Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged CAKE, Françoise Mouly, Marta Chudolinska, meghan turbitt, retrofit comics, Rob Clough, rowhouse residency, Sacha Mardou

Sally Ingraham

Posted on June 17, 2016June 17, 2016

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04/06/2017

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

07/23/2018

Caleb OrecchioJuly 23, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here as always for the Monday edition of The Daily News! ————————————————————————————————— Okay so I was at Frank’s house and he had to answer some important emails or something so I sat in a comfy chair and started flipping through a bunch of Yokoyama books he had laying around. I started reading World Map Room when Frank turned on some music by Daily Life; you know, the band CF is in. The smooth symphonic melodies created this really nice atmosphere in the house that synchronized with my reading. The characters in the book started marching to the pace of the music. It was as if I was standing on some inter-dimensional harmonic crosshair. I was hypnotized by the coupling. I forgot Frank was a few feet away from me and I became one of Yokoyama’s characters moving through space, taking note of my bizarre surroundings. I felt myself sink further into the chair as if I was becoming more susceptible to gravity. The feeling was akin to dipping into a hot tub in winter. I finished World Map Room and began Garden. The record had repeated once or twice by this point and the familiarity with it’s pattern and with Yokoyama’s pacing intensified the hypnotic effect. Eventually, the mood changed. The music was turned down and the books set aside for conversation. I was back on Earth. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

08/02/2018

Caleb OrecchioAugust 2, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with a Kirby and Toth collab! ————————————————————————————————— Look! At New Dimension Comics in Elwood City the other day, I found this comic I didn’t know existed! Did you? I mean, it’s really not that great of a comic. Neither genius shines particularly bright here, and the inker is nothing short of BORING! That’s okay. I just like looking at this spread and seeing both cartoonists side by side. Just the idea of it. Plus Kirby drawing his old team! The Challengers of the Unknown were kind of the beta stage for the Fantastic Four if you think about it. I can’t help but assume Toth was re-drawing some of his pages that were probably originally Jack’s for the finicky DC editorial staff. You know? Surprisingly they kept Kirby’s Superman face. Was Swan too busy to “fix” it? That’s the beauty of the back issue bins folks. After three hours you tend to run out of gas and start to feel hungry and depressed but, once you have recovered, you realize how happy you are that you spent the day this way. Right? Right! Especially when you find gold such as this! ————————————————————————————————— Cement Mixer – 8-2-18 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

04/27/2018

Sally IngrahamApril 26, 2018NewsSally Ingraham here with comics by Sophia Foster-Dimino, Glynnis Fawkes, and Rachel Masilamani; a Swedish canon of female cartoonists; plus much more! ————————————————————————————————— The Eisner Award nominations have been announced, and Sophia Foster-Dimino‘s comic Small Mistakes Make Big Problems, from the Comics for Choice anthology edited by Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor, and O.K. Fox, has gotten a nod in the Best Short Story category. You can read the whole comic HERE. Another noteworthy nomination is Nick Sousanis’ essay on Karen Green, Columbia’s first curator for comics and cartoons, which appeared in Columbia Magazine last year. You can read A Life in Comics: The Graphic Adventures of Karen Green HERE. Check out the numerous other Eisner Award nominations HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Juan Fernandez pointed me toward a powerful dissertation by Swedish visual communication design student Stina Sandström, which digs into feminism in Sweden and how comics play a role in the continuing discourse on gender performance there. Looking specifically at three female cartoonists – Liv Strömquist, Sara Granér (her work pictured above) and Nina Hemmingsso – Stina Sandström focuses on how they work independently and yet imitate and expand on each others work, together creating a unified voice that is having an increasingly profound effect on popular culture and cultural norms in Sweden. “The success of these comic artists is reliant on their notion of Sisterhood. They have responded to the fragmentation of feminism by recognizing the power of coalition: that the search for essential female unity is not of gender identity, but of sexual afﬁnity. They’re connected in the realization that current representations of women’s roles, status, as well as the female body are all affected by gender norms which are growing stronger by repetition. By experimenting with 48 sexual transgressions and trying on a variety of gender costumes they try to break and disrupts repetitive gender performances. They have realized that by imitating and expanding on each others work, they share the burden of communicating the entire feminist story. These women make up a choir that, unlike the second wave of feminism, do not make up one united voice but rather sing in canon. A canon is a musical technique where an initial melody is imitated and expanded on by others at different intervals creating a wall of sound without interruption. As one singer takes a break to inhale there are others to ﬁll the gap and so the canon can continue in an endless loop. Like a canon these comic artists’ voices ﬂood the media landscape with provocative female identities and carnivalesque behavior without interruption. They keep repeating them until they lose their provocative nature and start to feel acceptable.“ Read the rest of The Carnival Grotesque: Representations of femininity in Swedish feminist comics HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Glynnis Fawkes takes Charlotte Brontë to yoga. What a concept! It makes for a good comic – read the whole thing on Spiral Bound. ————————————————————————————————— The Lines Drawn collective has a new installment of their project up on MUTHA Magazine. Part of a comic by Rachel Masilamani is pictured above. The collective states: “We are parents and teachers using comics to illustrate how we feel as adults responsible for the care and safety of children and youth in an age of continued school shootings. We hope our comics add momentum to the groundswell of students demanding solutions to end gun violence, not only in schools, but as related to police shootings of people of color, and the criminalization of African Americans. The collective includes Emilie Bess, Adam Bessie, Amy Camber, Sarah Romano Diehl, Ellen Forney, Robyn Jordan, David Lasky, Meredith Li-Vollmer, Mita Mahato, Rachel Masilamani, Annie Murphy, Amy Ongiri, Marc Parenteau, and Rachel Scheer.“ This installment, posted on the anniversary of the Columbine High School Shooting, includes comics by Ellen Forney, Rachel Scheer, Sarah Romano Diehl, Adam Besie and Marc Parenteau, and Rachel Masilamani. See them all HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Extra! Extra! The New York Times weighs into the conversation on the “new” Nancy, as envisioned by Olivia Jaimes – HERE. At The Comics Beat there is a “hits” version of the Nancy buzz – and the anticipation for the reveal of Aunt Fritzi is getting out of control…! Six cartoonists look at immigration – on The Nib. Graphic Novel TK talks to Annie Koyama about her life as a comics publisher – listen HERE. Sloane Leong talks to Nivedita Sekar about her upcoming comic Your Mother’s Fox – on The Comics Journal. I haven’t been reading Natasha Alterici‘s Heathen, but after skimming this article on the upcoming film production, I feel like I need to start. A “lesbian Viking comic” about a gal named Aydis “who is intent on ending the patriarchal and oppressive reign of the god-king Odin“…? YES PLEASE! ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 4-27-2018 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

