Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged alienation #1, el dia de Julio, gutter fest, how to read donald duck, ines estrada, para leer al pato donald, save the fanzine

Juan Fernández

Posted on May 18, 2016May 18, 2016

Explore

04/08/2016

Sally IngrahamApril 8, 2016NewsSally here with the good news from Retrofit, the Bad Boyfriends collection, and comics from Amanda Hamilton, Disa Wallander, and Jonathan Yee to send you into the weekend with light feet – plus Gabriella Tito on Audra Stang’s new piece! ————————————————————————————————— Kicking things off with a couple of forays into comics that’ll give your Friday a colorful start! From Amanda Hamilton comes this piece in marker – a new medium for her, and one that seems to suit! The comic came about “…during one very anxious night where it was too noisy to sleep. I was inspired…to do something with markers instead of colored pencils and I had a set of Rose Art neon markers I thought would be good to convey that jarring, discordant feeling and combine the colors in interesting ways.” ————————————————————————————————— Next up, something from Jonathan Yee – Jonathan made this comic last weekend at PIX, during a Comics Workbook workshop with Juan Fernandez and Frank Santoro. ————————————————————————————————— Gabriella Tito taking a turn here! Attention: Audra Stang is branching out into new territory (following her recent wrap up of “Love Me Like An Autograph“) with her new comic “April 2008“ (see panel above). Most noticeably, in her recent series taking place in the fictional town “Star Valley”, is her change in technique! Instead of using bold line art for her characters and traditional color, she’s now transitioning into using sleek pencil shading without too many lines – and I think it’s absolutely fabulous. Audra keeps the style current with light digital color overtones, not breaking the mood and flow even the slightest. Once again, check out my good friend Audra’s new comic HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Back to Sally, with the stellar news that Retrofit did it! All those lovely books will be coming out soon – including the title above by Sophie Franz – with the first ones hitting the world in May. Congratulations! ————————————————————————————————— Bad Boyfriends is out now. It has comics by Cathy G. Johnson, Celine Loup, Hannah Kaplan, Laura Lannes, Julia Gfrörer, Laerte Coutinho, Mariana Paraizo, Paula Puiupo and Hazel Newlevent (above). This collection is important and gut wrenching – available as a free download HERE, and for sale as a physical copy HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Disa Wallander posted a cute spring comic, which offers a glimpse of sunlight unlike anything I personally have seen recently…! Spring is around here, somewhere. ————————————————————————————————— Something to take with you into the weekend – Practice your craft, whatever it may be, stay nimble and sharp and badass! Catch you later – Sally and Gabriella Share this page: [...]

04/06/2017

Sally IngrahamApril 5, 2017NewsSally here with updates from John Jennings; the (H)afrocentric project; Ron Wimberly/C. Spike Trotman/Ariell Johnson on NPR; throwing “diversity” under the bus. ————————————————————————————————— Gene Demby and Glen Weldon of NPR spoke to Ronald Wimberly, C. Spike Trotman (online comics publisher of Iron Circus Comics in Chicago, and creator of the long-running webcomic Templar, Arizona), and Ariell Johnson (owner of Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse in Philadelphia) about “changing color in comics“. Listen to the podcast HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Check out (H)afrocentric, a comics project created by Juliana “Jewels” Smith. An educator, writer, and organizer based in Oakland, CA, she “created (H)afrocentric as a way to challenge students and readers alike about the presumptions around race, class, gender and sexuality through character dialogue. Her practice focuses on the links between racial justice, gender equity, and political literacy; using creativity to facilitate dialogue.” There are 4 volumes of the comic so far – you can preview Vol. 1, 2, and 3 HERE and Vol. 4 HERE. Juliana writes it and Ronald R. Nelson provides the artwork (with Mike Hampton as colorist/letterer). The team also makes a comic strip which is available as a “Sunday Funny” via email subscription – or you can catch up with the whole thing HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Over the past weekend, a few folks at Marvel Comics put their feet in their mouths. This is not unusual, these days. David Gabriel, Marvel’s senior vice-president of sales, print, and marketing, tried to blame Marvel’s recent decline in sales on their attempts at adding “diversity” to their comics. Que an uproar. The Guardian‘s JA Micheline had some things to say about it: “Let’s look at how the discussion was framed: “Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up,” says Gabriel – without a qualifier or interrogation of which readers and why. I can promise you that it’s not women going into comic-book shops, sick of female characters. I can similarly promise you that people of colour are not entering comic-book shops and turning their noses up at faces that look like theirs. By even making remarks like these, Marvel is seemingly conceding that its target audience, its “core” audience – and their “core” characters – are white and male.“ Read the rest of her comments HERE. G. Willow Wilson, the writer behind Ms Marvel, had a thoughtful response as well. Among her comments was a reminder to the folks at Marvel and elsewhere: “Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is *the world.*“ Read the rest of her thoughts HERE. Vox offers up a detailed and fairly balanced look at the whole snafu and pinpoints some of the reasons for both the outrage and the cause of it. ————————————————————————————————— John Jennings spoke to The Boston Globe recently about his new comic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (above) and his interest in horror stories. His comic recommendations and recent reads are all excellent, and I like where he says (despite the evidence of his new book) that he doesn’t like the idea of graphic novels being a “gateway” to reading books. Read the interview HERE. There is also a great interview on NPR from February 2017 about the joys (and fears) of making Kindred into a comic – check it out. I’ve linked to this piece before, but if you’re unfamiliar with John Jennings and the work he does in the comics community, get to know him better HERE. ————————————————————————————————— The illustration above by Comics Workbook student Shannon Wright accompanies an article about a case of “shared” identity. Not comics at all – but an interesting read. ————————————————————————————————— Comics Workbook will be at the Pittsburgh Indy Comix Expo on Sunday, April 9th. We will be hosting a workshop series with instructors from the school, as well as special guests Carol Tyler, Lale Westvind, and Connor Willumsen! More details HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Blinkers – 4-6-2017 – by Jack Brougham ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 4-6-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 4-6-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

