December 2013
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Interview

Jordan Shiveley p1

By Simon Sandall ⋅ December 1, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Readersvoice.com aims to collect a few interesting reading tips. Jordan Shiveley is the publisher of Grimalkin Press based in Minneapolis. Grimalkin publishes books like the HIVE comics anthology, which Mr Shiveley also edits. These feature comics artists from around the world, and always sell out quickly. He has an extensive collection of comics and minicomics, and there are a lot of good suggestions for comics and novel reading in this interview.

Jordan Shiveley is busy. He runs Grimalkin Press, which has published Everything Dies by Box Brown; Noah Novella, which is a collection of autobiographical comics by Noah van Sciver; Crying in Front of Your Dog and Other Stories by Phil McAndrew and other comics. He has also drawn and written his own comics, including March 29, 1912 which can be viewed on tumblr, and Rejoice. He sells his comics at events like the Toronto Comics Arts Festival. He is a co-founder of Autoptic which is a festival in Minneapolis that features comics creators, musicians, printmakers and illustrators. And he is a sous chef at the Bryant-Lake Bowl (the BLB) in Minneapolis.

READERSVOICE.COM: You seem to have busy schedule with running Grimalkin and being a sous chef at The Bryant Lake Bowl, Minneapolis. Can you give a rough outline of your daily schedule?

JORDAN SHIVELEY: Wake up at 7 am. Get ready for work.
Be at work by 8 am.
Work managing the restaurant till either 9 pm or 11 pm depending on day and unforeseen emergencies.
Walk home.
Spend a few hours working on illustration or publishing matters.
Try and sleep by 1 am or 2.

REPEAT.

RV: I saw you mentioned in a comic about Autoptic by Elijah J. Brubaker. How did the idea for Autoptic come about and how did you and the other publishers go about organising it?

JS: I think the seed of the idea was between Raighne Hogan and Zak Sally to try and do a winter event to replace the now defunct and sorely missed MIX (Minneapolis Indie Expo) That didn’t pan out so they retooled and brought in the rest of the current board of directors to brainstorm and nail down what would come to be Autoptic 2013.

We ended up meeting once a week for a year leading up to the show ironing out all the details from the curation process to how many dumpsters to rent.

From the very beginning we wanted it to be a show that was inclusive of all aspects of indie art culture, not just comics. That’s why we brought in folks from varying fields everything from printmakers, animators, record labels, music collectives . . . and of course cartoonists.

The show was a success apparently and we are already planning the next one for 2015.

– continued next page
– copyright Simon Sandall.

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