Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged Aidan Koch, austin english, berliac, bill kartalopous, blaise larmee, cathy g. johnson, henry darger, Jack Kirby, juan fernandez, keith jones, mimi chrzanowski, Patrick Kyle, safari festival 2016

Aaron Cockle

Posted on May 23, 2016May 24, 2016

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12/11/2017

Caleb OrecchioDecember 11, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with the Dayton-based educational comic, Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact—plus other news. ————————————————————————————————— Several weeks ago I found Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact Vol. 24 No.12 in a dollar bin here in Dayton, OH. It was a nice find. The cover was a portrait of The Wright Brothers, Dayton’s most celebrated sons, with the cover story drawn by none other than “Joltin'” Joe Sinnot. “What a find!” I thought. I look at the indicia and found the book was published right here in Dayton, OH–on 5th Street, right near where the convention center is (where they now hold Gem City Comic Con). “Gee! This is tops!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. I had no idea this comic existed, nor did I realize (obviously) that it was published right here in Dayton near a culturally thriving part of the city. The issue itself is cool. The Sinnot/Wright Bros story, some gag strips, some serialized stories, an illustrated prose story about elephant poaching, and a great editorial page called “Backtalk” located on each inside cover that could go toe-to-toe with Stan’s Soapbox. It was an educational comic that was published “twice monthly during the school year…” It was distributed across the U.S. and Canada, subscription-only, to Catholic schools mostly from what I can find–which makes sense with Dayton being a primarily Catholic town in the past (ever heard of the University of Dayton?), and being in the Rust Belt. The series ran from 1946 to 1972. You get some great EC cartoonists like Joe Orlando (!) and Reed Crandall, plus Silver Agers like Sinnot throughout the years. Really interesting stuff—and many other notable artists. I love finding these x-factor comic books that seem to come out of nowhere (to me). Anyway, the most interesting part I found about this series was the story, “This Godless Communism.” Drawn by Reed Crandall (whom I’m a fan of), it was a 10-part story serialized in every other issue from Vol.17 No.2, until No.20 in 1961. Basically, the title (you have to admit it’s a zinger of a title despite the propaganda) says it all. It documents the rise of communism in Russia and its evils and all that. Evidently, the story made it’s way up the chain. Look at the letter below that graced the inside front cover of the Vol.17 No.2. This must have been the pride of George A. Pflaum, the publisher of this Daytonian mag: NOTE: Apologies for the bad scan above–it’s the best I could find online since I don’t actually own the physical copy. The other images of Treasure Chest herein are from my own copy and scanned at a reasonable dpi. You can read and/or download, if you want, “This Godless Communism” in it’s entirety here, and be on the lookout for other issues of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact in your local dollar bin. To me, it’s one of those weird pieces of comics history that almost seems to run parallel with the industry as oppose to within it—make sense? It’s just weird that it exists I guess. -CO ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Gilbert Hernandez gives a “graphic review” of Catcher in the Rye at The NY Times. TCJ.com has a great inside baseball conversation between Dash Shaw and Connor Willumsen about the latter’s book, Anti-Gone. Also, Greg Hunter reviews Old Ground by Noel Freibert on the same site. Didem Tali writes about women in Mongolia making comics to raise questions about gender norms. Shout out to Dayton comics-blood-brother Jason Hart who is appearing in the New Zealand literary magazine, Geometry, issue 2. The comic that appears in the mag is a short story he did last year I think. It’s called, “Message in a Bottle”. I am happy to see it find a home because this to me was around the time we both were finding our sea legs in comics and was his best work at the time. He has since gone on to be published in Ink Brick and other publications. Former New York State Senator Marc C. Panepinto had a box of comics stolen from him, which he claims was worth $20,000 to $40,000. Haha I wonder what the perpetrator’s reaction will be when they find out that comics are actually worthless. The Schulz Museum is hosting a fundraiser for those affected by the North Bay wildfires. See the journey of Simon Vance, narrator of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem audio book, to Northampton where he meets with the man himself. Prologue starts here. ————————————————————————————————— The Winter Semester of thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers starts January 18th 2018! 8 weeks – 500 bux – coaching for as long as you need. The course is hard, but Frank will push your comics making practice to a new level, getting you to think about timing and color in new ways. Makes a great holiday gift for yourself – or for a loved one who is interested in comics. Apply by midnight (EST) on Dec. 25th and get $100 off the course price. Full details and how to apply can be found HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 12-11-2017 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

10/15/2018

Caleb OrecchioOctober 15, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with a story. ————————————————————————————————— I show my comic strip to another syndicate editor. Their smiling face quickly turns to curiosity. Then to confusion. Then to bafflement. They say the usual, “It’s great! But it will never sell. We need something a little more universal. Have you read the new Nancy strip? It’s funny, modern and very universal. Think a little more along those lines and come back with something else.” I stormed out of the building. What do these people know about comic strips! I have a great strip! People will love it! Nancy and Sluggo died with Bushmiller I always say! Later, I am visiting a lifelong friend. We, that is my friend his wife and me, are visiting his in-laws (her parents) for dinner. Somehow, I agree to come along. It’s actually a pleasant evening until: “Caleb makes comic strips,” my friend says at the dinner table. The father-in-law lights up, “Really?! I LOVE comic strips!” My friend takes out a self-published copy of my book collecting my strips from his book bag. “You carry this around with you?” I ask. No not usually. He had brought it to show his father-in-law and thought I would be flattered to witness the father-in-law read my comic. I was not and would continue not to be. The father-in-law opens the book with a smiling face that quickly turns to curiosity. Then confusion. Then to bafflement. “It looks great! I don’t understand what is going on, but I like the way it looks! I like the character’s expressions. Have you ever read Nancy? You know, with Sluggo – that new artist is HI-larious! You should make something like that. You just need a good idea.” I stormed out of the house. ————————————————————————————————— Cement Mixer – 10-15-18 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— 10-15-18 – by Niall Breen Share this page: [...]

11/04/2016

Sally IngrahamNovember 4, 2016NewsSally here, ready to shout about some cool comics and the women who make them. I’ve got notes on Lynda Barry, Julia Gfrörer, the She Changed Comics project, Lyn Chevli, Shade the Changing Girl #1, the CW Roller Derby “of the mind” League – plus an interview with Kevin Czap and Comics Workbook at CAB. ————————————————————————————————— Comics Workbook will be at Comic Arts Brooklyn this Saturday, Nov. 5th – find us upstairs at table 27! Frank Santoro, Juan Fernandez, Jenn Lisa, and John Kelly will be there, with other Comics Workbook students and friends stopping by throughout the day. Thee incredible Ronald Wimberly will be signing at our table at 2 pm! Just when I thought it was safe to pack up the purel! I’m guesting at @comicsworkbook table at @comicartsbklyn this Saturday at 2pm. I’ll have Prince of Cats, Attack on Titan, and Something Wicked this Way Comes (The original to this is still available $300. Hit me in my DMs) #comicartsbrooklyn #comicbookworkbook #RonaldWimberly #FrankSantoro #GratNin #PrinceofCats #Hanzōbō A photo posted by Ronald Wimberly (@ronaldwimberly) on Nov 3, 2016 at 3:32pm PDT Also catch Whit Taylor and Alyssa Berg and Aaron Cockle tabling downstairs! ————————————————————————————————— I finally had a minute to pick up Shade the Changing Girl #1 while working at Copacetic Comics this week. Steve Ditko’s original Shade the Changing Man series (1970s), and Peter Milligan’s wild reworking of the Shade stories (1990s) seemed to be lurking around, wondering what these GIRLS were going to do with the material. I was curious too (I spent a fair amount of time this past summer just staring in awe at some of those Brendan McCarthy covers of Milligan’s Shade). Shade the Changing Girl comes from creative team Cecil Castellucci (writer), Marley Zarcone (pencils), and Kelly Fitzpatrick (color), and at a glance, it certainly has the right look. The story ties easily into earlier Shade while quickly forging it’s own plot line: university dropout Loma (a big fan of lunatic poet Roc Shade) steals the “madness coat” from a museum on the planet Meta, and zips to Earth where she takes up residence in the body of a dying teenage girl. It doesn’t take Loma long to realize that dealing with high school, the uncontrollable madness, and the folks on Meta who want the coat back will make life a lot more difficult than she anticipated. Cecil Castellucci (whom I know from her work on The Plain Janes – which Jim Rugg did the artwork for) so far seems to be rocking this, and I’m pretty excited to see where the story goes. Here’s an interview with Castellucci from July that details her own excitement about the project. Issue #2 came out this week – I’ll be aiming to get my hands on it asap. ————————————————————————————————— The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund started the She Changed Comics project last year – it was a series they ran on their Tumblr during Women’s History Month. They successfully Kickstarted a book in the spring of 2016, and it has just been released. The book was another one that I managed to check out this week during my time at Copacetic Comics. Meant to be much more than just an overview of (the dreaded phrase) “women in comics”, the book claims to be “the definitive history of the women who changed free expression in comics, with profiles of more than 60 groundbreaking female professionals and interviews with the women who are changing today’s medium“. While a book that clocks in at 170 pages can hardly be called comprehensive, it did feel like a great who’s who of important names, drawing from the breadth of comics history and the mainstream, syndicated, and alt-comics scenes. Cartoonists, publishers, and editors all got a shout out – Edwina Dumm to Jackie Ormes to Marie Severine to Diane Noomin to Kate Beaton to Roz Chast to Fiona Staples to Francoise Mouly to Karen Berger. With two pages devoted to each person, the book is definitely a good resource and a nice thing to have on hand when some idiot wants to claim that women don’t make or read comics. Almost entirely written by women as well. My only complaint is that there weren’t enough pictures! Get a copy of the book HERE. ————————————————————————————————— One of the women who gets a mention in the book above is Lyn Chevli, the co-founder of Tits & Clits – the first comic book written, drawn, and published solely by women (beating the first Wimmen’s Comix to the newsstands by just a few weeks in July of 1972). Lyn recently died, at the age of 84, and Joyce Farmer (her Tits & Clits publishing partner) provided a remembrance of her on The Comics Journal – read it HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Lynda Barry of course also makes the CBLDF’s list of women who changed comics, thoroughly, constantly, and wonderfully. She is featured in The Guardian this week, riffing on “comics, creativity, and Matt Groening”. Her career has zigzagged through the comics industry, beginning in the syndicated world with the strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek (which ran for 30 years), bumping into a novel or two along the way, and now exploding in both the classroom at the University of Wisconsin (where she was recently named as the UW-Madison’s first recipient of the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art) and a lively lecture circuit, where she preaches the gospel of creativity. Read the article HERE. ————————————————————————————————— You can see some pages from Julia Gfrörer‘s new book Laid Waste (Fantagraphics, November 2016) over on Flood Magazine, part of an interview with Julia that digs into her interest in the Middle Ages and the origins of this particular dark story. Check it out HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Kevin Czap was awarded the CXC 2016 Emerging Talent Award a few weeks ago during Cartoon Crossroads Columbus. In the words of Tom Spurgeon, who presented the award to an astonished Kevin, “…this goes to a cartoonist whom we feel has plenty of promise as a cartoonist and has shown themselves to be a solid and giving community member as well… We love everything we’ve ever learned about you, in terms of your comics community heart.” Alyssa Berg caught up with Kevin a week later and continued the conversation about CXC, comics, and community – and the type of energy a person consciously puts into their work. Their conversation is featured here on the site today. Catch Kevin and Czap Books at Comic Arts Brooklyn this weekend! ————————————————————————————————— The Comics Workbook Roller Derby League has shared the results of a recent “roller derby bout”. The group is constantly expanding, while dialing in a deeper team practice and refining the goals and projects that we’re about. Much more to come – meanwhile, check out some comics we’ve made recently. See the rest of this “derby bout” HERE. ————————————————————————————————— #sallyingraham #comics A video posted by Sally Ingraham (@sally_ingraham) on Nov 2, 2016 at 9:57pm PDT Have a fantastic weekend folks, and get up to some mischief. Don’t let November get to you yet – and don’t forget to turn your clocks back an hour on Sunday! – Sally (Rogue) Share this page: [...]

