Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged bryce davidson, Chris Diaz, Honore Daumier, Jaime Hernandez, tom gauld

Comics Workbook

Posted on January 31, 2018January 31, 2018

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Simon Hanselmann Bad Gateway Tour with Joe Matt Cameo Appearance

Chris Anthony DiazAugust 14, 2019The Diaz ArchiveSimon Hanselmann Bad Gateway west coast signing tour, Green Apple on the Park, San Francisco, Friday evening, August 2, 2019 and Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Saturday evening, August 3, 2019 Share this page: [...]

07/04/2017

Aaron CockleJuly 4, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Jackie Kirby at the Rowhouse Residency; Leonara Carrington; Babel Unbound; some dispatches from the CBLDF; Florine Stettheimer; William Blake ————————————————————————————————— Jackie Kirby writes about their Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency this past June here on the site. A poet and a comics maker, they really dug deep into their practice while they were here and had a lot to share and teach Frank and Sally and the Pittsburgh comics community in their turn. “My conversations with Frank were thoughtful, engaging, and exciting. Among the most interesting aspects of our discussions was comparing analogies of music and poetry to comics. I know very little when it comes to music. Half-kidding – it’s one of the few popular art forms I’m not a snob about, and I’ve tried to keep it like that. Frank, on the other hand, is a total music nerd. I came into his house for espresso one afternoon and he presented me with a piece of scrap paper on which he had written “2/3 ¾ rectangle riff seen from a poet’s pov in relation to ‘meter’ / and relation to ‘the Breath’ or Dylan’s ‘long line of spit.’ ” Frank and I chatted for hours regarding this. He would riff for fifteen minutes or so about music and I would respond with a riff on poetics. Forty five minutes could go by without comics being explicitly mentioned once, but the composition and formal techniques of comics practice underlined every moment. When I brought this up, Frank brushed it off, saying “Of course we could talk about how Robert Crumb is this or that but we both know that.” What’s interesting is what we can learn from each other.” Read more of Jackie’s thoughts HERE. You can read more Rowhouse Residency Reports HERE – and learn more about the Residency program HERE or email santoroschoolATgmail for more info. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Even though you won’t believe me / my story is beautiful’ At Hyperallergic, Elisa Wouk Almino looks at some books by Leonara Carrington: In her memoir and fiction — and, in retrospect, her visual art as well — Carrington strives to understand people’s “systems;” to peer into them and visualize all their beautiful or ugly selves, often through animal incarnations, as in fables. Evil characters have hair “like black vipers” or “a little bird’s laugh,” and good ones have skin that glints like stars. In Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s 2000 film about women Surrealist artists, Gifted Beauty, Carrington advises, “We have to listen to the soul … and to know when it’s a soul. … Each soul has a daemon.” It seems to me that both her writing and visual art takes up this very exercise — a kind of study of the human soul. ————————————————————————————————— Babel Unbound Closing July 8 at the CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery in Cork, Ireland, Babel Unbound, by Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban. Referencing a series of historical works intertwined with the function and performance of the library, such as Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, Borges’ The Library of Babel, and Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking my Library, the artists contemplate the library of today- one filtered through reproducibility, access to information and an ever-evolving understanding of curation, aesthetics and the archive. The library is a fertile place for exploration, a place that most often prioritizes use over display whereas the gallery is a site that prioritizes display over functionality. Babel Unbound attempts to do both; and while doing so slowly becomes aware of itself, as illegible, complicated, incomplete… ————————————————————————————————— At the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund A couple of recent posts of note from Maren Williams at the CBLDF: Cartoonists Under Threat Worldwide Two years after the attack on Charlie Hebdo staff, the world’s free expression focus has largely shifted away from cartoonists. That certainly does not mean the danger has disappeared, however, as a recent 30-page report from the French nonprofit Cartooning for Peace/Dessins Pour la Paix shows. The report brings together profiles of cartoonists under threat and background information on the free speech situation in the countries where they work — or from which they’ve been forced to flee. New TSA Rules May Require Books to be Scanned Separately Air travel in the U.S. may be about to get a bit worse for the literate, as the Transportation Security Administration is reportedly testing a new requirement for passengers to remove books and other paper items from their carry-on luggage during security screening. While the TSA says the proposed new policy arises only from scanning machines’ limitations in discerning explosives from other contents of packed bags, there is no doubt that privacy concerns can and will arise.Testing of the new procedures quietly began last month at a handful of small airports including Colorado Springs, Boise, and Lubbock. Since that time, according to the Wall Street Journal, passengers at larger airports have also encountered new rules on paper goods but those rules may “change line by line, airport by airport.” ————————————————————————————————— ‘You might say she took the red, yellow and blue that Mondrian was just discovering and added purple, orange, pink and black.’ Roberta Smith at the New York Times reviews the Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry show: The first Stettheimer cult was the one she painted. After a disappointing — and premature — solo show at Knoedler in 1916, she exhibited most frequently at her private salons. The women in her scenes were almost always her mother and sisters. The men were for the most part movers and shakers of the small New York art world, dandies, if not gay, who frequented the salon and admired Stettheimer. ————————————————————————————————— William Blake and the Age of Aquarius September 23, 2017 – March 11, 2018 Block Museum of Art Northwestern University William Blake and the Age of Aquarius will consider parallels between Blake’s time and mid-twentieth-century America, touching on such issues as political repression, social transformation, and struggles for civil rights. Blake’s protests against the conventions of his day were inspirational for many young Americans disillusioned by perceived cultural tendencies of social uniformity, materialism and consumerism, racial and gender discrimination, and environmental degradation. This generation sought in Blake a model of independence, imagination, and resistance to authority. The exhibition will feature American artists for whom Blake was an important inspiration and will include more than 130 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, films, and posters, as well as original Blake prints and illuminated books from collections throughout the United States. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 7-4-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 7-4-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 7-4-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

