Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged Bernie Wrightson, caleb orecchio, daniel clowes, Dash Shaw, Gary Panter, gloria rivera, html flowers, jack brougham, Michael Comeau, simon hanselmann, tyler landry

Sally Ingraham

Posted on April 2, 2017

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On Philippe Druillet – by RM Rhodes

Comics WorkbookJuly 30, 2017EssaysRM Rhodes presents commentary on the work of Philippe Druillet ————————————————————————————————— I feel like when someone like me asks a young artist “Have you ever heard of…?” the young artist is expecting to know why the person in question is important. Or, even more simply, why they should care. Having said that, Philippe Druillet is important because he’s one of the founding members of Les Humanoïdes Associés, the group that created Metal Hurlant (which later became Heavy Metal in America). If you’re guessing all of that French indicates Druillet’s national origin, you’d be correct. Of even more relevance, Druillet is an amazing visual artist whose work deserves to be looked at by anyone who has any affinity for color and the use of color in art. His work is clearly influenced by Jack Kirby, but it also harkens back to European engravings that have been colored from the mid-17th Century. His early work is black and white, but when he got his first airbrush, his entire style changed. As far as I’m concerned, Druillet levelled up when he started working color into his compositions. He clearly spent a long time working on the underlying pen illustrations, but it’s his use of color as a major element of the composition that’s worthy of note. Speaking of composition, Druillet’s works like Lone Sloane, Salammbô, and Gail gave him ample opportunities to create some really challenging page layouts. These layouts are so distinctive that Benoit Peeters’ Four Conceptions of a Page uses Druillet as the exemplar of Decorative pages. In the interests of show vs tell, I’m going to stop talking about how awesome Druillet is and just show you a whole bunch of his artwork. It will either resonate with you or it won’t, but I have a feeling that if it does resonate, it will resonate strongly. ————————————————————————————————— RM Rhodes is the curator of the Heavy Metal Magazine tumblr. He lives and works in Washington, D.C. His current project is a weekly online anthology called The Rumor published on the Comics Workbook tumblr – see issues of it HERE. Check out more of his comics at Louis Deux. Share this page: [...]

