Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged caleb orecchio, Dash Shaw, gabriella tito, Gary Panter, hannah kaplan, juan fernandez, Michael DeForge, robyn chapman, simon reinhardt

Juan Fernández

Posted on January 8, 2017January 8, 2017

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03/30/2016

Sally IngrahamMarch 30, 2016NewsHighlighting Retrofit Comics and bringing some words of wisdom from Jillian Fleck, along with a new comic – plus a kitchen disaster from Byron Alaff and dating woes from Julia Wertz. ————————————————————————————————— Retrofit Comics has 9 days left on their Kickstarter campaign! Take a gander at their list of artists, and you’ll immediately recognize the publisher to be a general force for greatness in the comics community. The crop of books they’re currently publishing is particularly spectacular. It includes titles by the likes of James Kochalka (Elf Cat in Love), who has the distinction of being the first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont. Eleanor Davis has an offering (Libby’s Dad), and Kaeleigh Forsyth and Alabaster Pizzo teamed up on Hellbound (here’s a process post from them about the “raw material” the book was sourced from). Also among the comics that may get loosed on the world, should the Kickstarter make it to the stretch goals, are works by Anya Davidson and Tyler Landry. Pretty rad. Please support Retrofit Comics by pitching some funds their way, or helping to spread the word. Check out the Kickstarter HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Jillian Fleck joined us today on the Comics Workbook website with some thoughts about finishing your comic, and the type of value you place on your own work. Jillian is a cartoonist from Calgary, Alberta, who is currently going to school in Scotland. She still finds time to draw Bad Thoughtz on a regular basis (check out this achingly hilarious comic HERE) and recently made a lovely observational piece for the Comics Workbook tumblr. This one demonstrates how Jillian follows her own suggestions regarding keeping the process playful, mixing it up. From her article: This is why I encourage you to finish your comic, so you can get up tomorrow and begin your next one. It can be about whatever you want, and can be drawn however you choose. Itʼs entirely new and up to you. Just think, if you finish it in one day, tomorrow you wonʼt have to suffer under the decisions of the past. If you finish your comic in one go, you could put it up on the wall and look at it, think about why you did what you did. Then the day after, maybe you can build on that. Or do something different. You can set challenges for yourself. Can you tell a complete story in a single page? Inside a triangle? On a roll of toilet paper? Please read the full piece HERE – lots of good stuff to consider. ————————————————————————————————— Byron Alaff published a one pager today that cracked me up. We’ve all had that kitchen mishap I’m sure! Byron keeps up a steady stream of comics on his website – take some time to scan through and find your favorite among the various styles and topics he lands on. ————————————————————————————————— The Denver Independent Comics Expo (DINK) went down last weekend (March 25-26) and although we’re still waiting for a proper scene report for this brand new event, Julia Wertz gave us a little glimpse of the action: Indeed it is. (Noah Van Sciver will be one of the guests at PIX this coming weekend, incidentally.) ————————————————————————————————— That’s a wrap on your Wednesday news! I’ll bump into you with more tidbits next week. – Sally Share this page: [...]

8 1/2 by Roman Muradov

Chris Anthony DiazAugust 4, 2016The Diaz ArchiveRoman Muradov’s portrayal of Barbara Steele as Gloria Morin from Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (Italy, 1963) for my ILLUSTRATED MOMENTS IN CINEMA/TELEVISION. Roman dressed up like TOBY DAMMIT and his candid along with Alison Dubois was taken at Mission: Comics & Art, San Francisco, Friday, October 12, 2012. And Graham Willcox did the color on Roman’s candid Share this page: [...]