11/24/2017

Sally IngrahamNovember 23, 2017NewsSally here with work by Jessica Campbell, Jessica Abel and Meg Lemke, Sophie Goldstein, and more! ————————————————————————————————— Hillary Brown talks House of Women with Sophie Goldstein on Paste Magazine. About the comic itself Hillary writes: “Alternately spiky and luscious, it draws you in by receding. She writes with economy, but the resulting story isn’t irritatingly arty or hard to follow; it’s not drawn by a comics artist only for other comics artists who speak the lingo and can read the subtext. It’s no surprise, in fact, that Margaret Atwood (restless, relentless experimenter, unafraid to leap into any genre that grabs her interest, including comics) is an inspiration for this female-centered and complexly feminist story of colonization and controlled social dynamics. Goldstein provides no easy answers—the book is thematically driven rather than focused on plot first and foremost—but she knows how to be just difficult enough.“ Read the interview HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Jessica Campbell has a comic about The Bad Behavior of Men in Comics up on Hyperallergic – it’ll probably make you squirm or steam, depending, because she brings up all kinds of things that no one likes to talk about. Read it HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Meg Lemke interviews Jessica Abel about her new book Growing Gills over on Mutha Magazine. Jessica has spent her life making comics, working in arts education, and developing theories about maintaining creative focus – something that I’d say the majority of us struggle with. This book came out of a series of online courses she taught and a working group she managed – where instead of dealing with issues like “how can I tell better stories?”, for example, the overwhelming chorus from her students and peers was “how can I deal with my paralyzing anxiety and procrastination?!” In Growing Gills Jessica offers some working theories she’s developed (although she struggles with the same issues in her own life on a regular basis.) In the interview Jessica and Meg talk about organization, self-forgiveness, and process over progress. “MUTHA: You talk in the book also about process over project outcomes, can you unpack that more? JESSICA ABEL: What’s destructive is when people want to make art, but don’t want to sell art. AND at the same time they feel they can’t be artists if they aren’t attempting to be professionals. “If I’m not showing in a gallery, am I really an artist? If I don’t have a mainstream publisher, am I a writer?” Yes, you are. It may be that the business side is not what you’re interested in; it requires sacrifice of your creative time to do the work required to be a “pro.” People miss that the selling part is a separate project. If they can recognize and commit to selling as a separate project, great. If you constantly find yourself saying “I don’t want to do the things needed to sell my work,” then maybe you need to rethink the underlying model. Maybe the creative work on its own is what you need to feed your psyche. Make room in your life for your work without worrying about making it pay for itself. Maybe it’s enough to share it with your family, friends, or put it up for free on Medium. Don’t confuse the creative work with your childhood dreams of fame.“ This speaks to me right now, as a good reminder that making comics and making money can’t always be the same thing, and if I’m sacrificing making good comics in favor of making money, then I need to reevaluate. The book is long and full of good stuff, but if you don’t have time to squeeze reading it into your already busy life, at least read this interview, which unpacks a lot. Check out Growing Gills HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Thanksgiving Leftovers (always better the next day!) Melanie Gillman‘s webcomic As the Crow Flies has been released by Iron Circus Comics – the A.V. Club reviews the comic HERE. GG discusses I’m Not Here over on Smash Pages. NPR reviews Body Music by Julie Maroh – apparently “earnest romanticism buoys it over the trouble spots“. Read the review HERE. Drawn + Quarterly is publishing new work by Rina Ayuyang and the last work of Geneviève Castrée – both comics coming in 2018. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 11-24-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 11-24-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