08/01/2017

Aaron CockleJuly 31, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Jackie Kirby; Printed Matter; Romance Comics; What the World Wants (And How to Pay For It) ————————————————————————————————— Meter, Geometry and Comic Form Featured on CW this week is Jackie Kirby’s work looking at verse and the grid: In an initial attempt at translating verse form to comic form let us equate syllables with panels, and spreads with lines. Each row of panels will represent a metrical foot. Stress is produced relationally, and in comics one can use size, color, density, and a myriad of other visual techniques to “stress” a panel. The actual size of each panel per “foot” or row is up to your own discretion but I prefer to use a more qualitative than quantitative approach to my “comics scansion.” ————————————————————————————————— Something Unusual is Happening Was Happening The experimental comics exhibit at Printed Matter recently ended. The show was co-curated by Leslie Lasiter and Cory Siegler. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Almost always there were tears—buckets and buckets of beautifully rendered tears.’ Kelly Faircloth at Jezebel on The Tear-Stained, Forgotten World of Comic Books for Teenage Girls. Today, the genre is probably most familiar through the work of famed pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. (Though one artist who drew them, Everett Raymond Kinstler, was dismissive to Hadju: “No comics publisher would have hired Lichtenstein—he wasn’t good enough. Romance comics dealt with a range of emotions, some of them quite subtle and sophisticated, and they called for real storytelling ability.”) When they’re remembered outside of the world of dedicated comics fandom, it’s largely as a curious, campy footnote to the story of the caped crusaders who are such a prominent feature of our blockbuster summers and Decembers. ————————————————————————————————— What the World Wants This infographic has been kicking around since at least the late 1990’s, but it looks like it’s been updated. Via Buckminster Fuller‘s World Game Institute and the Global Energy Network Institute. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 8-1-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 8-1-2017 – Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

Conversation with images: ERIK NEBEL AND THE SPIRITUALITY OF COLOR

Gloria RiveraApril 6, 2017EssaysErik Nebel is a contemporary comics maker, whose body of work is predominantly published digitally. The comics world is founded on a history of printed matter, and it often unintentionally disenfranchises work that is strictly made for the web. Web comics typically have their own forum apart from comics made for print, which is self-categorizing. Erik Nebel’s comics dominate their platform, in terms of simplicity for means of visual distribution, as well as accepting and employing the screen to their advantage in regard to color and motion. Erik Nebel, from a formal standpoint, uses the elements of color, scale, pattern (repetition) to create a connection with their audience without means of establishing “character” descriptions. We look to Erik’s images of fluid, moving, form-ambiguous figures across the page, with the only rigidity in their work in the sequencing across the template of three rectangular panels. It is a primitive instinct to read groups of figures as multiple persons when placed in the same space, so the setup of the comics are a defining line, implying a narrative. It’s a simple mechanism (the three panel grid) but without it, it would be a different kind of comic. If anything, the stationary structure of the grid enhances Erik’s graceful forms, and stark choices in color/contrast. Comics made for print usually see a loss in translation to the digital screen, but this is where Erik does their best to exploit the gap between the two. Nearly every strip they create vibrates between lines, flat against flat. In 1963 Josef Albers published a book known as Interaction of Color, and described various principles, one being the Bezold Effect. This effect describes a color illusion called “optical mixture” where two or more colors perceived simultaneously are seen combined. From the impressionistic painters we have learned that they never presented, let us say, green by itself. Instead of using green paint mixed mechanically from yellow and blue, they applied the two unmixed in small dots, allowing perception of the green – as an impression. (Incidentally this is the same principle used in 4 color process printing). Nebel’s colors are joyous and spontaneous, working to retain your attention as the eye reads the figure. The colors appear to have no code, which is important to the narrative of the non-binary; the stories are of figures in ecstasy, emotion. When we look at the way the images relate to figures in art history, we can see Matisse. Bold color and iconography only suggesting “Humanity”, to tell stories of spirituality. When we talk about the Eastern perceptions of gender in imagery, they see male as an Earth figure, carnal and woman pertaining to the spiritual. The figures we see in these stories are both and neither. They are charged and meditative. I do not assume any comics maker is looking to be regarded through a lens outside their intentions, but the language of images is made for these sort of relationships. Looking outside of a formal breakdown of Nebel’s comics, we see a space for loud, silent moments. For figures which best express themselves by means other than speech. We are challenged by Erik’s images, in such a way that while the digital screen generally promotes the shortening of the attention-span for images, this timing is thrown off by the interactive quality of Erik’s work. Timing is one of the variables in comics that is controlled through the panel (largely through multiple panels), and Erik manages to alter this further through means of color, in very limited space. This questions what other ways of interacting with our readers we cartoonists may be overlooking. Erik Nebel is not only a deft cartoonist demonstrating new boundaries, but with these comics is forcefully pushing a space for social change. ————————————————————————————————— Erik Nebel has been published in print in Best American Comics 2015, and listed under Notable Comics in Best American Comics 2016. They have a 96 page compilation through Yeti Press of their online work. Erik Nebel participates with The4PanelProject (exploration of the four panel comics format) and you can see more of their work on their tumblr, where they post a new comic everyday. Share this page: [...]

