Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged 2dcloud, Cameron Arthur, comics & medicine conference, florine stettheimer, Françoise Mouly, jorge zenther, magie umber, pan terzis, RM Rhodes, roz chast, ruben pellejero, sally ingraham

Aaron Cockle

Posted on May 22, 2017May 23, 2017

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10/30/2017

Caleb OrecchioOctober 29, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thoughts and ramblings on Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur brought on by reading Brian Evenson’s book, Ed vs. Yummy Fur–and other news.————————————————————————————————— A recent conversation I had with Comics Workbook’s fearless leader, Frank Santoro, about Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur has got me all hot and bothered about the title again. Every so often I go back and flip through my copies and marvel at the energy of Brown’s early strips, and the absolute beauty and power of the later stuff going into Underwater. YF is the promise of the undergrounds fulfilled as a vessel for looking inward and taboo exploitation, and there is virtually limitless aspects of the title to consider and examine as a 21st Century cartoonist. Consequently, I recently read Ed vs. Yummy Fur: Or, What Happens When a Serial Comic Becomes a Graphic Novel by Brian Evenson, published by Uncivilized Books–being their debut title in their line of prose comics criticism, Critical Cartoons. The book compares and contrasts “Ed, The Happy Clown” as a serial within Yummy Fur, and Ed, The Happy Clown the graphic novel. Now, I will admit that the book left a lot to be desired due to the titular focus of Ed which I felt limited the scope of Evenson’s point. However, I was fascinated with Evenson’s consideration of Brown’s Gospels as being inextricably linked to the reading of “Ed” within Yummy Fur. Brown’s Gospels (being The Book of Mark and the unfinished Book of Matthew) are a bit lost on my generation (millennials). This is no doubt due the fact they haven’t been reprinted into a book, but also I think it is simply difficult to understand the significance of such a work during the time of its publication. From what I can gather, no cartoonist had really done a Bible adaption in such a faithful (ha), straight-forward, and non-judgmental way (at least, certainly, for “Mark” this is particularly true). The only other widely-known comics Bible adaption I know of from up to that point is Mayer and Kubert’s, which could basically be considered easily-digestible, white-washed propaganda. In an interview with Brown from Evenson’s book, Evenson says (or writes, because I assume the interview took place over email or at least that’s what it feels like–I wouldn’t be surprised if Evenson just gave Brown a questionnaire to fill out and mail back), “Issue #4 [of Yummy Fur] is one of the few issues of comics I remember being really shocked by. I think it was less because of the sex and murder at the end of the Ed material in that issue and more because we go straight from that to an adaption of the Biblical book of Mark.” I think what Yummy Fur readers were expecting from Brown’s “Mark” was biting satire and exploitation, and obviously the lack of both and the general neutrality of the adaption shocked his fans more than any “parody” could have. However, I think if Brown had published “Ed” and the Gospels in their own separate books, the effect Evenson talks about experiencing would be less severe or memorable. After reading this, and the rest of Ed vs. Yummy Fur, I can’t help but see YF as anything less than one complete work–as oppose to a book containing many serialized stories. All comics in YF from “Ed” to “Showing Helder” to “The Little Man” to “Fuck”, (AND the letters pages) etc. have an interesting give and take with the Gospels they share a book with. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there is an unsevered umbilical chord connecting the early pre-“Ed” material to the later autobio stuff; and going further into Underwater. I see Yummy Fur being the record of a developing cartoonist constantly tinkering with his craft, and a self-aware conscience looking at it’s old-self in the face. When you read the “Playboy” stories, the juxtaposition of the Gospels are impossible to ignore while reading about young Chester’s religious upbringing. It’s like the Gospels and the teachings of Christ are always in the back of Brown’s mind and dictate his actions and motivations for better or for worse. Anyone still here? Well if you are, here is what I’m picturing in my head: A multi-volume, “The Complete Yummy Fur.” Everything reprinted (including Vortex house-ads–like, literally just scan mint copies of Yummy Fur cover to cover and sew them together) even the letters column, aka “The Fur Bag”–of course all this would be done as a bootleg, to Chester Brown’s chagrin I assume. The last volume would be subtitled; the complete Underwater. Unedited, these volumes would contain an interesting insight into an individual’s reckoning with their “conflicting” interests, political views, personal stories, and relationships with readers and “the times”. Something to chew on for 21st Century cartoonists like myself. -CO BONUS: Lookit this! An observant, Tom K from the 90s in the letter pages of Underwater. Tom would go on to publish Evenson’s book in 2014. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Jim Rugg on Paste Magazine talking Street Angel. Fantagraphics has a sale going on until tomorrow! Don’t miss out! Need to know what the program for CAB 2017 looks like?? Here it is. Karl Stevens is the latest guest on Process Party. Campbell White is the latest guest on Inkstuds. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil– 10-30-2017 – by Sally Ingraham —————————————————————————————————Joanie and Jordie – 10-30-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— Cozytown– 10-30-2017 – by Juan Fernandez Share this page: [...]

