The Black Comic Book Festival at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem happened a little over a week ago. If you had been hoping to making it out, but couldn’t, good news: the panels they hosted are now online. Check it out! Organized by Deirdre Hollman, Jerry Craft and John Ira Jennings the show has experienced great growth in the past 4 years. If you weren’t able to make it to the event, or just could not get to the panel discussions Karama over at Blerd girl has put together a page with the panels!
If you’re looking for an exciting scroll comic to read today, big news: Sophia Foster Dimino andAnnie Mok‘s Swim Thru Fire, has finished its run on Hazlitt. You can now read the entire comic! Wottaday.
part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8.
MOOOVING SALE – Kris Mukai has discounted a lot of titles over on the BigCartel WebShoppe on account of Kris moving across country in about a month. Cool zines from a smart maker.
Sale might last a week or two, and I might close the shop in February, but who knows, i might not! idk!!! idk what the future will hold!!!!!!!????!???
Melissa Mendes has an ongoing Patreon to support her comics making endeavors. She’s been focusing all her comics making energies on her greatest work to date – The Weight, an epic family saga set in rural New York state, spanning from the 1930s onward. The story is inspired by her late grandfather’s life. He wrote a short memoir, full of detailed descriptions of his childhood. Mendes is working and riffing off of that to make this work. Do share the video below if you’re down with The Weight. Melissa would appreciate it!
Your boy Aaron Cockle’s “Annotated 17″ is now available in the Birdcage Bottom Books shop:
Alternate history. 5.5″ x 8.5″, 44 pages. $5 Multi-color mono-print cover with b&w interiors. Mystifying narrative movement, corporate recursion if you will…
** Each cover is different…handwritten titles, various colored mono-prints **
For your deep reading needs, Annie Mok took some time and wrote about comics maestro Carol Tyler’s 3 part epic Soldier’s Heart. –
I reviewed Carol Tyler’s heartbreaking, beautiful, complex book Soldier’s Heart for TCJ. If you got a bland breakfast, read this review, cuz it’s a lil salty. Here’s an excerpt:
Essayist Meghan Daum writes of “The Joni Mitchell Problem” in The Unspeakable, claiming that most audiences mistake Mitchell’s layered, Nietzche-informed lyrics for tell-all confessionals. It speaks to the inability of most people to tell the difference between putting yourself out there and letting it all hang out. Letting it all hang out is indiscriminate and frequently gratuitous. It’s the stuff of paint flung mindlessly at a canvas and words brought up via reverse peristalsis, never to be revised or thought better of […] It asks the audience to do the heavy lifting. It dares the audience to ‘confront the material’ without necessarily making that material worth anyone’s while.
Putting yourself out there is another matter entirely. It’s an inherently generous gesture, a gift from artist to listener or reader. The artist who puts herself out there is not foisting a confession on her audience as much as letting them in on a secret, which she then turns into a story.
Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart collects her trilogy You’ll Never Know, which tells the story of how her father’s PTSD from serving in WWII reverberated throughout three generations. The narrative jumps between “Dad’s Army Scrapbook and Tour of Duty Highlights” and Carol’s account of the time spent making the books. During the 8-year stretch, she worked as a substitute teacher, was a semi-single mother, and slept on a mat on the floor. She mentioned in a 2012 Comics Reporter interview that she got by during this time with food stamps. (The harsh economics of cartooning makes me wonder whose stories we’re losing to time and resources, especially as deep racial and gender biases remain intact within comics institutions, as the recent Angoulême Grand Prix news illustrates. By the way: fuck the Angoulême Grand Prix.)