02/23/2018

Aaron CockleFebruary 23, 2018NewsAaron filling in today with Christina Ramberg; More from that Austin English TCJ Essay; Post-Text Futures (According to the NY Times); Desert Island’s 10-Year Anniversary ————————————————————————————————— Dan Nadel on the Art of Christina Ramberg At ARTFORUM Curator Jenelle Porter nicely summarizes the breadth of Ramberg’s interests: “To browse the over 1,000 slides Ramberg left behind is to gain a foothold on how she looked at the world. Slides of Buddhist hand mudras echo the elongated fingers in Hand. Patterned asphalt shingles, hand-painted signs, wig shop displays, the homes of outsider artists, a twisted and frayed awning—one can begin to decipher how Ramberg translated quotidian visual experiences into highly ordered paintings.” Ramberg and Hanson also created a scrapbook of comic-book clippings with examples of explosions, word graphics, and dreams, among other categories. The scrapbook, Ramberg noted, was “valuable as a sourcebook of comic conventions or shorthand methods of depicting various themes and objects.” She did not, however, employ collage and comic-book imagery in her paintings, as some of the artists Ramberg admired—Öyvind Fahlström, the Swedish master of reconfiguring comic-book elements; San Francisco’s symbolist painter and collage-master Jess; and Yoshida—did in their own. For Ramberg, these fragments revealed modes of rendering and moments of accidental strangeness, such as when a speech balloon hovers above a house to indicate an interior conversation. Taken out of sequential context, as in Ramberg’s scrapbook, the house appears to “speak,” as if in a Magritte painting. ————————————————————————————————— Where I’m Coming From (Part 2) Juan posted about this yesterday, but here’s another look at the 2nd part of Austin English’s personal exploration into zines and mini-comics. There’s a lot of ground covered here. Bessijelle made this zine on a home printer, and stapled it at the edges—everything about the assemblage of this comic is worked out by the author on a system of their own. A heartfelt pride in its making comes through, which is augmented immeasurably by the purposefully labored over work within. The author made the art according to their own principles and found the images to be powerful, thus making reproduction and dissemination of the work essential. But how to go about that? Like some of the most uniquely beautiful zines, the printing is as personal as the drawing within, and if the reader brings themselves to it, a total work of art can be seen. Unlike self conscious art zines that stress their expensive production values, this work’s quiet features make it priceless. … Annie Murphy’s I Never Promised You A Rose Garden is an extremely important project. Murphy is a hard-to-do-her-artistry-justice cartoonist who isn’t extremely prolific, so each new work is worth studying. More then that though, Rose Garden is a historical work that is more vital then that description usually suggests in zine culture. Instead of a ‘historical’ zine that is concerned with the changing storefronts of main street, Murphy’s subject is no less than the history of mood, the underground itself, sordid half-truths, and tragedies involving all of the above within her home of Portland, Oregon. Murphy is a cartoonist like no other, more emotionally precise than most artists who work in comics. Murphy’s feelings are clear to her but unique in spirit: she communicates them to the reader without noise and we are left with new heartbeats. ————————————————————————————————— ‘The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion.’ At The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo contemplates a ‘Post-Text Future’. The internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood. Then we started giving machines eyes and ears — that is, smartphones were invented — and now we’ve provided them brains to decipher and manipulate multimedia. Suddenly the script flipped: Now it’s often easier to communicate with machines through images and sounds than through text. ————————————————————————————————— Hey Desert Island, Happy 10-Year Anniversary! ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 2-23-2018 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 2-23-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

02/01/2018

Posted on January 31, 2018January 31, 2018 by Comics Workbook

Bryce Davidson shares the work of Honore Daumier, and Chris Diaz has 3 new photo reports for us!