10/18/2018

Juan FernándezOctober 18, 2018Festivals and Shows / NewsJuan here with a mid-October weekend recap: the Idea Factory and the Eighth Annual Pittsburgh Zine Fair Last weekend was a brilliant doozy here in Pittsburgh. I mentioned that it was a busy one, so you knew something was coming! I was programmatically double booked, with a cartooning program, the Idea Factory, from 10am-4pm at the Children’s Museum on Saturday and Sunday, and then as one of the head organizers of the Pittsburgh Zine Fair the zine fair’s annual mixer and reading from 4pm-7pm and the main zine fair event from 2-8pm. Combining the setting up, the striking, the picking up of a U-haul and tables Sunday morning at 6am… It was a lot. Thankfully, I wasn’t afraid to ask for help and got the much-needed assistance from the cartooning team that I scheduled at the museum, and my fellow zine fair organizers. Thank you so much. I was anxiously going over all possible scenarios, load-ins, transitions, shifts at the museum, and above all the zine fair set up. This anxiety filled all last week, so I’m happy to say that it all went swimmingly. I hate that feeling of anxiety trying to get all of your ducks in a row while an event looms ahead, especially when certain things can only come together last minute, but it’s that feeling that drives me to be careful and make sure that everything goes without a hitch. Especially when you’re in a sequence of weekend that all follow each other, in this case, SPX and CXC happening every other preceding weekend… We made it through folks! The Idea Factory was a concept that I came up with Zena Ruiz, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh’s Program Manager. The idea was to create a playful space for an imaginary patent office for contraptions. The goal was to come with ideas for Rube Goldberg style contraptions and draw out blueprints for these contraptions, live, and for kids to take them home to decorate their homes. This process was to be a collaborative one between children visiting the museum and local cartoonists. I was the ringleader of this drawing circus. On hand I had a great crew that comprised of Jennifer Lisa, Audra Stang, Asia Bey, Caleb Orecchio and Camden Yandel. They were my brilliant inventors. When visiting the Idea Factory, the kids found prompts on colored paper all around the room. These prompts invited them to make a contraption that did a certain thing, buttered toast, brushed a horse’s hair, fed a goldfish, etc. They did this on letter size sheets of white paper. When they were done, they brought their finished draft to the inventor/cartoonists. Children were visiting the museum with their parents so my team had plenty of parental assistance when kids were confused, stuck or needed a snack. For my crew of cartoonists, their primary role was to work with kids to take their ideas to JUMBO size with writing and clear drawing. Using a big black marker, the cartoonists reviewed over the drawings with the kids asking them about what they drew. How one part connected to the next part and the next part. This was done by having the child work witht the constraints in the prompts and arrive at a workable silly or serious, though usually silly, drawing. Then they went up to the cartoonists and described their machine. The cartoonist the wrote down the play by play in the tradition of Rube Goldberg’s cartoons. Then they worked together to draw, color and label the jumbo blueprint version of their machine. It was REAL. This was essentially a writing and editing exercise that allowed children to see how their ideas translated across forms. Of course, that was all going on under the hood. On the surface, the kids were drawing their inventions with inventors! It was such a blast. Besides having fun, the underlying goal was to create a collaborative moment between adult and child of communication and collaborative work – where the child could see their idea fleshed out by someone else. In this sense, it would allow them to be listened to. That their ideas are worthy of attention. This sense of validation is very important to me in the workshops that I lead, with both adults and children. All of this in the tradition of Fred Rogers. A huge thank you to Zena for inviting us to spend these two amazing days at the museum during Rube Fest. Another huge thank you to museum staff who were always on hand to solve any problems that came up! What else? Well, the Pittsburgh Zine Fair returned to its home base, the Union Project on Sunday! Naturally, by this point of the weekend I was beat. All of the previous week, I was on the verge of tears balancing all of this stuff all of last week on top of my day job and getting some sleep. I can’t tell you what a relief it was at 4pm when my old radio pal, dj extraordinaire Allison Cosby stepped up to the plate play a set of reggae and dub on WRCT Pittsburgh’s mobile rig. It was bliss. The sun was beaming in through the stained glass windows, the dub warmed my body with its groove, the wall of noise of chatter fluttered around me. People were smiling, trading, spending money, eating tacos, catching up, meeting for the first time. In all the wretched isolation that comics creates as a commodity form, these moments are what I live for. People really sweetly asked if I had some new comics and zines and I smiled that I’d been busy with other work. Thankfully, they got it. In it’s eight iteration, the zine fair is a real community production. For example we don’t get access to the space until 1pm, so the first 15 minutes is us all collectively working together to get all 38 tables set up and to get all exhibitors in their spots! It’s a zine fair so we fly low to the ground and are super agile/flexible. Despite that, it was still a super stressful 15 minutes this year. Thankfully, exhibitors Max Gonzalez and Jerome Charles stepped up and helped me direct folks to where tables needed to go. And, as per usual everyone was game to lend a hand and make it happen. And, make it happen we did. Thom Delair, Raiona Gaydos, Jennifer Lisa and Kate Harmon all pitched in and helped things flow during the fair where we received 790+ attendees from 2-8pm. Wild. We were all wearing many hats that day, organizer Christina Lee was hustling her wares and repping her new print studio, Pullproof Studio, and organizer-on-hiatus/ new-momma Maggie Negrete was there showering her yet-to-be-month-old Mora in the glow of zines. It was a family affair. We were lucky to have Di-ay Battad snapped some photos right as we opened our doors: We’re proud of how affordable we can keep table fees. We charge $10 for a 1/2 table and $20 for a full, this is thanks to our low overhead and the great relationship we have with our host site, the Union Project. This important to me personally. This cost allows people to experiment with publishing techniques, commit to publishing things and ideas that are hard to sell, while ensuring that they won’t have to dig themselves out of a financial hole because of their self-publishing. This year we received 143 applicants but could only offer spots to 64 exhibitors -ACK – this put us in a pickle as to our curatorial process. Above all we wanted, as we always do, to uplift the work and voices of marginalized makers while creating a fertile and ecologically diverse intellectual and artistic landscape in Pittsburgh. The head organizers got together + 6 volunteers and we evaluatde our applicants along several axes to arrive at our 64. It went smoother than any prior year, but it was a whirlwind of a process. Though it wasn’t easy, but it seems to have been successful as multiple people came to me explicitly to tell me how much they enjoyed the variety of zinesters on hand. It’s important to take note, this is a zine fair, not comics show, not an art book fair. There’s nothing inherently wrong about those things, but there are some things that inevitably get lost in those spaces. Aesthetics and popularity before community and empowerment, more often than not. At the Pittsburgh Zine Fair, we hold in highest regard the idea of democratic multiple and the self-authorization that zines give our community of makers. A high school poet who has been exhibiting at the fair for 3 years now mentioned that she wants to work with the zine fair to organize a high school zine fair in the coming year. What could be more exciting than that? That’s what I’m here for. -juan 10/18/2018 – by Fifi Martinez Cement Mixer 296 – by Caleb Orecchio – 10/18/2018 Share this page: [...]