04/03/2018

Aaron CockleApril 2, 2018NewsAaron here today with Keren Katz; Mounira Al Solh; Yvan Alagbé; DRT; SOIMOCCA; Generative Adversarial Networks ————————————————————————————————— Keren Katz on The Academic Hour The 213th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 3, 2018 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, Kellen Auditorium (Room N101, off the lobby), Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. 66 Fifth Avenue. Free and open to the public. Keren will talk about the process of using dance, performance, props and costumes to generate the events that have inspired this book as well as her upcoming projects. She will demonstrate the techniques and references used to compose her pages and will also display a collection of contemporary Israeli Graphic Novels for viewing. Keren Katz is a Tel Aviv based illustrator, comics artist and the non fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She graduated Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, and received an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in NYC. She has contributed stories to anthologies published by Retrofit/Big Planet Comics, Locust Moon Comics, Smoke Signal, The Brooklyn Rail, Ink Brick Rough House Comics and more, as well as self publishing mini-comics all year round. She practices performative, interactive and collaborative storytelling marathons in odd locations, and is part of The Humdrum Comics Collective and Pathos Mathos Company. Her Ignatz nominated debut graphic novel is titled The Academic Hour (Secret Acres, 2017). https://www.instagram.com/thekatzsisters/ ————————————————————————————————— Mounira Al Solh: I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous At Art Institute Chicago through April 29, 2018. While the drawings map geographies of departure, arrival, and nonarrival through storytelling, the embroideries serve as testaments to more collective histories. Weaving together the accounts that connect and divide families, friends, and other relations across the spaces and temporalities of migration, these portraits made on fabric culminate in the Sperveri, a so-called bed-tent that memorializes recent events in the Middle East and Europe within a larger history of Islamic culture. ————————————————————————————————— Shea Hennum at AV Club on Yvan Alagbé’s Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures: The story is told elliptically, with Alagbé shifting perspective, setting, and time period without warning or explicit notation. Dialogue and exposition are collapsed into one rhetorical space, and all the text is set off from the images. The effect is a distancing, and the eye is able to focus on and fall in love with Alagbé’s images, rich black smears of ink converging and diverging from one another in passionate plays of sex, sorrow, and salvation. But while there are no white figures in the story, there are allusions to white characters, demonstrating the inescapable gravitational well that is whiteness. “Dyaa” serves as the most aesthetically pure distillation of Alagbé’s ethos, because he makes literal what was merely figurative in “Yellow Negroes”: the idea that blackness is constituted by whiteness and vice versa—infinitely complicating the questions he introduced in that first vignette, “Love.” ————————————————————————————————— Was it your intent for this book to have an air of mystery around it? RJ Casey Interviews D.R.T. The terms dodecahedrons and oblongs are used prominently in this comic and your backgrounds, even your endpapers, feature three-dimensional shapes. What is your interest in geometry? I find geometric shapes aesthetically pleasing. Also, the mathematical meaning that is inherent to geometry is equally as pleasing to me. Math is responsible for the way our universe works, from quantum mechanics to something as simple as 2+2=4. It is a universal truth that if you have two things, and add them to two other things, you will have four things. Why is that so? And why does math work so well in our universe? In the universe that Qoberious takes place in, math has the same roll and these geometric shapes symbolize that. Every time I write a scene with the Keepers, I spend days researching different mathematical concepts and when I’m all done, I think this isn’t funny, and why am I trying to prove? I end up cutting it out. ————————————————————————————————— Society of Illustrators Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art Arts Festival The MoCCA Arts Festival is a 2-day multimedia event, Manhattan’s largest independent comics, cartoon and animation festival, drawing over 7,000 attendees each year. With 400 exhibiting artists displaying their work, award-winning honorees speaking about their careers and artistic processes and other featured artists conducting workshops, lectures and film screenings, our Festival mission accelerates the advancement of the Society’s broader mission to serve as Manhattan’s singular cultural institution promoting all genres of illustration through exhibitions, programs and art education. The 2018 MoCCA Arts Festival will take place April 7-8th, 2018 at Metropolitan West in New York City with programming mere steps away at Ink48 (653 11th Ave). Here are a couple panels of note: 3:30 pm / HELVETICA ROOM The International Scene: Max de Radiguès and Anna Haifisch Every comics culture — no matter how vast only presents and perceives a fragmentary view of global comics culture, a rich field of diverse human expression that is interconnected in some ways, and disconnected in others. International festivals and publishers can be sites for global exchange, and individual artists who travel and work outside of their home countries help develop ties between comics cultures. Max de Radiguès’s graphic novel about his time at the Center for Cartoon Studies was part of the Official Selection at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême in 2012, and his second English-language translation is forthcoming from Conundrum Press. He is additionally the co-publisher of the Belgian publishing house Employ du moi. Anna Haifisch is internationally known for her comics series, The Artist, and has published widely in many languages. Her book Von Spatz was recently published by Drawn and Quarterly. They will discuss their work and the international comics scene with Bill Kartalopoulos. 2:00 pm / HELVETICA ROOM Somatic Comics: Drawing the Body Comics frequently render the body — in ways both realistic and abstract — and are typically indeces of the body, made by the hands of artists who labor at desks and tablets. Kriota Willberg’s work covers all aspects of this spectrum: her new book Draw Stronger offers medically-grounded self-care instruction for cartoonists engaged in the repetitive labor of comics-making, and her larger body of work includes drawing and needlework based on anatomical and other medical imagery. She will be joined in a discussion about comics, health, and images of the body by Kate Lacour (Vivisectionary) and Lauren Weinstein (Normel Person, “Carriers”), whose work has engaged and expressed ideas about anatomy and pathology in diverse and fascinating ways. Moderated by Marsha Hurst (Columbia University, Narrative Medicine). ————————————————————————————————— “The way that it paints faces makes me uncomfortable. It always paints them as like, purple and yellow globs — that isn’t in the training set so I’m actually still not sure why it does that” AI researcher Robbie Barrat decided to see what would happen when he fed a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) thousands of nude portraits from a dataset and then trained it to create its own bizarre artworks. Generative adversarial networks are defined as a class of artificial intelligence algorithms used in unsupervised machine learning, which uses two different neural networks, one called the “generator” and one the “discriminator.” “The generator tries to come up with paintings that fool the discriminator, and the discriminator tries to learn how to tell the difference between real paintings from the dataset and fake paintings the generator feeds it,” Barrat told me. “They both get better and better at their jobs over time, so the longer the GAN is trained, the more realistic the outputs will be.” Some additional GAN info can be found here. To understand GANs, you should know how generative algorithms work, and for that, contrasting them with discriminative algorithms is instructive. Discriminative algorithms try to classify input data; that is, given the features of a data instance, they predict a label or category to which that data belongs. ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 3-3-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