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Bryce Davidson here: What’s up with cartoons? Caricatures perhaps might be more accurate. Simplified, amplified, and elegant, is it just good drawing? Nice shapes and lines? No, there’s something more. Most of us who read comics and appreciate the form will understand what I am referring to. Why do we spend so much time looking at these distorted images when we could look at a real person with actual facial expressions? Why does that twisted grin of a Chuck Jones character seem to portray more emotion and depth than any actor in Hollywood? It’s a tough question. For one thing it seems that the exaggeration of a cartoon help consolidate and refine the emotions and actions of character. It’s like boiling down syrup – only the essential, the truth, remains.

This brings me to the artist whom I want to focus on, one who everyone should know, especially within the current political climate – Honore Daumier, the quintessential political cartoonist. Coupling the revolutionary political climate of 17th century France and the burning hate of the bourgeoisie, “He revealed, as a true visionary, the faults endemic to the system that transcended the cast of political players” (Erlanger).

The venom this guy spits in his drawings is insane. The introduction to Daumier: Politicians goes on to explain:

“The overfed, somnolent, or sneering deputies in Daumier’s picture are physically and morally hideous. Here is an art that denounces not only individuals, but underlying attitudes. Daumier brings to the pitiless light of day monsters serving as puppets for monied interests, electoral fraud, and the inextricable links between money and power.“

I shouldn’t even have to mention how relevant it all is. If you’re looking for an artist who defined the sneer and critique of political caricature, look no further. I could rattle on about artists who are still producing work that rips this guy. His stuff is that universal. The characters are timeless, truly human, no smoke and mirrors. It’s really something that only a cartoon can do. Following are some more scans from the previously mentioned book, Daumier: Politicians by Philippe Erlanger. It can be purchased HERE if you’re interested in learning more. – Bryce Davidson

Works Cited:

Erlanger (Author), Philippe. “Introduction.” Daumier: Politicians, Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1992.

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Jaime Hernandez at The Last Bookstore in old downtown Los Angeles – photo by Chris Diaz

Chris Diaz was busy attending comics events in the last few months! He shares photos from Jaime Hernandez’s Dec. 11th 2017 chat with Jordan Crane HERE, Charles Forsman at Comix Experience on Dec. 6th 2017 HERE, and Tom Gauld at a few places in Nov. 2017 while he was on tour for his new comic Baking With Kafka HERE. As always, comics fandom thanks you Chris!

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Collected from the thousands of pages of material that Frank has left scattered all over the digital landscape, these 4 PDF collections contain Frank’s best writing on comics and comics making from the past decade. Theory and process, reviews and discoveries, journeys both physical and spiritual.

Check out the “Best of Frank Santoro” PDF collections, available HERE!

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Joanie and Jordie – 2-1-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged bryce davidson, Chris Diaz, Honore Daumier, Jaime Hernandez, tom gauld