Quick Guide to Frank Santoro’s Grid Theories

Frank SantoroMarch 16, 2017Classes / ResourcesOn The Comics Journal, the Layout Workbook Series (from 2011): Layout Workbook 1 Layout Workbook 2 Layout Workbook 3 Layout Workbook 4 This is the one where I first laid a grid on Tintin pages and people lost their minds. Layout Workbook 5 Layout Workbook 6 I get into Poussin in this one. Layout Workbook 7 Layout Workbook 8 Layout Workbook 9 Prince Valiant here. Layout Workbook 10 Asterios Polyp Layout Workbook 11 Layout Workbook 12 Beto vs. CF The lecture notes that I usually riff on – they condense the ideas in the layout workbooks: Notes for Comics Symposium Even better, video excerpts from some of my recent lectures: Comics As Music (PIX 2016) Frank at SPX 2016 My old website coldheatcomics.blogspot.com is full of good riffs. Check out the Format Fever notes and thoughts on my Pompeii process. A lot of the stuff on this website is used as reference for my 8 week online correspondence course. Here is the Santoro School Handbook, written with the help of Kurt Ankeny: Santoro School Handbook Notes for my lecture with Aidan Koch and Connor Willumsen at LICAF 2016: LICAF Master Class Share this page: [...]

8 1/2 by Roman Muradov

Chris Anthony DiazAugust 4, 2016The Diaz ArchiveRoman Muradov’s portrayal of Barbara Steele as Gloria Morin from Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (Italy, 1963) for my ILLUSTRATED MOMENTS IN CINEMA/TELEVISION. Roman dressed up like TOBY DAMMIT and his candid along with Alison Dubois was taken at Mission: Comics & Art, San Francisco, Friday, October 12, 2012. And Graham Willcox did the color on Roman’s candid Share this page: [...]

05/18/2016

Posted on May 18, 2016May 18, 2016 by Juan Fernández

Juan Fernandez bringing you: Gutter Fest #4; Inés Estrada’s Alienation #1; SAVE THE FANZINE; Feira Dente; El Día de Julio; y Para leer al Pato Donald.

—————————————————————————————————

GUTTER FEST #4 – Fira d´Autoedició i de Microedició –
It’s right around the corner in Barcelona, the 20-21 of May. Gutter Fest just released this promo videa… watch it. Full screen.

Good luck making a promo for your zine fest fresher than this! Stay up to date with Gutter Fest over on their tumblr.

—————————————————————————————————

Alienation #1 by Inés Estrada
Estrada’s new science fiction series about the future, sex, love, virtual reality, paranoia and rock and roll! It’s available via her shop, GATOSAURIO. Dig into her work.