06/12/2017

Caleb OrecchioJune 12, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with some thoughts on Brighter Than You Think: Ten Short Works by Alan Moore—plus some links ————————————————————————————————— Though Alan Moore has not really drawn a comic since the late 70’s, he is so obviously the auteur of the comics he writes that I am tempted to consider him a “cartoonist.” I mean, not really, but I think a more articulate, alternate-dimension version of myself could make a strong case for that designation. Regardless of the artist, Moore’s comics have an undeniable feel and pace, even when drawn by a sub-par cartoonist—AND is never out-shined by a particularly excellent cartoonist. The latest installment of Uncivilized Books’ “Critical Cartoons” series, Brighter Than You Think: Ten Short Works by Alan Moore with essays by Marc Sobel, has been my in-between-other-readings book for about a month now. I like not reading it all the way through at once because 1.) it is a collection of short stories over almost 20 years so it makes sense to pace myself, and 2.) Moore’s work is just too damn dense to swallow in one sitting. If you add Marc Sobel’s essays that follow each comic, you’re looking at a very annotated and involved effort that requires time for thinking and reflection with each story. Something I find very interesting about Moore is his awareness of the artist. He seems to know how to “use” an artist better than any writer I know of, which, to me, aids him in diversifying the types of stories he can tell. He uses them like a solo cartoonist might pick a color to evoke mood, or use a certain brush to evoke a certain era of comics’ past. Using an artist like Mark Beyer can help to abstract a story and give it a heightened sense of reality and playfulness, whereas using an artist like Stephen Bissette can help ground a story to real-life and make a comic more like a documentary. If you’re writing a story for Peter Bagge, the writing is funny and whimsical (Moore’s ability to write comedy is WAY under appreciated in my opinion); and you write strange stories of flight and fantasy for Rick Veitch. I always found his collaboration with Melinda Gebbie, “This Is Information” (a “reaction” comic to 9/11), to be very interesting. Moore wisely keeps character at arm’s length and is communicating in symbols and metaphors; and Gebbie’s art is key because she can draw cartoony caricatures, she can draw realistic rendering of hands clasping in desperation, or she can precisely and patiently draw a falling house of cards (harder than you think). The breadth and nuance of her skills matches the breadth and nuance of emotions Alan Moore implements in this story about a devastating and monumental event. There’s so much I could say about Moore, and there’s so much people have already said. If I were a better writer I could better explain the value of such a great contributor to comics clearer. The best I can really do is point you to the work, and right now I’m pointing you to Brighter Than You Think. Go grab a copy at Uncivilized Books’ website. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know There were several links I was hoping to share today, but came to find out Sally covered most of them here on Friday (I was involved with my sisters wedding all weekend so I’m a few days behind). Go back and check out Sally’s post if you haven’t already, featuring good stuff from Trina Robbins, Jillian Tamaki, Eleanor Davis, and more. Adam West, Batman star and icon to, I’m sure, more than a few comics fans, has died at age 88. Anita Gates has an obituary over at The New York Times. I thought Chris Mautner expressed the brilliance of Alan Moore’s Providence quite well in this article on The Smart Set. The way he briefly-yet-impressively articulates Jacen Burrows’ contribution to the work was overdue I think. The Panic Fables by Alejandro Jodorowski have finally been collected and translated to English. Get a copy from Copacetic Comics. The legendary Steve Ditko is still at it, and you can contribute to his latest Kickstarter (though the goal was met very rapidly with plenty of days still to go) to get a copy of the new Mr. A which marks the 50th anniversary of the character. ————————————————————————————————— Blinkers – 6-12-2017 – by Jack Brougham ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-12-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-12-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK by Charles Forsman