09/08/2017

Sally IngrahamSeptember 7, 2017NewsSally here with new work from Hannah K. Lee, and Sheree Domingo, plus other comics and news! ———————————————————————————————— I was excited to perused the advanced review PDF of Hannah K. Lee‘s book debut, coming out from Koyama Press next week. Language Barrier collects several of Hannah’s zines and comics, as well as a new piece. The design of the book looks beautiful, from the end papers, to the full color comics and the scans of zines (I really like the aesthetic of scans of existing books, for some reason!) The new comic is great (no spoilers allowed yet) and it’s nice to revisit some of the riso printed zines that Hannah made in 2012/2014 which are long out of print. I love her Shoes Over Bills zine, which is contained in this collection, and is a striking visual game of balance between wants and needs… Hannah’s work as a commercial illustrator and letterer comes into play nicely in this collection. I like when the text in a comic or zine is as much an artistic and visually stimulating part of the work as the drawings are, and Hannah definitely plays with her words in these pieces. Check out more of Hannah K. Lee’s work HERE, and keep an eye out for her book in shops around Sept. 12th 2017, or at the Koyama Press table at SPX next week! ———————————————————————————————— Electrocomics (Ulli Lust’s online comics publishing platform) just released a comic by Sheree Domingo called Omegawolf (above). You can download the comic HERE. I like Sheree’s use of watercolors, with a 3 color palette and no blackline. The story is about a brief connection between a boy and a wild “omegawolf”. You can find more of Sheree’s work HERE. ———————————————————————————————— Women Who Draw organized an international art project last month, which Topic recently compiled and published. “On August 13, 2017, at precisely 12:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, 88 artists all over the world stopped what they were doing, looked up, and drew the sky. What each artist saw was unique to the time, the weather, and the place. The locations ranged from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn, Buenos Aires to rural Georgia. Some saw different hues of blue. Some saw black, pink, or gray. Some saw stars or clouds or fog or rain. Here it was summer. There it was night. In one place a fire left a heavy brown haze. Whatever sky the artist saw, they captured it on paper in their own unique style. They were, at that exact moment, separate skies. But when we view these drawings together, they become one far-stretching, simultaneous world view. They become a portrait of one shared sky.” —Wendy MacNaughton and Julia Rothman, co-founders of Women Who Draw See the entire One Sky project HERE. ———————————————————————————————— Boundless by Jillian Tamaki is reviewed on the LA Review of Books – HERE. Paste Magazine‘s “Required Reading: Comics” roundup for the week reminded me that I want to read Bombshells United #1, which is written by Marguerite Bennett and drawn by Marguerite Sauvage, and just came out. The A.V. Club took a look at a preview copy recently, which you can check out HERE. Arianna Margulis‘ Instagram comic But Like Maybe is something of a phenomenon, earning her a nod from The New Yorker this week. There’s a review of Anna Haifisch‘s new book Drifter in the German Art Magazine – read it here. Ulli Lust is having a book release party in Berlin this month – here are details for the party on Sept. 10th 2017 – and here’s a look at Ulli’s new book courtesy of Lauren Weinstein! Liana Finck explores “who does a story belong to?” when it comes to loved ones, and making comics about them – on Topic, HERE. ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 9-8-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ———————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