—————————————————————————————————

SAVE THE FANZINE

“Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It’s all just clamour and confusion. It only becames a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections. That we speak again and again to ourselves or to others. First, creating the narrative of our lives, and keeping the story from dissolving into the darkness…”

Nick Cave, 20.000 Days on Earth

SAVE THE FANZINE is a digital and online archive for self-published books. Not intended to replace the physical object, its purpose is to pay homage to the self-publising culture and to record these unique publications. It’s a killer record of contemporary zine making in Spain! Make an account and take dip. Water’s fine 😉

Check out SAVE THE FANZINE’s physical home, Sandwich Mixto, if you’re feeling adventurous today. Based in Madrid, they run a shop and workshop space that’s become a hub of Madrid’s self-publishing community. More on that in a future week.

—————————————————————————————————

Passion and Militancy: the fanzine’s resistance as an art object.
Madrid’s Libros Mutantes Zine Fest has prompted a little reflection on zines and their cultural significance in Spain over at El Confidencial. Smash that translate button 😉

—————————————————————————————————

Feira Dente
Coming up in June in Brasilia, Brazil. Mark, your calendars for what’s to come! This is Dente’s second iteration. The programming schedule of workshops and More information to roll out, so keep it locked to their facebook and instagram accounts.

—————————————————————————————————

Reseña de El Día de Julio

Jesús Játiva reviews Julio’s Day over on Zona Negativa.

Es esa capacidad magistral de plasmar en cien páginas cien años de historia familiar lo que hace esta obra tan buena: la muerte de muchos y el nacimiento de otros, la vida retratada en toda su miseria y también en su esplendor. Da la sensación de que Beto Hernández es pesimista, y parece caer en cierto fatalismo mostrando a todos y cada uno de los familiares bajo las más horribles desdichas y envejeciendo y engordando y volviéndose cada vez más feos. El contacto con la muerte y su presencia durante todas las páginas es constante, pero no parece Beto tan interesado en ese momento en el que dejamos de existir como en el momento que nos ha hecho lo que somos y nos ha marcado para toda la vida

—————————————————————————————————

Para leer Al Pato Donald – Mass Communication & Colonialism

This one is a throw back, but is well worth looking into if you haven’t before.

How To Read Donald Duck (1972) by Ariel Dorfman (Argentina-Chile) and Armand Mattelart ( Belgium ), is a key piece of political literature of the seventies. An essay, or a “decolonization manual” in their own words that analyzed comic books published by Walt Disney for the Latin American market from the point of view of mass Marxist literature.

Its main thesis is that Disney cartoons would not only be a reflection of the dominant ideology -the ruling class , according to the tenets of Marxism , but also be active and conscious accomplices of the task of maintaining and disseminating that ideology. It highlighted qualities of Disney characters and their world, notably that parents, or ancestors, generally were not present.

Hay un desfasaje entre la base económico-social en que vive cada individuo y el estado de las representaciones colectivas, y es precisamente lo que asegura la eficacia de Disney y su poder de penetración en la mentalidad comunitaria en los países latinoamericanos dependientes »

—————————————————————————————————

hasta la próxima, chiquillos,
Juan

Share this page:

Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged alienation #1, el dia de Julio, gutter fest, how to read donald duck, ines estrada, para leer al pato donald, save the fanzine

Juan Fernández

Posted on May 18, 2016May 18, 2016

Explore

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: [...]