Connor Willumsen on LICAF 2016

Frank SantoroOctober 29, 2016Festivals and ShowsLICAF 2016 report by Connor Willumsen. A year ago Frank Santoro, having just returned from The Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2015 (LICAF), suddenly called me and spoke to me for an hour to interest me in an ambitious plan he had for a touring workshop that would broadly function like a campaign for inclusive visual literacy. I agreed because my first experience of Frank was of him thoroughly terrifying students in a “Business of Comics” class at SVA in 2009, which he did by raving about, among other things, the misguided and stunted influence of Alex Ross on the medium. LICAF 2016, after about a year of planning, was Frank’s experimental initial step to these ends, which have an unknown and expanding scope. Me, Frank, and Aidan Koch met up in NY to fly together to Manchester. The rest of the CW crew met us there. Here is my report: It is a struggle to reflect on anything without first commenting on the unfathomable number of sheep abstractly pacing between an ancient network of low stone walls up in the Lake District of northern England. I guess I saw, by virtue of my eyes being open, over a thousand sheep over the weekend. I became self conscious and learned to be discreet about my developing preoccupation with photographing them. Recently it was pointed out to me that children rarely marvel at vistas, which suggests it’s a learned adult concept – a needless excuse for hiking and travel, but yes the scenery was beautiful, etc. Kendal is known for Beatrix Potter and the Kendal Mint Cake, which is no cake at all. All guests received at least one. Mine was an anti-freeze indigo blue. I am not aware of anyone who tasted one. Here are the ingredients: Kendal is also known for it’s precocious adolescents of the Middle Ages who had an obligatory devotion to the laborious longbow discipline in order to slaughter the French under a carpet of arrows, which they very much did in Crécy and Agincourt. These archers were cloaked in “Kendal Green”, a wool fabric, not to be confused with the over-hyped “Lincoln Green” worn by Robin Hood. Frank made an attempt to charm the mayor of Kendal, in my presence, by telling him that I practiced Longbow in Canada, a misleading truth. The Mayor could not have cared less, and I respected his appropriate reaction. He then told me not to jaywalk. At a gallery displaying beautiful comic pages from Hanneriina Moisseinen’s recent work Kannas – The Isthmus, described as a book about cows and other animals during World War 2, the mayor (Stephen) and his wife (Sarah) struck up a conversation with Aidan Koch, Frank and myself. He was wearing a massive piece of gold jewelry around his neck that sort of resembled an ammunition belt. I didn’t understand why this was happening, and any time I say “I didn’t understand why this was happening” in regards to my time in Kendal, it’s because in terms of comics culture, I am more used to experiencing a disinterested glazed pessimism, often from the likes of it’s own tribe, to say nothing of relatively high ranking civil servants. The mayor and his wife came to hang out and meet cartoonists, him and the rest of the town were genuinely enthusiastic. As our conversation progressed I fell into a light panic from wondering who was supposed to end this conversation and how. The implied pressure of civility and politeness is real in England. My contrary reaction to this was a suppressed and sadistic urge to stretch the length of the conversation beyond comfort. Sarah was chill and doodled a map on a scrap of paper towards other towns we could check out in our rental car. We were mercifully spared this trial of mannered courtliness by being interrupted with an announcement that there would be an interpretive dance piece performed by the local students which had been inspired by Hanneriina’s book. They walked right in among us and danced in black tights. The easiest way to impress me is with a casually presented dance performance. I didn’t understand what was happening. It was great and we applauded and the students sort of unceremoniously vanished while we were ushered to a dinner. what other comics festival has interpretive dance on it’s opening night? LICAF 2016 A photo posted by @santoro.frank on Oct 13, 2016 at 2:30pm PDT Throughout the weekend, not once was I left wanting for a hot meal (and alcohol, if necessary), generously provided by the LICAF organizers or Frank, who was acting as a professional host. This concept is so otherwise foreign in my experiences that it triggered in me the alert paranoia of theft. This might seem like a trivial detail but I appreciate it deeply. It’s a simple concept that cites by way of action the insufficiently discussed problematic nucleus of the comic industry and culture: food money. At the last MoCCA everyone knew to meet at the Society of Illustrators simply because it was known that they were serving free pasta salad. At dinner it became apparent how varied the guest list was in terms of audience. I only recognized a few names and nobody knew me. Almost every time a name was announced, with the exception of a few nabobs, there would be an audible “who?” A musician in the corner entertained us by playing a saw and DJing with phonographs. My jaw dropped when I heard that otherwise there was a nearly successful booking of something like a Jim Steranko nude escape artist routine. I’m not sure if I misheard but I got the impression that it wasn’t a joke. We played a UK game called Pub Quiz, and our table tied for the lowest score even though we cheated. At the dinner and throughout the weekend, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and fans reminisced about Darwyn Cooke, who passed away in May of this year. He was a special guest at LICAF 2015, which I’m told was his first time out of North America. I’m also told that, by all accounts, the experience had a profoundly positive effect on him.** The next day, part of the Comics Workbook crew presented a sort of lecture together. It was Frank as MC, commanding the room, and me and Aidan in a couple chairs playing off his questions and AV ephemera. We had a full audience but I suspected we were unknown entities to the majority. Frank had already earned my trust in terms of leading us through public and educational presentation by showing me the John Berger clips he would prep the audience with, and he cemented that trust in practice. He intuitively understands how to keep it from becoming a condescending Ted Talk, a thinly veiled advertisement, or, most common in the comics scene, a painfully reluctant reading and slide show. Berger 2 from Frank Santoro on Vimeo. The John Berger clips, serving a foundation of accessible art theory, were used to establish a context for the audience which would envelope our disparate work and leave no person unequipped to understand where each of us were coming from. While each of us spoke, a video played showcasing one of our works. The camera behaved like a patiently mobilized reading eye, with which the audience could passively and fluidly empathize if they chose, while listening to us speak or reading the overlaid excerpted quotes. It lacked the the dead rhythm of a normal slide show, and the content and conversation worked harmoniously together. As always, Frank was emphasizing timing. We didn’t plan it strictly or stick to a script, so what Frank and Aidan were saying felt fresh to me, and I became a part of the audience whenever I wasn’t speaking. The direction of conversation between us and the rest of room was guided by curiosity. (all the videos are HERE) We all retreated to a group Workshop with local students. Frank’s teaching style was like an energetic performance. He was literally running down a hallway between two rooms, simultaneously teaching two groups of students, with