Chris Anthony DiazJuly 11, 2016The Diaz ArchiveCharles Forsman’s b&w portrayal of Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken and Season Hubley as the Girl In Chock Full O’Nuts in John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981, USA) for my ILLUSTRATED MOMENTS IN CINEMA/TELEVISION collection. The illustration was completed late 2015 in ink, and Charles’ photo was taken at Comic Arts Brooklyn, Saturday, November 7, 2015. And Graham Willcox did the color for Charles’ portrait Share this page: [...]

01/09/2017

Posted on January 8, 2017January 8, 2017 by Juan Fernández

A month of diary comics by Hannah Kaplan; Simon Reinhardt’s Mystery Town; Michael Deforge’s twitter comics; Gary Panter; Dash Shaw on Moonlight; Robyn Chapman’s 2016 Micro-Press Survey; Weird chat robot theater; and daily strips by Juan Fernandez, Caleb Orecchio and Gabriella Tito.

Juan here. It’s getting bone chillingly cold here in Pittsburgh. We’re starting to burn the shitty minicomics to stay warm…it’s getting rough out here. Hope you’re warm at least, dear reader!

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The 2016 Micro-Press Survey is now live! If you’re a micropublisher, would you take a moment to fill it out? Robyn Chapman puts this together every year and its an invaluable resource for the scene as it ebbs and flows in energy and size. New for the 2016 Yearbook: Publishers that only publish anthologies will now be included in the Micro-Press Yearbook. If you only publish anthologies, please complete the regular 2016 Survey. If you’d like to recommend some anthology publishers for the list, please contact Robyn at robertaraechapman (at) gmail (dot) com.
Weird robot theater – You can now watch Two Google home bots chat live. They go at it on a variety of topics, usually bickering back and forth. There’s a text stream in case you can’t quite make out what they’re saying. If you want a fun comics excercise, jot down some of their exchanges and use them as the fuel for a dialogue in a strip. Weird AI (fueled by cleverbot‘s AI) that creates a quiet, DADAist bit of chat logs you could imagine Samuel Beckett scripting.
Philadelphia based cartoonist Hannah Kaplan is making a diary comic everyday this month. Catch up with the past week and tune in for the rest of the month. Highly recommended if you like the work of Gabrielle Bell, Julie Delporte or Sacha Mardou.

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Did you know Simon Reinhardt released twelve issues of Mystery Town in 2016? 1 Every month. You can read them all (plus the first two issues, from 2015) right here: http://mystery-town.tumblr.com/all Featuring guest comics from Luke Healy, Reilly Hadden, Nik James, Dean Sudarsky, Aaron Cockle and yours truly.

The diligence and commitment of a King Cat zine with the far out obliqueness of comics by CF.

Simon Reinhart has been putting out these monthly issues in a really fun and smart distribution model for zines. He makes the print ready PDF available online for free for you to print at home and brings copies around with him to give away wherever he exhibits. It’s clever in that the physical version of these comics is available for distribution anywhere, without him having to do a crazy amount of work printing and distributing.

What I think is the most beautiful part of this is the nature of distortion in these zines. He’s playing around with different kinds of visual distortion and abstraction of images through his cartooning and the digital and analogue reproduction techniques he uses. Physical drawings scanned, photographed, halftoned, dithered… And of course, each zine comes out printed differently according to the kind of printer that is being used by the reader at home.
So, hop on over to Mystery Town, print some issues out, staple them together, have a read and leave it somewhere for someone to find it.

CW students, here’s my word to the wise: Consider self-publishing a monthly zine. Whatever writing or drawings you make that month, include it in the zine. Give it a cool name like SIRK or DEEP GIRL. Hold yourself to that deadline. Keep production simple. Black and white xerox it. Some months will be great, some months will be not so great. That’s ok. What’s most important is that you’ll be processing your world on your own terms through your comics. You can do it.

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Michael DeForge is publishing a new comic on his Twitter thread…! The first episode is shown above, and there have been further updates since then. Check it out – follow Michael on Twitter – @michael_deforge.

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Dash Shaw was one of a number of contributors to a cool feature on Talkhouse Film – The 2016 Talkies: Talkhouse Film Contributors’ Top Films of the Year. The favorite theatrical releases of 2016 were voted on and then graphic and written responses were shared, including Dash’s illustration for the movie Moonlight (above). Check out the rest of the list HERE.