04/06/2016

Juan FernándezApril 6, 2016NewsJuan here with your mid-week comics news fix. A pair of interesting comics events in the United States, MoCCA Awards of Excellence, Mari Naomi, Gabrielle Bell, Leslie Stein, Retrofit Comics Kickstarter in the final stretch, Rosarium Publishing launches its Indiegogo, the Picturebox Inc. bibliography. Let’s do this. ————————————————————————————————— Small Press events this weekend PMF 7 Building on six consecutive years of growing print celebrations, Baltimore’s Open Space gallery will present PMF VII, the Seventh Annual Publications & Multiples Fair, taking place April 9th and 10th, 2016, from 12 pm – 6 pm each day, at the Baltimore Design School, 1500 Barclay St. This annual exposition provides the opportunity to peruse, purchase, and discuss artist publications, prints, and objects produced in multiple. There’ll be over 130 local and national artists, and on-site programming all weekend. The fair is free and open to the public. There’s a killer line up of really raw work. Meghan Turbitt, Lala Albert, Lale Westving and Aidan Koch will be there among the throngs 😉 Learn more here. SPACE 2016 Now coming up on it’s 17th year, S.P.A.C.E. (Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo) is the midwest’s longest running exhibition of small press,creator owned and art comics. And Columbus’ longest locally owned and operated COMICS show of any kind. Long live the Rustbelt. Read more here. ————————————————————————————————— Gabrielle Bell Instagram In the age of fractured social media, it’s important to know who posts where or you’ll miss out on the beautiful writing or drawing they might do. Now you’ve got no excuse to be missing Bell’s off the cuff drawings. You can follow her here. ————————————————————————————————— Cheerleader by Mari Naomi Mari Naomi’s got a new one for you via Buzz Feed. Lot’s of eyes sure to get on this one. Smart use of the scroll and subtle visual punctuation makes this a satisfying look back on an unexpected friendship. Take a trip down memory lane and read it here! ————————————————————————————————— Retrofit Kickstarter – Last 2 Rounds Retrofit Comics is in its last TWO days of their Kickstarter campaign! They’re in the last rounds of their bout. You can help them win this fight. Support them to make it happen. The crop of books they’re currently publishing is really special. It includes titles by the likes of James Kochalka (Elf Cat in Love), the first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, Eleanor Davis with her an offering (Libby’s Dad), and Kaeleigh Forsyth and Alabaster Pizzo with a team up on Hellbound (here’s a process post from them about the “raw material” the book was sourced from). Also among the comics that may get loosed on the world, should the Kickstarter make it to the stretch goals, are works by Anya Davidson and Tyler Landry. Please support Retrofit Comics by pitching some funds their way, or helping to spread the word.Less than $2,000 left to go. Check out the Kickstarter and make it happen HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Time Clock Leslie Stein is back with the newest installment of The Eye of the Majestic Creature is back! Here’s a link to see some of the pages Stein has posted on tumblr, there’ll be more soon until Time Clock is out. You can snag a copy by preordering from Fantagraphics Books. The book will be out in June. ————————————————————————————————— Rosarium Publishing launches an Indiegogo As Retrofit wraps up it’s big push, ROSARIUM PUBLISHING begins to rev their engines. Rosarium Publishing is a publishing house founded by Bill Campbell that is a space of resistance to the erasure of diverse voices by a saturated public sphere of massive hegemonic media giants pushing the authors they want to the forefront of the market place.f …Rosarium Publishing was started with an idea; it was not, however, started with a lot of money. This has all been funded by the publisher’s day job. So, with the rapid growth we’ve been experiencing, it is now time for us to move away from print-on-demand, which, in the long run, is too expensive for any publisher to rely on, and have to move to offset printing. – Bill Campbell Read more about their campaign here. ————————————————————————————————— Awards of Excellence at MoCCA Fest Chosen by a jury of professional peers including Senior Editor at First Seond Books Calista Brill, artist Cliff Chiang, Editorial Director Charles Kochman, artist Mark Newgarden, and cartoonist, illustrator, and painter Lauren Weinstein. Awards of Excellence are given out to recognize the most outstanding work on view at the festival created by an independent artist. This Award of Excellence year’s winners include: Glynnis Fawkes, “Alle Ego” Pat Dorian, “Lon Chaney Talks Part 2” Shreyas R. Krishnan, “Becoming Rosie” Kate Lacour, “Vivisectionary II” R. Sikoryak, “iTunes Terms and Conditions” The SOI will host this year’s MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellence winners in an exhibit featuring original art from their award-winning books. The exhibit will run from May 06-June 11th. More information here. For a full list of the works awarded recognition by the Society of Illustrators at MoCCA Fest 2016 hop on over to Comics Beat. ————————————————————————————————— The Classics The closing up of Picturebox Inc. isn’t news to anyone but it should never go forgotten. Nadel and company created an incredible publishing legacy and it is of vital importance that comics makers young and old understand the scope of what Picturebox accomplished with comics. Here’s a list of their bibliography so you can dig into the raw material yourself: Study up on the classics. If you can’t find what you want at Copacetic Comics, check your local library. You can thank Bill Boichel and your librarian in advance. Share this page: [...]