me and Aidan in the wings for assistance. It was telling to watch the students take the limited premise and engage with wild variation. The personal associations they were forming were evident in the drawings. Then we got to see Kendal. I liked walking the town with Aidan because we had a similar height and silhouette. I looked like a grown-up version of the blueberry girl from Willy Wonka, and she had a good kind of a bleached Mick Jagger thing going on. We were both devastated to discover that we had missed out on some local owls that had been hanging out in the town center, supposedly happily available for head-patting. Late that night, outside the Ring of Bells Pub, a quiet old man with a muzzled dog read my mind and gave me elaborate directions to a urinal I would access through the alley. The man using that urinal loudly grumbled at me about his having long hair in the 1970s. I had been told that two of our crew had experienced a sort of hallucinatory waking nightmare sleep paralysis at the hotel all the guests were staying at. While I was taking flash photos of sheep in the middle of the night, Craig Thompson approached suddenly out of the darkness and gently explained to me and Aidan that he had experienced the same thing. That night it happened to me. That makes 4 people, that I am aware of. Me and Naomi Nowak walked through the local castle ruins in the middle of the night under the light of a full moon. To access it we had to traverse a cemetery, a moat, and a cricket club. I was too afraid to fully enter a dungeon which had lacked any light or visibility. I returned during the day to learn it was a toilet. The temptation to watch TV in the hotel at night was itself an existential horror. The content was comprised mostly of Gordon Ramsay, Bradley Cooper movies, and a British version of Maury that had a Euro flavor to it. The next afternoon I gave my own workshop. I walked the audience through a basic conceptual approach to making a comic page that I might use, one that allows for speed and discourages the common trepidation or burden of the ‘next image’. While they drew I shared from my mixed bag of cautionary tales, which, for instance, described how division of labour and editorial hierarchy in mainstream comic books discourages communication and often prohibits the artist from making creative decisions in terms of layout and sequencing, which for me is the essence of cartooning, and limits most of it’s craftspeople to being dependent storyboard artists under a constant threat of replacement, as it meanwhile postures as a pseudo-auteur culture. We talked about arbitrarily contrary but equally valid systems of visual perspective. Unstructured composition. Web programming. I struggle to remember most of it, but had the impression it was well heard. Here’s me paraphrasing a conversation I read between Paul Joyce and David Hockney in on the subject of western and Chinese visual perspective. Connor Willumsen demonstrating the differences between Western and Eastern landscape painting #comicsworkbook LICAF UK 2016 #licaf A video posted by @santoro.frank on Oct 15, 2016 at 2:16pm PDT I would have liked to have seen Aidan’s workshop but it was going on at the same time in the next room. It encouraged me to hear that she had people drawing their own feet in silence. When I learned that Jordi Bernet was at the festival I decided that I would try to meet him. There was a man walking around the festival who resembled an aged and weathered Torpedo. I lightly shadowed this man until discovering that I was completely wrong in assuming it was Jordi Bernet. Eventually, at the hotel, Frank pointed out the back of Jordi Bernet’s head from a distance, which was disappointingly unremarkable and un-gangster-like. I think I expected him to be a sort of evil Euro-Seth. However, I did happen across Gilbert Shelton in a carpeted hallway. He explained that he was there to “bullshit about the past”, which struck me as an appropriate sub-header for most comic festivals and literature. Frank repeatedly reminded me that Gilbert laid essential groundwork for the American underground comic scene, and further on through his example to Crumb and then to Moebius, and marveled that he was simply walking around undisturbed. He stressed that the important moments at festivals like this are when you run into people between two places, which Kendal was ideally suited for given that the festivities truly encompassed the entire space of the town. At the closing reception Hanneriina Moisseinen outlined some of the ways in which she has been directly and practically supported as an artist by her own country, the likes of which were unheard of to me. I asked her about notable pop-cultural offerings from Finland, and she immediately and excitedly described a TV show called The Horny Police Officer, which has proved difficult to search for. Frank rented a car for the pleasure of it, and he kindly offered to tour us through the countryside once we finished our duties. His driving was intuitive, confident, and frightening, the experience marked by a constant terror that we were on the wrong side of the road, which at times we actually were. Frank reassured us by describing an incident at the last LICAF wherein he wrecked a rental car and a belligerent man screamed at him for ruining his vacation. When concerns were raised about us scraping along the side of parked cars on the left, he said this: “It’s not a matter of if, but when.” Our crew, with Frank behind the wheel, left Kendal at 5 am to catch a plane in Manchester. That’s a little over one hour of high speed driving through torrential rain on a slippery highway with low visibility, navigated through disorienting traffic circles and a condescending GPS, making it at times one of the hairiest drives of my life. Each of us personally had to reach a peaceful acceptance of the possibility of a gruesome death out of a desire to catch our plane on time. I am retrospectively grateful for this moment, which was essential to our bonding and had a satisfying narrative conclusiveness to it. As Frank eloquently put it, it felt like we were leaving the scene of a bank heist. At airport security we were obligated to go through a bizarre cultural interrogation. They asked Aidan what her favorite TV shows were, and what my high school principal’s name was. We made it back in one piece from England #comicsworkbook #beautiesandthebeast A photo posted by @santoro.frank on Oct 17, 2016 at 10:53am PDT Aidan was dropped off in Brooklyn, and me and Frank eventually parted ways at a turnstile in a subway station in Manhattan. Through the gate, I watched him return back up to ground level, passing 5 cops performing “random” bag checks. As he passed them, he let loose a loud Transylvania laugh which lasted and echoed until he was on the street and out of sight. I saw that this made the police laugh nervously, glancing at each-other. A video posted by @santoro.frank on Oct 19, 2016 at 5:01am PDT Shout out to people I met, conversationalists, and new friends. Aidan, Naomi, Niall, Oliver, Jack, Craig, Ollie, Joe, Joe, Chris, Tony Baba Ganoush, the Finnish crew, and those who’s names I forgot or forgot to mention. You can all crash on my couch. And additional, privileged, special thanks to Frank Santoro, Julie Tait, Carole Tait, Aileen McEvoy, other festival organizers, and all the volunteers for their generosity. bye (Check out more LICAF coverage HERE! and Check out a 20 minute video of Connor’s workshop HERE!) (**Editor’s note: RE thee late great Darwyn Cooke – See Seth’s touching eulogy of sorts from The Doug Wright Awards from this year HERE where he describes the scene at the hotel bar at last year’s LICAF.) Connor Willumsen makes comics in Montreal, Canada. His newest works are Portraits and Swinespritzen. Find more of his work HERE. Share this page: [...]

09/12/2016

Juan FernándezSeptember 12, 2016NewsJuan Fernandez here to start your week off right! Your chance to sign up for the OFFICIAL Comics Workbook Cartooning Workshops at SPX; Dash Shaw’s My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea nails it; A new semester of the Santoro School; The Black Hood: an anthology of Depression and Anxiety; The Tale of Kitty-in-boots – Beatrix Potter’s latest posthumously published work; “Swinespritzen” and Portraits by Connor Willumsen. ————————————————————————————————— Stop whatever you’re doing and make sure that you are signed up for the terrific workshops that Comics Workbook is hosting at SPX next weekend. Make comics with Carol Tyler, Jeffrey Brown, Charles Burns, Frank Santoro, Cameron Nicholson, Juan Fernandez, and some of the crew from Fantagraphics Spanish Fever! Full workshop descriptions HERE. SIGN UP FOR THE WORKSHOPS HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Dash Shaw Does it Again The WORLD PREMIERE of Dash Shaw’s new film – My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea – just took place at the Toronto International Film Festival – And the movie has opened to some much deserved praise. What a joy. Do yourself a favor and check out what Eric Kohn has to say about it over at IndieWire: Combing the twitchy look with storytelling that follows suit, “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” is by far the most original animated movie of the year, or any other in recent memory. While Charlie Kaufman’s “Anomalisa” used its own delicate approach to represent one man’s alienated state, “High School” barely even bothers with narrative consistency in its quest to achieve a vivid representation of its protagonist’s experiences. A third act finale, as the survivors make a desperate dash for the exist, goes on for so long that it pitches the whole experience into the realm of avant garde, with coherent images morphing into strobing colors and abstract shapes. (The movie justifiably opens with an epileptic seizure warning.) ————————————————————————————————— Speaking of school – the VERY BEST SORT is also back in session. The fall semester of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers is a GO! Applications are due Sept. 16th – course starts Sept. 23rd. You’ve always wanted to make comics, right? And all those terrific comics popping up all over Tumblr lately (due to the Comics Workbook Composition Competition 2016, no doubt) has really inspired you – RIGHT? So sign up for the Correspondence Course and take your cartooning to a whole other sphere of being. Do it! ALL THE DETAILS ARE HERE. ————————————————————————————————— “Don’t miss ’em at SPX” Frank’s in great company on this list put together over by Comicsverse by Luc Boyce. Ben Marra, Liz Suburbia, Tom Gauld and Noah Van Sciver.They’ve all got the fighting spirit and it’s a real pleasure to see others take note. A good and well deserved write for everybody there. Don’t miss any of them at this weekend’s small press explosion: SPX. We will be at table N8 this year – stop by and say “Hello” – check out new work by Frank and the students – buy some old and rare comics from Frank’s vast collection! We’re coming at you full blast this year. ————————————————————————————————— The New Depression: The Black Hood Now available online, it’s The Black Hood: an anthology of Depression and Anxiety is a new collection by the people who brought you “Suspect Device.” This book is determined to do for comics about Depression what Black Flag did for songs about depression. Want to see how it all pans out? Get yourself a copy. The Black Hood collects pieces by artists like John Porcellino, Box Brown, Tara Booth, Noah Van Sciver, Elizabeth Bethea, Josh Simmons, Mike Freiheit, Pat Aulisio, Katie Fricas, Mike (Late Era Clash) Taylor, Hyena Hell, and many others. Includes a one page comic/interview with Dwid Hellion from famed HC band Integrity, and an essay by artist/writer Eve Wood. ————————————————————————————————— There is still dancing in the streets over the Comics Workbook Composition Competition 2016 results – if you haven’t checked out the hefty list of comics yet, give it a look HERE! There’s so much to enjoy. ————————————————————————————————— The NEW Beatrix Potter – The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots Maureen Corrigan over at NPR’s Book Review has a look at Beatrix Potter’s posthumously published tale, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. Like Tupac, Potter is back. Quentin Blake is at the helm with illustrations for this one. To some, for better, to others for worse. Cash grab? Inspired publishing? The stars alining? It’s definitely an interesting time to see a new book by Beatrix Potter on shelves. Personally, I’m excited to see how this book feels, among her other work, what is no less than a canon of children’s literature unto itself. Check out what Corrigan has to say over at NPR: Here’s the backstory to this “new” Beatrix Potter book: Two years ago, a woman named Jo Hanks who’s an editor at Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom came upon a reference to a letter that Potter wrote in 1914. In that letter, Potter mentioned working on the manuscript of a story about “a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat who leads a rather double life.” Hanks dug into Potter’s archives at The Victoria & Albert Museum and she found the manuscript of The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. Potter had written three drafts of the story and had done one watercolor illustration of Kitty, but for various reasons, she died in 1943 without completing the book. Skip to the present and this lavish debut edition of The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. ————————————————————————————————— To conclude – one last thing that you CANNOT sleep on…!! – Connor Willumsen’s “Swinespritzen” is now available from Comics Workbook. Who knows for how long though! Connor and@santoro.frank reprinted this classic wacky pack originally produced for@breakdownpress – DM @santoro.frank and He’ll tell you all about it. A favorite of all Connor W fans – people have been bugging us about this for months. These are hard to make so we’re only offering them like this. Keep your eyes peeled at SPX because we might have a some! ALSO this is probably the last week that you can take advantage of the pre-sale on Connor Willumsen’s new book Portraits. Check it out HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Well, I’ve got to get to hustling for SPX. Lots of books to finish up and workshops to prepare! Until next time. -JF Share this page: [...]

02/22/2018

Juan FernándezFebruary 22, 2018NewsJuan stepping in for Sam here with comics and comments from Austin English and Mari Naomi! ————————————————————————————————— Where I’m Coming From (Part 2) Another excellent exploratory archive post comes to us from Austin English over on The Comics Journal. Grab a coffee and dig in. The first half of this column explained the intentions behind it, but let’s rehash things for a moment: as we all converge together to discuss, draw, or simply read comics, most of our knowledge is shared (Peanuts, a vague notion of Wimpy requesting things he cannot afford) whether we endorse or react against it—but our experience of zines is a personal one. Geography, a personal pantheon of aesthetics, varying levels of enthusiasm for continuing to amass piles of paper into one’s life: all of this contribute to a unique archive of “containers of human creativity” (to use a phrase cartoonist Jason T. Miles once employed to describe zines). I was intrigued by people’s reactions to the first installment of this series. Some expressed excitement at seeing one of the first zines by artist Margot Ferrick. The work in question is from 2012, not ancient history in the least, but Ferrick’s work has changed considerably since that moment. As I said before, zines disappear arbitrarily and without warning. A reader’s favorite artist may have made something deeply heartfelt in the very recent past, but the work and the attitudes expressed may forever be obscured. With this in mind, for the final installment in this series, I’ve tried to write about a great many zines, in the hopes that works that have moved me might open up forgotten corners of what is possible in cartooning (which is the not so secret intention of this column in general). You can read it all here. (After you’re done, start working on your next zine.) ————————————————————————————————— COMICS ARE FOR WHITE MEN: backstory Mari Naomi offers up an illustrated backstory of the Cartoonists of Color and Queer Cartoonists databases. This comic originally appeared in NEW FRONTIERS, an anthology published by SI Universe. Big ups to Mari Naomi for managing this huge project. ————————————————————————————————— 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! Share this page: [...]