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The pages pictured above are from Gary Panter’s ground-breaking and totally hilarious Cola Madnes.

“Cola Madnes was created by Panter primarily for his Japanese audience (who named a cafe in Nagoya ‘Gary Panter Squar’ in his honor) using a manga-style two-panel-per-page layout that paid silent and respectful homage to the work of Toho Studios (creator of Godzilla) and comic book legend Jack “King” Kirby. Cola Madnes was Gary Panter’s artistic “holy mission” way back in 1983. A project that was spawned from sketch-book jottings to rise up phoenix-like 18 years later as a smoldering piece of graphic and literary art that deserves to be stacked alongside J.G. Ballard’s Crash and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.” – via Fantagraphics.com

Gary Panter generously donated this seminal book – along with 100 Drawings, where Gary documents many of his best commissions – to Comics Workbook to help support the Rowhouse Residency and our other projects. Get copies of both at the school store – HERE.

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1-9-2017 – by Juan Fernández

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Joanie and Jordie – 1-9-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio

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Suzy and Cecil – 1-9-2017 – by Gabriella Tito

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged caleb orecchio, Dash Shaw, gabriella tito, Gary Panter, hannah kaplan, juan fernandez, Michael DeForge, robyn chapman, simon reinhardt

Juan Fernández

Posted on January 8, 2017January 8, 2017

Explore

07/18/2017

Aaron CockleJuly 18, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Helen Jo; Safari Festival Reminder; Chitra Ganesh; Helen Frankenthaler ————————————————————————————————— ‘Without a car, commuting into the city via public transit becomes a nightmare.’ Alex Wong talks with Helen Jo about Jo’s translation of Yeon-sik Hong’s Uncomfortably Happily: Do you think, compared to other books, there was less of a risk of the original material being lost in translation in Uncomfortably Happily? Because of all the universal themes that are covered in the book? I think that something may always be lost in translation. Translating from one language to the next is not mathematics. Even if you strip away all of the cultural context and stick to the academic bare bones of a language itself, you can’t fit a Korean peg into an English hole. Each language is a system of words, connotations, innuendo, context, unspoken intentions, and none of it is exactly equal to its foreign counterparts. I think a good translation is mindful of that fact, and tries to re-interpret the intent behind the words for the new audience. I may not have been able to provide an exact translation, because an exact translation cannot truly exist, but I did my best to bring the intention and meaning and context of each and every page to the English reader. ————————————————————————————————— Safari Festival 2017 ————————————————————————————————— Tales of Amnesia This is just a link to an image search for Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of Amnesia comics. ————————————————————————————————— As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings / No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts Helen Frankenthaler has two exhibitions currently at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA, USA. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 7-18-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 7-18-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 7-18-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

07/27/2018

Sally IngrahamJuly 27, 2018NewsSally Ingraham here with comics and news from Nick Fowler, Annie Koyama, Believer Magazine, and much more! ————————————————————————————————— Here on the site Nick Fowler writes about his recent Rowhouse Residency: “One of the most important things that was cemented for me during my time at the Rowhouse was the immense importance of environment. In both a social sense…and a more literal, spatial sense. The room at the Rowhouse had a bed, a table and a box of Love and Rockets (#17-28 if I remember correctly). And nothing else. Every day I would wake up and take two steps to the drawing table to either draw, or to read Love and Rockets and then draw. For the week I was there, there was nothing else I had to do. It felt like a splash of cold water on my face.“ Read the rest of Nick’s Residency Report HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Annie Koyama has announced that she is changing the way in which she supports artists. She will conclude her time as a publisher in 2021, closing the doors of Koyama Press. Her focus will shift to channelling her financial support and incredible positive energy directly into the hands of specific artists whom she chooses to be a patron of. She spoke to The Comics Journal about “switching gears”: ” “I will not tell the artists how to do anything,” Koyama said. “There are no strings attached. Once I decide to work with an artist, as I have always done with the press, I put enough trust in them and their project not to interfere. They don’t need my creative help, they need money.” How this next venture will work is still being formulated. Though the projects she supports will not be owned by Koyama, recipients of these “micro-grants” will be expected to fulfill their end of the bargain, whether if be self-publishing the project, offering a performance, or whatever Koyama and the participating party agree to. Additionally, the publisher expects to continue to pursue broader methods of support by hosting financial and business literary workshops and supplementing residencies. Her support will not be limited to cartoonists, either. Koyama recently supported a feature film and is already contributing support to projects with several fine artists. “I am choosing the artists because I like their work,” Koyama said. “I feel that they deserve a higher profile. I know that they can’t do it on their own. What I am most interested in is taking people who are known for one discipline and for example, helping them to try another discipline. For example, people who are good at drawing already but really want to work on a little stop motion animation. Or they want to go off and learn to play the trumpet, try sculpture, learn printmaking or start community art related initiatives.” Read the rest of the article and full announcement HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Believer Magazine has updated their website and built an archive for the comics that have appeared in the printed mag. Above is a page from Leela Corman‘s story Kraut – read the rest HERE. You will also find comics by Andrea Tsurumi, Ann Xu, Jennifer Camper, Anna Haifisch, and others. Check out the archive! ————————————————————————————————— Hyperallergic features an article about Carol Tyler and her new comic Fab4 Mania – HERE. Lauren Weinstein‘s Normal Person now appears at popula.com – here’s the latest strip! Mimi Pond also has a new comic up at Popula – Blind Dates of the Near Future. Jessica Campbell‘s latest comic on Hyperallergic – Musings About Life Today – can be read HERE. Anders Nilson writes about the process and responsibility of finishing a friend’s last book – A Bubble, by Geneviève Castrée (who passed away in 2016) – on The Comics Journal. Here’s an excerpt from Nancy Peña’s Madame Cat – on Paste Magazine. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 7-27-2018 – by Gabriella Tito Share this page: [...]