06/17/2016

Posted on June 17, 2016June 17, 2016 by Sally Ingraham

Sally here this Friday with festival news from CAKE, quick profiles on Marta Chudolinska and Françoise Mouly, more Retrofit Comics reviews than you can shake a stick at, and further details about the first rad Rowhouse Residency!

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Matt Frank Mahmoud — Matt, Mahmoud, and Frank around the Rowhouse

Mahmoud Hashemi and Matt Conway spent Memorial Day Weekend at the CW Rowhouse, and then Mahmoud wrote us a detailed report of the experience.

Check it out HERE on Comics Workbook.

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Also on the site today, we have Sacha Mardou‘s take on CAKE. She exhibited at the show last weekend and took a minute to chat with fellow cartoonists like John Porcellino and Anya Davidson among many others.

Read the complete write-up HERE!

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One of the folks whom Sacha met for the first time was Marta Chudolinska (pictured above), a Polish-Canadian cartoonist based in Toronto, who makes paper-cut and linocut comics. Sacha particularly liked her work, and I’m pleased to share a bit more of it here.

55_babcia-1-colour-web — A page from Babcia by Marta Chudolinska – 2013-ongoing.

Babcia is a papercut comic about Marta’s Grandmother and her family’s history in Poland, serialized in Broken Pencil Magazine. (Take a minute to check out Broken Pencil Magazine for more zine culture and other independent artist-related stories!)

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7162cfb7e798fce805a99118658f2c48._SX640_QL80_TTD_ — A page from *Debbie’s Inferno*, by Anne Emond

Over on The Comics Journal Rob Clough dug into the Retrofit Comics catalog, reviewing work from 2013-2016. He gives Box Brown kudos for all the work he’s done through Retrofit.

“Retrofit Comics began as a Kickstarter experiment in 2011. By then, comics tended to be printed as minis or graphic novels, leaving Box Brown missing the heyday of the alt-comics comic book. In 2013, he joined forces with the DC-area comics store, Big Planet Comics, which took on a lot of the costs and production work, allowing Brown (and BPC’s Jared Smith) to concentrate on other duties as publisher and tastemaker. This was one of the early examples of a store deciding to publish its own comics. Overall, the results have been of a fairly high quality, and quite varied in genre and approach.” – Rob Clough

Read all of the reviews HERE.

If you don’t get enough there on TCJ, you can catch the “Retrofit Extra” on Rob Clough’s blog, High-Low.

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pg8_original — From Meghan Turbitt’s *Teach Me How To Be A God*

While you’re surfing around High-Low, check out Rob Clough’s review of Meghan Turbitt’s work!

Rob writes –

“There’s no cartoonist quite like Meghan Turbitt, as she balances self-effacing humor, frank talk about sexuality, trenchant social commentary and a furiously visceral drawing style that pummels the reader on every page. Let’s take a look at her output over the last couple of years.” – Rob Clough

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dec2015_q11_educationmouly.jpg__600x0_q85_upscale — Eleanor Davis comic about Françoise Mouly

I’ve been on a Françoise Mouly tear recently, researching this rad lady and drawing inspiration from her amazing career as an editor, publisher, and all-round cornerstone of the comics community. She is (incidentally) the wife of Art Spiegelman, with whom she created the groundbreaking Raw. In addition to her work for The New Yorker, she created TOON Books, which publishes comics for kids. Jeet Heer wrote an excellent profile of her (which I’m reading now) – In Love With Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman.

Last year Françoise Mouly won a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, and Smithsonian correspondent Jeff MacGregor and cartoonist Eleanor Davis teamed up to give her some kudos.