12/2/2016

Sally IngrahamDecember 2, 2016NewsSally here with comics by Ulli Lust, Mai-Li Bernard, Laila Milevski, and the CW Roller Derby League, a Standing Rock and Resist! check-in, plus new stuff from Carol Tyler and Vanesa R. Del Rey. ————————————————————————————————— One of my favorite comics is Ulli Lust‘s Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life. I traversed it’s 450 pages again this past summer and found that I heartily agree with Jaime Hernandez’s review of the book: “Ulli Lust really nails my favorite part of storytelling. Bumming cigarettes, learning how to hitchhike – the small details that create great character.” The haphazard travels of Ulli’s then 17-year old self from Vienna to Sicily, described in lively pencil drawings, are the “stranger than fiction” stuff that life is made out of. I’ve had similar adventures (perhaps a little less perilous) and tromping through Today is the Last Day always makes me want to get on the road again, while simultaneously making me especially grateful for my warm house and glass of wine and comparatively sane companions. It’s been awhile now since this book was released, and it is out of print and out of stock most places. (You can amazingly still get a copy from Copacetic Comics however!) I’m always keeping an ear open for news of more work by Ulli Lust, and was thrilled when she mentioned back in September that she had drawn page 333 of her new book! Today I was poking around on her website again and I noticed that for a few months this year she was publishing a comic series in an English language magazine from Berlin, the Exberliner. She has four of the comics up on her website – here’s the first one: You can check out the rest of them HERE – (use the arrows at the top of the page to move forward.) The second comic is pretty hilarious, and the third hit me right in the gut – I have so been there (yesterday morning, for example…read it to see what I mean!) ————————————————————————————————— My internet wanderings took me from the Exberliner to a German comics blog where there was a blurb about Ulli Lust. It appears that this site – Dreimalalles – has concluded its comics reporting, but it seems to be an interesting archival document about the German comics scene in the last few years. They hosted the German version of Matt Madden’s Style Exercises: 99 Ways to Tell a Story as well as a webcomic called Pigments by Mai-Li Bernard. Mai-Li was born in Vietnam and currently makes comics in Angoulême, France. According to her Dreimalalles bio (translated by Google…) she “playfully explores the possibilities of narrating stories with reduced means“. This is apparent in Pigments, which is about two lovers. It follows their interactions and conversations, many of which end in dark thoughts… Check out the rest of this work HERE. And more of Mai-Li Bernard’s work can be found HERE. cafébabel interviewed Mai-Li in January of this year, right before France’s Angoulême International Comics Festival, where her book Mortelle Vinasse (Deadly Wine) was an official selection. “cafébabel: Mortelle Vinasse is a mute comic strip. Why the choice of a story without text? Mai-Li Bernard: I am not very comfortable with words. Paradoxically, I have a great interest in linguistic tools and everything related to the mechanisms of language. That’s why I like making comic strips without text. The subject of my Master’s dissertation was the process of reading silent comic strips. I have to mitigate this absence of text through the way I work. In reality, there’s a lot of dialogue in my strips – they are very talkative! I use a very minimal language, quasi-autonomous, which is close to pictograms. The reader is forced to analyse the images. I built the story so that during the first reading they can appreciate all this information. I wanted something playful that called for a participatory reading.“ Mai-Li feels like she is part of the OuBaPo school of thought (which is “the artistic equivalent of OuLiPo (that emphasized self-imposed constraints in literature, ed.) created by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lyonnais.” (I used to be super obsessed with this group – I had a whole sub-category on my blog devoted to reviews of books by Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec…) The topic of women in comics comes up in the interview, of course, as it took place right after that notorious Angoulême Grand Prix 2016 list came out… There are some other good moments in the conversation too – check it out HERE. Get a copy of Mortelle Vinasse HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Laila Milevski‘s Enter, Holy Pilgrim just came out! It is the 9th book in the Ley Lines series published by Czap Books and Grindstone Comics (November 2016). It is about a troubled serf who is seeking spiritual guidance while on a pilgrimage. You can see pages from the book HERE at Laila’s website. Get a copy HERE. Also check out Drawing Antonioni, a comic series Laila drew for Comics Workbook in 2014 – the whole thing is available HERE. ————————————————————————————————— I wrote about a recent Comics Workbook Roller Derby League bout – some of the gals and I copied a whole Locas story by Jaime Hernandez. It was pretty nuts to trace these highly detailed pages, to get the gestures and expressions of these familiar faces down to my satisfaction. Labor intensive, to say the least, and incredibly eye-opening for myself and the other women involved in the project – all of whom are intent on pushing themselves to new levels and continuing to develop as cartoonists. Check out the rest of the pages HERE – mine are p.6-10. ————————————————————————————————— There is a hideous lack of news coverage of the ongoing situation at Standing Rock – but The Nib featured a comic by Jen Sorensen that weighed in a bit – here’s a panel: Read the rest HERE. ————————————————————————————————— You can now help support the Resist! project by ordering a “supporters copy” – the proceeds will go towards production costs – more info HERE. Be sure to keep checking for the Daily Image – which is actually being updated every few hours with new comics from folks – mostly women – from around the country. Intense stuff. Print ran a brief feature on the project – Gabe Fowler’s intent is for the project to have “a strong and powerful roar of female voices without meddling by men“, which is why he tagged New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly to be the editor. ” “Oy! I’m so overwhelmed with work and projects as it is,” she told him. “But this is exactly the kind of project I’d drop other things for!” Mouly mentioned it to her daughter, writer Nadja Spiegelman, who immediately signed on and drew up a list of their favorite artists, and also put together a website in order to place an open call for submissions.“ This free special issue of Gabe Fowler’s Smoke Signals will be handed out “by the tens of thousands from the back of a van during the Women’s March in Washington D.C.” on January 21st, 2017. ————————————————————————————————— Carol Tyler just released a teaser cover for her new book Fab4 Mania, due out from Fantagraphics late Summer/Fall of next year. If you’re eager to stay on top of developments for this book, here’s the FB page. ————————————————————————————————— I love Vanesa R. Del Rey‘s work – her drawing chops are a constant source of inspiration and sometimes jealousy to me. Her Instagram feed is one of the best, full of process posts and badass ladies. It’s been fun to be on the edges of a Comics Workbook publishing project involving her work, and I’m so excited to see the finished book – The Art of Vanesa R. Del Rey. Check out the video: You can pre-order a copy of the book HERE! ————————————————————————————————— It’s high time for a new gif, but this one continues to crack me up – and it is exactly what the school email feels like. I help field applications for the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers, and can report that the Winter Semester is filling up rapidly. It starts December 29th, and you have until the 28th to submit an application – but only 12 days now to get in on the early application discount! The details: 8 week course – 500 bux – 10 spots available – apply by Dec. 13th 2016 and get $100 off course fee! More details can be found HERE – or email santoroschoolATgmail. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 12-2-2016 – by Sally Ingraham More via @suzy_and_cecil ————————————————————————————————— Enjoy your weekend folks. I’ll be spending it drawing more strips like the one above, getting a start on making some Xmas presents, and hanging out at Copacetic Comics! Cheers – Sally Share this page: [...]

10/22/2018

Caleb OrecchioOctober 22, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with The Black Diamond Effect no. 3. ————————————————————————————————— The Black Diamond Effect no. 3 by George P. Gatsis, 1991 Look at this comic. This comic is a mess, yet it is visually electrifying. I love looking at this. It is like a digital/analog collage. It almost looks like something Michael Comeau would make in an alternate universe void of punk rock or zines or shame. In fact, if I had not looked at the indicia and saw that this was made in 1991, I would assume this comic was riffing on The Dark Knight Strikes Again aesthetically. There is so much spirit to it. There is an attitude to this comic that has no idea what it’s doing, and yet is brimming with confidence – so maybe it is punk rock. I have only looked at the pictures of this book. I could not forgive myself if I read a word of this comic. That would defeat the purpose. This is not a comic that you get because you’re interested in the story. This is yet another comic that you get because it is a strange artifact of comics that, previously, I had no reason to believe existed. The fact that this comic exists is without a doubt the greatest part of this comic. The discovery of it is a ten-fold joy. Culturally, it’s interesting to line up the computer generated art with the year (1991) and to notice where the future of CG was going (i.e. Pixar). In fact, I did a little digging and found this website. There is a conscience effort to be part of the cutting edge. It’s a similar sentiment that the creator of Donna Matrix had. The future of everything is digital – computer generated! Both comics are forgotten, lost to the burst of the nineties. I love this comic. It is a true treasure of the medium. Although it is “bad,” it is amazing in so many other ways. For example, the covers are fantastic. They hold up to me as a warped pop art of some kind. Above I brought up the comparison of an alternate Michael Comeau. The Black Diamond Effect is a Canadian “collage” comic that blends different visual mediums that fuse into its own visual rhetoric. It is strange beyond belief. I’ve never seen anything like it. I take up a lot of space on this platform writing about the esoteric in comics. I can’t always justify my focus on this aspect. I simply enjoy sharing them. I think this realm of disregarded comics is fascinating. There is true art locked inside these works that give no heed to the history of the medium. Therefore what is produced is often something made entirely without comntext. There are a few cartoonists today who, I think, attempt to recreate the naiveté of the eighties black and white boom as well as the wackiness of these strange nineties comics (the latter being the kind in question today). Most of these artists are running a fool’s errand. They are often too aware of our history to make anything sincerely naive. Many of the works they try to imitate were obviously made in a void with maybe TMNT and Daredevil as their only reference. Good luck to all of you such cartoonists. Though foolish, I believe your journey to be an honorable one. And to all you forgotten cartoonists who didn’t “make it” and disappeared, I appreciate you. ————————————————————————————————— Cement Mixer – 10-22-18 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

05/24/2016

Posted on May 23, 2016May 24, 2016 by Aaron Cockle

Berliac Week Continues at CW; Venn Diagram Panel; Kirby Gridz; Safari Festival 2016; Dueling Book Release Parties; Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum; Juan Fernández Comics

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Featured this week: Gwai-Lo of the Heart by Berliac. Made for Comics Workbook in 2015.

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Venn Diagram Panel from MoCCA Festival 2016
Painter and cartoonist Keith Mayerson once called his 1996 graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged “too arty for comics” and “too comics for art.” The boundary between those two fields, however structural and arbitrary, may be weakening, but is it happening quickly enough to accommodate the rapidly growing number of artists who are now so productively working in this seam? Moderator Bill Kartalopoulos will investigate these questions and more with three leading lights of contemporary artcomics: Austin English (Gulag Casual), Aidan Koch (After Nothing Comes), and Blaise Larmee (3 Books).

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Via Micheal Oeming’s Facebook page.

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Safari Festival: New waves in contemporary comics and art.
11am to 6pm, 27 August 2016
Protein, 31 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EY
safarifestival.tumblr.com | @safarifestival | info@safari-festival.com
Safari Festival is a celebration of the new wave of alternative and art comics from the UK and beyond. Taking place over one Saturday at the end of August, the festival is an opportunity for a curated group of cartoonists and publishers to exhibit and sell their artwork, prints and, primarily, comics, and for attendees to experience the best of UK comics’ avant-garde. The artists exhibiting have been selected for their innovative, fearless, diverse approaches to making comics; approaches to cartooning that Safari intends to champion. The festival will be free to attend, and will take place at Studio 2, the Shoreditch gallery space of London-based creative agency, Protein.

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Thursday, May 26, 7-pm in Providence and/or NYC

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Henry Darger at the Folk Art Museum

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I Can See the Birds by Juan Fernández
5.5″x8.5″, Color & Risograph, $6 postpaid (International Shipping).
This one is my Yo La Tengo comic on the shoulders of the poetry giant, Mary Oliver. The words are excerpted from her poem, Wild Geese. All drawings are first takes on location here in Pittsburgh.

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Aaron Cockle

Posted on May 23, 2016May 24, 2016

Explore

06/20/2017

Aaron CockleJune 20, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Lauren Weinstein; Jillian Tamaki; Ad Reinhardt; Georgia O’Keeffe; Kriota Willberg; Snail Farm & Friends Book Fair ————————————————————————————————— Normel Person Lauren Weinstein continues her strong run of weekly strips at the Village Voice. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Each story shifts emotional and visual register.’ Jillian Tamaki’s new book, Boundless, receives another solid review, this time over at The Atlantic: An ambitious and eclectic set of tales, it focuses on the interior lives of unexpected subjects: the writer of a pornographic sitcom, a shrinking woman, a plant-nursery employee with an internet doppelganger, even a fly. Boundless uses a constantly varying visual treatment that keeps readers on their toes and mixes and matches artistic styles with a proliferating set of genres, from speculative fiction to domestic drama to magical realism. If a reader comes to Boundless with assumptions about visual storytelling, Tamaki will confound them. ————————————————————————————————— 5. No design. “Design is everywhere.” Via ARTNEWS, Ad Reinhardt’s 12 Rules for a New Academy: Much of today’s discussion of contemporary abstraction is centered on “Zombie Formalism”—Walter Robinson’s coinage for new work that revisits (or apes, one might say) historical forms of abstraction for purely stylistic reasons. Given the intensity of that debate, we thought it would be interesting, for this week’s Retrospective column, to jump back almost 60 years, to 1957, when Ad Reinhardt took up the subject of contemporary abstraction in ARTnews. Reinhardt, who had written for the magazine previously, said that the article—titled “Twelve Rules for a New Academy”—”constitute his last words on art in terms of words.” He sharply criticized his formalist contemporaries, offering instead twelve ways to achieve purity in art. There would be no forms, no texture, no color, nothing—just pure blackness, as in Reinhardt’s most famous paintings. Reproduced in full below is Reinhardt’s article, which takes subtle swipes at Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, the Abstract Expressionists, and more. —Alex Greenberger The Six General Canons or the Six Noes to be memorized are: (1) No Realism or Existentialism. “When the vulgar and commonplace dominate, the spirit subsides.” (2) No Impressionism. “The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.” “The eye is a menace to clear sight.” (3) No Expressionism or Surrealism. “The laying bare of oneself,” autobiographically or socially, “is obscene.” (4) No Fauvism, primitivism or brute art. “Art begins with the getting-rid of nature.” (5) No Constructivism, sculpture, plasticism, or graphic arts. No collage, paste, paper, sand or string. (6) No “trompe-l’oeil,” interior decoration or architecture. The ordinary qualities and common sensitivities of these activities lie outside free and intellectual art. ————————————————————————————————— Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern At the Brooklyn Museum through July 23, 2017: The exhibition is organized in sections that run from her early years, when O’Keeffe crafted a signature style of dress that dispensed with ornamentation; to her years in New York, in the 1920s and 1930s, when a black-and-white palette dominated much of her art and dress; and to her later years in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the surrounding colors of the Southwestern landscape. The final section explores the enormous role photography played in the artist’s reinvention of herself in the Southwest, when a younger generation of photographers visited her, solidifying her status as a pioneer of modernism and as a contemporary style icon. ————————————————————————————————— ‘The Internal Body Interacting with the External World’ New York Academy of Medicine’s Artist-in-Residence, Kriota Willberg, recently concluded a 4-week workshop, Visualizing and Drawing Anatomy, and has a brief recap about it. And in a post from 2016, Willberg looks at some historical anatomical drawings: The images of Jacopo Berengario da Carpi’s Anatomia Carpi Isagoge breves, perlucide ac uberime, in anatomiam humani corporis… (1535) powerfully emphasize the fiber direction of the muscles of the waist. This picture in particular radiates the significance of our “core muscles.” Here, the external oblique muscles have been peeled away to show the lines of the internal obliques running from low lateral to high medial attachments. The continuance of this line is indicated in the central area of the abdomen. It perfectly illustrates the muscle’s direction of pull on its flattened tendon inserting at the midline of the trunk. ————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 6-20-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-20-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-20-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

08/25/2016

Sally IngrahamAugust 25, 2016NewsSally here, bringing you a look at some of Pittsburgh’s born or borrowed cartoonists (Ed Piskor, Yona Harvey, Ben Sears) as well as another read through that Trevor Von Eeden interview. ————————————————————————————————— Yona Harvey is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh – and Marvel’s first black female writer. She is working on a 10-page story for the upcoming Black Panther spin-off series, World of Wakanda. “Harvey says, as a poet, she’s always considered herself a visual thinker, and explained how poets, like comic writers, have to condense life into as few words as possible. “I think it’s more in the thinking, like when you’re a poet you do sort of shrink moments,” she said. “A lot can happen across the day, from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. There’s something about when you’re a poet, you’re able to sort of zero in on very specific moments, maybe the most tense or terse moments of the day, and I like putting that way of thinking to use for a comic. Because you do have to be super precise.” Though the writing shares some craft elements, the audience crossover between poetry and comics isn’t one-to-one, according to Harvey. “I’ve had friends who have said, ‘Man, it’s been years since I’ve read a comic book,’ or ‘I’ve never read a comic book and this’ll be the first time that I’m reading a comic,’ and that’s really exciting to think about poets who are reading comics for the first time,” she said.“ Read the rest of the article HERE and keep an eye out for this series soon (the bulk of which has been written Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, with artwork by Alitha Martinez and Afua Richardson.) ————————————————————————————————— Ed Piskor‘s Hip Hop Family Tree Vol. 4 was featured on NPR recently – Etelka Lehoczky wrote about the “bubbles” in the work, “phenomena that inexorably head skyward, pop suddenly and create a roiling surface“, or the numerous artists who kept the stew at the boil throughout ’84 and ’85. She revels in Piskor’s use of color, always part of the wonder of these books. Check out the whole thing HERE. Another Piskor-related thing that’s been on my mind is this picture that showed up on his Instagram a few weeks ago. What gives?! Giant HHFT cover burner on the wall at the Smithsonian in DC. A photo posted by Ed Piskor (@ed_piskor) on Aug 1, 2016 at 12:08pm PDT I know where I’ll be headed in the summer of 2018…! Ed Piskor has always been an unstoppable force, quietly conquering the world, and now with the announcement last week that Hip Hop Family Tree will soon be an animated TV series (yes you heard me right! – check it out HERE) – it seems like the world has noticed and won’t soon be forgetting. ————————————————————————————————— Ben Sears is in Pittsburgh this week for a Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency – which of course includes field trips to Copacetic Comics to look for treasures with Frank. Check out Ben’s book Night Air (Koyama Press, May 2016) and stay tuned for more of his Rowhouse adventures! ————————————————————————————————— Last week we mentioned the incredible interview with Trevor Von Eeden, and if you haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet, here’s your reminder. There was one detail from the interview that’s worth another look. There’s a yet unpublished – “…Black Lightning/Superman comic book called Sources commissioned by DC Comics, written by new Batman writer Tom King especially for Von Eeden to draw when he was both undergoing and recovering from cancer surgery.” – Rich Johnson via Bleeding Cool Find more of Von Eeden’s artwork (below) for this future project HERE. Also be sure to give Trevor Von Eeden’s Kickstarer campaign for the series The Hard Code (with Ramon Gil) a look! ————————————————————————————————— This is Sally signing off – Harrison will be back with your Thursday music choices next week! Share this page: [...]