10/11/2018

Caleb OrecchioOctober 11, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with some comics I bought from The Billy Ireland’s overflow collection. ————————————————————————————————— This year at CXC, The Billy Ireland Museum was selling comics, magazines, fanzines and books from their collection. These were items that they had multiples of and needed to purge to make space. It was a treasure trove. I passed up a lot of good stuff, but am incredibly happy with the few things I did pick up. I basically picked up trash. I love comics trash. Comics trash is beautiful. Shopping for comics with Frank Santoro and Jim Rugg really made me appreciate this facet of comics. “You’ll never see this again,” they always say when they come across some forgotten comic that was self-published in West Virginia in 1986. One of my favorite aspects of comics is finding this wonderful garbage and then showing it to everyone who is willing to look. I passed around these books like a crazy person with a shopping cart passing out occult books and warning people to not join the boy scouts because they will use you (some people react to these comics in the same way one would react to a crazy person). Others are fellow admirers. When I showed showed some of these comics to Nate McDonough, he picked up this gospel and spread it around to more people. I flipped one of the comics, a William Black comic, I got and sold it to Chris Pitzer, a fellow admirer. “Are you sure you want to sell it?” he asked. Yes! Finding and subsequently showing this stuff around is the best part of the process! Below are the comics I bought, minus Tara of the Lost Continent which I flipped to Chris. Obviously not everything is “trash.” I found a Chinese comic and a Jewish comic about the power of prayer. I use the term “trash” to refer to comics that people don’t want or care about for whatever reason. There is also an issue of The Comics Journal herein which is obviously far from trash. Maybe a better word to use is weird? You decide! ————————————————————————————————— The Lair of Madness No. 1 by various artists (Ellen Balliet, S. Geary, L. Ogan, Dale and Jim Pinkoski, 1972 (D.B. Features) ————————————————————————————————— *someone will have to help me out with the info on this one. I can’t read Chinese ————————————————————————————————— Mendy and the Golem vol. 2 no. 1 written by Leibel Estrin and drawn by Dovid Sears. Colored by Barry Grossman. 1982 (Mendy Enterprises) ————————————————————————————————— The Comics Journal no. 120 edited by Gary Groth, 1988 (Fantagraphics) ————————————————————————————————— Photo by Chris Pitzer featuring Kurt Ankeny and a dumpster diver. See you on Monday folks! I promise I will have the review of Andrew White’s Yearly 2018 I have been hinting at then. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

07/05/2017

Juan FernándezJuly 5, 2017los Cómics / NewsJuan here. In observation of Venezuela’s Independence day, no news for today. Instead I offer you an opportunity to look into and reflect on the reality of life in my homeland, Venezuela. We’ll be back in action, with everything you need to know about Latin American comics making next week! Behind the Protests in Caracas (VICE) Grocery Shopping during Venezuela’s Food Shortage (VICE) El dia a dia en Venzuela (Reddit) Venezuela is Starving (WSJ) “Una Guerra Ajena” (Luis Manuel Aguana) Venezuela declared it’s independence from Spain on July 5, 1811. July 5, 1811 – July 5, 2017. 205 years, the blink of an eye. ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 7-5-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 7-5-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