04/23/2018

Caleb OrecchioApril 23, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with Kyle Baker’s excellent cartooning on the 1990’s adaption of Dick Tracy, plus other news! ————————————————————————————————— I’m out on the road visiting my sister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (aka Amish Country) so lots of horse pulling buggy alongside hasty drivers speedily swerving around the innocent carriage, narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic. Other than that, this weekend was essentially stress free, full of familial love and camaraderie and void of any care of the world; but I’m going back to Pittsburgh today, count up to thirty. Round that horn and ride that train, gonna thread up. Lo and behold, in the brisk departure for my sister’s, I forgot to bring the various incarnations of Mister Miracle Frank loaned me to look at and possibly write about. Lo! there will be a day when my wits and memory will work faster than my feet and CR-V, but until that day comes we are stuck with my forgetfulness. Be encouraged, however, that lately I’ve been carrying around Kyle Baker’s 1990 Dick Tracy series. It’s interesting because it more or less came out around the same time as Why I Hate Saturn, and was probably read by more people at the time than what has become Baker’s auteur calling card. Baker’s Dick Tracy has been the subject of my drawing studies lately. I really appreciate Baker’s strong, brisk lines that let the colors breathe. The forms are rendered in a Moebius-esque Upon a Star style contours that please the eyes with their simplicity and accuracy. It’s Moebius by way of Sergio Aragonés by way of Chester Gould, the real hero here. The colors themselves are very limited, they’re beautiful. Baker’s Dick Tracy is a great study of what one can achieve in a limited amount of time with a limited resources. The book very nearly lives up to the beautiful simplicity of Gould’s strips. Have you seen the original art for Gould’s Sundays? They look amazing. Obviously the drawings are fantastic, but the simple layouts speak volumes, particularly when compared to most other, more muddled (layout-wise) comic pages you find at a cartoon museum. Baker’s layouts more or less stick to a 6 to 9-panel layout, and with that, keep a really steady pace. The sequencing of images is natural and makes one feel that Baker’s inner metronome went uninterrupted. I highly recommend to the aspiring cartoonist (or, for that matter, the passive reader) to look for Kyle Baker’s fantastic Dick Tracy books. Baker’s lively lines are infectious, and the images teem with an energy that can be hard to harness in a comic book adaption starring Warren Beatty. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Frank Santoro is going to Italy for Comicon in Naples. Jaime Hernandez is the latest cartoonist guest on Virtual Memories. I personally think the new Nancy is kind of funny. Really, anything other than Guy Gilchrist comics looks great to me. Keren Katz is the latest guest on Process Party. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 4-23-2018 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

04/03/2017

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Sally Ingraham

We start the week with Wilson and Dan Clowes, on old/new comic by Dash Shaw, insights from HTML Flowers and Michael Comeau, and Gloria Rivera’s CW Rowhouse Residency Report – plus much more!

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Mini-comic by Dash Shaw drawn in 2008/2009

Dash Shaw wrote a “Filmmaker’s Letter” for Landmark Theater, which will be showing his film My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea! in locations around the country starting next week (find the complete list of showings HERE). Along with the letter, which details some of his thoughts behind the creation of the film, Dash shares the original mini-comic that inspired the film. The first spread is above – you can see the rest HERE.

Read Dash’s Filmmakers Letter and be sure to see the film when it comes through your town!

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Daniel Clowes spoke to The Guardian recently about the similarities between the cynical world of his 90’s comics and this new “Trumpland” we live in – plus the experience of making Wilson, the new movie staring Woody Harrelson that is based on his 2010 comic of the same name. I read the comic and then saw the movie last week – Wilson the comic was quite amazing, and the movie didn’t disappoint either. Dan Clowes talks here about a powerful scene in the comic and the movie – and in real life, as it turns out:

“You drew the graphic novel around the time your father was dying, and Wilson’s father dies in the book. How much of it is autobiographical?

I began writing it when he was in the hospital, on his literal deathbed. He never got to see any of it. When I first began it was just something to keep my mind occupied while I was sitting in the hospital room with him. He was very much like Wilson’s dad, where he was just tuned out. He was clearly in his own head trying to process what was going on. I sort of expected that he would try to impart some, you know, final wisdom to his son, but he had no interest in that whatsoever. He was really just thinking about bigger things that I couldn’t comprehend.

That’s a moment in the book, isn’t it?

Yeah, it was a surprising moment in life and it was one of those things where we’d always had that kind of strained relationship where we never talked about anything deep or emotional. And I was waiting for that kind of my whole life. “When he’s dying, he’ll finally summon the courage to talk to me in that way!” and that just didn’t ever happen. That was very surprising, in a way. Even though it makes perfect sense: there was always this feeling that we had this unspoken thing between us, and now I realize maybe that thing can’t be put into words. Maybe that’s how it takes form – as an unspoken thing.“

Read the rest of the interview HERE.

Wilson by Dan Clowes and Wilson by Woody Harrelson

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Shawn Starr interviews HTML Flowers and talks with him about the evolution of the No Visitors series.