Comics Workbook

Posted on January 31, 2018January 31, 2018

Explore

Comics Workbook at SPX 2016

Sally IngrahamSeptember 3, 2016Festivals and Shows / School UpdatesJoin Frank Santoro and Comics Workbook at SPX – September 17th and 18th 2016! We will be at table N8 this year – stop by and say “Hello” – check out new work by Frank and his students – buy some old comics from Frank’s vast collection! We are excited to announce that Comics Workbook will be hosting a series of special workshops at SPX this year! Details below. Learn to Draw from the Pros! Join educator Frank Santoro and his Comics Workbook school 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 Brookside A&B 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. ADVANCE SIGNUPS FOR THE WORKSHOPS ARE CLOSED. CHECK AT THE BROOKSIDE ROOM ON THE LOWER LEVEL OF THE CONFERENCE CENTER TO SEE IF ANY SEATS ARE AVAILABLE FOR THE SESSION YOU WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND! Saturday September 17th 12:00-1:00 PM Comics with Jeffrey Brown Bringing the “Star Wars Academy” to you! Maybe you have a burning desire to learn to draw Luke Skywalker, or need help transporting your own middle-school adventures into a galaxy far, far away? Jeffrey Brown will be on hand to share storytelling tips and drawing advice. 1:00-3:00 PM Comics Workbook Hangout Join the Comics Workbook team for an afternoon of comics-crafting. Learn about color and line, explore the rhythm of the grid, and take your comics-making game to a new level. Simple exercises will push you in mind-bending directions. Drop in for a minute or an hour. 3:00-5:00 PM Spanish Fever (Spanish Language Workshop) SPX and Comics Workbook, along with the Spanish Cultural Ministry and Fantagraphics, is pleased to provide Spanish language instruction and presentations with José Domingo and David Rubín. 5:00-6:00 PM Cameron Nicholson and Frank Santoro Comics Workbook founder and internationally known cartoonist/teacher Frank Santoro will be joined by rising star Cameron Nicholson for a conversation about comics and music, and developing the samurai skills of a dedicated comics maker. Be prepared for mind-expansion. Sunday September 18th 1:00-2:00 PM Comics with Carol Tyler Learn the ins and outs of autobiographical comics from a maker who has been defining the form since the 1970’s. Carol Tyler will discuss her adventures in comics and share drawing tips and storytelling advice. 2:00-3:00 PM Comics Workbook Hangout Casual drop-in session with the Comics Workbook team. Take a break from circling the ballroom and channel some of that energy and those new ideas into your own work. Instructors and materials will be on hand for those who need additional inspiration. 3:00-4:00 PM Comics with Charles Burns We hear that Charles Burns is bringing slides to show us. Join us in discovering what his sometimes dark but always thrilling world involves. Draw along with him – maybe he’ll even create some of those immaculately inked black lines before your eyes. 4:00-5:00 PM Comics Workbook Hangout You never know who you might bump into at this final Comics Workbook hangout session. Everyone needs a place to chill out near the end of the show – we might be working on comics when Jaime Hernandez shows up to kick it, or Daniel Clowes – who can say? _____________________________________________________________ SIGN UP FOR THE WORKSHOPS HERE! Check out the rest of the fantastic programming available at SPX this year – HERE! Share this page: [...]

01/16/2018

Aaron CockleJanuary 15, 2018NewsAaron today with Richard Hell; 2 from Liana Finck; The representation of the Spanish Civil War in North-American comic strips ————————————————————————————————— Richard Hell’s Small Press Publishing At White Columns: White Columns will host a small exhibition of Richard Hell’s 50-year history – 1968-2018 – as a small press writer, publisher, editor and designer. Hell, under his original name of Richard Meyers, began his first small literary magazine and press at the age of 17, shortly after arriving in New York City. The magazine was called Genesis : Grasp, as was the press. Genesis : Grasp ran for six issues (numbers 1-5/6, 1968 – 1971), and also released three authors’ first books and two folders of broadsheets. Richard’s small press endeavors have proceeded, under a variety of names (Ernie Stomach, Theresa Stern, Richard Meyers; Genesis : Grasp Press, Dot Books, CUZ Editions …), up through the present, in publications often typeset and printed, as well as designed, by Hell. ————————————————————————————————— A Loner’s Guide to Planning and Cancellation + The Distance Test Some recent work from Liana Finck. At Topic At Catapult ————————————————————————————————— Francisco Manuel Sáez de Adana Herrero on The representation of the Spanish Civil War in North-American comic strips. The 204th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018 at 7pm at The New School, University Center, 63 Fifth Ave, UL 105 (lower level). PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION. Free and open to the public. The North-American comic strip of the early twentieth century has manifested itself, on many occasions, as a powerful means of transmission of history. In that role, the form of reproduction is a determinant factor since the comic strips were published together with the news of the time and, for that reason, they had an audience of several million readers. Many times the comic strips played the role of showing the public what was happening outside the United States, especially in the years before Pearl Harbor, when American society was more concerned with what was happening within its own borders than with international events. This study shows how an event such as the Spanish Civil War is represented in the comic strips of the late 30’s and how this shows the American society’s position towards this conflict. Francisco Sáez de Adana is Professor at the the Franklin Institute of American Studies of the University of Alcalá in Spain. He works as a comic scholar, mainly focused on American comics, interested in that medium as a way to depict historical events. He has published five chapters in books, seven papers in Spanish and international journals, and several communications In international conferences. He imparted a seminar on Miton Caniff and American culture at the University of Salerno in Italy. He organizes a summer course on comics imparted in the University of Alcalá which is celebrated annually from 2014. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

