Ladies' Night Anthology Volume 1: Chicago

Over the past several months, my roles as comic book fan and blogger have taken a back seat to a new position: come book collaborator. I have previously written about my role as moderator of Graham Crackers Ladies' Night, a monthly meeting of female comic book fans, but I have not devoted any time on my site to talk about the resulting comic book anthology. Ever since Hannah Chapman created the Ladies' Night event shortly over a year ago, participants kept bringing up the idea of creating our own comic. The initial concept was for it to be something the creators amongst us could work on and share with everyone and receive feedback. It didn't take long to realize what a large pool of talent we had in our group and we decided to make our project a little more ambitious. We assigned editors for each story, created deadlines for each stage of creation rather than setting a final date for completed stories, and organized workshops for writing, penciling, and lettering. My experience as editor-in-chief has also taught me to appreciate those comic book creators that are always up to date on their reading (as I have clearly fallen behind). It's hard to imagine working on more than one comic at a time, let alone more than one a month! And yet I'm not the only contributor anxious to start on volume two even though we have yet to print volume one. We're close but still have work to do including formatting final artwork for print and getting together the rewards for those that contributed to our crowd fund. This might be an eleventh hour plug, but there is still time to back the project as we are a little more than 24 hours from the end of the campaign:

GCC Ladies' Night Anthology

We're still taking pre-orders from comic book retailers and hope to raise enough to meet the minimum amount required for a price break from the printers. DIY comics, everybody! Everyone involved is just thrilled to see this thing come to fruition no matter how large or small the print run. Mark my words though, you will say many of these ladies creating comics on a larger scale in the near future. I truly believe any one of them could go on to make a name for themselves if they keep creating, and really that is the hardest part. But I've definitely got the bug for editing and may contribute a story for the next volume, so I am happy to continue supporting more opportunities for these and other creators to make comics. We're tossing around ideas for volume two now and a Star Trek zine is also in the works. We'll be sure to make more frequent updates about these endeavors as they form. Until then, keep checking back here for continued comic book blogging and you can also follow us on tumblr now where we can more easily make micro-updates and keep the long form writing on the main site. Here are a few panels from the upcoming Ladies' Night Anthology: Volume 1 Chicago. Unless specified, each artist completed all artwork and lettering: