and Eamon for showing up, bringing it on and signing the hell out of their books for everyone. As usual, MoCCA was a great chance to check out too many great, new and wonderful comics, make some new comics friends, and get down with all of our old, but still awesome, comics folks. Thanks for checking out our table and buying our books!

The first set of notices for Fatal Faux-Pas are in and they are unanimously positive! Check them out here, here and here. Sam is also going on tour! Click here to see his DIY poster for all of the “Northbeastern” tour dates.

And now, the sad news: the Secret Acres Emporium has been temporarily closed down for repairs and upgrades. We’ve been having periodic problems with the speed and connectivity of PayPal’s servers and we are working on an improved solution for our online store. Our most sincere apologies if you’ve been itching to make an order. If you want to make an order while you’re waiting for the relaunch of the new and improved Emporium, you can always email us at info@secretacres.com and we’ll be happy to make it all happen by hand. You can still purchase Fatal Faux-Pas and Wormdye on Amazon. We expect the store to remain closed for about a week.

Is it almost summer vacation? It feels like it. Stay cool.

Your Pals,

Leon & Barry

OMG, Secret Acres Has Books!

OMG, SECRET ACRES HAS BOOKS, which you can even pick up and read if you’re around for MoCCA. Wormdye and Fatal Faux-Pas will finally be on sale, on Friday, June 6th at Desert Island (540 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn). Desert Island is host to what will surely be the biggest MoCCA kickoff of all time: Secret Acres, Sparkplug Books and Bodega will be debuting five (yes, FIVE) new books. All of the artists will be showing up – and there will be beer. We’ll be starting at 6pm or so and going until 10pm (and then moving down the block). We expect all the best people to be there, especially you and yours.

Here are the awesome books that will premiere:

Windy Corner #2 by Austen English
Wormdye by Eamon Espey
Fatal Faux-Pas by Sam Gaskin
Neverland by Dave Kiersh
Inkweed by Chris Wright

As for the main, big, old MoCCA event itself: Secret Acres will be at table A75 on the Main Floor in the big room. The charming Eamon Espey and Samuel C. Gaskin will be signing Fatal Faux-Pas and Wormdye, or vice versa. We’ll have lots of mini-comics from all our guys, and, somewhere at MoCCA, you can get hold of the brand spanking new fourth issue of the Ignatz-winning series P.S. Comics from superstar Minty Lewis. In fact, Minty and Jospeh Lambert and Ken Dahl will all be in attendance; how many can you find?

Stalker.

Speaking of Mr. Dahl, Microcosm Books will be selling a collection of his early (but not primitive) work, entitled Welcome to the Dahlhouse. We highly recommend that you buy this book and refer to it often. We also insist you check out Xeric-award winner, and pal to Secret Acres, Colleen Frakes’s Tragic Relief, which will be available at tables C25 & C26 (Main Floor). Get familiar with Colleen. She likes that.

In Emporium news, we have Angee Lennard‘s latest issue of Mossdale Estate, Sean Ford‘s third issue of Only Skin, and a book of illustrations by Theo Ellsworth called Thought Cloud Shrines. We have also replenished our stock of Theo’s immensely popular Capacity #7.

If we say we’ve been “busy,” we’re making an understatement. We’re frazzled; we’re comics gone wild; we’re barely legal. But we do it all for you, so you have to at least come say hi. Don’t make us come over there.

Your Pals,

Barry and Leon

Edie Fake Joins the Fold

IF no news is good news, we apologize for ending our very long silence. However, we are back with some unquestionably great news for two of Secret Acres’ own: Joe Lambert’s “Turtle Keep It Steady” has been selected by the honorable Lynda Barry for inclusion in Best New American Comics 2008, due this fall from the Houghton Mifflin Company. Minty Lewis’s “Just This Side of Heaven” will appear in the upcoming issue of The Black Warrior Review. Congratulations to both Joe and Minty; thanks for still talking to us. All you visitors can, of course, purchase either (or even both!) of these mini-comics at the Emporium, so you can talk about how way ahead of Lynda Barry you are. Speaking of people getting ahead, a collection of early comics by our man, and yours, Ken Dahl is forthcoming from the good folks at Microcosm Publishing.

Before you start wondering if every other publisher on earth will get to our artists before we do, Fatal Faux-Pas and Wormdye are actually in production and we will have advance copies waiting for you in four short months at MoCCA (see a preliminary exhibitor list here). We’re hoping to announce a release party just as soon as we get the details together. Besides, you won’t want to miss this.

And finally, we are happy to announce that Secret Acres is now officially planning to release a collection of comics from Edie Fake. When we get a chance, we’ll add an artist page for Edie and get some of his comics in the Emporium for you to buy so you can see what all of the fuss is about.

We hope you’re staying warm this winter and reading loads of comics.

Leon & Barry

P.S. All you people sending us your submissions, we are on it. Really.

Happy Thanksgiving!

SO we’re back. It’s been a little busy for us, day job wise, and now we’re heading right into the holidays which are very big deal for us, but we haven’t forgotten about you, we swear.
First of all, we’ve had a change of plans. As most of you are probably aware, APE has moved out of April and into November. This is extremely annoying for a lot of us. We’d been getting ready to hit you over the head with Fatal Faux-Pas, Sam Gaskin’s unbelievably awesome book – and our big debut – at APE, in April. Rather than keep you waiting till November, you can now brace yourself for Fatal Faux-Pas and Eamon Espey’s Wormdye both, at the same time, at this coming MoCCA. Eamon and Sam may or may not fight to the death.