06/19/2018

Aaron CockleJune 19, 2018NewsParadise Systems; NYer at SOI; Desert Island; Dank Meme Machine ————————————————————————————————— Paradise Systems on publishing and distributing underground Chinese comics Fei Liu spoke with R. Orion Martin about comics in China: says the biggest challenge with indie comics in China is the lack of a network of independent bookstores. To overcome that, many artists distribute their stories in the form of tiaoman 条漫(web based strip comics — which can sometimes be like fan works, not unlike doujinshi of Japanese manga that have amassed huge cult followings) — of which many comics Paradise Systems prints are reformatted in. Tiaoman comics are popular on social media sites like Douban, a media site for youth culture that’s “a little like Tumblr but with Rotten Tomato’s review function” which allows for cult-like analysis and adoration. The comic artists Paradise Systems publishes are already Douban celebrities and now also have WeChat pages, which is China’s more mainstream social media network — though, finding indie comics on WeChat is often harder because you have to find and friend people already invested in the culture to see the content. ————————————————————————————————— Funny Ladies at The New Yorker: Cartoonists Then and Now July 24-October 13, 2018, The Society of Illustrators in NYC, curated by Liza Donnelly. In art, when the standards for what is considered “good“ are broadened to include more approaches, it leads to more diversity of thought and more creativity. That’s what happened under Lee Lorenz and Harold Ross’ editorship. In addition, the increase of women cartoonists under their editorships happened during times of positive cultural change in attitudes towards women. This is happening now. As the result of an effort led by senior editor David Remnick and newly hired cartoon editor, Emma Allen, The New Yorker now has a greater percentage of women cartoonists than ever. This exhibition is a commemoration of some of the women who drew cartoons for The New Yorker past and present. It’s a celebration of their creativity and fortitude as they pushed past cultural stereotypes to create humor and offer the world laughter from all points of view. ————————————————————————————————— Neighborhood Joint: The ‘Punk Rock’ Comic Book Shop Beyond the meritocratic inventory system, Desert Island proselytizes offbeat creativity through its annual fall festival, Comic Arts Brooklyn, together with the Pratt Institute. It also publishes an all-illustration newspaper, which comes out a few times a year called “Smoke Signal,” now in its 29th issue. Copies of the publication, whose pages have carried works by Mad magazine legends alongside up-and-comers like Abby Jame, are free to customers. ————————————————————————————————— Dank Learning: Generating Memes Using Deep Neural Networks Via Abel L Peirson V and E Meltem Tolunay We introduce a novel meme generation system, which given any image can produce a humorous and relevant caption. Furthermore, the system can be conditioned on not only an image but also a user-defined label relating to the meme template, giving a handle to the user on meme content. The system uses a pretrained Inception-v3 network to return an image embedding which is passed to an attention-based deep-layer LSTM model producing the caption – inspired by the widely recognised Show and Tell Model. We implement a modified beam search to encourage diversity in the captions. We evaluate the quality of our model using perplexity and human assessment on both the quality of memes generated and whether they can be differentiated from real ones. Our model produces original memes that cannot on the whole be differentiated from real ones. ————————————————————————————————— Thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers Summer Session starts NOW! Floating start date! Apply anytime between now and July 12th 2018 to join the summer course. Email santoroschoolATgmail for more details. Ask about the Fall Course if now is too busy for you! The course is 8 weeks – 500 bux for 8 weeks plus access to Frank’s coaching for as long as you need. Payment plans are available. Put your summer to good use! ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 6-19-2018 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-19-18 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

08/08/2017

Aaron CockleAugust 7, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Flipism in the USA; New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium Fall 2017 Schedule; The Black Hood; Whit Taylor/Miranda Harmon; Workers of the World, Conform!; Book-making in the USA ————————————————————————————————— ‘At every crossroad of life, let Flipism chart your course!’ On an episode of the new season of the streaming Netflix series House of Cards, a political crisis in the United States may have to be decided by a coin flip (as determined by that country’s originating document of fundamental principals and established precedents), and the President in this alternate history extols the benefits of Flipism, a philosophy created by Carl Barks for a story in a Donald Duck comic in 1952. To date, Flipism remains as valid as any other belief system currently in practice. ————————————————————————————————— New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium Fall 2017 Schedule Lectures of specific interest to readers of this newsblog include: September 26 – Katie Fricas October 3 – Sue Coe October 10 – Kurt Ankeny ————————————————————————————————— ‘A number of the cartoonists focus in on the grey, hazy feeling of depression.’ Rob Clough reviews the excellent anthology The Black Hood: An Anthology of Depression and Anxiety, edited by Josh Bayer and Mike Freiheit. With regard to trying to find a way out, Lizz Hickey’s “My Lamictal Side-Effect Diary” is another great fit for this book. There are many cartoonists here who do weird and unnerving autobio as well as bizarre fiction, so it makes sense not only to include them, but that they’d be willing to talk about it in such a blunt manner. Hickey goes week by week and talks about the doses of medication she’s taking and the effects, which range from nervous to sleepy, to normal, to frustrated. The final week seems promising at the highest dose, until she becomes manic, teary, and tired once again–and that’s the end of the strip. No further conclusions are offered. ————————————————————————————————— In other Rob Clough News… At his review blog, High-Low, Clough has started a new series, High-Low Intersection, an occasional (and hopefully soon to be regular) feature that will highlight reviews, essays and interviews by other writers about comics, specifically for this site. They will be posted on High-Low’s regular blank day (Friday) when they appear. There are so many excellent writers about comics and too few of them have a regular outlet for their work. In this first edition, Whit Taylor interviews Miranda Harmon: What advice would you give to fans of your work who are looking to make their own comics? People should come before work if you can help it. When you’re making friends, find your peers instead of chasing down your heroes. Keep reminding everyone that you exist by making comics and showing up. It can feel lonely at first but in my experience people respond to sincerity and kindness. Really listen and get to know people and draw from your own experiences when you make comics. ————————————————————————————————— But, Ostwald complained, in the realms of science and geistige Arbeit—which roughly translates as intellectual work—there had been “virtually no level of organization.” At Triple Canopy, Nader Vossoughian about the history of information standards, standardization of information, and what it all means for someone reading this on a computer screen (or printed out on regular paper, I guess): The imposition of uniformity that was achieved before and after WWII by the German state and party organizations is now more likely to be undertaken by software companies, industrial consortiums, and groups such as the ISO and ASTM International. They claim only to ease the circulation of information and goods, but in fact they make highly political decisions about, for instance, the flow of data in packets through broadband cables. As Andrew Russell asserts in Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (2014), the rhetoric of openness that characterizes the Internet belies the role of sophisticated (and nearly invisible) forms of hierarchical control. Russell scrutinizes the “system builders” who create the infrastructure on which we rely, and who are “always engaged in ideological and discursive work, not merely technical work.” ————————————————————————————————— Never Comes Tomorrow – Frank made a graphic novel about his parents and he needs help making handbound copies for each of them. Frank Santoro, our illustrious founder/editor-in-chief, is raising some money for a book-making project, and is offering a good deal of historical comics documents in support of this. Please consider helping out. ————————————————————————————————— And remember: ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 8-8-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 8-8-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 8-8-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

