Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged adam griffiths, black comic book festival, caleb orecchio, derick jones, juan fernandez, sally ingraham, sam ombiri, shannon wright, tyler landry

Sally Ingraham

Posted on January 12, 2017January 12, 2017

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Comics Workbook Workshops at SPX 2019

Juan FernándezAugust 19, 2019Festivals and Shows / NewsJoin Juan Fernandez and the Comics Workbook gang for a series of workshops featuring hands-on instruction from some of the most talented makers of independent comics. All workshops will held in the Glen Echo and Oakley rooms downstairs at the Marriott Hotel. Please consult the workshop schedule and sign up in advance to insure a spot. Walk-ins will be welcome, however, space permitting. (Curious about this years panels? Check out the rest of the fantastic programming available at SPX this year.) SIGN UP HERE FOR ANY OF THE SPX 2019 COMICS WORKBOOK WORKSHOPS. SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 14 11:00 – 12:00 pm Glen Echo Room Take a crash course in comics making – for kids big and small. We will bring the grids, the markers, the know-how – you bring your personal spark. Discover the comics-maker within you and let them out! Join Richie Pope for an easy foray into comics making – the perfect thing to start a weekend at SPX! All ages. 12:00 – 1:00 pm Glen Echo Room Join Jessica Abel and design your days with clarity and purpose, so the things that get done are what you care about most. Figure out where your time really goes, and use that information to create an action plan for your week built around your current reality, not some fantasy version of your life. Make smart, conscious decisions about your time, and take control of your creative life. 1:00 – 2:00 pm Glen Echo Room Learn how to make miniature clay cakes with Sweet Success & Sweet Competition author/sculptor Liz Reed. Attendees will create their very own unique clay character as Liz guides the class through different sculpting techniques using everyday household items. 2:00 – 3:00 pm Glen Echo Room Loglines aren’t just for screenwriters. If you’ve ever put together a pitch for a publisher or just needed 1-2 sentences for a Kickstarter project description, knowing how to communicate your story in a concise and effective way is essential for any comics creator. Led by Kickstarter’s Comics Outreach Lead Camilla Zhang, this workshop will help you craft a compelling logline or refine one you already have in the works. If you have a pitch you’d like to workshop, please bring up to 20 copies. 3:00 – 4:00 pm Glen Echo Room Tom Hart, the founder of The Sequential Artist’s Workshop (SAW), will help you with your storytelling flow! Feeling stuck? Tense? Like you can’t figure out which way to turn? Not sure which idea to build on or how to tell a good idea from a bad? Do you feel overwhelmed or underwhelmed by your own ideas? Loosen up and follow your story ideas from beginning to end in this workshop. Daydreaming, not drawing skill, is necessary. 4:00 – 5:00 pm Glen Echo Room Rachel Masilamani will lead a workshop for people who draw and people who don’t think that they can draw of all ages. We’ll work on shaping stories together. What comes first? What comes second, and how can we tie it all together? 5:00 – 6:00 pm Glen Echo Room Join cartoonist Fifi Martinez to learn how to explore how we can capture and share the emotional essence of what our subjective lives feel like in real time through comics. Using drawing, writing, diagramming and the collage-like capacity of comics, attendees will experience what it is like to keep a comics diary and how their comics can be used for reflection, meditation, and healing. 6:00 – 7:00 pm Glen Echo Room Emil Friis Ernst takes you through the basics of spatial design to boost your visual vocabulary with a third dimension. In this workshop, you will learn how to put characters in perspective easily, use the space around a character to tell a story, and use the third dimension to make poetry. SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 15 12:00 – 1:00 pm Oakley Room The ability to draw is a basic human ability, and sequential images are prevalent across human history. This fundamental aspect of human expression yields several important questions, such as how are such individual and sequential images structured, and how do people process and comprehend them? Join Juan Fernandez to learn how Visual Language Theory offers a framework to answer these questions and how principles and methods of the linguistic and cognitive sciences can enrich and expand our ability to make, read, and teach comics. 1:00 – 2:00 pm Oakley Room Estate Planning, Preventative Care, and Health and Wellness: these often neglected issues can up have huge impacts on the lives of cartoonists and those around them if not considered early on in life. Join Carol Tyler for an intergenerational community discussion on how we can create a better world for cartoonists to work and live. 2:00 – 3:00 pm Oakley Room In this workshop, you will work with NPR’s Malaka Gharib, the author of I WAS THEIR AMERICAN DREAM: A Graphic Memoir, on using the mini-zine format to explore your personal histories. In a brief presentation, she will discuss the power of mini zines in inspiring artists to make short and completable creative projects that are perfectly sharable in the Instagram age. Using deliberate questions aimed to have participants reflect on their own personal immigration stories, participants will create their own zine. This workshop is intended for anyone with an immigrant story to share, and all are welcome! At the workshop, we hope you will be able to complete one mini zine using a template or your own design. 3:00 – 4:00 pm Oakley Room Cartoonists can work in many different ways, shared studios, solo studios, and from home, each of which are conducive to very different kinds of work. Join Aimée De Jongh & Kenny Rubinis to discuss the art and craft of the cartoonist’s workspace. Among the topics covered will be the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of workspace. 4:00 – 5:00 pm Oakley Room Kickstarter may be the place to expose your comics project to a wider audience, but the secret to crowdfunding will always lie in the crowd! Build your community building muscle and learn some outreach tips and tricks at this fun workshop, where you can make new connections and reaffirm old ones. This session will be led by Kickstarter’s Comics Outreach Lead, Camilla Zhang. 5:00 – 6:00 pm Oakley Room Comics language and cinematic language are two distinct, yet related visual dialects. Each offers unique advantages in creating engaging experiences for audiences. We’ll dive in and dissect the work of a few specific animation designers as we broadly discuss composition and sequential storytelling tools as they might pertain to all visual storytelling media, focusing on emotion, engagement, charm, and clarity. Bring a sketchbook to record your visual thoughts as we take a deep dive into some tools that might help broaden your approach to storytelling. Check out the rest of the fantastic programming available at SPX this year – HERE! SIGN UP HERE FOR ANY OF THE SPX 2019 COMICS WORKBOOK WORKSHOPS. Share this page: [...]

Gloria Rivera – Rowhouse Residency Report

Comics WorkbookApril 2, 2017Residency Reports / School UpdatesGloria Rivera is a comics artist from Canyon Country, CA. An alum of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers, and a member of the CW Roller Derby League, she joined us in Pittsburgh for a Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency March 23rd-29th 2017. Here are Gloria’s thoughts about her experience, in her own words. ————————————————————————————————————— The Quick List of What Happened: 22 pages completed, drawing to color w/lettering – comic 1 6 complete pages (B & W) – comic 2 Yona Harvey and Ed Piskor lecture at the Harris Theater Visit to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Copacetic Comics visits various nature walks, incidental birding with Sally Ingraham I had no expectations for my residency when I had arrived – only to work. I had followed Frank Santoro’s online presence for a few years prior and had taken his online correspondence course, but really couldn’t say that I had any idea of what kind of a teacher Frank was in person, or how much of a gift being in this space could be, not only referring to the Rowhouse, but to Pittsburgh – a town constantly working its bellows to support its comics scene. The first day I had arrived, I met Sally Ingraham. I was really blown away by Sally, who works as a coordinator for the Rowhouse Residency and holds various responsibilities for Comics Workbook. She is exhaustively knowledgeable, hardworking, and compassionate. She asked me what I had come to Pittsburgh to work on, and we sort of agreed that this first day I would work in solitude on my comic that I had started half a year earlier, until I felt I had gained some momentum, and then we would go from there, gauging if/when I wanted outside conversation. For the majority of my stay, the rhythm I kept to was non-stop working until a personal moment was offered (whether it be a walk, dinner with Frank and Sally, or short trips through the city), taking those moments, being present, and then continuing my work. Any time spent with other cartoonists (Frank, Sally, one of Sally’s 9-yr old students, cartoonists in a lecture, a.k.a Ed Piskor) was used to further my stride into my work. On the second day of my residency I met Frank. We had dinner at his house, where he was working on his new book. He is spirited, purposeful, mindful, and has endless passion for his work. He told a brief history of Pittsburgh, intertwined with his own of growing up, leaving and returning. It’s a story of dedication and belonging which I think not many people of MY generation are comfortable with, as many seem to be constantly striving for “better”, but without knowing, really, what “better” is. Aside from the stories Frank told about the city, he also gave me insight into the reality of living as a comics maker, which I would not have been privy to, and which until then I really was only guessing at. Some may be disheartened by these sort of conversations, but I am excited by how real it made things for me, despite it being a gauntlet. Topics for the week were: comics making process, the value of comics as a physical object/printing, the strengths of the avant-garde (non-narrative) against those of the narratively structured comic (two very different modes of storytelling), visual literacy, and comics community (inclusive of audience, publishers, comics friends, and family). The talks were long, but the time passed quickly. I tried my best to respect both Sally and Frank’s personal time to work, as they had mine. When Frank approached my work for advisement he was very objective, and I wanted his worst, so that I could do my best. Still, I think he saw my being in the work, and was courteous with his critique. Before coming to Pittsburgh I had half of my comic completed – 25 pages – and I completed the remaining 22 there. I completed as much as I did from August to November of 2016 in a week at the Rowhouse! I won’t say it was easy, but provided with the time to concentrate and motivation from the community, I was happy to put in any amount of time that my work demanded. Any formal education I had before comics was always for painting, and the more serious I allow myself to become about comics making, the more I see they are not so dissimilar. Frank is really great about sharing his knowledge and relating it to that which you came with. He was generous in his talks, while asking me to be accountable for the information I did know. One night Frank had casually presented me with some reading material; recommendations – mostly comics (Yuichi Yokoyama, Rich Buckler) – and among them two catalogues of Philip Guston paintings (it turns out that Frank is not only a comics expert, he is well versed in art history as a whole). Although in the past I have kept Guston as a sort of painting mentor (through books and image), I was surprised when I was presented with these catalogues – to be looking at his work during this comics residency. Phil Guston was a painter who understood the politics associated with images, but always kept a personal relationship with his visual library. Imagine your images are made of characters, places, things, each one a word, a letter, all making up your language. You hold this close to you. This is comics. What follows is an excerpt from a book of collected writings on Phil Guston: “Now, I think the original revolutionary impulse behind the New York School , as I felt it anyway, and I think my colleagues felt it, in the way we talked all the time, was that you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall, with no place to stand, just the place you occupied. And it’s as if the act of painting itself was not making a picture, because there are plenty of pictures in the world. Why make more pictures, clutter up the world with more pictures? But it’s as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible. Whether it was possible.” (Guston 58) I never expected to have felt this myself, to be able to talk to a group of people about images in such an earnest way – always internal conversation, now externalized. Frank and Sally offered their criticism, and experience, and questioning. I am working everyday to be worthy of comics as my form, and regardless, I put the pen to the paper – but over time I’ve forgotten to ask the big questions. Now I am more than willing to report that while the uninterrupted work time, the comics lectures, and accessible reading material was what whipped me into completing my goal, what I am bringing home with me – more than another book done – is a sense of what true community is, and the importance of holding your peers to standards that will benefit them in the longer run. It’s with great enthusiasm that I support the agenda of Comics Workbook, and the Residency program, and look forward to furthering my involvement with them to make better work (my own and that of others). ————————————————————————————————————— Check out more work by Gloria on her website, follow her on Instagram, and look for her new comic soon! For more information about the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency visit this page or email santoroschoolATgmail Share this page: [...]

09/11/2017

Caleb OrecchioSeptember 10, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thought’s on GG’s new book, I’m Not Here, from Koyama Press and other news. ———————————————————————————————— GG’s work has a lot of pain. I’ve always been very frustrated in the past by GG’s work because I felt like, though her comics are excellent, I was not being “let in” so to speak. It always seemed that the emotional resonance of her work was being muffled to the point of complete ambiguity–which isn’t bad–I just felt like something was being consciously held back. I don’t want to pretend that I know GG’s intentions, (and obviously, this is my own opinion) but I definitely feel that lately her work has taken on a more emotionally straight-forward approach, for the better–particularly with I’m Not Here, published by Koyama Press. The joy of reading a GG comic is the sensational drawing. I really like the below page of suburban houses and lawns. There is an undeniable beauty there that I hesitate to elaborate on just because I don’t feel like I have to explain why something like this is beautiful. GG’s drawing is a really excellent vessel for emotion. Her “cartoony realism” style (that arguably skirts the border of realism if not for lack of detail–or rather, the use of minimal detail) feels completely comfortable to my eyes and I believe in everything I see. So, when a child cries because a precious toy must be thrown away or a mother is bent over in physical and emotional anguish, it hits like an F# note on a piano–it’s jarring and instantaneous. GG’s drawing eschews the use of impressionistic facial expressions that a less technical cartoonist must utilize to impress emotion upon a reader, and is able to directly depict emotion through face and body language. This to me is a mark of an excellent cartoonist–which, I don’t have to tell you, GG is. This has always been true of GG’s work. I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but what separates this work from her past work, for me, is that this book feels particularly personal. Not that GG’s work has never been personal–in fact I’d argue all of GG’s work is intensely personal. However–I have never felt that F# note with her other work. The immediacy of I’m Not Here is undeniably pertinent–almost like we are going to the source of it all or something. The pain depicted in this book feels real as oppose to metaphorical or situational to me. Make sense? Personally, this is (if I haven’t made myself clear) GG’s best work. I had a sigh of relief after reading I’m Not Here. There is a real catharsis to this book. If you believe in everything you see therein, like I did, and allow yourself to partake in the emotional arc of the story, you will find yourself–like you just ate a very nice, delicious meal without feeling overly full or drunk–satisfied. -CO ———————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Plan your SPX weekend!–it’s this week! Comics Workbook will be there in full force haven’t you heard! CXC is just around the corner too Dan Nadel on and talking to Richard Kyle on TCJ. Looks like Study Group Comics is serializing another Farel Dalrymple comic which is good news for all. Latest Comic Books Are Burning in Hell is excellent, duh. Speaking of Study Group, last weeks Process Party guest was Jeff Smith–pretty good interview. They usually post a new episode after this news post goes live so see what the latest one will be this week while you’re at it. I like when Tom Surgeon posts links to sites like this that posts Golden Age and other not particularly easy to find comics. ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil– 9-11-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 9-11-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

Comics Workbook Composition Competition 2017

Frank SantoroJuly 24, 2017Santoro Schoolthee SANTORO CORRESPONDENCE COURSE and thee Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency presents thee COMICS WORKBOOK COMPOSITION COMPETITION 2017 ———————————————————————————————— 1st place – A week-long Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency (valued at $500 – travel and expenses not included) 2nd place – $250 credit at Copacetic Comics 3rd place – $100 credit at Copacetic Comics plus four $50 honorable mention prizes from Big Planet Comics ———————————————————————————————— Create a 16 page signature comic book narrative to the specifications below ———————————————————————————————— DEADLINE: Tuesday, September 5th 2017 at 11:59 pm NYC time ———————————————————————————————— HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE are last four years if you haven’t heard of the contest. HERE are all of the 2016 contest entries. This isn’t a scam, silly. ———————————————————————————————— Here are the 2017 composition competition specs: Contest take 1 from Frank Santoro on Vimeo. PAY ATTENTION! Watch the video above! Take an 11×17 inch piece of paper and cut it down to 10 1/4 x 13 1/2 inches. Fold this piece of paper in half. Measure in 3/8ths of an inch from the top and the sides, and 3/8ths of an inch in on both sides of the center fold. Measure in 3/4s of an inch from the bottom. This will make two 6 x 9 inch live areas on your 10 1/4 x 13 1/2 inch paper – as you can see in the example below. Watch the video for clarity. Make three equal “landscape” oriented tiers on each live area. Make copies of this “spread”. Do your layouts at this size. PAY ATTENTION! ***Draw your original artwork at 10 x 15 inches. Use 11×17 inch paper – make a 10×15 inch live area on the paper. Measure in 1/4 inch on each side and a 1/4 inch from the top to situate your 10×15 inch live area within the 11×17 inch paper. See video. The top tier and the bottom tier must have two 5×5 panels. The center tier may be open completely to make one 5×10 inch panel or two 5×5 inch panels. Again see video for clarity. The top tier and the bottom tier MUST have two panels. The center tier may have one panel or two. You may use the 6-panel grid throughout the entire 14-page story but one of the pages MUST have an open center panel. All of the pages may have an open center panel. Each page will have either 5 or 6 panels. Watch THIS video and THIS video for context. Pay attention to the parts about opening up the center. Also read Layout Workbook 1 and 2 for more info about traditional North American comic book proportions. You may break up your panels like this: 14 pages and two covers. Meaning seven spreads and a front and back cover. A 16 page signature. Work may be in color OR black and white – OR – a combination of both. International students must use the same specs. No complaining. It is recommended that you draw the pages on 11×17 paper with a 10×15 inch live area. It is recommended that you print your comic at traditional North American comic book size – which is 6 3/4 x 10 1/4. Again, see video. THE STORY MUST BE COMPLETE. SERIAL INSTALLMENTS of a longer narrative ARE NOT ELIGIBLE. THE STORY MUST BE NEW. IF YOU REPURPOSE AN OLD STORY THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN PUBLISHED YOU WILL BE DISQUALIFIED. Consider this an exercise in short story writing. I think the 16 page signature is ideal to contain a short story. Adaptations of existing works are not eligible. Like, you can’t copy a sequence from a movie. To submit your comic to the composition: Photograph or scan your pages and post them on your tumblr AS SPREADS. If you don’t have a tumblr – make one just for this contest. No exceptions! No complaining! Post the front cover as the lead image and the back cover as the final image and put your name and the title of the work in the text field and that it is for the Comics Workbook Composition Competition 2017. Email me – santoroschoolATgmailDOTcom – that you have posted your entry to your tumblr and give me a direct link to the post – and I will reblog it on to the comicsworkbook tumblr. I will be posting them – reblogging them – on comicsworkbook as they come in. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I will, however, only be posting stories that stick to the RULES. If you don’t follow the rules, I will not reblog the story and you won’t be eligible for the prizes. I will reblog them as quickly as I can and keep the list of entries updated – if you do not see your entry right away do not panic – I will make every effort to keep the list up to date but as long as you get your entry submitted correctly via email before the deadline your work will be in the competition. Last year we had over 100 entries and near the end things were hectic – so be patient. Any questions about the competition – please email me – do not leave a comment on this post – I will not reply here. Just email me. The competition is open to all. You do not have to be a former student of mine. Former students of mine ARE eligible to compete, as are winners of previous competitions. Again, if you have any questions about the rules please ask. Better to ask and be safe than to be mad when I disqualify you over some missed detail. Seriously. Work may be in color OR black and white – OR – a combination of both. You MAY have panel gutters. You MAY work digitally. And you MAY work as a team. Remember! Email me – santoroschoolATgmailDOTcom – that you have posted your entry to your tumblr – I will reblog it. DEADLINE is Tuesday, September 5th 2017 at 11:59 pm NYC time Winners will be announced the following week. Please share this announcement GOOD LUCK! signed Frank Santoro Share this page: [...]

02/18/2016

Juan FernándezFebruary 18, 2016NewsAlabaster Pizzo has a new one for ya. A little ditty if you will. Alabaster has been making interesting comics out of seemingly innocuous material like amazon reviews for wooden rulers. Real clever. This piece maintains the same exciting formal cheekiness. You can read SOLID ADVICE here. The fifth and final chapter of my Kris Mukai‘s latest comic, Angels’ Share is now online at Hazlit! You read the whole thing by accessing the other chapters via her author page on Hazlit. As an aside, I’d like to point out that serialized comics stories are a big deal. Never underestimate them. Good way for people to work on longer form work and a good way to keep comics in the layman’s everyday experience. The story in Angels’ Share takes place around the same time as Mukai’s story in Weeping Flower . Mukai blends text, image and animation seamlessly to create a microcosm of grief and frustration, wrapped in phantasmagoric digital figuration. Cool stuff. 2dcloud has been reaching for the stars in their forthcoming publishing season. They have taken to kickstarter for supporting their campaign. They aim to release an ambitious collection of work by Sarah Ferrick, Andy Burkholder, Austin English, Leon Sadler, Caroline Hennessy, Nicholas Verstraeten, Katherine Poe, Leslie Weibeler, Connor Willumsen, among others. They are at 19% of their goal. At this rate, we’ll only reach 59%. Please donate whatever you can if you love 2dcloud. Their artists are making difficult work and that makes their books a harder sell, but we believe in them. We believe that there is an audience for their work. Prove us right! Don’t just listen to us here at Comics Workbook, Mari Naomi has sounded off on the inspiring work that Raighne and Megan Hogan have been doing with 2dcloud. Give Mari Naomi a listen and consider supporting this ambitious crowdfund.. The work 2dcloud publishes is experimental without being pretentious, entertaining without compromising taste, and oh so exciting. 2dcloud are true pioneers. It is so important that they continue existing, putting voices in the mix that might not otherwise find homes. So here’s why I’m writing this: Right now, 2dcloud is trying to grow. They’ve hooked up with Consortium to distribute their books, which is a huge coup for everyone involved (especially their authors!). But working with a distributor has its challenges, particularly in the money department. You can read about the nuts and bolts in their blog post, which you should check out if you’re curious at all about how publishing works: https://medium.com/@2dCloud/can-indie-publishers-afford-to-grow-4e509d702333#.y8wo6886a From overseas, there’s a great piece over at Fumettologica on the legacy of Bill Sienkiewicz. Some good italian thinking right there. Read it here. Be sure to hit that translate button! It’s a bumpy read after translation but it’s a rewarding reflection on the arc of Sienkiewicz’s artist evolution and creative commitments. Some things, you understand well, are never easy to deal with. So the author has preferred to avoid a traditional script, building the dense pages of the volume of an exhausting succession of memories, metaphors, fragments of visions and mental spaces . Definitely a choice of effect, carried out with such vehemence to go to involve the rare segments set in the real world. These, though regarded with almost external eye – although remain narrated by the protagonist – we seem indistinguishable from the most symbolic sections. As if to say that for some people, achieve the objective world view is impossible . As can be straining, their eyes will always remain too conditioned by the noise and the hood of desperation in their head. A disastrous condition, impossible to understand for anyone not have ever tried on his own skin. Elijah Brubaker has made a short recording of his process working on his newest work, This Is All We Have. As a comics maker you can absorb a lot in a minute of watching this video. If you’ve never worked physically before. lettered with a nib, or used a light box to allow you to draw on separate sheets of paper, you might learn a thing or two! And LAST BUT NOT LEAST: Anya Davidson takes a big bite out of Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force over at the Comics Journal. One hell of a good read. Her writing digs deep into Brian’s latest work and it connects dots from all over the multiverse in its exploration of satire in the modern era. With each new generation there are new crises to confront and new inventions that change the way human beings function in the world and relate to one-another. And with each new generation comes a new crop of artists to help us contemplate the events of the day through the lens of their work. In the wake of the plague, death bed scenes and vanitas paintings became popular-a reminder to the viewer not to become too attached to the things of this world because death is always close at hand. In his fourth graphic novel, Puke Force, Brian Chippendale bravely tackles the perils of modern American life. The book begins where the action in his earlier book, Ninja, left off. Share this page: [...]

01/12/2017

Posted on January 12, 2017January 12, 2017 by Sally Ingraham

Sam and Sally here to share info on the 5th Annual Black Comic Book Festival, work from Derick Jones and Shannon Wright, a whole pile of comic strips, and thoughts from Sam on influences in film.

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Sally here – This Friday and Saturday the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library will be hosting the 5th Annual Black Comic Book Festival. You can register to attend HERE. Expanded this year to fill two days, the schedule of events includes panels with Kyle Baker, Trevor Von Eeden, and Ronald Wimberly among others, a tribute to Jackie Ormes, and a number of “how-to” workshops including “How to Draw Afrakan Superheroes” with Akinseye Brown. There will be a comics exhibition both days as well.

More details on the event HERE.

Ronald Wimberly is pumped about going – he reported via Instagram:

“Of course white people are welcome! Who’d exclude white commerce after the opium wars?! …. This weekend I’ll be at the Black Comics Festival (@schomburgblackcomics) at the Schomburg Center. I’ll be selling and signing copies of Prince of Cats, the Attack on Titan Anthology and maybe something else… On Saturday 5:30-6:45, I’ll be on the Comics and Hip-Hop panel moderated by Jonathan Gray featuring Andre Leroy Davis, Eric Orr (@orrdesigns), and Sole Rebel in the Langston Hughes Auditorium.“

Be there!

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Shannon Wright drew this cute comic about “A proud father recording his son demolish DDR” and went on to comment on these rare cool Dads:

“…in a lot of cases it’s shocking because we don’t see that involvement, especially when the hobby or interest doesn’t revolve around a sport or a prominent musical instrument. It was refreshing to see.“

I love when Shannon makes these quick comics – her skill set is incredible and I enjoy her more illustrative work – but her 4-panel strip comics and work like the piece above really capture moments in a special way. More please!

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Derick Jones is publishing a webcomic called Dead Days in Kowloon – he’s been at it since October of 2016. He updates it twice a week – read it from the beginning HERE.

I really like the work Derick has been posting on his Instagram recently – check it out @skudsink – straight inks, no midtones is his tune for the year so far!

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Sam Ombiri here: The quote of the week comes from Jafar Panahi – “Every film is worth watching.”

This is from his last risky movie that he “didn’t make”, using a security dash cam, called Taxi. (Editor’s Note: Jafar Panahi has been making films while under house arrest in Iran since 2010…!) He’s more optimistic than his buddy Abbas Kiarostami was. I read somewhere that Abbas Kiarostami was optimistic about the idea up until he realized, eventually, that the public having cameras wasn’t enough, and the promise he had felt about the general population having easy access to the camera didn’t yield what he had hoped.

What Jafar Panahi says reminds me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s whole thing of “zen in art”, that it can be something like nature – you can choose to interact with it or not. I think it’s really interesting the amount of danger both directors put themselves in for their movies. (They also each made great movies called The Mirror.)

At the beginning of Powr Mastrs 3 CF says, “I see you all imitating me – Disappointing – Follow your own star.”

One hope with looking at how movies are made – it’s something like what Robert Bresson said, something along the lines of “I’m often influenced by other mediums.” (He was actually quoting someone else whom I can’t remember. He was about to walk off the interview because he thought they were going to ask questions that he didn’t want to engage in. or in the context with which they were asking.) Anyways, I’m thinking about the way people like Lynne Ramsay, Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Michael Haneke process their Bresson/Tarkovsky influences. (With Panahi I’m only guessing that he’s influenced by them – the other two I know for sure, and with Ramsay I only sense Bresson). Whereas there are others who are processing that influence in a way that can feel… I don’t really know the right word. I don’t want to be more harsh than necessary.

I think Haneke’s work studies the relationship between projected reality and reality as it’s happening. In White Ribbon, which I haven’t seen for a long time, I think it’s the relationship between the photos taken in that time in relation to what could have been going on in those photos, that could suggest that this generation of kids will be the ones that accept Hitler. There is the ideal image being imposed…or, well…because of being caught up in these ideal images that are being imposed, the adults remain naive and too blind to see this other mysterious “behavior” rise from their romanticization of their children. The behavior is only being suspected, as you can’t tell whether or not the children are lying. – Sam Ombiri

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Adam Griffiths brings us another ‘Zine Tree Interview – this time with JB Brager – a Philadelphia-based cartoonist and writer, and a PhD candidate in Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University.
Tarantula by Alexis Ziritt & Fabian Rangel Jr. & Evelyn Rangel is coming out via AdHouse Books any minute now – and they have released a gorgeous full color preview for us to drool over – HERE.

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From the Comics Workbook school store – Zona #3 – all student work – 40 pages of comics – stories by Kurt Ankeny, Jacqueline Huskisson, Paddy Lynch, and Tyler Landry. Covers include an additional unique hand drawing by Frank Santoro – edition of 100 – signed and numbered. Get a copy of this book HERE!

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Suzy and Cecil – 1-12-2017 – by Sally Ingraham

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Joanie and Jordie – 1-12-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio

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1-12-2017 – by Juan Fernández

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Dungeon Lollers – 1-12-2017 – by Tyler Landry

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged adam griffiths, black comic book festival, caleb orecchio, derick jones, juan fernandez, sally ingraham, sam ombiri, shannon wright, tyler landry

Sally Ingraham

Posted on January 12, 2017January 12, 2017

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09/15/2016

Sally IngrahamSeptember 15, 2016NewsSally here to introduce a new Daily News team member and run you through the Comics Workbook happenings this week, in between making books and packing the car for the big trip to Small Press Expo this weekend…! ————————————————————————————————— This week we are joined by Samuel Ombiri, a Pittsburgh cartoonist and one of the cornerstones of our monthly Pittsburgh Comics Salons (pictured above). To kick off his CW Daily News career, Sam shares some thoughts on “Furukawa and Nara”. He writes: “An Interview With Yoshimoto Nara Above is a link to a dialogue that’s pretty inspiring to me in kind of a symbolic manner (Hideo Furukawa is probably my favorite author – or maybe not). I found an album where he’s featured in a track (and there’s a track by Oval and the Zs – it almost feels like a dream, but I wish I could speak Japanese in this dream I’m having.) I don’t have a favorite artist, because it would be physically painful to pick one, but let’s pretend that Yoshimoto Nara is my favorite artist (though to be honest I don’t know too much about him – Ian Jones-Quartey did a really cool short based off his work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrpmIZlFpWY ) So on a shallow level …words and images… and I guess.. comics right? Though I don’t know if their words and images would compliment each other too well if put together, but I look at howww they are maybeee people with massive strengths in their own domain, and them coming together to talk gives me power……..If I was better at writing I’m sure I’d be able to articulate this concept better – that’s it! I give up! “The only thing I allow myself to expect is that something unexpected will happen or appear through the course of writing. This ‘something unexpected,’ which underlies the work in a piece of writing should be independent from the writer, and only then does this ‘something’ emerge. In this way the writer is simply a bridge between the piece and image to be delivered. The writer wouldn’t need to claim ‘This is My work. Read My story.” – Hideo Furukawa “As for me, I don’t care much about the audience and their reactions nowadays. It might be another effect of aging. What I wish now is that my works remain for, say, 200 years after my death. I hope they are strong enough, in various senses to over to overcome the disappearance and death of the person who’s created them.” -Yoshimoto Nara Thanks for sharing this Sam – here’s the link again to the full conversation between Furukawa and Nara. Sam will continue to contribute news items and his own thoughts in the coming weeks – and probably a comic or two! ————————————————————————————————— Bethesda, MD – where we will be this weekend, in force – look for the blue shirts! Some of the fantastic workshops Comics Workbook is offering at SPX this weekend will be standing room only based on the signup numbers! We hope to see you there. Full Small Press Expo details HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Applications for the fall semester of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers are due September 16th 2016 – course starts September 23rd. FULL DETAILS HERE. The course is filling up, so if you are interested make sure to shoot us an email asap at santoroschoolATgmail…! ————————————————————————————————— Once again presenting this unique opportunity to get a rare Connor Willumsen book. “Swinespritzen” is now available from Comics Workbook. Connor and Frank Santoro reprinted this classic wacky pack originally produced for Breakdown Press in 2014. We have recreated the original item right down to the envelopes, paper, and crappy glue-job that Connor manifested one late night at Kinkos. We will have these at SPX but this is an extremely limited edition – so if you want one email santoroschoolATgmail or DM @santoro.frank on Instagram! ————————————————————————————————— I’ll be back with more news tomorrow (and hopefully full of the mysterious calm that descends right before a momentous occasion…?) Cheers – Sally Share this page: [...]

Kurt Ankeny on MICE Boston 2016

Kurt AnkenyOctober 31, 2016Festivals and ShowsWell, last night we wrapped up yet another lovely MICE Boston! MICE is my local indie comics expo, and it is the equal of any American event, as far as I am concerned. The staff, led by Shelli Paroline, Dan Mazur, Rebecca Viola (I couldn’t find a website!), Zach Clemente, and volunteers by the dozens, is the nicest and most attentive of any in the country, hands down. As cartoonists, we aren’t used to being spoiled by people coming around, asking us if we need snacks, food, or someone to watch our table while we take a short break. While other indie expos are starting to follow suit (CXC had a set of volunteers that were just as lovely as the MICE staff providing most of the same perqs, and Autoptic and CAKE provide lots of free snacks) I believe MICE was the first to provide this level of courtesy to the exhibitors, and it is the favorite show for lots of cartoonists for that reason. MICE consistently packs in a widely varied crowd, full of people from every age group and background. Part of this is the fact that it is held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has one of the most highly educated and diverse citizenries in the nation (it’s home to both Harvard and MIT.) But MICE just has some magic about it. The show has been steadily growing over the past few years. Last year, they broke the 3,000 attendee mark for the first time, and preliminary figures for this past Saturday’s attendance were over 1600, so they seem on par to keep that streak going. People are there to immerse themselves in the comics culture, and to buy, which is always helpful. There was a great representation of different cartoonists at the show. Featured guests included Faith Erin Hicks, the ubiquitous-in-2016 golden-boy-of-the-year Nate Powell, the French husband-wife team known as Kerascoët, local art-and-comics phenom Raúl the Third, Wren McDonald, Sara Varon, Jeremy Sorese, and Drew Weing. Kevin Czap was in attendance, fresh off their amazing weekend at CXC where they took home the Most Promising Talent grant award. Tony Davis of Million Year Picnic was there with his wife and son, selling comics and generally being the hub of the local scene. Nobrow had a table, Neil of Radiator Comics was there, the Boston Comics Roundtable was out in force, alums and current students from the Center for Cartoon Studies were down from Vermont, and several Comics Workbook folks were either tabling or wandering around the show. Comics on parade at the end of a long con season! Saturday was a blast. My new book In Pieces, debuting at the show, was a big hit, and I sold copies to lots of people coming up and telling me how much they had enjoyed the book on Comics Workbook’s Tumblr, and how they had been waiting to buy it! That was a great feeling. I had a great time tabling next to David Marshall, a local comics guy and someone I know from the monthly comics hangouts in Salem. David makes retro-homage superhero comics that are full of nerdy puns, references to UNIX coding, and Doctor Who in-jokes. He knows tons of people from the immediate neighborhood, and spent his time talking them up and accosting the attendees he didn’t know in the most jovial and pleasant way possible. David’s one of those guys who’s the life of the con. Someone truly at home among the comickers. To my other side was the lovely and talented Molly Dean, who makes webcomics and had several printed issues to sell. I waited too late to ask her if she’d like to trade, and she’d already sold out of all of her books! I will see her around though, and I’m looking forward to reading her webcomics at meedean.com. Saturday night, MICE puts on a free dinner for all attendees at Lesley University’s neighboring art gallery, the Lunder Arts Center. (They also provide bagels, cream cheese, donut holes and coffee each morning… I’ll stop talking about the free food.) While I would have LOVED to hang out with everyone, I’d been fighting a sore throat for the last week, and after talking all day, I knew my voice couldn’t handle small talk in a loud and echoing cement room, so I met my wife for dinner in Harvard Square and we had a quiet night. Meanwhile, the party there continued until 9pm, and then the various groups decamped for other venues and watering holes. Much to my chagrin, I missed what Mimi Chrzanowski described as a “magical” night of karaoke at Limelight, near Boston’s Chinatown. I know for sure that Kevin Czap and Cathy G. Johnson were there singing their hearts out. I assume that Dustin Harbin also made it. Sunday at MICE is Kid’s Day, and so the little ones made up a slightly larger percentage of the attendees than on Saturday. Kerascoët frequently had a line as they tag-teamed signing books with full-color sketches as the European cartoonists are accustomed to. I finally got to meet K.L. Ricks, whose illustration work and comics I deeply admire. I got to chat over breakfast with Maria Hoey, who is half of the brother-sister team behind Coin-Op books, and who I’d met for the first time at Autoptic in 2015. Maria’s looking forward to Comic Arts Brooklyn next weekend, and made me regret not taking up Whit Taylor‘s offer of sharing her table there this year. At noon, I was a guest at MICE’s new feature, the Cartoonarium, which is a little table set up to project your drawing to a screen, where people can watch cartoonists work and ask questions about their process. Zach Clemente came around to record a brief Twitter interview. First Cartoonarium of the day! We chat with @kurtankeny about his writing process! pic.twitter.com/bOaDRFRYg5 — MICExpo (@MassMICE) October 30, 2016 Sundays crowds had more ebb and flow to them that Saturday, but the sales were steady and people were engaged and fun to talk to, which is always the best part of a con. Since MICE was on the weekend before Halloween, costumes were in effect more than usual. I counted four girls and women dressed as Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service, there was a very well done Daphne and Velma from Scooby Doo, Saga seemed to be popular as I saw at least three separate groups dressed as various characters from that comic, and there were several low-key Steven Universes and even a person dressed as Neil Gaiman’s version of Death, complete with parade of people with rainclouds and a concertina. Thanks again to all involved in making MICE such a smooth and friendly and successful show for everyone! Until next year! Kurt Share this page: [...]

05/02/2016

Juan FernándezMay 2, 2016NewsMaggie Sutrov’s plein air comics, Dan Nadel chronicles Paper Radio; Clean Sweep; Creators For Creators; Koyama Press in the news; Rokudenashiko; Jason Moran; Remembering Harold Cohen. ————————————————————————————————— New Comics – Maggie Sutrov Comics Workbook is featuring a collection of comics drawn and painted by teacher and artist, Maggie Sutrov this week. Made on site and in the moment, these comics represent an under-examined mode of comics making. Join Maggie for a walk on the page. Here’s hoping her work gets you inspired to make observational comics of your own. Check it out here! ————————————————————————————————— Inside front cover of Christopher Forgues’s Low Tide #5, November 2001. Punk and Hippie Dan Nadel has put together a killer reflection on the collaborative work Ben Jones and Christopher Forgues(CF) did as Paper Radio over on Art in America. It’s something else. A Comics Comics boomerang that smacks you hard across the face. Nadel explores the roots of their comics, growing up in Massachusetts, subversive fan fiction, and the monumental impact of their short lived collaboration in the early 2000s. So many great details in this piece: Jones and Forgues found their own ways into making comics, but neither made a hierarchical distinction between mediums.Everything was fair game, except perhaps the remote-seeming New York art world. As Forgues recalls, “The idea of being an artist seemed absurd.” The venues, audiences, and markets for gallery art appeared totally foreign. “I’m going to do an installation? Where? I’m gonna paint on canvas? How? Where am I gonna show? At a coffee shop? Art seemed like the past, and a zine was the present and tangible . . . a way to proceed.” And this one: Both Jones and Forgues drew, as they still do, in pencil, which was unheard of at the time in professional circles but appropriate for Paper Radio’s primary printing technique: photocopying. Without the need for the photostat process by which older comics were created, there’s no need for ink. They produced flat and open figures through their airy, calligraphic approach. Paper Radio never attempted illusionistic realism; instead, the drawings invite projection from readers, which the artists saw as a way of initiating an intimate exchange with their audience. As Forgues puts it, “I was thinking about how to make this work with the least amount of stuff possible. That sounds easy or lazy, but it’s actually incredibly hard. The whole mission of cartooning is, with a few lines, to bring something across that’s real in the mind. The whole magic of what it is to represent something on a surface. The space is there, and you fill it with your brain.” By foregrounding, and deepening, the interaction that happens in all kinds of reading, Forgues and Jones understood Paper Radio as connected to performance, which was integral to so much of the culture pouring out of Fort Thunder. Read it all here on Art in America. ————————————————————————————————— Clean Sweep CF has released 3 new works that you don’t want to sleep on: THERMAL PRINTED RECEIPT MAGAZINES PRINTED ON 25ft LONG BPA FREE PAPER Dumb, beautiful and soon to be out of stock. CF takes on the scroll. Minds are sure to melt. See what it’s all about over on the Free-CF site. ————————————————————————————————— A Neo-Xeric Grant Image Comics and Iron Circus Comics have teamed up to create the Creators For Creators grant. Seems like good stuff for makers who feel they have the chops to get a big break from two independent publishing powerhouses. The goal of the Creators for Creators grant is to help pave the way for the next generation of comics creators by supporting their work financially and through mentorship, as well as providing opportunities for their creations to reach a wide audience. We plan to give $30,000 to a single cartoonist or writer/artist duo in order to support the creation of a new and original work of a length between sixty-four and one hundred pages over the course of a single year. The recipient will be selected by committee according to rigorous criteria. Submissions opened yesterday. Learn more here. ————————————————————————————————— Koyama Corner Koyama Press has been featured in the culture section of FADER, the music magazine. It’s great to see Koyama Press, and Annie in particular, getting profiled for audiences outside of comics circles. Zainab Akhtar puts together a nice profile of the publisher for folks outside of the very comics publishing bubble that Koyama press has spent it’s existence trying to bust. From the article, here’s Michael Deforge on Annie Koyama: “She was a comics reader, but Koyama Press didn’t start out primarily as a comics publisher, so she didn’t have that weird, insular point of view that some people who’ve spent too long in comics can develop,” says DeForge. “She didn’t have preconceived notions about what a ‘proper’ comic looked like, what a sellable one looked like, or the formats they should be printed in.” Check it all out here. MANKO MANKO MANKO Robert Kirby takes a good look at Koyama Press’ What is Obscenity by Rokudenashiko over on The Comics Journal. It’s great to see this book make it through people’s hands and gain momentum as a vessel for Rokudenshiko’s thoughts and experiences as a Japanese woman. Ultimately, Rokudenashiko’s greatest weapon is her refusal to capitulate to the attempts at belittling and dismissing her: when she claims “Rokudenashiko”/”Good for Nothing”, as as her own, she ties herself to a long and noble activist tradition of reappropriation (for example, feminists reclaiming “bitch,” to express strength and independence, and the LGBT community’s use of “Queer” to connote solidarity among its different factions and to state opposition to sexual binaries). Also, she tells us, “I’ve always liked to fight.” The fact that the authorities prove utterly clueless about crowdfunding, among many other things, only strengthens her resolve and defiance. Read it all on The Comics Journal. ————————————————————————————————— STAGED in NYC The work of musician/composer/artist Jason Moran is being exhibited in Bushwick gallery, Luhring Augustine through July 30th. Moran’s work links music and visual art in a way that deeply explores racial entanglements in American cultural production. This exhibition is an especially notable one for how it explores the flow of music through space and time via architecture and the performance of remembered music. It’s jaw dropping stuff. STAGED will include a range of objects and works on paper, including two large-scale sculptures featuring audio from Moran’s STAGED series that were recently exhibited in the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Based on two historic New York City jazz venues that no longer exist (the Savoy Ballroom and the Three Deuces), the sculptures are hybrids of reconstructions and imaginings. Works on paper and smaller objects will be in dialogue with the stage sculptures on many levels: citing performance and process, employing sound, and exploiting the visual history of jazz in America. It’s interesting to see how the history of Jazz is treated in the world of fine Art, when it’s not just seen as an ancillary development to the narrative of arts movements. It’s really striking when Jason speaks in the above video about the role and Jason Moran’s body of work speaks to how the music transforms from healing to hurt. Makes you think. ————————————————————————————————— Harold Cohen Has Passed Away Last week, on the 27th of April, code artist, Harold Cohen, passed away at age 88. Cohen, a computer scientist and artist, developed AARON, code which could generate unique visual compositions autonomously in 1973, starting with abstract and later with more representational subjects. Interestingly in the 1990s, Cohen’s compositions were translated to the physical realm, drawn and painted by plotters onto canvas. The blog, Prosthetic Knowledge, has a good look at his AI and its evolution for those interested in his legacy. ————————————————————————————————— That’s all for today. Until next time. Stay dry. Share this page: [...]

06/23/2016

HarrisonJune 23, 2016NewsHarrison’s Daily News for June 23, 2016 starts off in the Salon, drops off midway with Inkbrick 5, and lands with some Busdriver. ————————————————————————————————— Salon Etiquette Your favorite correspondent’s favorite correspondent Juan Fernandez reflects on the latest meeting of the Pittsburgh Comics Salon. Ingest your daily vitamins of theory, modular grids, holding the center, and more below. http://comicsworkbook.com/notes-from-the-salon-june-18th-2016/ ————————————————————————————————— Visions Chris Visions was at Heroes Con last weekend, where Izzy Renzi took this photo. As soon as he got back… “’…all of a sudden, for no pahticulah reason… I decided to go for a little run…’ And draw.” Always moving. Check out The Chris Visions Summer Collection, 2016 ————————————————————————————————— Ink Squad Alexander Rothman: We’re proud to announce that INK BRICK no. 5 is now available for preorder from our online store! Yet again our submission pool brought us more excellent work than we could hope to print, and as a result this will be our largest to date. Part of the book is a special section excerpting Jenny Zervakis’s upcoming book Strange Growths, which will be published jointly by John Porcellino of Spit And A Half and Tom Hart of the Sequential Artists Workshop. ————————————————————————————————— GATOSAURIO Gatosaurio Grab Bags! Each includes one surprise tee, sticker pack, tote bag and enamel pin plus more surprises like zines, 90s tattoo chokers, a pocket notebook or a coin purse! inechi.com ————————————————————————————————— Color is Light I heart kokooma_, you should too. instagram.com/kokooma_ Quang Comics ————————————————————————————————— Thumbs “Po-pos don’t wan’t to follow me, when they see me in sneakers and cotton tees.” Busdriver Thumbs out now. Share this page: [...]