07/25/2016

Juan FernándezJuly 25, 2016NewsJuan Fernandez here with: Tom Kemp’s MIDDEN FEEDER; building your goddamn website;Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey to Write Black Panther spin off World of Wakanda; Mark Newgarden’s Garbage Pail Kids interview; Zara rips off illustrators; Comic Arts Brooklyn 2016; The NIB takes Philly; 2016 Eisner Award Winners; new Street Angel; latest Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency Auction. ————————————————————————————————— midden feeder by Tom Kemp I’m happy to announce that we are featuring Tom Kemp’s midden feeder on the site this week. midden feeder was made by Tom Kemp in 2015 and was printed for Safari Festival 2015. Kemp will be surfing the new waves in contemporary comics and art at this year’s Safari Festival in London on August 27th. Don’t miss him! ————————————————————————————————— Build yerr own damn Website Max Riffner lays out how to build a comics website that works for you. It takes some effort but with Riffner’s detailed tips, you can make the most of the best tools available online today to make the site that best suits your work. and can keep you from getting stuck with antiquated web hosting services. No one else is going to do it for you, so get cracking! Your cartoonist website is your digital hub. Get that through your head right now. Your website is home base for everything that you do. It’s going to represent you and your work. It needs to be professional. It needs to work, and it needs to work for you. In fact, this is all about you and your freedom. Some of the hosting services may offer to provide domain name registration. And whichever domain registrar you use may offer hosting. The temptation to have everything in one spot is high. Don’t do it. Sometimes, either one will hold the name or the hosting hostage. You want to have these pieces all separate from each other so you can easily move services. ————————————————————————————————— Taking trash with Mark Newgarden – 2016 Interview The Garbage Pail Kids website has a wonderful, extensive intervew with Mark Newgarden on his time working for GPK. They go into lots of juicy production details and discuss Newgarden’s formative years. Exciting. What was it like working with the many artists involved in creating GPK? Correspondence and communications is so different now-a-days; I would imagine receiving Pound’s paintings with paint strokes would be a lot different than receiving a scanned electronic image these days. Can you explain the teacher/student relationship you had with Spiegelman and were you comfortable directing the GPK artists? I have to say, the original sets are untouchable when it comes to the level of quality (even printed on lesser-grade card). There was always a lot of creative back and forth, it was a big part of the job. Phone meetings, faxes, Fed-Exed tracing paper overlays with notes. Art and I were usually on the same page. John’s pencils or paintings would come in on a Monday and I’d make notes all over them. Then on Tuesday, Art would make notes on my notes and we’d usually call John in the afternoon and hash it all out. Tom Bunk and James Warhola were local, so they’d take the subway. We’d all do lunch in the fabled Topps cafeteria and then go through the same routine in person. At times (when there was time) we’d go through 2, 3, even 4 rounds of revisions on a single image to get it just right. The input usually focused on emphasizing clarity and amplifying (or extending) the gag. The goal was always to balance impact with visual clarity. May sound obvious, but it really isn’t always so simple. The initial staging or composition of a GPK gag was crucial as to whether it lived or died. Then the execution needed to be solid and plausible and never distract, or get in the way of the concept. John set a very high bar from the start. Tom brought a wacky energy to the mix. James added an air of foreboding mood and mystery. Seeing what these guys would come back with was always the highlight of my week. It was fun and collaborative, and I think our fresh eyes and brain cells helped make better GPKs. ————————————————————————————————— Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey to Write Black Panther spin off World of Wakanda The New York Times has announced that Ta-Nehisi Coates has brought on Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey to work on Black Panther: World of Wakanda, an upcoming Black Panther spin off. News out of left-field from the world of the Big 2 but a relief and a ray of very necessary light. And just like the current Black Panther series, which is written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author and a national correspondent for The Atlantic, the new comic will be written by newcomers to the industry: the feminist writer Roxane Gay and the poet Yona Harvey. “My agent was not thrilled that I was taking on another project,” Ms. Gay said. But learning to write comics exercised different creative muscles, which she said she found exciting. “It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever done, and I mean that in the best possible way,” she said. ————————————————————————————————— Comic Arts Brooklyn 2016: It’s a go! The premiere NYC art comics show, CAB, has announced that the festival WILL be happening this year. It will take place on November 5th. Exhibitor applications available soon. ————————————————————————————————— Artists Take a Bold Stand After Accusing Zara of Ripping Off Over a Dozen of Their Designs Spanish clothing retailer Zara, like many corporations, has no qualms at throwing their weight around when it comes to plagiarizing the designs of illustrators for their own use. Zara was found to be ripping off illustrator Tuesday Bassen’s designs. Bassen took matters into her own hands and spoke publicly on twitter last week about the incident. The internet took notice. Marie Solis has comprehensive coverage of the whole corporate debacle over on Mic.com. In an interview with the Daily Dot Bassen said, “It absolutely hurts my business and waters down the brand I’ve slowly built based around my original artwork.” She added that the legal fees alone are enough to tear down an independent artist: She’d paid $2,000 just to send her claims to Zara. But Bassen isn’t giving up — not just for her own sake, but for the recognition of at least a dozen other artists who also believe Zara has stolen their designs. New York City illustrator Adam J. Kurtz said when Bassen’s tweet blew up, he and a handful of other artists were texting and Facebook messaging each other, realizing the brand had stolen a slew of their designs all at once. ————————————————————————————————— The NIB takes Philly The NIB is taking over an art gallery and transforming it into their headquarters, bringing in six cartoonists to cover the 2016 Democratic Convention. If you loved their coverage of the Republican Convention last week, you’re not going to want to miss them this week. They’re going full force. ————————————————————————————————— 2016 Eisner Award Winners Announced Tom Spurgeon reports this years Eisner Award winners from San Diego Comic Con. The award ceremony was held Friday July 22nd. The winners for this year’s Eisner Awards were announced last night at a fancy program at the Hilton Bayfront. It was a well-received program, with a little bit of something for everyone: John Barrowman making nerd-culture and penis jokes, emotional speeches, people being adorable, Ed Brubaker and Gary Groth and Peggy Burns kind of mixing it up acceptance-speech wise. It was great to see a night where Kate Beaton got an award and Lynda Barry got in the Hall Of Fame. Two great cartoonists. I thought the winners were all pretty good. There were two I’d change if I could — actually more, because I’m a jerk, but two stood out to me as personal “aw, man” moments. That’s actually really good for an awards show. Biggest surprise was Bill Schelly’s Kurtzman book, I think. Spurgeon’s full reporting from SDCC 2016 is now online and available HERE. It’s always a pleasure to see this world through Spurgeon’s eyes, especially if you’ve never stepped foot in SDCC before. ————————————————————————————————— —————————————————————————— New Private Rowhouse Auction – 7.24-7.30 Last but not least, we have a new private auction up at auction.comicsworkbook.com! Lots of old and new comics for you to take home. email Frank Santoro at santoroschoolATgmail for a password, if you don’t already have one. If you already have a password, it is the same from last week. All funds go to helping keep the lights on and further developing the school. until next time! Juan Share this page: [...]