05/15/2018

Aaron CockleMay 15, 2018NewsLucy Shelton Caswell Research Award Winners; Colleen Frakes; Katie Fricas; Clough/Porcellino; Park on Reynolds; Spatial Frequency Analysis ————————————————————————————————— Announcing the 2018 Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award Winners The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICLM) is pleased to announce the winners of the first annual Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award. The award of up to $2500, named for the founding curator of the BICLM, Professor Emerita Lucy Shelton Caswell, supports researchers who need to travel to Columbus, Ohio to use the collections materials of the BICLM on site. Thanks to the generosity of the Will & Ann Eisner Family Foundation, we are able to give three 2018 awards in celebration of the launch of the program. Moving forward, we will give one award per year. We were delighted to receive a large and diverse range of proposals from both national and international scholars and artists. A panel of ten reviewers from a variety of disciplines at Ohio State was appointed to assess the proposals. The recipients for 2018 are: Dr. Daniel Worden, Visiting Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology’ School of Individualized Study. He holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University. His project is entitled “Oil Comics: Iconographies of Energy, Environment and Motion.” Worden’s research aims to chronicle the imbrication of comics with the oil industry and the normalized use of petroleum as a fuel source, from the late 19th century to the present. Xavier Dapena, Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His project is called “’They do not represent us’: Radical Imageries of Contemporary Spanish Graphic Narratives (1973-2011).” Dapena’s project centers on the intersection of graphic narratives and political imagination and seeks to understand how the political repertoire of images, symbols, and metaphors express three processes: memorialization, precarization, and legitimation. Frank Santoro, creator of Pompeii, Storeyville and other comics. He is also an educator who runs ComicsWorkbook, a training and residency program for cartoonists. His research on “The Ohio School of Naturalist Cartooning” will look at how Billy Ireland’s influence on Edwina Dumm, Noel Sickles, Milton Caniff, and C.N. Landon informed a language of 20th century cartooning that has carried on into the 21st century. Congrats, Frank! ————————————————————————————————— Colleen Frakes: A Cartoonist’s Diary ————————————————————————————————— ‘Stopping for Art and Conversation Along the High Line’ Katie Fricas looks at the group exhibition, Agora, in NYC. ————————————————————————————————— One night group exhibition and book release with work and new publications by: Clark Keatley Leon Sadler Stuart McKenzie Tom Sewell Viktor Hachmang Yannick Val Gesto At Dinner Party Gallery, Thomas Briggs Building, 2-4 Southgate Rd, N1 3JJ. Walk past reception to the door under the stairs. ————————————————————————————————— ‘How do you compare the experience of taking acid with your later practice in Zen Buddhism?’ Rob Clough continues the long interview with John Porcellino, over at The Comics Journal. The long “Mr Dusty” letter from Mr Mike that you printed was epic. That was an intense amount of text to lay down, which made me wonder how you feel about lettering and how your lettering has developed over the years. Did you look to others for inspiration? Did you ever use any kind of guide? Have you ever considered developing your own font? When I first started King-Cat, the lettering was as sloppy as the drawing! I didn’t care about stuff like that. I was just slinging ink. As my drawing got more evolved, the lettering did too. I started to get a kick from lettering more legibly, making those E’s, S’s. When I’m doing it it can be quite enjoyable. One thing I’ve found is I have to concentrate, kind of empty my mind, and focus on things. I can tell when I’m lettering and my mind starts to wander, things get sloppy. Then I pull it back in and keep going. Just like meditation, I guess. For guides, like a large bunch of text like a Snornose page or a letters column, I usually use the edge of a piece of paper as a ruler… line it up with the edge of the page and use it as a guide, siding it down a bit with each new line. But it’s not perfect and half the time I end up inking a page and it’s all on a slant. In my OCD days I would redraw it. Now I just kind of laugh at myself and let it go. Occasionally I’ve ruled bluelines to guide me, and at least once I used graph paper. I think that’s how Cometbus does it. That sure helps, but maybe I don’t really wanna think that much about it. When I look back at my lettering in the OCD years, it floors me, how precise it is! I was nuts! It’s beautiful, but the cost is too much maybe. I don’t know. The whole story of my post-meds career has been learning to balance that spontaneity I had before OCD with the precision I got from it. It’s taken me like ten years to start to figure it out. Font: no. ————————————————————————————————— Mauretania Comics Ed Park looks at the Chris Reynolds collection, The New World. The stories start on solid ground, then twist like dreams. Reynolds sets everything in uniformly sized panels, edged in black like funeral invitations. His impossibly thick line lends weight to these uncanny dramas of lost time. Calling the comics black and white feels insufficient; they’re more like black and white and black. This starkness, and the stabs of poetic word-image interplay, can call to mind his stateside contemporary Raymond Pettibon, while the silent, depopulated spaces that loom throughout—abandoned houses, vacant cinemas, phantom transportation—suggest any number of uneasy de Chirico vistas. ————————————————————————————————— Spatial Frequency Analysis – II The contrast sensitivity as a function of spatial frequency (called CSF) can be obtained psychophysically from the test image below . You will perceive a curve which peaks at some certain optimal frequency in the middle range of the image (depending on the viewing distance) at which the visual system is most sensitive to the contrast. The sensitivity is reduced when the frequency is either too high or too low. ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 5-15-2018 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 4-15-18 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

