I’ve decided to start blogging more frequently about Occupy and Oakland since when I tweet I just tip off the local press who won’t hire me. And I’m not going to put those frequent posts here, because this is more of a Susie Cagle clearing house for all my work.

So the blog is here! First post is about Occupy Oakland’s latest camp and police raid last night.

I have a new long piece at Cartoon Movement about faith-based crisis pregnancy centers in the Bay Area. I visited a bunch of them over the last couple months pretending to be naive and knocked-up. A column detailing why and how I did it will be up later today is right here.

I went into this weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform expecting a lot of hand-shaking and back-patting — and not necessarily a whole lot else, to be honest. I am forever the cynic, especially when it comes to events where preaching to the choir seems to be the main course (e.g. comics conventions). However, while I don’t want to give away the ending of my illustrated piece for Truthout, I came away from NCMR with quite a different feeling. I think preaching to the choir works when there’s a culture of collaboration instead of straight competition; self-made abundance as opposed to scarcity, that sort of thing. I’m drawing and painting the Truthout piece today and tomorrow, and I’ll be filing as soon as it’s dry.

Not to say there wasn’t hand-shaking and back-patting too. I met a ton of amazing people over the weekend, so many of whom were excited about the possibilities of comics journalism! It was appropriate timing that my piece for Campus Progress was blowing up via Consumerist and the Huffington Post the very same day we gave our (awesome! engaging! well-reviewed!) panel on graphic reportage. Editors, take note: if you want traffic, you want comics.

So along those lines of creating spaces for this kind of work while also fostering collaboration and abundance, I launched GraphicJournos.com this weekend. GraphicJournos had been in the pipeline for a while now, and this seemed like a great time to introduce it to the world. We are a small collective of reportage illustrators of various stripes and interests who are coming together to promote the concept of fact-based graphic storytelling. If you’re reading this blog, I probably don’t need to convince you, but please keep your eye on the site, and follow us on Twitter. We’ll be posting our own recent work, as well as the work of other creators we appreciate in comics, illustration and design, writing on topics like the ethics of drawn journalism, process and multimedia experiments, plus best practices and how-tos for editors interested in this stuff (which should be all of you!).

I’m excited! Time to draw.

I haven’t decided yet when I will start using different me’s at the bottom there. Maybe soon, maybe not.

I’m drawing cartoons for AOL’s URLesque.com now about internet things!

I’m still somewhat new to deadline drawing, and there are some things I would’ve changed had I an extra half hour there at the end for perfection — for example, there was supposed to be a bar under Cathy in that panel where she’s discussing the fall to indicate that she’s on TV. It was going to say “Developing Story: Fountain Lady Actually Reasonable.” But it was on a separate layer of tracing paper, and I forgot to scan it in! I also would have gone for a lighter purpley-gray background color, to offset the darker values in the rest of the comic.

But this is the nature of deadlines! I got used to this sort of thing when I was blogging on the regular, but cartoonists are a perfectionist bunch, and we usually have the time for that sort of coddling. I think the deadline drawing agrees with me, though, and I look forward to doing these better, faster, and error-free in the future.

I did this illustration for the Awl’s series running this month of less mainstream recipes for the holiday. More to come in the next couple days. First I have to perfect the spiced sweet potatoes.

My first installment in a new bimonthly series for The Rumpus just went up! I’ll be telling mostly Census stories, with some others thrown in when the paperwork gets too boring. I’m really excited to be working with The Rumpus, even though I think the Blue Bottle in Dolores Park is no big deal.

Also tonight I’ll be reading second in a sweet line-up of cartoonists at Comic Relief in Berkeley, starting at 8 p.m. Free beer and lots of talent! Tao Lin RSVPed “maybe” on Facebook!

This week and next I’ll be guest-blogging about San Francisco neighborhoods, real estate, transit and other pertinent junk over at Curbed SF. You might remember I was the editor of Curbed SF back in 2008. It’s kind of fun to be back on my old beat, but I’d forgotten how stressful quota blogging is — especially when it comes to the snarky commenters. For as much as I complain about it, I kind of like the self-congratulatory back-patting world of comics a bit better.

A bit!

So far I’ve raised $600 for my story about Mid-Market blight and troubles, past and future, at California crowdfunding journalism site Spot.Us. I’m humbled and amazed by the generosity of my friends and strangers — and I’m surprised by the general interest in this topic. The story will be finished in two weeks (hey Newsom, call me back!) but in the meanwhile, I’ve been posting brief updates on the Spot.Us site. My most recent one concerned this little infographic seen here.

When McSweeney’s hired me to write this story for the Panorama, they also hired graphic designer Laura Foxgrover to work up an accompanying infographic that would include my reporting on the individual empty buildings plus a map of the Mid-Market area. I’m working with Laura to update the graphic for Spot.Us and I’ll be paying her 15% of whatever I raise. This is just an unreadable preview of Laura’s most recent draft — we’ll be adding a bunch more info to the map by the time the piece is out.

Consider this another reminder to subscribe to Harper’s Weekly Review as soon as Webly possible (or you can just read them all at the archives). They have real sweet kickers. e.g.

“Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the destruction of parts of an ancient Muslim cemetery, where some of Saladin’s warriors are buried, to make way for a new Frank Gehry-designed $250 million Museum of Tolerance.”