12/12/2016

Juan FernándezDecember 12, 2016NewsJuan here with the Art of Vanesa R. Del Rey; the 2017 Official Selections for Angoulême prizes; the glory of Katsuhika Hokusai; Censors and Satirical cartoons in Turkey; David Salle; Hallie Jay Pope on the ACLU sues NSA; understanding Neural Networks; new Suzy and Cecil. ————————————————————————————————— The Art of Vanesa R. Del Rey In May 2016 Vanesa R. Del Rey came to Pittsburgh, PA, to visit the Rowhouse and share her sketchbooks and her passion for comics with Frank and the rest of us. Their conversations about her work and experiences have been transformed into the book The Art of Vanesa R. Del Rey, which is full of gorgeous images as well. Frank Santoro: Vanesa, I’m quite taken aback by your sheer technical ability which seems to be married to a poetic sensibility. There’s a lightness there. Sometimes illustrators with that ability get heavy-handed. Yet you manage the push-pull between the two sides of yourself – because you’re like a samurai. The humble samurai. Vanesa R. Del Rey: It’s about trying to remember that. I can get all this praise, I can get all these amazing responses from strangers, but at the end of the day – I’m still a student. I’m still learning. The crown doesn’t fit. The crown should never fit. You can get a peek into the book and pre-order a copy HERE. I had the honor to design this publication, I’m extremely happy with how it came out and I hope you dig it. The process was so invigorating that I also went and created the following video based on some footage that Michael Pisano shot in the Rowhouse during Vanesa’s stay. I turned up all the nobs. Slam that play button to dive head first into the world of VRDR. Pre-order a copy of The art of Vanesa R. Del Rey HERE. (Video by Michael Pisano, Di-ay Battad and Juan Fernandez // michaelpisano.com // cargocollective.com/di-ay // juanjosefernandez.com – Soundtrack // Victoria’s Other Secret // Galapagoose) ————————————————————————————————— Heidi MacDonald’s got a look at the 2017 Official Selections for Angoulême prizes over on the Beat. It’s quite an eclectic list, if not as diverse as you’d like to see, but Angoulême’s move to a more modern and global outlook continues to advance. The jury this year was significantly broadened after the intense scandals of last year, with more women and booksellers. ————————————————————————————————— Hokusai – The glory of Manga Over on the New York Review of Books,Christopher Benfey takes a look at Hokusai’s Lost Manga, a collection of previously uncollected drawings by Katsuhiko Hokusai, published by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, had long possessed—in its fabulous collection of Japanese art unparalleled anywhere outside Japan—an anonymous album of drawings long assumed to be by Hokusai. That album has now been persuasively linked to the artist, through art-historical detective work, via a hitherto mysterious publisher’s advertisement, from 1823, for Master Iitsu’s Chicken-Rib Picture Book.(Iitsu was one of Hokusai’s many disguises; the title might thus be translated, as MFA curator Sarah E. Thompson notes, “Hokusai’s Tasty Morsels.”) The volume of tasty morsels remained unpublished—until now. (…) When French artists like Manet and Degas first encountered Hokusai’s manga, in fifteen volumes numbering some 4,000 plates, it was the disjunctive, off-the-cuff quality of the images that proved most exciting. Hokusai seemed to be a Japanese flâneur, sketchbook in hand, who quickly took down whatever he saw on his travels or in his teeming imagination. Again and again in Hokusai’s Lost Manga, travelers take a break from their journeys—up craggy mountains, down dangerous rivers—to scrutinize the countryside. A couple years ago, Steve Bissette introduced me to Hokusai with an oversized collection in the Schulz Library in White River Junction. It changed my life. All the pieces came into place. Landscape, portraits, caricature, comics, beauty, humor. It was all there. The next day Connor Willumsen gave his artist lecture as the Center for Cartoon Studies fellow. The stars had aligned… On the subject of Hokusai, though: There are someecent publications worth looking at – Seigensha’s Hokusai Manga series. Small and lovely (~4″x6″), these make incredible companions for occasional contemplation throughout your day as you make your way through the world. As Hokusai would have liked. Check it out at your local library! You can find the ISBN over on Amazon,use that and ask your librarian real nicely for help getting your hands on these! ————————————————————————————————— CBLDF on Satirical Cartoon Blog Post Blocked in Turkey Maren Williams from the CBLDF reports on how a blog post featuring satirical cartoons of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is currently blocked by court order inside Turkey but freely available elsewhere. Cartooning’s once again at the forefront of censorship laws and the interaction between corporate autonomy, intellectual freedom and regional law. Faced with no ideal options, WordPress chose to geo-block the specific site requested within Turkey but direct users to a multilingual site with directions for circumventing online censorship via services such as VPNs and Tor. It also reported the takedown to the Lumen database, and the WordPress rep identified as Janet J told Jones that the company is brainstorming ways to maximize intellectual freedom and transparency for its users: There is no good solution to the issue of political censorship, and we are constantly reviewing the processes to find ways to combat it, including taking legal action in Turkey where appropriate. Going forward, we’ll look into making the current process clearer in our next transparency report. ————————————————————————————————— Encryption and You – ACLU sues NSA Every