Dear Friends of Short Run,
We are finding it hard to make a closing statement about 2020: It was hard, confusing, shocking/not shocking, boring, scary, and it went on and on. The best we could do was stay present and hold our community close. This year-end report shares what we did to make it through. Your donations and your support helped keep the lights on throughout it all.
Show your community that you’d like to attend a comic festival again one day! These logo masks are made locally by Misty Mountain Mfg. in Georgetown! They will be generously donating 50% of the profits to us! Here’s an easy way to order from our etsy site!
What has it meant to live through this time? It’s been different for each of us, but many of our experiences are shared. We’ve watched our collective anxiety creep to a boiling point as we’ve learned to fear one another’s touch and presence. Read more…
Short Run and Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery present: BLAZERS NOV 14 – DEC 09 Read more…
Short Run and Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery present: HOT MACHINES
OCT 10 – NOV 11 (all day opening on Saturday, October 10th)
Hot Machines is a Risograph art show featuring prints and books printed at Paper Press Punch (Jessica Hoffman & Justin Quinlan, Georgetown) and Cold Cube Press (Aidan Fitzgerald & Michael Heck, Pioneer Square), two homegrown small businesses hanging on through it all – Read more…
There’s lots of great online content out there to keep you inspired and help you keep up your drawing and comics-making practice. Read more…
Short Run is honored to among the grantees! This is the first relief grant we have received and it gives us hope that we can outlast the COVID-19 disaster.
The Literary Arts Emergency Fund, launched and administered by the Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazine & Presses, and the National Book Foundation, has announced that it will distribute $3.5 million in emergency funding to 282 nonprofit literary arts organizations, magazines, and publishers who have been severely financially affected by COVID-19. The organizations receiving support have cumulatively reported over $27 million in financial losses and are projecting over $48 million in financial losses in the next year. Literary Arts Emergency Fund was established “in response to the lack of institutional support for the nonprofit organizations and presses that sustain literary culture in the U.S.,” and was made possibly by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Read more here.
Thank you so much to everyone who bought a t-shirt and made a donation!! We were able to donate $870.40 to Wa Na Wari, one of our neighborhood partners!
We have just a few t-shirts left from a 2nd printing – visit our shop!
In the spirit of collective well-being and care, we are postponing the festival until we can meet again safely. With this year being our 10th anniversary, this announcement is truly tough to make. Short Run has always been more than just a festival; it is a community made up of all of us weirdo artists and readers who found each other through our shared love of comix and zines. We will miss seeing you in person—crowded together in Fisher Pavilion, behind and in front of tables filled with the best books. We hope to announce a 2021 date as soon as we possibly can.
In the meantime, we’re not going away! We know we have a community to support—whom we need just as much! The festival has always served as a deadline for us artists to make new work. For the time being, we have to find new ways to get motivated and feel connected—new ways to celebrate printed work and to share the stories that are piling up inside of us. The pandemic has exposed how broken our systems are. It has revealed truths about suffering that we have known all along. Comix and comix artists help us heal by expressing solidarity in both our shared and unshared experiences. They are a critical eye on these broken systems. They envision a better tomorrow by helping us process our thoughts and realities.
We can’t wait to surprise you with upcoming print and publication projects, offbeat summer school workshops and discussions, and revamped grant and residency opportunities. Keep a look out—and let us know what you’re up to, even if it’s just staring into space (we’re doing a lot of that, too). Stay safe—and, more than ever, STAY WEIRD!
The Short Run Board of Directors
(Kelly, Mita, Emilie, Jessica, Otts, Lyli, and Meredith)
Are you stuck at home? Are your anxieties through the roof? We’d like to collect 1-page comics about what your daily life looks like now, whether it be good or bad. We’d like to share what this experience LOOKS like. Pages will be reprinted in a quick & dirty old-school photocopied zine (once we feel safe going out to print it), in the meantime, we’ll post the comics on our tumblr page and share the link widely. Stick to 5.5″ x 8.5″ digest mini-comic format so that we can easily put it together. No deadline, comics will be loaded as they are received.
Email your comic page to short.run.info@gmail.com
UPDATE: Short Run’s Dash Grant is temporarily on hold! All applications received will be held until further notice, and the applicants will have a chance to refresh their application before judging.
This micro-grant is for self-publishers who could use the help to finish their comic. Because of our fundraising efforts, we are able to double the cash amount previously offered. Guidelines are below. Read more…
