2dcloud | ep. 001 | Discordant Life, Soft Delusions
60% OFF NEARLY EVERYTHING • Angela Fanche • 2dcloud news • book previews
Discordant life, soft delusions. My time in Queens has left me with a lot of feelings. The last night of my stay I ended up inviting a few people over for a social thing at Aunt Ginny’s in Ridgewood. Kyung-Me, Gabrielle Bell, Liza, Michel Jensen from Random Man Editions, Clair Gunther, Angela Fanche, Mei, Max 1 and Max 2, Caveh Zahedi, Maxwell, and a few others showed up.
It was intoxicating. I hadn’t quite realized how starved I felt for socialization with these specific people — many of them I had not seen in person in 5 years, some of them I was just meeting for the first time. 5 years though. So wild. The passage of time, I mean. How we’re always ourselves, orbiting through time. Our bodies wear, people grow apart, people grow together. It just accelerates and accelerates. And in this meantime, if you’re lucky, you find something worthwhile to do. If you’re especially lucky, you do it with people you love for as long as you’re able, as long as the friendships hold. To me, and I think to every living soul, that is what life here is for. And in these moments, life is beautiful.
In the morning I caught the Megabus back to Baltimore. To pass the time I read ‘Me & Night’ by Angela Fanche, an autobio comic published by Cram Books. It’s an interesting object. Clearly printed and bound by hand. Screen printed cover with french folds, 112 page risograph printed interior, stab-bound by hand. On the back of the book are blurbs from Gabrielle Bell, Laura Lannes, Josh Bayer, Austin English. Names that would likely move units in the book market. They’re on this hand bound object. It’s so intimate. The illustrated life of Angela Fanche, printed and bound by artists. This directness seems magical to me — objects made by hand, traveling to the reader, and resting in their hands then to be read.
Within the first 5 pages of Fanche’s book there is a sequence that I found really touching. She details her “successfully but not unawkwardly” giving her zines away to new faces in the hopes of them liking her work and wanting to be her friend. That really hits at the desire and the point I think of art and of life. Being seen, truly seen, and the relationships we have with people, friendships. It’s certainly why I am doing what I am doing with my life.
What has drawn me to books and zines is their physicality, their very realness, their ability to actually touch and be touched by readers. A real way for an artist to reach out and commune with strangers and friends alike, to share experiences, to not feel alone.
5 years ago I got divorced (Maggie Umber), booted out a core member of my team (Justin Skarhus), burned a lot of bridges (too many to list), and participated in the cancelation of 2 of our artists who were some of my closest friends (Andrew Burkholder and Blaise Larmee). It absolutely destroyed me and the company as well as what made it special — which was the relationships artists had with each other. It was further complicated by debts owed to many of them. This absolutely totalling collapse fragmented and damaged many of the artists and the relationships they would have with each other, and sometimes even with their art. For some of them it put a real limit on the kind of support they received when the label was whole.
At its best, 2dcloud functions as a kind of small network for artist relationships to, and with each other, and as a vehicle for their personal practice to be given some kind of physical form in print (via books and zines), or in person (via events). When artists were really struggling they would reach out to me and to each other, and I/we would try to be there for one another. When Morgan Vogel, a friend and artist we published committed suicide in 2020 — what I saw, what I felt, was how my failure with the label led to its collapse and how, because of that, Morgan had far fewer people to reach out to when she was struggling and in need. People that maybe could have helped to talk her down. I had done this countless times in the past, as had others. Many of the artists in this space, the artists I work with, and myself included, are at times very vulnerable.
Within that 5 year time period I had become a completely hollowed out person. Absolutely alienated, I would attempt to cosplay as a person, as myself. But I didn’t know what that was anymore.
An area that we fell short on as a publisher was payments to artists. For the first 8 years of the label's existence, we always paid on time. But due to the limitations of our reach, payments were very meager. The objective of hooking up with a distributor was to change that. But upon gaining a distributor we had to change our scale, which shifted the ambitions for the label. Initially this felt very exciting. But over time and under the stress of this ambition, things started to fall apart. We were always short of money and time. And I was always late paying artists.
The next 3-5 years I will be doing a lot of high pay clinical trials, every 2-3 months, to pay my debts and to move the company forward. This will take time, and we will have to go slow. Being away from home for months at a time, in what a friend has called “drug jail” takes its toll on me as an individual, as well as the team. When I am away, this puts a lot of pressure on Stephen Z. Hayes, our Associate publisher, and Melissa Carraher, our Publicist to pick up the slack. All of which is all to say, the label will go at the pace it can afford.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know if this will prove sustainable, especially with the type of work we’re interested in publishing. But for the next 3-5 years that is what we will do. And we’ll find out together.
Oh ya, I should mention that Stephen has been busy working on a conversation podcast, mostly with artists so far. Altcomics+
—Episode 1 with Clair Gunther
—Destroy Yourselves with Israel Lund
—Clinical Trials with Raighne
—Do You Think Comics Are Mysterious? w/ Steve Grove
—Oh Boy! with Andy Heck Boyd
Next month we’re starting something new. We’re calling it Big Ticket. A limited subscription service to the first round of titles we’re releasing this year.
—Grand Electric Thought Power Mother by Lale Westvind
—Sometimes, all the Time by Tara Booth
—self titled zine by nuie
—Compact Magazine 1, ed by Stephen Z Hayes, cover by Margot Ferrick. Featuring work and conversations with Maggie Umber, Brian Bamps, Morgan Vogel, Raighne, Caroline Lee Barber, and Margot Ferrick.
We’re having a 60% off sale on nearly everything. It runs from February 3rd through the 20th. This sale is in support of Big Ticket and directly of the label. Below is a preview of what you can look forward to for next month's A House on Fire w/ Raighne. See you then.
—Raighne, Publisher