05/06/2016

Sally IngrahamMay 6, 2016NewsWolverine still walks the wilds of Canada via Michael Comeau’s pen – Alyssa Berg frees her mind through the mysteries of the grid – Erik Nebel reverses expectations in every direction – the laughs come from Fabio Tonetto – the tears (perhaps) come from Lisa Wilde – Free Comic Book Day is upon us – and Bruce Lee never dies. ————————————————————————————————— Philippe Leblanc converses with Michael Comeau at Barbed Comics, digging deep into the why and how of Comeau’s Hellberta (available through Colour Code Printing). Michael Comeau is a Canadian cartoonist living in Toronto. Extensive travel throughout the provinces informed the creation of Hellberta over an 8-year period, and the book is a filter through which Comeau examines Canada’s complex relationship with the oil industry, and the mysterious “Canadian Identity”. Or, as the recently released collected edition is described – “The gloom, the entitlement, the desecration of the tar sands hangs over a province, a nation. Dirty oil addiction. A popular myth set in the rocky mountains. A mutant named Logan. A poetic salve for sore eyes weeping for a metaphorical context. WWWD? What would Wolverine do?…” The interview between Comeau and Philippe Leblanc ranges far and wide, hitting upon the nature of narrative, learning how to make comics, road tripping adventures, the shifting political climate in Canada, and exactly how tangled up Wolverine is in it all. Interesting on a number of levels – read the whole thing HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Alyssa Berg delivers Part Two of her museum-visit-inspired process meditation series today, this time exploring the grid with us. “Sometimes my mind is unwell, or full of complicated messy things or unable to think of new ideas (‘creative block’, I guess?). When I am in this state, I let my wild, creative mind rest. One way to do this is by going into a gentle analytical and physical practice. I sit down at my desk and pre-draw pages of panels and grids. Similar to preparing my work space as mentioned in Part One, pre-drawing panels and grids is a simple concentration-meditation that doesn’t require much thought (common theme: freedom from the mind!).” Read all of Part Two HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Drew Miller interviewed Erik Nebel recently, and their conversation is full of important stuff – ‘Drew Miller – You use vibrating colors as indicators of form, specifically for referencing the human body. The colors are strong on the screen! The drawing relies much less on direct line-work, which is uncharacteristic for the medium of comics. It’s an interesting way to develop distinct forms and negative space. Can you talk about color at all? Erik Nebel – I think of color in a way that may be different from how other cartoonists think of color. Traditionally, in our popular narratives, dark colors are associated with sadness and badness and things that are primitive, and light colors are associated with goodness and happiness and things that are civilized. That’s completely racist. It’s part of binary thinking. It’s poison in our society. I’m trying to reverse those expectations with my comics.’ Read the rest HERE, and follow Erik Nebel’s daily comic posts on his tumblr. ————————————————————————————————— Giving a shout out to cartoonist Fabio Tonetto, whose work has been cracking me up lately. Check out the rest of the comic above on Vice. ————————————————————————————————— Lisa Wilde’s Lacunae: Elegy For My Mother just finished being serialized on Mutha Magazine. A recent press release about the series described it as – “…a webzine that pushes the boundaries between comics and art. Tracing an arc from childhood to adulthood, the piece gives form to the unconscious side of a life narrative through single-image pages and minimal text. Wilde’s visceral and powerful drawings reference children’s art, comics, Jungian archetypes, and artists as wide-ranging as Chagall, Munch, and Eva Hesse.” Start from the beginning HERE, and follow this link to a list of all 5 parts. ————————————————————————————————— Another reminder that tomorrow (Sat. May 7th!) is Free Comic Book Day. Find a participating store near you via the Store Locator, call them up to get the details, and plan to get there early! I’ll be running out myself to find a copy of this sweet looking Bruce Lee comic! ————————————————————————————————— While we’re on the topic, here are a couple of apparently “lost sketches” by Bruce Lee, and the brief story behind them. ————————————————————————————————— Thanks for hanging out in the Comics Workbook newsroom this week! Meet back here bright and early Monday. Cheers! – Sally Share this page: [...]