time you email or text someone overseas, the NSA copies and searches your message. It makes no difference if you or the other person has done anything wrong. An ACLU lawsuit is challenging this dragnet spying. We’re suing on behalf of a coalition of internet, human rights, legal, and media organizations whose work depends on the privacy of their communications. The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international communications. At issue is the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance, through which the U.S. government monitors almost all international – and many domestic – text-based communications. The ACLU’s lawsuit, filed in March 2015 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, is brought on behalf of nearly a dozen educational, legal, human rights, and media organizations that collectively engage in hundreds of billions of sensitive Internet communications and have been harmed by NSA surveillance. The district court dismissed the case in October 2015, concluding that the plaintiffs lacked “standing” to sue because they could not show with sufficient certainty that their communications have been intercepted. The ACLU appealed to the Fourth Circuit, and heard oral argument last week December 8, 2016 in Virginia. Details on the hearing are now available from Wikimedia Foundation. Hallie Jay Pope‘s created a comic that lays out the nature of the NSA’s global internet surveillance system and its implications for the present. Dig into it. ————————————————————————————————— Neural Networks and the Bridge in Parsing Images On this wavelength, here’s an interesting thing to note: it’s been shown that computers can’t read, or even effectively parse comics, try as they might. Computers can parse what is in comic, but not how it’s organized. And in comics, the composition is as important as the content. The semantic units in comics are arguably too complex for computers to model and categorize. Comics as a space for encryption. Embedded meaning within the liminal space. Think about that… Here’s a little on why. It’s all about neural networks. Let’s talk about how computers recognize objects in images – Adam Geitgey has a great 5 part series over on Medium on Machine Learning and neural networks. I urge you to check that out. Accessible writing for the layman on the algorithms that are beginning to dominate are everyday digital life. Worth a look. Get a glimpse of a field of thought that cross cuts computer science and linguistics. NeuralTalk and Walk from Kyle McDonald – See in real time a neural network identify what is being seen through a camera. It’s creepy, astounding and hilarious at the same time. All that said, of especial interest for us visual thinkers is Geitgey’s article on deep learning and convolutional neural networks, focused on object recognition in images. Any 3-year-old child can recognize a photo of a bird, but figuring out how to make a computer recognize objects has puzzled the very best computer scientists for over 50 years. This article delves into that. sidenote: What does all this digital garbage have to do with your comics? Simply put, this is the world that we live in. The Butlerian-Huxlerian-Orwellian Cyberpunk Apocalypse. Work with me, this level of digital literacy is really important nowadays. These concepts are the cogs that turn the global machinery. It’s not magic, it’s numbers. Come to terms with the machinery or else. ————————————————————————————————— What kind of Artists do we want? David Salle‘s expanded a 2000 lecture of his over on Art News to fold in much of what he has been preoccupied with over the past 16 years. An exciting read with A LOT to unpack! I’ll confess straightaway that the proliferation of presentational art makes my heart sink. The inconvenient truth is this: It’s easier to present art than to make it. It’s easier to select than it is to invent. It gets confusing, because some of the great pictorial inventors of the twentieth century, like Andy Warhol, obviously, appeared to be doing nothing more than choosing—but that was an illusion, something borrowed from the beauty industry, where the amount of time spent in the makeup chair is meant to result in an effortlessly natural look. To make something that really holds our attention, especially over repeated viewings, requires levels of integration—intellectual, visual, cultural—expressed with a unique physicality. Art that eschews this integration is unlikely to be durably compelling for the simple reason that less is at stake. One component without the others is like an unstable chemical compound; it will degrade, or, to continue the chemistry analogy, it will fail to catalyze. Over time, the result will come to have the flavor of commentary. This is incredibly resonant for me. Ask yourself, what is it that makes comics certain comics transcendant or revolutionary as developments in the form? What do you think Salle would say about the creative process that brought them into the world? ————————————————————————————————— The latest Suzy and Cecil strips by Gabriella Tito and Sally Ingraham! Suzy and Cecil is a collaborative daily comic strip project based on characters invented by Bill Boichel and Frank Santoro. It is primarily drawn by Gabriella Tito and Sally Ingraham, teammates in the Comics Workbook Roller Derby League. The strip is part of their continuing development as cartoonists – follow @suzy_and_cecil on Instagram to see the project unfold and keep an eye out for guest strips drawn by other Comics Workbook students and friends! New comics Daily! ————————————————————————————————— Like what you just read? You’ll want to get in on our Daily News Wire. Sign up here. ————————————————————————————————— until next time hot shots, Juan 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: [...]

