Aaron CockleDecember 19, 2016NewsAaron here today with an Upside-Down World; Internet Comics & Free Speech; Broken Frontier Awards; Héctor Germán Oesterheld; Paul Karasik on Gary Groth (and Frank Frazetta); Security of Culture and Culture of Security; Some Olivier Schrauwen for the Holidays; a Riso Lab Missive
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Gustave Verbeek, October 4, 1903
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How Web Comics Revolutionized Free Speech
Caitlin McCabe at the CBLDF talks about the internet and the ways in which comics can exist there:
The internet hasn’t just become a vehicle for free speech in the English-speaking world. Cartoonists around the world — especially in countries where expressing oneself freely can have legal or physical repercussions — are finding their voice on the internet. Sudanese cartoonist Khalid Albaih has built a following online publishing comics that address serious global issues. Chinese cartoonist Badiucao may have left his home country, but uses Twitter and the independent web newssource China Digital Times to reach his audience and sidestep censors. Kanika Mishra, a female cartoonist out of India who has been threatened for her work, describes how social media has enabled her to not only find new audiences, but empower her to continue to spread her cartoons which discuss social injustices in her home country.
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Broken Frontier Awards 2016
The comics blog has announced nominees for its annual awards. It includes work from CW favorites Tillie Walden, Simon Moreton, Eleanor Davis, Kelly Kwang and Richie Pope, Anna Haifisch, and Daniel Clowes; as well as publishers: Koyama, Press, Avery Hill Publishing, Breakdown Press, Fantagraphics, and Retrofit/Big Planet. Please consider voting, if you are so inclined.
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El Eternauta
Dominic Umile profiles the comics writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld, his work with Francisco Solano López, and the fate of Oesterheld and his family members at the hands of the Argentine dictatorship in 1977.
“Oesterheld played an important role in the development of the Argentine comic between the 1950s and the 1970s,” University of Iowa professor Ana Merino wrote in the International Journal of Comic Art in 2001. “He unknowingly opened up a bridge between fantastic and comic literature, showing that comics could be as intense as literature, and in turn, can offer alternative aesthetic possibilities.”
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‘Meet Gary’
Via Paul Karasik, excerpted from the recent Fantagraphics history/hagiography, We Told You So: Comics as Art, edited by Tom Spurgeon and Michael Dean.
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Security Culture is Good
Kade Crockford at The New Inquiry has some information about navigating and negotiating in these current and soon-to-be current times: Take these precautions to protect yourself and your loved ones from the state.
When the FBI interviews someone, they send two agents: one person asks questions, and the other takes notes. The stenographer then goes back to the office and types up the notes into an official document known as Form 302. This is the government’s official record of the interview, and it can and likely will be used against the interview subject. If an FBI official writes on the 302 that you said you were at a basketball game Sunday morning at 11, and then you later tell a grand jury that you were at the basketball game at 10, you can be charged with lying to a federal agent. A conviction for lying to a federal agent will land you in federal prison for years. This is how the FBI puts people in a vice, and gets them to inform. The truth doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is what’s written on that Form 302.
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Je peux rentrer chez moi maintenant?
A grab-bag (or hodge-podge) of writing about Olivier Schrauwen‘s comics work to date, in French, just waiting to be translated into your language of choice.
For example:
Entre-temps, les extraterrestres lui font assister en miniature et en immersion au spectacle de l’histoire humaine, de plus en plus douloureuse au fur et à mesure que les événements se rapprochent de sa propre vie, déclenchant un stupéfiant moment d’hystérie infantile dans les rues de New-York, le jour du 11 septembre 2001. Toutes ces pages sont les plus belles et les plus fortes de l’album, Schrauwen s’y représentant comme un géant surplombant la destinée des hommes, mais se comportant en réalité comme un gamin détaché du passé et insoucieux du futur (sommet d’ironie : le narrateur, qui vient d’assister à la fin du monde, dit simplement « Je peux rentrer chez moi maintenant ? »).
In the meantime, the extraterrestrials make him assist in miniature and immersion in the spectacle of human history, more and more painful as events come closer to his own life, triggering a stunning moment of infantile hysteria On the streets of New York on September 11, 2001. All these pages are the most beautiful and the strongest of the album, Schrauwen representing himself as a giant overlooking the destiny of men, but behaving in reality Like a kid detached from the past and careless of the future (summit of irony: the narrator, who has just witnessed the end of the world, simply says “I can go home now?”).
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Dispatch from the Riso Lab
Getting ready for tonight’s (or yesterday’s, considering I am posting this news update on Monday afternoon, to be read on a Tuesday, by you, or whenever, it’s not like time has any sort of relevancy any more, here on the internet, or out in the real world, for that matter, if it ever did) Print Slam 4 event, I had booked some time in the Riso Lab at SVA, and was able to print and assemble a mini, Math Comics 2.
Print Slam 4 promo poster by Panayiotis Terzis.
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Suzy and Cecil – 12-20-2016 – by Sally Ingraham
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In theory “How To Do Nancy” is getting revamped and expanded and will be published by Fantagraphics
whoops “How to Read Nancy” LOL
Ha ha, maybe Fanta is reconstituting their ‘erotic comics’ publishing house..