08/04/2017

Sally IngrahamAugust 4, 2017NewsSally here to finish the week with the focus on Flo Steinberg, and Lynda Barry – plus other news and comics by fabulous women! ———————————————————————————————— Flo Steinberg, longtime secretary of Marvel’s Stan Lee, and underground comics publisher extraordinaire, died last week. Any number of obituaries and tributes have shown up since then, but I especially enjoyed the memories of Michael J. Vassallo, who was a friend as well as a fan of Flo’s. He wrote about her life and work and their friendship on his blog Timely-Atlas-Comics – read all about her HERE (via The Comics Reporter). Flo’s escapades at Marvel are well known – her work ethic, her enjoyment of the form, and her support and interest in the creators inspired devotion and respect from everyone she met. When she left Marvel in 1968 she dove into the world of underground comics, and produced one of the very first independent comics EVER – Big Apple Comix (1975). The one-shot featured work by Wally Wood, Neil Adams, Al Williamson, Denny O’Neil, Archie Goodwin, Ralph Reese, Marie Severin, Paul Kirchner, Stu Schwartzberg, Alan Weiss, Herb Trimpe, Mike Ploog and Larry Hama. Linda Fite contributed a strip and helped with the production, alongside John Verpoorten and Michele Brand. Flo was the editor. She printed 20,000 copies (some stories say) and Warren Publishing helped her store and distribute it. The comic helped build the wave of direct market publications which led to the thriving alternative and underground comics scene of the 80’s. Read more about Big Apple Comix HERE. As one of the stewards of the comics community and a bridge between the mainstream and underground worlds, “Fabulous” Flo earned her status as a “legend” and is certainly an inspiration to those of us who feel compelled to till the earth and look to the tending of this scene. I hope she continues to turn that beautiful smile on us from wherever she is now – and keep us on target as well! ———————————————————————————————— If you were to only read comics by Lynda Barry, and no one else, for a year, you would learn just as much about living – with yourself and with others, and in this weird world – and about the craft of making comics, as you would by reading widely and deeply all across the medium. I revisited One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) recently and it was like being picked up by a tornado full of bright objects, spun round roughly, and spat back out a few blocks away from where I’d started, dizzy and bruised, but laughing. Lynda’s ability to delve into her own memories of childhood, to summon the demons and put them in their place, is frightening and beautiful. Lyda reminds one that childhood is a wild place, and how you felt then is not so different from how you feel now – and that’s okay. I appreciate that Lynda stuck to some formal restraints in the making of this comic – all square panels, arranged in a row of 4 across a spread – which makes for a comforting beat as you move through the somewhat tumultuous story. The black line (made with a brush) and the colors are very satisfying. Her figures are somewhat grotesque at times – even the “pretty” ones – but they are wonderfully alive and vivid. This is great cartooning, in the proper sense of the word, not just lovely illustrations in sequence with word balloons. Groundbreaking at it’s time of publication, and still just as good. Get a copy of One! Hundred! Demons! HERE. Lynda is one of my greatest inspirations as a master cartoonist and a woman. Her teaching and lecturing has impacted numerous creatives and non-creatives alike – as this New York Times Magazine article from 2011 proclaimed, “Cartoonist Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe in Yourself“. For another dose of passion and drive, check out this Ink Talk about how “the answer is in the picture“: Lynda Barry lives and teaches in Wisconsin. She created a comic strip that was nationally syndicated for 2-decades (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), and has created numerous graphic novels, prose novels, plays, and how-to books. She was recently given the National Cartooning Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, and is in the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. She doesn’t mess around, and she doesn’t keep quiet – Lynda is a force of nature and we are lucky as cartoonists to count her among us. Keep up with Lynda Barry HERE – and with “the Near-Sighted Monkey” version of Lynda HERE. ———————————————————————————————— The Rest of the Party Women Write About Comics has a nice overview of some recent acquisitions to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum – a wonderful new collection of original art by female cartoonists of the 80’s and 90’s. Read and see pictures HERE. Philippe Leblanc reviews a number of Shee Phon‘s comics over on The Comics Beat – check out his take on her “progressive and personal” work HERE. Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristin Radtke has been getting mixed reviews – over on The Comics Journal Greg Hunter is pretty clear about not liking it – and I find myself thankful that some people are still willing to talk about what makes certain comics poor works of art and storytelling. Check out the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s Digital Exhibit of work by Edwina Dumm! Zainab Akhtar is going for Critical Chips 2 – check out the Kickstarter HERE. Brigid Alverson writes about Svetlana Chmakova‘s career over on Publishers Weekly. Sarah Glidden has an on-the-spot autobio comic posted HERE. The celebration of Annie Koyama and Koyama Press’s 10th anniversary continues! Read about it over on Nekkei Voice. ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 8-4-17 – by Gabriella Tito ———————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 8-4-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

Wizard World Sacramento 2016

Chris Anthony DiazJuly 8, 2016The Diaz ArchiveHoward Chaykin along with original art featuring Nick Fury and a paint pen signed AMERICAN FLAGG!: SOUTHERN COMFORT, Paolo and Joe Rivera and Gerhard with his cover for THE COMICS JOURNAL 130 Dave Sim interview. Appeared at Wizard World Sacramento 2016, Saturday, June 18th. Portraits colored by Graham Willcox Share this page: [...]

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