03/01/2017

Juan FernándezMarch 1, 2017los Cómics / NewsJuan José con un poquito sobre #GRAFBCN2017; Bas Backer on Chicks on Cómics; Inés Estrada’s Booklyn 2012; Mireia Pérez; Núria Pompeia; Berliac; Salva Rubio on Jiro Taniguchi; 100 Años de TBO; CW Daily Comics. Cómics y noticias que me han llamado la atención esta semana: ESTE FIN DE SEMANA: #GRAFBCN2017. Esta a la vuelta de la esquina. GRAF is coming to Barcelona. Here’s all the info you need for #GRAFBCN2017‘s programming. March 3-5 at the wacky warehouse space, Fabra i Coats. It’s the ninth edition of the Festival so it should get pretty wild. – If you’re following from home, check out twitter and tumblr for the #GRAFBCN2017 to get some insights on. Want to know who’s going to be there? Here ya go. Need more info? Here’s Mireia Pérez with the scoop you need on #GRAFBCN2017 over on RTVE’s La Hora del Bocadillo, Spain’s weekly national comics radio hour. (Fast forward to minute 48). Descubre a Núria Pompeia en la exposición ‘Núria Pompeia, sola ante el peligro’. Fundación Gin‘s digital editorial cartooning museum, Humoristan, has got a great online exhibition of Pompeia’s work with highlights from Maternasis and Las Metamorfosis. Berliac‘s got some new comics on Vice – Asian Food Store Junkies – S01-E03 This week will horrify your taste buds. Inés Estrada’s dropped a zine she made, quick and dirty after her time at Comic Arts Brooklyn in 2012. “I was going to make a zine of my comics diary of Brooklyn 2012 (cus I never did) but fck it… who cares about 2012″ Now you can read it online. Inspiring, fast, six panel autobio. Salva Rubio offers a great reflection on the work of the late Jiro Taniguchi. Especially of interest given it’s a Spanish perspective on the manga titan. The theme here is the eternal return. This March, it will be the 100th anniversary of the first issue of “TBO”, the popular illustrated magazine that gave name to Spanish comics, tebeos. To commemorate this the newly published, Antoni Guiral‘s 100 Años de TBO, tells the history of a publication which passed the great names of twentieth century Catalan comic. Take a tour of a century “TBO”. (In Catalan!) Bas Backer ha hecho un relato hermoso de su paso por Buenos Aires, el encuentro con amigos y actividades de Chicks On Comics. A nice report, filled with photos and drawings of time passing through the amazing Chicks on Comics show and Buenos Aires. A nice long distance relationship travelogue, haha! ————————————————————————————————— Berliac offers some fresh cuts over at Fumettologica, the central axis of the conversation being his work editing and contributing to Kuš! #25’s Gaijiin Manga. Short and sweet but goes in deep with his thoughts on gekiga, the western gaze and his own evolution as an author. How do you explain the current popularity of Gekiga in the western comics scene? Now they’re getting published and before they were not, simple as that. If you want to dig deeper, I guess the publishers finally realized that since the late seventies, Western adults grew up with manga and anime, and we just needed a cultural approval from well-respected publishers, to re-unite with our childhood love without feeling embarassed about it. Put that together with the concept that publishers from liberal countries have of what a Graphic-Novel is supposed to be (basically realistic stories about the suffering of people from far away countries, to be enjoyed from the comfort of our sofas), and there you go: Gekiga provides us with both. Here lies another reason why I like to call my own work Gaijin-Gekiga: if Gekiga was the Japanese expression, in a dramatic comics form, of their own collective anxieties in times of hypercapitalism, then I can undoubtedly say that the main focus of my work is the very same one, only about my own place and time, of course. I have the impression that not many well-known cartoonists are really talking about what’s going on right here and now, on this side of the world, on a collective scale. In Graphic-Novels, all I see is either boring lectures about foreign or past war conflicts from an “objective”, Western point of view, or feel-good stories about individual self-improvement, and in the most successful cases, a combination of the two. These stories are just two different ways of patting our backs and telling ourselves how great we Westerners are. Gekiga was a beautiful, dignifying way to accept the crushing reality of post-war defeat. Western narratives of today, on the contrary, insist on that we’re on the winning side, even when our reality clearly points to the opposite (see Donald Trump). I’m not saying there’s dignity in being a loser, but in seeing reality for what it is. Drama without exaggeration. That is the essence of Gekiga. Now that a few months has passed from the release of the Kus, can you say that the anthology also served as a bond between the artists of this possible new western manga scene? Bonds among artists always exist, but maybe not explicitely. to the point not even we are aware of it. Many of the artists involved discovered each other’s work in that issue of š! As I said in another interview, it is not the artists’ task or responsablity to make that bond intelligible for the public, but the publishers’, gallerists’, and journalists’. As an author, I’m not too concerned about it. As a co-editor of š! #25, I certainly hope we provided a grain of sand to this cause. ————————————————————————————————— The Spring Semester of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers is starting soon! The semester has a rolling start date, but it will officially kick off on March 7th. We will continue taking applications past that date – Frank is always willing to make it work for your schedule. Just apply! The course is 8 weeks long – 500 bux – payment plans are available. More details can be found HERE. Email santoroschoolATgmail to apply ————————————————————————————————— Blinkers – 3-1-2017 – by Jack Brougham ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 3-1-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 3-1-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— Cozytown – 3-1-2017 – by Juan Fernandez Share this page: [...]