05/23/2017

Posted on May 22, 2017May 23, 2017 by Aaron Cockle

Aaron Cockle here today with Roz Chast (and Françoise Mouly); Pan Terzis; Graphic Medicine; Florine Stettheimer; Maggie Umber; Dieter Lumpen

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Back of Motherboard embroidery piece, Roz Chast

‘I like taking on complicated, detailed projects, especially if I’m not a hundred-per-cent sure how they’re going to turn out.’
Françoise Mouly looks at the wonderful embroidered piece Roz Chast made for the May 15, 2017 issue of the New Yorker, including an animation of the process that went into making the cover.

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A spread from Trapper Keeper #4 by Brenna Murphy

‘Each issue has a secret formula that I have to discover. ‘
Frank Santoro continues his survey of recent developments in Art Comics Risography – this week he talks with Pan Terzis:

People want to show up. They want to look at your thing in person, hold it in their hands. They want to talk to others in person about it and look at it at their own pace, without the publisher or distributor knowing how long they spent lingering on a page or whether they got to the end of the book in the same time as 76.3% of other consumers. All of this activity is still happening in the context of capitalist systems of production, supply and demand and distribution, but I think that people who work with this kind of cultural ephemera must know on some level that the real art is what happens in between the object and the viewer, and the consumer of that piece of art and the person they describe it to. It’s inherently a social act, and this can manifest through all stages of the process. People-power is what drives this activity, and just like a blade of grass can slowly destroy a piece of concrete given enough time to push to the surface, I think DIY culture might be the key to breaking out of the mechanistic, algorithm driven nightmare that our tech overlords are driving us towards.

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SAVE THE DATE:
2017 Comics & Medicine Conference: Access Points
June 15-17, 2017, Seattle Public Library Central Branch

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Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry

The artist Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) is an icon of Jazz Age New York. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Rochester, she studied at the Art Students League in New York City and then in Europe, where she encountered two profound influences: the Symbolist painters and poets and, on the eve of the Great War, the Ballets Russes. Returning to Manhattan, she hosted an elite salon together with her sisters Carrie and Ettie and their mother, Rosetta, attracting many of the leading lights of the artistic vanguard. Her circle included Alfred Stieglitz, Carl Van Vechten, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elie Nadelman, Gaston Lachaise, and many others. Among her intimate friends was Marcel Duchamp.

Through over 50 paintings and drawings, a selection of costume and theater designs, photographs and ephemera, as well as critically acclaimed poems, the Jewish Museum will offer a timely reconsideration of this important American artist, revealing Stettheimer’s singular and often satiric vision and significant role in American modern art. The exhibition highlights the artist’s distinctly personal style of painting, Stettheimer’s position amidst New York’s artistic elite and avant-gardes, and her continued influence on artistic practice today.

May 5-September 24 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, NYC.

Florine Stettheimer, Family Portrait II, 1933. Oil on canvas 46¼ x 64⅝ in. (117.4 x 164 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Miss Ettie Stettheimer, 1956. Image provided by The Museum of Modern Art / SCALA / Art Resource, New York

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2dcloud in Toronto
Maggie Umber has a nice photo-recap of the TCAF show:

Some of my favorite 2dcloud convention moments – talking with Carta’s wife Emily about our shared adoration of Junji Ito and Emily Carroll. @cartamonir letting me read Ghost Call on her phone since my Tumblr app never let me read the end last Halloween. Meeting @tommipg and watching them embroider a beautiful panel, meeting @goodcomicsbykim and being astonished by her energy and exhaustion, her humor and her seriousness. Blaise rearranging the 2dcloud table into a better format that sold more books. Juliacks casual yet persistent (and very successful) sales style and her gorgeous book trailer. I was also very excited to meet @artbl0g Xia Gordon when we did a panel together. 2dcloud is publishing a mini-comic with her soon!!!!!!