Speaking of Eamon, we just finished scanning in the complete Wormdye last weekend. It’s so great, that we feel compeled to give you a sneak peak at it.

We had our big scanning party down in Baltimore, which also happens to be home to MICA (the Maryland Insitute College of Art), which is host to Closed Caption Comics. CCC, if you’re unaware, is composed of a dozen or so MICA students who are producing some the best comics around. We tend to spend all our money on their stuff at every con and we finally got to sit down with Connor Stechschulte and Noel Freibert, or two thirds of Witch Hat. They’re very cool people and we’re looking forward to having the CCC anthologies in the Emporium soon. In the meantime, you can catch some of their stuff here.

Time now for some InDesign. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

Barry and Leon

Secret Acres is Exhausted!

SECRET ACRES is exhausted. After an action-packed, booze-soaked, smoke-filled weekend in Bethesda, Maryland, at SPX, we’re finally back in New York, collecting our wits and jonesing something awful. If you were there and we missed you, we miss you still.

We did manage to say hi to some of our favorite people: Jamie Tanner, the Closed Caption Comics gang, Alec Longstreth, Randy Chang of Bodega, the Beat’s Heidi MacDonald, T. Edward Bak and pretty much everyone remotely associated with the Center for Cartoon Studies. Without you, we may have gotten a good night’s sleep.

Most impressively, not one, but two Secret Acres people grabbed a brick for their excellence at the Ignatz Awards on Saturday. Minty Lewis won hers (like there was ever a doubt) for Outstanding Mini-Comic for P.S. Comics #3, and Papercutter #6 (featuring a story by Ken Dahl) picked up an Ignatz for Outstanding Debut. We couldn’t be happier for Minty and Ken (and Ken’s co-contributors in Papercutter #6: Alec Longstreth, Julia Wertz and Laura Park).

In Emporium news, we finally have copies of Ken Dahl’s Monsters #1 and Monsters #2 for sale. Theo Ellsworth’s long-awaited and truly amazing new issue of Capacity has arrived and is available now. And next week, we’ll have JB’s latest and all-new and bigger-than-ever Curio Cabinet. Oh, and there’s this.

Okay. Nap time.

Leon & Barry

Outstanding Nominations for Minty Lewis

MINTY LEWIS is unstoppable. Her third issue of P.S. Comics has been nominated for not only the first annual Maisie Kukoc Award for Comics Inspiration, but the prestigious Ignatz Award for Outstanding Mini-Comic as well. The Maisie Kukoc award is a cash prize for mini-comics creators named for John Porcellino’s late cat. If you’ve been reading Minty’s comics (and you should be) you know how fitting it is that her book was among the first nominees. Somewhere, her muse, Lucy, is smiling along with us.

Speaking of Ignatz nominated people, we had the pleasure of finally meeting up with Edie Fake, the genius behind Gaylord Phoenix. Edie’s been on our coast for a stretch, taking a break from his tatooing apprenticeship. We can pretty much guarantee you’ve never seen comics like his and we are dying to have them on the site. You can take a gander at them here.

In other news, Sam Gaskin delivers. Having wrapped up his first collection, which will be the first Secret Acres book come the next APE, he’s putting the finishing touches on Faux-Pas 5. You can pick up the newest Faux-Pas at SPX in about two weeks and they’ll be here and everywhere after.

Finally, it’s fun having a web site. Sort of. Our apologies for the typos (you especially, Zoë), which have since been fixed. And, to all you people not in North America, thank you for reminding us what a big, wonderful world it is, annoying customs forms and webstore bugs notwithstanding.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the first week of secretacres.com. Next week will be even more fun; promise.

Leon & Barry

Secret Acres Website is Born

TODAY is the official date of birth of the Secret Acres website. A big, cuddly welcome goes out to all of you, our new visitors, and everyone else who has been patiently waiting for us to launch. The site took a little longer to put together than we had anticipated, but it’s up now and we think you’ll agree it was worth the wait.

Secret Acres is a comics publishing company started by Leon Avelino and Barry Matthews. You can read more about us here. Secret Acres books will start hitting the shelves next year. In the meantime, there are plenty of mini-comics to pick up in our Emporium.

All of our artists have individual pages with their bios and links to reviews and websites. Most of our artists have mini-comics waiting for you in the Emporium. You can also get a taste of their comics right here online. These will be updated weekly on rotating basis.

Our Critical Ends section is where you can find all the big ideas from comics scholars around the world. Every month, we’ll have a new essay up. The first essay, “Word and Image in Contemporary Fiction” by Zoë Sadokierski, can be accessed here.

Secret Acres’ s first book, Fatal Faux-Pas by Samuel C. Gaskin will debut at APE 2008 next April. Sam’s Xeric award-winning comic, Pizza Wizard #1, is in the Emporium right now. Don’t miss this one.

We’ll have more updates for you as the year winds down. If you’re curious, if you’ve got something to tell us or if you just can’t wait, you can find us at info@secretacres.com. We won’t hide.

Thanks for stopping by.