“There’s a greater focus on storytelling in No Visitors #2 compared to your earlier work, has your thoughts on writing comics changed?

i started trying to really talk about my life in a simple, non fantasy manner. i wanted to build something, see myself changed or change things about my life that i can’t go back and change. show people how painful, rare & sometimes beautiful life with a chronic illness is. No Visitors #1 is basically just scraps and shorts that were all a part of the lead up to developing Little & his lifestyle, in fact i don’t really consider the series properly starting until No Visitors 2. i’ve been working up to this for years, now i’ve arrived and i feel so much myself. i feel like i’m really making the work i’m supposed to have always made in a weird way. lol destiny.“

Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged Bernie Wrightson, caleb orecchio, daniel clowes, Dash Shaw, Gary Panter, gloria rivera, html flowers, jack brougham, Michael Comeau, simon hanselmann, tyler landry

Sally Ingraham

Posted on April 2, 2017

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07/12/2017

Juan FernándezJuly 12, 2017los Cómics / NewsEmpezamos el día con Jaime y Gilbert Hernandez; Amanda Mijangos y Armando Fonseca en La Polola;Klari Moreno; Cornet; Begoña García-Alén; E. Muñoz y CuCo 8; y los tebeos de Cómics Workbook! ————————————————————————————————— Punk, Latinidad, & Reviving Their Seminal ‘Love and Rockets’ Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez talk shop over on Remezcla: It’s like people were waiting for it. Latinos have been thirsty for that kind of representation. What I don’t understand is why, after 35 years, representation is still a problem. Do you have any ideas about why that is? Jaime: I think there’s a hell of a lot more Latino creators than I knew about back then. They’re doing it their way, some differently than I would. Which is cool. Everyone’s got their own view. I think the problem is still when money is involved. Whenever money is involved there’s going to be stereotypes. Everything is going to be done to please whitey. Money is going to steer you toward the money – and who is the 1%? You find out that the people in control of the TV studio or the movie studio or whoever is paying the check for this art – they don’t care. They don’t care about other cultures. When they find out that, “Oh well golly! Lots of Latin people spend money on our product” they don’t know what to do! The bottom line is when money is involved someone is going to get shorted. You’ve said, “The more ethnic I am, the more attention I get.” Why do you think that is and why does it work? Gilbert: I think I become more truthful when I get closer to who I am and where I’m from. I can tell a more truthful story and even a funnier and darker story because I’m just reflecting who I am. There’s a small element though, I hate to say, is it’s safe for non-Latino readers. It’s on paper. The characters are drawings. They’re not a threat. When it becomes a pop singer or actress or actor, they’re in your face. That’s a real person there. I think are a little tougher to take for some people. ————————————————————————————————— Cómics y noticias que me han llamado la atención esta semana: Jueves 3 de Agosto – Evento para recaudar fondos para el 2do Encuentro de Fanzineras. Santiago de Chile/Metro Irarrázabal. Organizado por @Comiqueraschile . Sol Díaz Castillo y Marcela Trujillo tienen una nueva edicion de La Polola Podcast! Las chicas conversan con Amanda Mijangos y Armando Fonseca, dos talentosos ilustradores Mexicanos. Hablan acerca de su trabajo, la importancia de buscar una mirada propia en la ilustración, la experimentación, la relación con los editores, sus proyectos personales y el proyecto que los trae a Chile, la obra de teatro “Risas de Papel” que estará en cartelera en Teatro Ictus, donde ellos hacen ilustración en vivo que dialoga con el actor. Un toquecito de historia: Cornet, Dibujante Catalan del siglo XX, fue uno de los artistas más populares que se formó en ‘¡Cu-Cut!’ – Humoristan.org les ofrece un vistazo a su vida en imagenes! Véte de cañas con Klari Moreno en Madrid con su entrevista en Segundo Premio. Moreno: «Defiendo la autoedición como acto político» Hay nuevo número de el espectador de Begoña García-Alén. El mejor de la serie, sin duda! E. Muñoz les ofrece un tronco de ensayo en CuCo 8:“El cómic como lenguaje visual híbrido y su vigencia en la era digital contemporánea”. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 7-11-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 7-11-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

02/26/2016

Sally IngrahamFebruary 26, 2016NewsEmil Friis Ernst offered up a new comic this morning, based on a text by Cathrin Peterslund… …and Simon Moreton recently posted his Hilltop Walking Comics (see the whole thing HERE). Drop yourself into two different wordless worlds, and find yourself floating in a cosmic pond or blustered along a hilltop ridge. Stay awhile, if you like. Then go lose yourself entirely in Si Fuera un Alma en Pena/If I was a suffering soul, a comic by Colombian cartoonist Jim Pluk – online HERE. After that, check out this awesome interview with Ronald Wimberly, up on Paste! The topic is Ron’s new comic GratNin, which is being published exclusively on the comic book app Stēla. He and Paste talk process (designing for a mobile-only platform), origins and inspiration, and what the heck a “Proust Knuckle” is anyway. Inspired by 80’s martial arts movies and manga, GratNin may strike one initially as more lighthearted than Ron’s previous work. However, while Ron admits to an indulgent element to the comic, he definitely isn’t just playing around. “As for GratNin specifically, I have looked at Sanpei Shirato in how he used genre as a tool to address social issues. I am also interested in continuing or countering dialogues on race, sex, gender and ethics that I have found in shonen manga. My goal is to continue the discussion with the manga vernacular, though I often just slip into my own thing.” Read the whole interview HERE. Over on Greenpointers there’s an interview with Julia Wertz which is also well worth a read. Check it out. She’s working on a new book about Greenpoint which will indulge her love for drawing cityscapes. “…I always enjoyed drawing random things and sets for apartments way more than I liked drawing people. People don’t interest me… things and spaces do, at least from an artistic standpoint.” She sends out a bit of advice to her younger self or anyone else who is considering getting into comics: “… just get to work. Don’t sit around waiting for the right publisher or the right pen or notebook, just do it. Start right now. The only people who survive in comics are those who truly love making comics, and if you truly love it, you’ll already be doing it, you won’t be wasting time trying to figure out how.” The new issue of Tender Journal was just released! This UK online publication is a platform for female-identified writers and artists, and the current issue features work by cartoonists Sarah Ferrick and Maggie Umber among other worthies. Read it HERE. And that’s our Friday morning comics news walkabout. Enjoy the weekend! – Sally Share this page: [...]