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Heavy Metal issue #121, July 1989 – Pages 34&35 Caribe: Dieter Lumpen by Ruben and Zentner

‘To be sure, these are the adventures of a white European wandering through the wreckage of a post-war world.’

Lastly, RM Rhodes looks at The Adventures of Dieter Lumpen, by Jorge Zentner and Ruben Pellejero:

Pellejero uses color and a confident line to build on top of a very solid foundation. The real appeal of the series are the settings. The premise is that shortly after the war, a German named Dieter Lumpen gets a job as a chauffeur and the first page of the first story finds him being chased through an Istanbul market by a man with a gun. From there, he travels to the Agean, Haifa, India, Sri Lanka, Paris, Manaus, Tunisia and the Caribbean. The appeal of these destinations is Pellejero’s ability to render them almost like a documentary film maker, matter of fact about amazing sights, which adds verisimilitude. The amount of detail on each page means that every time you return to a page, you notice something new. And the stories are very rereadable.

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Announcing the Summer Semester of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers!

8 weeks! 500 bux! Payment plans are available! Summer Course starts June 1st 2017!

Applications are due by May 25th.

Visit THIS page for more details and email santoroschool@gmail.com with applications and questions!

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A Cosmic Journey – 5-23-2017 – by Cameron Arthur

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Suzy and Cecil – 5-23-2017 – by Sally Ingraham

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Aaron Cockle

Posted on May 22, 2017May 23, 2017

Explore

Cartoon Crossroads Columbus: is this real life?