06/06/2017

Aaron CockleJune 6, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Davis/Tamaki; Alex Katz in the Subway; Line Hoven & Nora Krug; Ware on Steinberg; CAKE Reminder; Marginalia; NY Times Comics ————————————————————————————————— ‘I am constantly bewildered by the juxtapositions of city-life.’ Eleanor Davis in conversation with Jillian Tamaki, in support of Tamaki’s new book, Boundless: ED: Did you write “World Class City” after you realized you were gonna leave New York? JT: Oh yes. Definitely. I had always had a very weird, uncomfortable relationship with New York, but it was my home and leaving was very melancholy despite being 100% the right decision. ED: I read it in the voice of someone who is in love with a thing, but is aware of being in denial about its flaws. A keening sort of mournful love. JT: Oh, I never fell in love with the place. But, I’m glad. I prefer that, instead of it seeming sarcastic. ED: How did you decide the images for it? JT: To be honest, I can feel increasingly confined by the image part of comics. Perhaps because often, for more commercial works, the images need be a lot more literal? I feel like images can “lock” an idea. To depict someone specific can be nice sometimes – the books I do with Mariko are always about specificity of time and place and character. But sometimes it’s nice, when reading prose, to have the ideas and concepts more open. They can feel more universal or possibly even symbolic. So I guess this comic was about trying to stretch that word-image relationship. I don’t want to show you what kind of person thinks this way, acts this way, etc. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Lost Romance Will Soon Be at Your Neighborhood Itch.’ Alex Katz with some early-career subway drawings: Later this month, the Cleveland Museum of Art will mount “Brand-New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s,” an exhibition of the paintings that Katz made in the decade after he graduated Cooper Union and spent two influential summers at the Skowhegan School in Maine. “It rolls out of this,” he acknowledges of the work in that show. “I changed styles the minute I got out of school. In a practical sense, it was one of the dumbest things I ever did in my life. I applied for a Fulbright. I had three teachers who gave me A’s on the jury. And one of them said to me: ‘Alex, why did you send this? It’s crap. We couldn’t do a thing for you.’ ” ————————————————————————————————— Ferocious Ink: Line Hoven & Nora Krug MFA Visual Narrative and the Goethe-Institut New York present an evening with authors and illustrators Line Hoven and Nora Krug. Hoven and Krug will present their explorations of German identity in their graphic work and discuss ways of weaving the personal, cultural and historical into new forms of storytelling. Tuesday, June 6, 7-10pm, School of Visual Arts SocDoc Auditorium, 136 West 21 Street, ground floor. Free and open to the public. RSVP here. ————————————————————————————————— ‘As a cartoonist myself, I am dismayed that there’s little in the show I can steal…’ Caleb Orecchio linked to this Chris Ware catalog essay for the Along the Lines: Selected Drawings by Saul Steinberg show at the Art Institute of Chicago in yesterday’s newspost, but I wanted to post an excerpt, it’s always nice to see cartoonists writing about other cartoonist’s work: One can’t overstate the importance of Steinberg’s working for reproduction, of his creating drawings to be disseminated to the mailboxes, laps, and, I guess, bathroom walls, of receptive readers and not, at least initially, to museum walls. The Museum turns on an eminently Steinbergian tool—the rubber stamp—and, as a lithograph, manipulates the idea of reproduction while pictorially lampooning and dissembling it. Identical figures are plunked out to represent visitors and viewers of (what else?) official stamps of approval; over the museum’s horizon, stamps rise like suns, the entire composition grounded and buttressed by illegible signatures and, of course, more stamps. As a visa-seeking emigré in his early life, Steinberg’s fascination with legal seals is easily understandable. Riverfront and Certified Landscape pivot on the objectively ridiculous but fundamentally necessary imprimatur of government made corporeal, territorially imprinted as a skein of walls and fences. Steinberg quietly added his own signature directly into the rather unaccommodating landscapes—are they farms, factories, or concentration camps?—rather than putting it in the traditional antiseptic nonspace outside the pictorial “border.” But in The Museum, Steinberg bundles the stamp’s sanctioning power and aesthetics into the frame of the art itself, stamping his own authorizing red imprimatur in that expected nonspace outside the image, along with his signature (legible, one notes) and, as a digestif, a blind stamp (a stamp without ink, visible by the impression it leaves on the page), just to snuff out any lingering doubt about the drawing’s authenticity and, by proxy, the artist’s own legitimacy. ————————————————————————————————— Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) Saturday and Sunday, June 10 and 11, 2017 11 am – 6 pm Center on Halsted 3656 N Halsted FREE and open to the public! http://www.cakechicago.com Promotional artwork by Anya Davidson. ————————————————————————————————— Marginalia at the Drawing Center Marginalia: Open Sessions 10 declares our present geo-political and ideological constructs to be permeable and malleable. The artists in this exhibition view borders and barriers as material through which to build new avenues of both trespass and solidarity. Marginalia features Daniel Bejar, Ana Peñalba, Sue Jeong Ka, Carolyn Lambert, Srinivas Mangipudi, Irini Miga, and Rodrigo Valenzuela. Drawing is a mode of inquiry throughout the exhibition Valenzuela visualizes the American dream in deserted landscapes; Bejar traverses communities tenuously linked through political maneuvering; Peñalba sketches visionary architecture from the waste of the present; Ka explores the aesthetics of deportation; Miga archives tender and almost unnoticeable gestures; Lambert finds legible marks deep in Arctic ice; and Mangipudi creates notebooks inviting strangers to add their marginalia. Curated by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway. ————————————————————————————————— New York Stories Caleb linked to the New York Times Magazine’s all-comics issue yesterday as well, but it’s definitely worth another look. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 6-6-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-6-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-6-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

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