i am so predictable.

my latest sequential piece is a record-breaking THREE PAGES LONG, and by record-breaking, i basically mean "the longest comic i've made thus far." anyway, it's (no surprise) a romance-ish, bouncing back and forth through time as a sad old man reminisces about the one that got away.
like i said, zero percent surprising. in other news, it's halloween!! so go eat lots of candy and watch scary movies.

thesis part deux.

here are a couple more pieces from my thesis, tracks three and four. in the real world, i'm a shocking two-thirds of the way done, but here in fake-blog-land, i'm a little behind with the updating. the first image accompanies "postcards from italy" by beirut.
track four (below) is "if she wants me" by belle & sebastian. also in the works is a companion page with the track info to be placed opposite each illustration. so the final book will be 24 pages (or twelve spreads). less chat, more other things! there's a bunch of work to come, i swear. i feel like the boy who cried wolf, but i'm the girl who cried "new work coming soon." sigh.

dailies 10/19-10/25.

a bit of a weird week because of fall break (aka, four-day weekend) coming in and lulling me into a false sense of freedom only to be snatched away just as the revelry set in. but! here they are anyway:
sunday, october 19th: "longest, loudest, coldest bus ride. ever."
monday, october 20th: "dancing in real life to a song only in my head."
tuesday, october 21st: "feeling extra-wide today."
wednesday, october 22nd: "okay, so fine, i'm dwelling. what of it?"
thursday, october 23rd: "my first taste of the real world was pretty good."
friday, october 24th: "we sedimented ourselves under increasingly compounded layers of sad."
saturday, october 25th: "apparently, it's not worth the fight for me or anyone else."

i did some swell things in the city, like eat more rice pudding (a requirement, not a privilege-- this time it was cannoli flavored) and lurk around the strand, finding early release hodgman love and secretly awesome daumier lithograph books on high high ladder-requiring shelves.

also, last week i added a fictional sunday to the calendar, suggesting for no apparent reason that particular week was deserving of eight days instead of seven. the 19th, in fact, belongs in this week. traitor, slash, my bad.

platonic, entirely appropriate, and not at all scandalous.

so a bit overdue, here is my two! two! two!-page comic, "hide and seek" (the first of its kind!). it's slightly less suspensful when you can see both pages at once, but since i still can't do anything but adorable anyway, it's not that suspenseful to start with. be prepared for a full-on "awww" at least once, maybe more, depending on how susceptible to cute you are.
it's hanging in the illustration department's show here at mica right now, alongside one hundred thousand other cool kids taking classes with b.ralph (linked constantly, so i'll shut up about him already. his site's over on the left if you've been out of the loop since forever). if you're a baltimorean (baltimoreon? baltimoron?) then you can check it out for real, slightly more tangible and bigger! also on display is my hug-a-city friend, downstairs in the juried undergrad exhibition. she was my final from brian's class last year, so it's basically just a brian lovefest. minus the awkward implications that statement probably has.

dailies 10/12-10/19.

this week's dailies were delayed a day by my adventuresome mini-vacation to nyc. the visit was not nearly as eventful (read: good) as the actual travel there and back (read: bad), and as such, i didn't get home to baltimore until 1:30 yesterday morning, and at that point, prompt weekly dailies update was not so much a priority, i'm not gonna lie. but! better late than never, here they are:


sunday, october 12th: "like how i imagine king midas must've felt, if, you know, he spilled everything he touched all over instead of turning it to gold."
monday, october 13th: "i'm a little bit sick. "
tuesday, october 14th: "getting a little territorial about things that aren't actually mine."
wednesday, october 15th: "i scheduled my day around 6 hours of television."
thursday, october 16th: "there's nothing like hearing the things you try to ignore and push to the back of your brain come out of someone else's mouth."
friday, october 17th: "one roommate was rightfully celebratory and the other rightfully crestfallen.
saturday, october 18th: "this didn't actually happen, but was dangerously imminent."

back to reality and such for the rest of the week, plenty to do, yada yada. fall break is a big fat tease. also, presently stuck in my head is ne-yo's "miss independent", partially because it plays everywhere you go, and partially because i maybe like it. so there.

dailies 10/5-10/11.

a little late with the dailies this week, i am a little sniffly slash under the weather at the moment, and last night i was just not having it, where 'it' entails anything and everything ever. of non-sequitur note, i baked an apple pie last night at midnight.