MardouOctober 21, 2016Festivals and ShowsCXC happened last weekend in Columbus, OH, and I got to represent Team Comics Workbook and also myself as a special guest (this has never happened to me before – count me overexcited and also terrified!) I get in on Thursday night and head to the President’s Reception feeling very wallflowerish as I know literally no one except through Facebook and Instagram. First off I meet Tom Spurgeon (finally!), Jeff Bone and his lovely wife Vijaya, Caitlyn McGurk, and Robin the Inkstud. I nervously nurse my wine and then I am rescued by Sergio Aragonés, who sits next to me with a plate of meatballs and a beer. I’m a vegan but I don’t even care about the meatballs! It’s Sergio Aragonés and I proceed to fannishly monopolize him for the next hour. Sergio! I’ve loved his comics in Mad Magazine since I was eight years old. Ahhh. Those moments of life where nothing degrades or disappoints. CXC is already off to a GREAT start. Friday morning I’m giving a Peer-to-Peer talk at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. I’m very nervous, but also ‘over prepared’ – I’m not going to TRUMP this, thank you very much. It’s also at 10 am, so I figure no one’s hardly going to be there. WRONG! It was a full house; I talked about scripting and planning processes for long form fiction in comics. I tried to jazz it up with stories of ayahuasca (not my own of course, I’m totally square, dear reader) and out of body experiences and Amazonian explorers. And I did a reading from the thumbnails of a new graphic novel I’ve been working on this year. Once that was out of the way, I was free to enjoy the Billy Ireland Museum. I loved it so much. I copied some stuff in my sketchbook whilst I explored in a blissed out state. Oh and I ran into old pal T. Edward Bak and we had lunch. Day Two: AWESOME. I skipped the festivities on Friday night so that I could be the sole un-hungover person at CXC on Saturday for a full day of tabling and socializing. I made the right decision. You have to treat comic’s shows like an eleven-hour congressional hearing, i.e.: you need STAMINA. (Apologies if the election has snuck in to my CXC coverage. Ohio is very much a swing state and my weekend, traffic, eating in bars etc, were interrupted by bizarre looking fashionista Trumpettes and a presidential motorcade – yes, both Trump and Obama had been/were in Columbus that very weekend.) So, Day Three: Saturday tabling. It went great. I hunkered down with Team Comics Workbook, and got to finally meet some of my Comics Workbook Roller Derby of the Mind compadres, particularly Alyssa Berg, Whit Taylor and Sally Ingraham. At one o’clock I had an author spotlight thing, which was easy and fun, thanks to Jared Gardner. I read from Sky In Stereo, and afterwards would sell all my copies. Sweet! So far I’m enjoying this show so much. The downtown Columbus Metropolitan Library is bright and airy, there’s some good energy about, the locals are so friendly and the organizers are present and visible. And I’ve sold all my comics! This never happens. But afterwards when I’m alone again, in this new Midwestern city, I’m strolling around downtown Columbus at twilight. It’s Saturday but everything’s closing or closed. I feel a little spooked out and get to thinking about Dorothy Thompson talking about Terre Haute in the 40s or something. She wrote to her man, Sinclair Lewis: “This is a lonely country, it is so goddamned empty. I am turning mystic. Surely there is something in the very air of a city where civilized people have lived, worked, dreamed loved and enjoyed civilized pleasures for hundreds of years…some radioactivity which lingers in the atmosphere. I begin to believe in ghosts, gentle ghosts which keep one company in ancient towns. Here there are none.” Traveling alone spooks me out. I’m not a good traveler at the best of times. I walk; admire statues and fountains and government buildings. I pass a tiny Episcopalian church. It has an 8am service on Sunday morning. Tomorrow! Maybe I’ll go, I tell myself, just to feel somehow cosmically rooted again. ‘You know what?’ I think, ‘I will definitely go. I’ll set my alarm tonight.’ I go back to my hotel room and spruce up for that evening’s drinks reception in honor of Stan Sakai. And I have fun! I forget my lonely existential Midwestern emptiness and that night I roll into bed at 3am having been to a Haunted House in ruralish Ohio with my publisher and a couple of Rhode Island hepcats. The Haunted House has a definite ‘juggalo’ vibe, something I’d heard about but never seen. It was gross and yucky, people in costumes tried to touch me! But the sight of rural folk wielding fake chainsaws made out of leaf blowers and duct tape PLUS the company of good friends has somehow righted me again. I don’t set my alarm after all. I don’t need church. I just need sleep dammit, and I just need ‘my people’ and this weekend Columbus, OH, has been full of them. On Sunday I sell all my publisher’s copies of Sky in Stereo, experience a sleep-deprived meltdown and Alyssa Berg revives me with dried mango slices and crystal healing. I get through! I meet Keiler Roberts and Noah Van Sciver, they’re both great! I talk to lots and lots of people. Until its time to go get my plane! Sergio Aragonés stops by my table to say goodbye. Is this real life? Before I go I coerce Tom Spurgeon into a hug. It feels right. My delightful assistant (I have an assistant!) Sara drives me to Chipotle and then to the airport. I fly home that night in the darkness over Midwestern cities that look like small bejeweled funfairs in pools of rural soupy darkness. America is a strange place. I’m full of that crackling comics energy. Ready to retreat again and draw my next comic. Thanks Columbus, OH. Thanks to all the volunteers who were so nice and the librarians who were unfazed by all these cartoonists, and to the comics community, including my own Comics Workbook community, for being so rad. Is it not amazing that comics people can just assemble and friendships made at CAKE or SPX years ago, can just pick up again, over printed pages and falafels? Well, it’s sort of magical to me. I get to be part of this. It was a strange and spooky, magical weekend. I wanna come back for more! I do, I do. ————————————————————————————————— Sacha Mardou is a Brit making comics in St Louis, Missouri. Sky in Stereo is her most recent comic. For the rest of our complete CXC coverage check out the special “round up” report HERE. Share this page: [...]