01/30/2017

Sally IngrahamJanuary 29, 2017NewsSally Ingraham here to start the week off with news out of Angouleme, highly anticipated comics of 2017, new work from Noah Van Sciver, comics by Leah Hayes, Gabriella Tito, and Caleb Orecchio. ————————————————————————————————— “The Paste Comics Crew” has a new list for us – this time it’s the 35 Most Anticipated Comics of 2017. As they enthusiastically put it: “…a metric ton of sequential art gold is scheduled to hit shelves. Curiously, our list is light on mainstream capes and cowls despite the genre’s outstanding frequency. Instead, a slew of other genre and indie work has us feverishly thrilled. A new adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods will transition to panels, helmed by the author’s Sandman collaborators Craig P. Russell and Scott Hampton. The sci-fi corner will embrace a deeper shade of nihilism via James Stokoe’s Aliens: Dead Orbit and Jonathan Hickman’s delayed Frontier—a return for the creator to design-driven illustration alongside his winding plot development. Michael DeForge, Jillian Tamaki and Eleanor Davis will debut new projects and collections that will probably make our best of ’17 list (let’s be honest) and C. Spike Trotman and Jess Fink will continue to show why comics are the new home for female-friendly sexuality. Speaking of: don’t even get us started on the untitled Fall surprise from Tula Lotay and Becky Cloonan. We’ve also included a few early-to-mid January releases that are definitely worth your time.“ Check out the whole list HERE. ————————————————————————————————— There will be a lot more buzz this week about the 44th Angouleme International Comics Festival, but beating everyone else out of the gate is this fantastic story about the first South Korean cartoonist to be honored with a prize from the festival. Ancco, (the pen name of Choi Kyung-jin) was awarded the Prix Revelation for her comic Bad Friend. The festival has served in recent years as a gateway for Korean comics to find their way to European readers. The festival organizers, who had nominated Bad Friend for the Best Comic Book award as well, wrote that Ancco: “…paints an uncompromising picture of Korean society torn between tradition and modernity, haunted by the ghosts of history and shaken by Western materialistic civilization.” They also said of her work: “She appears as the spokesperson of Korean youth’s malaise through a cartoon centered on the daily lives of teenagers. Freeing the long-repressed language of Korean youth, it has become a reference for a whole generation.” – via The Korea Times Winning the Prix Revelation – which is given to up-and-coming cartoonists who have published no more than three comic books in French – will garner Ancco attention from all over Europe. She spoke to the Korea Manhwa Contents Agency (KOMACON) about the experience of being at the festival this year and winning the award: “I used to consider myself to be someone who led a weird, lonely life in Korea. But now I am here. This is, I think, the power of comics… My particular thanks to Kim Dae-jung, CEO of Sai Comics, who introduced me to the festival and told me, ‘You are not the only strange one. There are so many people like you out there.’ ” – via Yonhap News Bad Friends, or Mauvaises Filles as the French edition is titled, will hopefully make it into English someday soon. Meanwhile, you can see more of the book HERE. And a bit more about the author can be found HERE. ————————————————————————————————— In somewhat related news: Posy Simmonds (who was president of the jury at the 44th Angouleme International Comics Festival) is working on a new book about a “fat, rich, greedy, stupid and criminal” member of the British upper middle class, according to the Malay Mail Online. Posy Simmonds is the author of Tamara Drew and Gemma Bovary (both of which have been adapted into films). She was recently nominated for induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. Now aged 71 and able to draw for only 10 minute spurts, she nevertheless says the book is “well advanced” and I am hopeful that we will get a peak at it soon. Good luck Posy! France 24‘s Olivia Salazar-Winspear spoke to Posy Simmonds recently about her well-known work, about presiding over the jury at Angouleme and the increase in comics festivals, about women making comics, and about the good handbags that French ladies have…! It’s delightful. Check out the video HERE. Here’s a bit more about her adventures as the president of the jury at Angouleme – if you can read French (or are willing to pound that Google translate button and wade through it!) ————————————————————————————————— There is an article about the comics newspaper RESIST! over on Hyperallergic with a lot of scans of the pages – good news for those of you who didn’t managed to get your hands on a copy of this already rare item. ————————————————————————————————— The New York Times has hurt a lot of feelings recently with the announcement that they are discontinuing their graphic novel bestsellers lists. “The Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul confirmed that the paper will discontinue a number of its lists, including Hardcover Graphic Novel, Paperback Graphic Novel and Manga, effective Feb. 5. The sense of loss among authors and publishers, readers and retailers is profound.” – Michael Cavna for the Washington Post Despite some tweets that seem to indicate that Pamela Paul has a poor opinion of comics in general (I’m referring to comments that she made about John Lewis’, Andrew Aydin’s, and Nate Powell’s March which began with “hey, kids” and finished by calling March a “children’s book“), she has gone on to say that cutting these lists will allow the Times to actually expand its “graphics-book coverage.” We’ll see about that. Over on The Comics Beat Alexander Lu puts the ramifications of this bluntly: “The fact that comics had a bestseller list devoted to them was a symbolic sign of the medium’s importance to one of the nation’s most respectable media outlets and their importance to the nation at large. Moreover, there are few stronger marketing loglines than “New York Times bestseller.” While the Times is foremost a media outlet and not a marketing firm, the way their endorsements affect sales and popular discourse cannot be ignored. The decision to eliminate these lists will have implications for our conversations and our bottom lines.“ It’s hard not to be annoyed by this whole thing, especially when Pamela Paul piles the graphic bestseller lists on top of other “genre” lists that the Times has been planning to cut since last year. COMICS ARE A MEDIUM NOT A GENRE! For the millionth time…come on, people. More about the cuts HERE on the Washington Post. ————————————————————————————————— Meg Lemke presents Leah Hayes’ Not Funny Ha-Ha for the Illustrated PEN. Read Meg’s thoughts about the comic and an excerpt from it HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Noah Van Sciver has a new weekly strip in Columbus Alive called The Introvert Club (above) – check it out! Noah has been serializing his own graphic memoir nearly everyday via his Patreon – it is called One Dirty Tree and is “about growing up in a poor, unsteady Mormon family and its affects 20 years later in my life trying to hold together a relationship of my own and while making a name for myself in alternative comics.” You can see a 3-page excerpt over on his website – HERE – but to read the rest, consider supporting Noah’s Patreon. He is one of the hardest working cartoonists you’ll ever meet whose work is consistently funny and heartrending. I hope he continues making them forever – and it would be nice if he could have a real live cat someday…! ————————————————————————————————— Bits and Bobs Jack Mendelsohn, creator of the brief but brilliant comic strip Jacky’s Diary (1959-1961), among many other comics projects, past away on Jan. 25th 2017. Dan Nadel writes about Jack’s life and work over on The Comics Journal. Rob Clough wrote about Marnie Galloway’s mini-comics on High-Low last week. Heidi MacDonald says (via The Beat) that the TV show Riverdale, which is based on Archie comics…is pretty good. Should we try it out? Tom Spurgeon is updating his massive list of “all things comics-related by metropolitan area“. Last updated in 2014, it needs a careful overhaul – help Tom out HERE. There is an Instagram account devoted to “showcasing the most beautiful scenes, colours, sets and abstract compositions of The Simpsons.” Juan Fernandez showed the account to me and then riffed: “No cropping involved – just screen capping (moments chosen as opposed to aspects of moments chosen). It’s more about what is latent in The Simpsons than how the person curating this blog has chosen to present and eliminate – i.e. these compositions have all passed in front of viewers eyes, and to me that’s interesting.” Check out @scenic_simpsons. ————————————————————————————————— Needed: more comics in the world. If you want to make comics but you don’t know how to start, consider a crash course in the methods of the Santoro School – check out the handbook HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 1-30-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 1-30-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

Leave a Reply Cancel reply