CCS alumni Dan Nott ’18 and Daryl Seitchik ’18 have joined together to form Parsifal Press. With a focus on minicomics and other special objects, they are preparing to reprint some of their old favorites as well as new work. Their first collection of work is for sale, Parsifal Parcel #1, in part thanks to a Koyama Provides grant.

Dan talked with Angela Boyle ’16 about their project:

We decided to name our press Parsifal after one of the seekers of the holy grail, whose name means “pure fool.” This seemed like a fitting name for us, since our favorite comics have an indescribable magic to them that can only come from being playful and pure of heart on the page.   

Daryl Seitchik

What are your goals with this project?

For nearly as long as we’ve known each other, we’ve been talking about making a press. We make very different comics, but we have similar tastes and aesthetics, and a desire to share the comics we love with the rest of the world. We see Parsifal as a space and platform for artists to explore comics with empathy and a little bit of magic.   

Comics—particularly minicomics and zines—can sometimes have a short life to them that’s often limited to the convention cycle and the amount of energy an individual artist wants to put into distribution. For now, we want to republish our favorites with new attention to production and wider distribution.

So far we’ve published Follow the Doll, Issue One by Daryl, and a tiny abolition zine [Abolition Is a Presence] from Dan that’s raising money for Critical Resistance. We’re also carrying a screen-printed bookmark by Cuyler Keating ’19, and our latest is a risographed poetry comic by Sage Clemmons ’20 called Everyone Is Sorry. 

What are your plans for the foreseeable future?

We received a Koyama Provides grant, which we’re going to use to publish The Lover of Everyone in the World by Beatrix Urkowitz. When we decided to start publishing, we both had Sage and Beatrix’s work in mind. 

Looking to the future, we want to find a way to make special comics available. We love some of the publishing experiments going on—like Luke Howard’s ’13 Pay-it-forward model with Goes Books, or ShortBox’s digital comics subscription. Our current plan is to continue working with comic shops and distributors to get these books and objects out into the world.  

Small presses serve such an important role in comics. A small or micro press is able to highlight and talk about work in a way that can be difficult for an artist to do themselves, and also make room for a wider variety of comics. I love that there’s a growing market for 200-page graphic novels, but short and medium length stories are just as important to the medium and community. I’m hoping that Parsifal Press can be an outlet for this type of work. 

Dan Nott

Tags: Cuyler Keating, Dan Nott, Daryl Seitchik, Everyone Is Sorry, Follow the Doll, Parsifal Press, Sage Clemens