07/04/2017

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

10/16/2017

Caleb OrecchioOctober 15, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thoughts on practicing color, and other news. ———————————————————————————————— I’ve been thinking and working with color a lot. In this day and age, where color is an option for cartoonists looking to print their work (color was not always an option for ye olde comics makers, true believer), the quantity of choice of what the colors should be and how to apply them can be intimidating. Fear not. In my opinion, the best way to start in color is the classic CMYK–which is essentially, as you probably know, blue, red, yellow, and black. One reason this is a good choice is that most riso printers carry these four colors (riso being probably the best option in self-publishing in color if you can swing it) AND they are easily acquired in forms of marker or colored pencils, AND because these are the colors comics used in the past and traditions are important to me. The Classics Illustrated series is a great gateway into classic coloring. They all have a minimal, crude feel to the coloring. It does not seem that their printer offered a large pallet, or maybe they couldn’t afford it. Anyway, I read about the 152nd installment of the Classics Illustrated line, “Wild Animals I have Known”(adapted from the book by Ernest Thompson Seton; drawn by LB Cole) from Kevin Huizenga’s blog years ago and subsequently bought it. I’m going to run through an example of how I play and practice with this book. Here’s a good panel that demonstrates a nice, simple combination of CMYK. First, I isolate the colors by tracing over them with markers on tracing paper. I don’t worry about being exact because that isn’t the point. I’m not trying to recreate the image, I just want to see how colors interact. Then I put them together–then yellow, then red and so on. Please forgive how the lightbox makes the photos look. But the idea is to keep going. Okay so how would it look like if we took one color out? Or just used one color? I could go on and on. You just have to keep trying things. Try it if you want–and feel free to mix it up. Make a new blackline drawing and put it up against the color. Flip the color layers or stagger them. This is just something to think about while you work on your comic. Follow your bliss. ———————————————————————————————— if you don’t know now you know I meant to post about this a month ago when it came out. I sincerely love this youtube documentary about comic shop owner Glenn O’Leary and his store, Comic Book Palace. My taste literally never overlaps with his and I think he is wrong about almost every aspect of comics–accept the way he retails–but I can’t help but love it. Sticking with the retail theme; TCJ.com blog made me aware of this–Dan Gearino on Jim Hanley. LOL they are making the New Mutants movie a horror movie (or seemingly so)–nothing wrong with that I guess do what you gotta do whatever. Aaaaand a shoplifter jumped out of a Midtown Comics second story window–doesn’t he know comics are worthless? ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 10-16-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ———————————————————————————————— Cozytown – 10-16-2017 – by Juan Fernandez ———————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 10-16-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

11/09/2018

Sally IngrahamNovember 9, 2018NewsSally Ingraham here – I am traveling at the moment, going to birding festivals (which are a lot like comics expos!) in TX and NM. I am seeing rare and interesting birds, meeting amateur and professional naturalists and ornithologists and quite a few “bird artists”. When I walk the floor of the vender show at these birding festivals, I see similarities to the small press comics community – but I am one of the few people who plays in both sandboxes. Increasingly, I am a “bird comics” maker. Right before this trip I gathered all of my birding comics into one place – check them out on Instagram by following me at @duck_hollow_comics. My work is documentary and verging on journal comics, especially when I make them on the fly, in the middle of a birding trip, as seen below: Typical “rare bird” behavior! Incidentally, the Golden-Crowned Warbler, which we DID NOT see, is a Central American warbler that has ventured a bit further north than it usually does. The Buff-bellied Hummingbird which you see in the comic above – one of the birds that we DID see – is not a rarity for South Texas, but it is not a species I ever see in my usual haunts of Western PA! (Apologies for my bird nerd moment!) I met another “bird comics” maker at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival yesterday – Rosemary Mosco, who became well known for her web comics Bird and Moon. Science and nature cartoons! I have been a fan of her work for awhile, and it was terrific to meet her and immediately find a kindred spirit. Just briefly we touched on the interesting and historic significance of science comics, and the relationship between female artists and nature, and the overlooked impact of amateur female naturalists on science, etc. Great stuff. Check out Rosemary Mosco’s work and if you haven’t already, be sure to follow me on Instagram too. See you out there, on the road or somewhere in nature! Share this page: [...]

09/03/18

Caleb OrecchioSeptember 3, 2018NewsGone fishing ———————————————————————————— We will be back tomorrow at our normal programming schedule. Have a good one! ———————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

Announcing the Summer Semester of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers!

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