12/01/2016

Sam OmbiriDecember 1, 2016NewsToday we have Sam Ombiri with a new comic and his thoughts on rereading, Tyler Landry on the movement in Ronald Wimberly’s comic page layouts, new work by Chris Visions and Tanna Tucker, the POW! Womxn in Comics and Illustration exhibition, details on pre-ordering “The Art of Vanesa R. Del Rey” and your Santoro Correspondence Course reminder, plus the latest “Suzy and Cecil” strip. ————————————————————————————————— ReRun – Sam Ombiri Someone told me that, to them, rereading is like dreaming a dream you’ve had before. This person said it to me like it was something she often did. I’ve never experienced anything like that, where I have a “rerun” of a dream. I could relate to the idea of rereading being like revising a place you’ve been before. I don’t think I can come up with one specific motivation behind rereading. It’s something people do with different motivations. Sometimes rereading is like visiting a place, a kind of copy of the original moment, with intentions maybe of recreating the original feeling. Sometimes (while engaging with work in this manner) I find that I skip ahead to the best parts, then I feel like I’m betraying the re-creation, or maybe the form? I don’t know, but I feel like I’m doing something wrong. Sometimes it’s very fulfilling to read in this manner (of recreating the first reading), and sometimes reading work this way just ruins things. It can get really boring to just validate established feelings. Like really really really really boring. Or maybe not boring, just very bland. I think that’s why my short attention span kicks in, and I flip through mindlessly. Sometimes after going through this I reproach rereading and suddenly what I’m reading is not “ruined”. It’s like if you can be anywhere you want but it’s too dissatisfying and too easy to be everywhere, so any moment you encounter ends up feeling like…unearned? Kind of like how easy it is to get information now. So then it helps to navigate more delicately (that’s probably the wrong word). – Sam Ombiri ————————————————————————————————— Tyler Landry here. Gonna talk about movement in comics page layouts, via the highly energetic work of Ronald Wimberly. Sequences are nabbed from Prince of Cats. Check it out: This sequence shows the beginning of a violent altercation, with heavily weighted forward (left to right) movement, bringing your eye ever-closer to the focus, the point, the unmistakable K-T-T-T- sound of a box-cutter blade being pushed up… At a glance, there’s a powerful “X” slash through this sequence. Corner to corner, face to action/face to action, crossing through the attacker’s antic. We can also interpret, by the facing direction, and the trajectory of character movement, an intention on Ronald’s part to guide our eye along certain lines. Through the 3 horizontal strips, we feel a rhythm to this motion as well – perfectly paced out in corresponding measures. Pink > blue, pink > blue, pink > bl-blue. This next sequence acts like a ball, thrown across the page at first, then bouncing from one figure to another – still with diligent respect for a vertical stack of horizontal movement. I’ve focused mostly on characters, because they are the primarily active elements here, but this sequence leverages the content of its backgrounds beautifully for the assist. Check out the train across the top panels, then the view of the platform in bright yellow in the middle section, hauling your eye heavily towards the bottom right chunk, where tension has been building. The details get smaller, tighter, more condensed, helping you FEEL that something’s about to go down. Different groupings of characters take on different palettes, and different tones to reinforce their presence, and to balance them against each other and their background content. – Tyler Landry ————————————————————————————————— Sally Ingraham here with the news bites! While we’re on the topic, get a copy of Ronald Wimberly’s Prince of Cats from Copacetic Comics (it’s not listed on the website yet, but you can order one over the phone – I can personally vouch for copies of the book being in the shop!) From a recent NPR write-up on the book: “…Wimberly is out to do something more than just combine elements from two compatible genres. He’s clearly aiming to translate the mechanics of hip hop composition into a visual form. In Prince of Cats‘ introduction, University of California media professor John Jennings calls Wimberly a “See-Jay:” Wielding his pen the way a DJ mixes, he mashes up wildly diverse elements into a fresh creation.” – Etelka Lehoczky for NPR.org Read the rest of the review HERE. ————————————————————————————————— If you’re in the Oakland, CA, area be sure to check out the POW! Womxn in Comics & Illustration exhibition at Studio Grand. The opening reception is Dec. 2nd 2016. From the exhibition description: “Comics and illustrations have long been a popular art form, intended to reach the masses. They easily engage audiences by the use of humor, cliffhanging narratives, relatable stories, all through captivating visual narratives. Comics and illustrations have often portrayed womxn in a hyper-sexualized manner and have not shown more developed female characters. Much of this is due to the comic book industry which has historically profiled work written and created by men. POW! seeks to center womxn comics and illustrators who hold the pen and the narrative. This Exhibition centers stories that concern womxn comics and illustrators offering transformative narratives, one where women characters—speaking of mental health struggles, struggles of poverty and survival, isolation, resiliency, sisterhood—are at the forefront. The POW! Exhibition and accompanying events offer a nurturing space of solidarity and healing, letting womxn know that they are not alone in their struggles and resiliency.“ Check out the list of exhibitors HERE. I heard about the event from Tanna Tucker, an illustrator who is turning her focus increasingly towards comics. (She may join us in Pittsburgh next spring for a Rowhouse Residency!) Her recent ongoing projects include a 7-part fantasy comic with Mark Turner and Orpheus Forge Studios called Sea Wulfe – you can check it out HERE. Here’s an “excerpt” from Tanna’s piece at the POW! exhibition: Come see this piece in its entirety next week at the “POW! Womxn in Comics + Illustration” show next Friday @studiograndoakland Listened to Solange the whole way……. • • • • #womxnincomicsandillustration #afrofuturism #comics #illustration #artistsoninstagram #studiogrand #solange #wip A video posted by @t.ann.a on Nov 23, 2016 at 7:44pm PST ————————————————————————————————— Here’s Chris Visions dropping that hot fire! Gotta get back, back to the past– // ChrisVisions.BIGcartel.com, coming tomorrow! // #samuraijack #aku #red #art #comics #process #wip #ink A video posted by Chris Visions (@chrisvisions) on Nov 30, 2016 at 6:19pm PST Follow this link to get yourself one of these “visions in red” but don’t sleep on this – these pages are selling out fast. ————————————————————————————————— Thee great Vanesa R. Del Rey has generously agreed to let Comics Workbook publish selections from her sketchbooks. We designed it to look like a 1980’s comic book artist’s art book. The text is a transcription of an interview she did at The Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency in 2016. Vanesa is a once in a lifetime talent who studied with George Pratt and who has worked with Grant Morrison. We are offering pre-orders now at a lower price than we will be offering the book for in the new year. Great stocking stuffer. Pre-order your copy of The Art of Vanesa R. Del Rey HERE! ————————————————————————————————— December 1st! That means you have 13 days left to get an application in for the Winter term of the Correspondence Course if you want that sweet “$100 off” discount! More details below. The Winter Semester of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers starts Dec. 29th 2016! 8 week course – 500 bux – 10 spots available – apply by Dec. 13th 2016 and get $100 off course fee! More details can be found HERE – or email santoroschoolATgmail. Santoro School Application guidelines: -3 figure drawings done on blank 3 x 5 index cards -3 landscape drawings done on blank 3 x 5 index cards -3 still life drawings done on blank 3 x 5 cards -draw in a contour line style – Think Matisse – no under-drawing – draw directly in ink -just send small jpgs of images – dont post to your blog pls -specific url links to any comics work you have done. Send applications to: santoroschoolATgmail ————————————————————————————————— The latest Suzy and Cecil strip by Gabriella Tito! Suzy and Cecil is a collaborative daily comic strip project based on characters invented by Bill Boichel and Frank Santoro. It is primarily drawn by Gabriella Tito and Sally Ingraham, who are teammates in the Comics Workbook Roller Derby League. The strip is part of their continuing development as cartoonists – follow @suzy_and_cecil on Instagram to see the project unfold and keep an eye out for guest strips drawn by other Comics Workbook students and friends! 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