Greetings from Alex and Zack here at Zine Hug HQ!

Thank you for following our work through this newsletter. We’ve been going through a major phase of focusing on animation, and we are excited to share a new animation project we’re releasing (via livestream) this month! But please let us begin our update by sharing some printed excerpts of our most recent comic publication, Froggy Gets Fuel. This book is one of our proudest accomplishments to date 🥰

So here is how we did it:

The story of Froggy Gets Fuel has been stewing in Alex’s brain for a long time, so she was able to write the story and compose the rough layout of 24 pages in about a week.

Finished layouts were sent over to Zack to clean while Alex continued working on roughs. Zack drew the clean lines and shadows at a rate of about 4 pages per day.

Zack continued to clean and sent finished pages back to Alex to do lettering and color. Then she prepared the print layout and risograph printed the dang thing!

We discovered that each of us has the quickness in different aspects of art-making, and by combining our efforts, we finished by our actual deadline 😅 After this successful collaboration, we decided to try this same method out on a fan print.

WE ARE! working on a One Piece fan animation featuring a fight sequence between Luffy and Alabasta villain, Crocodile. If you stopped by our (mega) booth at Sakura-Con in April, you may have seen this print and the rough animation sneak-preview playing at our booth. We also gave out a contact sheet test print of the first 24 frames.

We currently have the contact sheet bundle on Pre-Order and we’ll release the full animation on Thursday, June 5th through a livestream on Zack’s Youtube. For those who are interested in learning more about our process, we’ll share some production footage and answer questions through a live chat. We’re pretty curious about engaging with our community through a premiere like this, so please let us know what you think 🧐 This curiosity is part of a larger conversation about making, sharing, and surviving off of independent art, and right now, we are really excited to animate.

Risograph animation has ignited a love for exploration in our personal art practices. We are really excited to keep on building and growing and powering up. It has also been a new way to fund these short animation projects. If the main goal of the riso animation process is to create a video, the by-product of this process is the beautiful contact sheet print. We have over 40 individual contact sheets from our animation projects, and they are usually our best-selling items when we have them at festivals.

Most of our upcoming projects and collaborations are animations, and recently, we’ve been getting approached to do commercial animation work. Zine Hug was originally formed to make art outside of working in commercial animation studios, but we’ve been referring to ourselves as an animation studio recently, which is starting to feel accurate.

On that note, we’re planning to celebrate 10 years of Zine Hug with some special releases later in the Fall. Until then, come check us out at a show (gearing up for SABF this weekend!) or join us for the One Piece Animation livestream!

Upcoming Events

• May 10-11 Seattle Art Book Fair at Washington Hall in the Central District 💚 Come out to Love Vs. The World at Common Area Maintenance, featuring work by Bridget Trout, Juliette Collet, and more (Zine Hug will be represented there by our collaborator Myra Lara and her book, Entrega!)

• May 17 Alaska Robotics Mini-Con in Juneau, Alaska!!

• May 26 RECC Anniversary Market celebrating two years of the lovely Reclaim Clay Community!

• May 31 Olympia Zine Fest It’s back baby!

• June 5 One Piece Animation release livestream please come ☠️

• June 21-22 Summer Story Fest hosted by the wonderful folks of Outlet and Sonny’s House in Portland, Oregon.

Application Reminders

Here are some events that currently have open applications. We just made the Tokyo Art Book Fair deadline a few days ago and really hope we get in!

• Unlimited Edition ~$275 - Seoul, South Korea - apps due May 16

• SABRS Zine and Small Press Festival - £15 - Riga, Latvia - apps due May 26

• Portland Zine Symposium - $20 - Portland, Oregon - apps due May 31

• Taipei Art Book Fair - $165 - $780 - Taipei, Taiwan - apps due June 15

• New York Comic Con - $565 - New York, New York - apps due June 16

We also wanna mention that the Seattle Independent Film Festival (SIFF) is starting up this month! Zine Hug 🩵’s SIFF and we so appreciate all of the efforts their staff put into indie animation programming. Check out this year’s animated shorts block on the evening of May 17th! Get $3 off 'Adult' tickets with code ZINEHUG51 😘

🩵Thanks for reading🩵

Alex + Zack