06/13/2017

Aaron CockleJune 12, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with The ClairFree System; Pope Hats; Blind Spot and Black Paper; The Republic of Samsung; Printer Steganography ————————————————————————————————— ‘Here, she explains the inspiration behind her images and what she hopes readers to take from her work.’ Sally linked to this piece this past Friday, Claire Landsbaum asked Jillian Tamaki to dissect some of the panels from her story ‘The ClairFree System’, which is included in Tamaki’s new book, Boundless. Tamaki talks about incorporating found objects into the art-making process: This is another sculpture from the Art Gallery of Ontario, but the original artwork was just the child — I created the rest. A lot of this story is about reframing context: taking a classical sculpture or a photograph, which is a specific instant in time, and stripping it of its information to make it universal, which is what I did here. The image itself is about someone’s hopes and dreams for their child — about everyone’s idea of a great parent, which is that they can give their kid everything they want. I’ve heard people say that a new child is a pure, unsullied human being who hasn’t ever made a bad decision — that they’re without sin. I find that extremely hopeful. I don’t have children, but I would imagine the desire to prolong that state is an emotion every parent feels. ————————————————————————————————— ‘I keep returning to this notion: that the best feeling in the world is working really hard at creating something with no guarantee of a positive outcome.’ Ethan Rilly talks about his process for making Pope Hats #5, over at the AdHouse Books blog: Enough people have asked me whether I’m a lawyer that it might be useful to answer here: No, and I never was. Never stepped foot in a law firm. This story might be autobiographical in all the regular faintly embarrassing ways but the lawyer stuff is a good distance outside of me. I did research and interviews. ————————————————————————————————— ‘I pray to Tarkovsky, Marker, and Hitchcock.’ Teju Cole will be exhibiting work June 15-August 11 at Stephen Kasher Gallery in NYC, photos and text from his new book, Blind Spot, as well as an installation piece, Black Paper. The exhibition features over 30 color photographs from the series Blind Spot, each accompanied by Cole’s lyrical and evocative prose. Viewed together, these works form a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel. In these photographs, we see what Cole has seen, from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; and we are drawn into the texts—which function as voiceovers—with which Cole complicates his already enigmatic images. At stake here is the question of vision, an exploration Cole began following a temporary spell of blindness in 2011, and which he presents here in a photographic sequence of novelistic intensity. The exhibition also presents Black Paper, a visceral photographic response to Cole’s experiences following the election of November 2016. This continuously evolving, large-scale work explores buried feelings, haunted space, and all that can be seen through darkness. ————————————————————————————————— “ABOUT MY WORK AND MYSELF AND ALL THE REST I USED TO SAY:/,” “I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I’M SAYING IT:.” As a continuation of its online Net Art Anthology exhibition, Rhizome features and discusses Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s piece, Samsung. The piece Samsung addresses the complex nature of the corporation—its existence not only as an economic entity but also as an emotional phantom, reaching its incorporeal fingers into relationships, daydreams, and fantasies. The text of Samsung, demonstrating many of the formal qualities of poetry, is interspersed with conversational breaks that establish intimacy with the viewer. The tone becomes conspiratorial as the narrator asks, “CAN/I CONFIDE/IN YOU?” There is no option to decline. The viewer is rendered complicit in the narrator’s confession of their adoration of Samsung. ————————————————————————————————— ‘The printouts contained invisible dot patterns added by the printer to identify the worker who sent the print job’ I posted about Video Steganography, the imbedding of hidden information within electronic files, a few weeks back. Recently, the Boingboing blog posted a piece about one of the ways the National Security Agency was able to determine the source of leaked information about potential hacking involving the Russians in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, by examining the hidden dot patterns that are used with color printers. There’s been much speculation on exactly how NSA leaker Reality Winner was exposed after giving The Intercept documents that showed the extent to which the security agency suspects Russian meddling (previously) in last year’s general election. On one hand, the filing against her talks of the “creases” seen in the scans The Intercept posted, tipping them off to it being a workplace printout from an insider–an insinuation of casual sloppiness on the reporters’ part. On the other hand, it seemed clear Winner did everything at a work computer anyway and was surely doomed once the story came out and internal investigations began. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 6-13-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-13-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-13-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

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