01/09/2018

Aaron CockleJanuary 8, 2018NewsAaron here today with an Art from Guantánamo Bay Update; Comic Book Heroes of Taiwan; Austin English on the End of Krazy Kat (and Superman Comics); More Machine Learning ————————————————————————————————— Ode to the Sea An update regarding the Art from Guantánamo Bay post from a few weeks back, via Patricia Mastricolo at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Fortnunately, the Pentagon is backing off its previous threat of incinerating art by the Guantánamo Bay detainees. Unfortunately, they still maintain all of it is the property of the U.S. military and will not be permitted to leave the prison. … The exhibit is free and open to the public and runs through January 26, 2018, at Haren Hall (899 10th Avenue at 59th Street, on the 6th floor in the President’s Gallery, New York City). The exhibit is open Monday to Friday, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (except January 15). ————————————————————————————————— Taiwan’s comic book heroes Via the BBC: Hsu Mao-sung, one of Taiwan’s earliest comic book artists, says it may be too late to save the industry. His generation endured censorship during the martial law period from the 1960s to 80s, but he says it didn’t kill off his passion for drawing. ————————————————————————————————— Anything But Reality At TCJ, Austin English takes a long look at some comics from the 1940s-1960s: The strip that follows is June 11th, with the stick now re-purposed to prop up the scarecrow. So, the final interactions of Krazy Kat and Ignatz map out like this: Ignatz tricks Krazy into getting hit by a brick toppling from a growing tree, Ignatz passingly confuses Krazy about oak trees vs. olive trees, Ignatz works to transform a weasel’s color in an issue whose subtleties are (seemingly) obscure to Krazy and finally Ignatz’ brick is discovered with a stick from Offisa Pup while Ignatz writhes in agony, his body beneath ground. After these events, the scarecrow emerges and Ignatz discards his brick. For a brief moment the strip is silent and empty. … The tone of the line defined itself in 1958, partly by a constraint that the comics world imposed on itself. Physical violence, while not banned by the comics code, was to be avoided. So Weisinger took a line of superhero comics and instead of emphasizing brawn, made them into intricate puzzles. Now, these are not puzzles that use the unreliable world as one of its factors in the way a Raymond Chandler novel might. Instead, every story has no relation to anything real (except basic outlines of things like ‘I have a job at a newspaper’ or ‘humans need to eat food to survive’ or ‘ice is cold’)—the comic book world of Superman itself is the only thing the stories use to set up their questions and render solutions. These are mysteries whose only logic is cartooning, and I’d argue that they are more beautiful as science fiction than anything EC ever published. ————————————————————————————————— Adversarial Patch An update from the machine learning front, via Boing Boing: Another key difference here: the researchers achieve their best results using a “white box” technique where they get to design their patches through detailed knowledge of the AI they’re targeting, unlike other adversarial preturbations, which achieved good results with “black box” constraints (designing attacks without any technical knowledge of the AI). The patches they created didn’t work very well on other AI image classifiers. We show that we can generate a universal, robust, targeted patch that fools classifiers regardless of the scale or location of the patch, and does not require knowledge of the other items in the scene that it is attacking. Our attack works in the real world, and can be disguised as an innocuous sticker. These results demonstrate an attack that could be created offline, and then broadly shared. There has been substantial work on defending against small perturbations to natural images, at least partially motivated by security concerns Part of the motivation of this work is that potential malicious attackers may not be concerned with generating small or imperceptible perturbations to a natural image, but may instead opt for larger more effective but noticeable perturbations to the input – especially if a model has been designed to resist small perturbations. Many ML models operate without human validation of every input and thus malicious attackers may not be concerned with the imperceptibility of their attacks. Even if humans are able to notice these patches, they may not understand the intent of the patch and instead view it as a form of art. This work shows that focusing only on defending against small perturbations is insufficient, as large, local perturbations can also break classifiers. ————————————————————————————————— The Winter Semester of thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers starts January 16th 2018! 8 weeks – 500 bux – coaching for as long as you need. The course is hard, but Frank will push your comics making practice to a new level, getting you to think about timing and color in new ways. His experience and ideas have influenced the likes of Connor Willumsen, Michael DeForge, and Simon Hanselmann (quote “I consider Frank Santoro to be my L. Ron Hubbard”) among many others. Dig into something new in the new year! Full details and how to apply can be found HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 1-9-2018 – by Cameron Arthur Share this page: [...]

