August 24, 2003
Trunktown goes Bit Pass!

Marking one of the first forays into Microstyle payments with Bit Pass, Tom Hart and Shaenon Garrity announce that their comic strip series Trunktown is now available to read for 25 cents.

October 14, 2002
http://www.trunktown.com

Tom Hart and Shaenon K. Garrity are proud to announce the debut of their collaborative daily comic, Trunktown, on the web site Serializer.net in October 2002.

Written by Garrity and drawn by Hart, Trunktown is a strip in the classic sense- a brief daily window on a cartoon world populated by countless nuts, weirdos and oddballs. The King of Trunktown is an ex-rap star named Big Daddy Warstocks, who has alienated the strip's heroine, Faustine, a trigger happy woman out for revenge. Meanwhile, completing the cartoon tableau are characters from some of Hart's popular graphic novels, such as Hutch Owen, Oswald from The Collected Hutch Owen and Fen from The Sands. A complete look at the cast can be found at http://www.tomhart.net/trunktown/cast.html.

Trunktown marks the first ever daily strip for popular graphic novelist Tom Hart, who has always cited as influences classic daily comic strips such as Peanuts, Bloom County and B.C.

"I've always believed that by now," Hart says, "the daily strip format should be considered dead and left alone. Though the form inspired me as a kid, the shrinking spaces in newspapers and the bland content craved by average audiences led me to find a voice elsewhere."

That voice became Hutch Owen, The Sands and other graphic novels, for which Hart has a significant following and has been nominated for every industry award.

It wasn't until reading Shaenon Garrity's web comic Narbonic, that he realized you can still make a funny, witty and smart comic strip.

"Shaenon has created this arrangement of characters who spark off each other, and thrive in the daily strip form. They get everything out in 4 panel bursts. They're hilarious, and Shaenon's timing is perfect." Hart says. "So I asked her to collaborate putting together a new strip with some of my old characters and enough of her energetic type of characters to really make the strip sing. In some ways, the world we've created is a more whimsical version of my current visual cartoon world, one that I have demanded Shaenon run around in and get to know. the result is Trunktown."

Garrity adds, "Trunktown crams in everything I love in a comic strip: adventure, fantasy, random weirdness, girls with guns, and some elephants and armadillos thrown in on top. And, if I've done my job right, it's friggin' funny, too. I can't wait to unleash this on the world.

"Tom Hart has been one of my heroes since I was a pimply teenager - heck, his strange and beautiful The Sands was my introduction to the pulpy netherworld of alternative comics. I'm thrilled beyond words to be working with him, especially on a comic as much fun as Trunktown. In fact, I try to avoid thinking too hard about how spectacular a cartoonist he is, because otherwise my head would explode."

Readers at the Trunktown site will also get a unique surprise- Shaenon and Tom keep all of their creative correspondence archived live on the site. Readers can read in real-time, Tom and Shaenon's idea process as it generates and refines what become the strips they will read weeks later. This "Creative Log" is available on the front page.

Trunktown will premiere with the debut of Serializer.net, a new web comics anthology edited by Hart, and showcasing more than 20 of the most exciting creators of comics today, including Nick Bertozzi, Ben Catmull, Tracy White among others.

Serializer.net is an offshoot/sister site to the popular Modern Tales, launched in March 2002 by TalkAboutComics's Joey Manley and viewed by over 1100 subscribers. Serializer.net marks the recent branching of Modern Tales into a more "alternative" niche, with a roster including numerous Ignatz, Harvey, Xeric and Eisner award winners, as well as many of web comics guru Scott McCloud's "top 10" list.

For a web-sized GIF of a sample Trunktown strip, click here: http://www.tomhart.net/trunktown/pressA512/strip009.gif
A print-sized TIFF file of a sample strip: http://www.tomhart.net/trunktown/pressA512/strip009.tif

Press and other interested parties are invited to contact Tom Hart below for a special limited preview of the first 20 strips.

For further information:
Tom Hart: tomhart@newhatstories.com, (718) 389-4606
Shaenon K. Garrity: narbonic@netzero.com
For Serializer and Modern Tales: Joey Manley: joey@moderntales.com (415) 871-3944 .

	Click here for an interview between Tom Hart and Shaenon Garrity conducted in May, 2002.
Tom Hart		Shaenon K. Garrity

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