sunday, october 5th: "i had an full day before noon today."
monday, october 6th: "a well-intentioned but terribly-executed effort to make sure he's okay.
tuesday, october 7th: "my mediocre research skills indicate that i do not have a future as a historian slash detective."
wednesday, october 8th: "i had distinct impression that someone was watching me today in the studio, but i didn't check. SO NOW I'LL NEVER KNOW."
thursday, october 9th: "misheard, misinterpreted, mis-everything."
friday, october 10th: "i didn't think sentences were allowed to start with "alissandra" and end with "got hit on in a bar like whoa."
saturday, october 11th: "world: 45 hundred million, alissandra: nothing."

i have a long weekend coming up, which should be secret code for "updates times one thousand!" but really is code for "nyc vacation." we'll see if it can't be a little of both.

oh, symbiosis.

here is last week's comic about adorably mismatched roommates. i have a bad habit of leaving the titles off my comics, but that will be remedied with the upcoming one, with 100% more, aka two, pages. for now, enjoy this little friend.

dailies 9/28-10/4.

okay, so super-speedy because i wanna shower and sleep like whoa. ratatat was tonight and it was epic. SO GOOD LIVE. it was round three of my new "ras are people too" strategy that was implemented this weekend, a most excellent of weekends. anyway, i'm out to be clean.

sunday, september 28th: "i can't take credit for the image here, but man was today a broken record sort of day."
monday, september 29th: "HOLY SHIT HEADACHE"
tuesday, september 30th: "high-five, sweet squidfire internship."
wednesday, october 1st: "today was the first day i ran into my roommate not in our house."
thursday, october 2nd: "this is all i need."
friday, october 3rd: "an experiment in 'to hell with it'-ing: i blew off my micro-managed self-imposed schedule."
saturday, october 4th: "powering through toward an unseen end."

castaway, sort of.

my second comic for brian's class, slash ever, based in the idea of the castaway (single character) escaping the island (any sort of entrapment/place). also, silent! since text and word bubbles introduce a whole other mess of complications. it reads without too much explanation, i hope? isn't that the point of a comic?
just a quick one today since i'm off to spx to spend money and drool over semi-famous people. i went to the spx-plosion last night (a pre-spx comics party-hipster-nerdfest of awesomeness) to see brian and others read their comics aloud and check out atomic books' new digs, where the event was held. weirdly enough, they partner with one of my favorite blogs, largehearted boy, to promote his "52 books, 52 weeks" resolution, and they're in baltimore, and they're awesome. anyway, see you tomorrow for dailies (now under slightly higher pressure since they're going on a wall next semester).

in which alissandra finally makes good on her eons of empty promises.

try not to have some sort of aneurysm or anything, but look! wow! cool! actual updates of substance. here are the first two pages of my thesis, which is, in short, an illustrated mixtape. each of the twelve tracks has an accompanying full-page illustration, with lyrics illuminated from each song to tell a simple love story through the course of the tape. here is the track list:

1. cath... - death cab for cutie (below)
2. pictures of success - rilo kiley (below below)
3. if she wants me - belle & sebastian
4. postcards from italy - beirut
5. you said something - pj harvey
6. gold in the air of summer - kings of convenience
7. look up - stars
8. the bleeding heart show - the new pornographers
9. a bird in hand - owen
10. take it from me- the weepies
11. tables & chairs - andrew bird
12. in an aeroplane over the sea - neutral milk hotel

as was mentioned and linked before, i had originally uploaded the entire playlist as a handy muxtape, an amazing (and therefore highly dangerous and destined to fail) mixtape service that the riaa killed a few months ago. check out the link to read about their story, and if you really want to hear the tracks, check out the hype machine or skreemr, two fairly reliable web aggregators that should give you a taste for what the accompanying music sounds like. or, you know, youtube that business. ideally the illustrations would be formatted as a lyrics booklet to accompany the mix, so in theory, the reader would have the track and the images together.

anyway, feedback would be greatly appreciated, especially in terms of readability as the book progresses. i just finished up the 5th track today, so there should be more work in the pipeline. and, two more sequential pieces on the way as well. this weekend is spx, the small press expo (and indie comics nerd holy grail) in the middle of nowhere, maryland with the likes of jillian tamaki, james kochalka, and jeff lemire, among others.

in other news, two bits of non-thesis-related splendor: i started my internship with squidfire yesterday and oh man, it is great. they are a little local t-shirt company that designs, prints, and sells their own shirts, bags, etc., and they just opened a retail store in hampden. i'm helping them out with the launch of the store, festival and craft show prep, and internet orders/inventory! yay. and lastly, i recently found out that i will be having a solo exhibition this coming february here at mica in one of the student space galleries, showing a full year of my dailies all together en masse. cool! okay. the end. sorry for the all trigger-happy hotlinking on this bad boy.