10/25/2018

Caleb OrecchioOctober 25, 2018NewsYour friendly neighborhood Caleb Orecchio here with a public service announcement. ————————————————————————————————— Hello fellow cartoonists, winter is on its way. For some, winter is practically here. Don’t be an Ice Worm this year. Don’t hole up in your lair until some wayfaring stranger comes across your cave to slay you. Get out of the house. Have coffee with a friend. Check in on a relative. Exercise. It is important to take advantage of the cold weather by staying in to work on your comics, but don’t forget that the world keeps turning outside the drawing desk. This has been another message from your friend, Caleb, the cartoonist who cares. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

Addley Walker’s Angle

Comics WorkbookJuly 9, 2017EssaysAddley Walker is a comics and pattern maker from Los Angeles, CA. He joined us in Pittsburgh for a Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency in June 2017 (read about his experience HERE). While he was visiting, we realized that Addley was plugged into a different corner of the comics making community, and seeing work that we weren’t familiar with. His enthusiasm was catching, so we asked him to share with us some of the comics makers and artists that he follows and enjoys. Below is the “list” he sent. – Sally ————————————————————————————————————— Crow Cillers – Cate Wurtz (http://lamezone.net/) By far the best project of the already impressive body of work of queer webcomics wizard Cate Wurtz, Crow Cillers is an intense story about cute animal critters stuck in an oppressive world of cults and body horror. Presented in a faux-television manner where characters’ dialogue appears as closed captioning, stories change channels into others, and “episodes” in an arc are collected into season “box sets” (it, and individual episodes available monthly via her Patreon, are html documents that bring up navigable menus), Wurtz presents us casual talking sitcom characters forced to deal with increasingly violent situations while weaving in a metanarrative dealing with issues such as the absurd and often dark environment of the internet itself. Wurtz’s aesthetic and thematic odes to DeviantArt and Hot Topic not only serves as a coherent vehicle for her message, but asks the reader to re-evaluate their relationship with not only the corporate rebellion of Korn (most evident in her chopped ‘n screwed electronic music that is the suggested series soundtrack) and Shadow the Hedgehog (Sonic with GUNS), but the earnest reaction to these institutions by the fringes of internet art and fetish communities. Download the pilot and first season free on her website. Hail Gay Satan. Music: https://partydog.bandcamp.com/ Past Comic: https://lamezone.net/comics/asscastle https://lamezone.net/comics/punc (not so explicit) ————————————————————————————————————— Angel of a Rope – Adam Buttrick (http://www.adambuttrick.com) There were some very good stories in Kramer’s 9, but Adam Buttrick’s entry really made the book for me. Adam’s making very peculiar and powerful work, with a literary influence that, while escaping my personal understanding, draws me deeper into the situations and characters that feel so familiar after a lifetime of cartoons and video games. His incredibly busy pages have a surprisingly minimal economy of shapes, making everything clear in the mess of action that make up his world. Angel of a Rope is another excellent entry into the ouvre of someone who I find to be one of the most exciting cartoonists working today. Work in question: http://dominobooks.org/angelrope.html ————————————————————————————————————— Now Nowhere – Elevator Teeth (http://elevatorteeth.com/) I’m generally very wary of artists who foster a branded presentation of their work, and Elevator Teeth definitely has that aspect. Scrolling on their website I watch art posts transform into shirts, a part of an image becomes a button or patch, an illustration becomes a record cover which becomes an object that gets waggled on a talk show. It helps that the work is rendered in such a clean and minimal style, which makes it very susceptible to duplication and modification. As such, words and images will come up again, re-arranged and colored differently. This shifting quality of Elevator Teeth’s work is part of it’s magic, though, and looking at one image after the other becomes very dreamlike and hypnotic. The objects in these images hold an internal charge and react in strange and interesting ways to new compositions. The zine Now Nowhere, which came out early last year, is a great example. With work originally presented as one pagers that work very well as statements by themselves, Elevator Teeth puts them together to reveal that side-by-side they form a coherent story that lasts 28 pages. Slick and fashionable as it looks, Elevator Teeth’s work is fundamentally about consciousness, and shows the way in which digital techniques can lend themselves to powerful forms of truth seeking. Work in question: http://elevatorteeth.storenvy.com/products/15662373-now-nowhere-riso-zine ————————————————————————————————————— Warrior Pose – Leon Sadler (http://leonsadler.com/) + Yannick Val Gesto (http://www.yannickvalgesto.com/) Omnipresent anthology contributor Leon Sadler and fellow fine art nerd Yannick Val Gesto are a dynamic duo whose collaborations I wish I knew more about. I do not know how I found this fabulous book in the first place, probably because I am great. Presenting itself as a gentle self help manual, Warrior Pose (which was consigned along with a video of the same name) might not be comics, but those literate to the form should have an entry into some joyful collages of anime, fanart, chan imagery, and other serene weirdness, along with drawings by both. Val Gesto’s quest in particular, revealing the beauty of internet ugliness, I find incredibly compelling, much like Cate Wurtz. Leon Sadler is pretty cool, too. Work in question: https://battcoop.org/en/produit/warrior-pose-2/ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2zAoe8ShMw ————————————————————————————————————— The Boys Are Back In Town – Mushbuh (http://mushbuh.com/) This entry is a funeral for the self experience that I discovered will be forever unrealized by me not owning this zine of colorful haniwa frolics. Mushbuh is someone who initially caught me with their lively Illustrator art and comics, as well as a demo for their N64 love letter Burrito Galaxy. While Mushbuh seems to be on a more automatic, almost anti-aesthetic track today, evidence is still there of the tightly geometric, bouncy cartoon art I see still around in works of artists such as George Wysesol. Please contact me if you have evidence of rare sightings of these boys… Work in question: http://www.mushbuh.bigcartel.com/product/the-boys-are-back-in-town-ed-of-50 Examples: Musbuh comics George Wysesol https://www.instagram.com/sassybluepanda/ George Wysesol web series(?) https://www.instagram.com/ithinkimintrouble/ ————————————————————————————————————— Check out work by Addley Walker on his website, and follow him on Instagram. Share this page: [...]

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