Keep this lady on your radar, folks, and for the moment check out the Smithsonian article HERE, along with more of Eleanor Davis’ comic!

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Have a great weekend folks! Read comics! Make comics! – Sally

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged CAKE, Françoise Mouly, Marta Chudolinska, meghan turbitt, retrofit comics, Rob Clough, rowhouse residency, Sacha Mardou

Sally Ingraham

Posted on June 17, 2016June 17, 2016

Explore

10/30/2018

Aaron CockleOctober 29, 2018NewsKatie Fricas, Kim Jooha/Conor Stechschulte, ‘Endless Enigma’, AI Halloween ————————————————————————————————— Via Whit Taylor at Pen America: I selected cartoonist Katie Fricas to create an original comic for Illustrated PEN because of her unique approach to the medium. Fricas’s autobiographical work regularly addresses the complexities of gender, sexuality, culture, and agency with a smart, quirky, and often humorous storytelling style. ————————————————————————————————— Comics Reading as Voyeurism and the Illusion of Continuity and Narrative: Kim Jooha on CHRISTMAS IN PRISON by Conor Stechschulte Comics consist of discrete units (panels), and we assume that these separate units (panels) are related to each other. We suppose that the similar image that appears in the later or previous panel refers to the same object. This is the principle of comics reading as the dialectic of repetition and difference as Thierry Groensteen argued in The System of Comics (1999). The reader creates a continuous story out of the discrete units. Christmas in Prison, with its aforementioned self-reflexive instruments, questions this principal assumption of comics. Our habit of finding sameness among different images as a comics reader deludes us to look for the sameness that does not exist, just as the book at the end of Christmas in Prison is not Christmas in Prison. It is an illusion. ————————————————————————————————— Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art This show closed this past weekend, but there’s a good deal of info about it online. It’s based on this MoMA show from 1936. The exhibition will provide a unique opportunity to examine affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time. Organized into six themes—Monsters & Demons, Dreams & Temptation, Fragmented Body, Unconscious Gesture, Super Nature, and Sense of Place—Endless Enigma will explore the ways in which artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion. Works on view range from gothic gargoyles; masterworks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a contemporary follower of Hieronymus Bosch, Piero di Cosimo, and Titian; seventeenth- century paintings by Jan Brueghel the Younger and Salvator Rosa; eighteenth-century works on paper by Francisco de Goya and Giovanni Battista Piranesi; nineteenth-century works by William Blake, James Ensor, Gustave Moreau, and Odilon Redon; and works from the twentieth century to the present day by Eileen Agar, Francis Alÿs, Michaël Borremans, Louise Bourgeois, Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Dzama, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Gober, Alfred Kubin, Sherrie Levine, René Magritte, Kerry James Marshall, Roberto Matta, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, and Lisa Yuskavage, among other artists. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Happy Halloween’ To create them, he used what’s called a generative adversarial network (GAN) to recognize patterns in data such as Halloween masks – Reed fed his computer thousands. The AI then tried to create its own that would fit the pattern, supposedly getting better over time. “What’s so scary or unsettling about it is that it’s not so detailed that it shows you everything,” Reed told New Scientist. “It leaves just enough open for your imagination to connect the dots.” ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

07/04/2018

Juan FernándezJuly 4, 2018los Cómics / NewsEntrevista con Emil Ferris; Broken Pencil Zine Award Deadline Extended; the Airtight Garage in Galicia – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – El Cómic como Reflejo y Abismo – Emil Ferris entrevistada Elisa McCausland, El Salto El formato del diario está muy ligado al género de la autoficción. ¿Hasta qué punto es Lo que más me gusta son los monstruos autoficción, un relato inspirado por tus vivencias personales? Es evidente que en mi novela gráfica hay mucho de autobiográfico, empezando por su ambientación en el Chicago donde nací y donde transcurrió mi infancia, como la de Karen, a finales de los años 70. Mucho de lo que cuento son cosas que me pasaron a mí por entonces o que le pasó a gente que conocí. También comparto muchos de los intereses de Karen, como su pasión por el terror, tanto cinematográfico y literario, como cuando adquirió un carácter muy pulp a través de las historietas y revistas de aquella época y décadas anteriores. Sin embargo, hay un dicho que me gusta recordar cuando se habla de estos temas, que viene a decir básicamente que no es importante que los hechos narrados en una ficción hayan sucedido o no, pero sí que la historia que reflejan sea verdadera, responda a una pulsión profunda, auténtica. En este sentido, la ficción funciona como un espejo que nos permite reconocernos a nosotros mismos, y también como un abismo que nos descubre aspectos de nuestra personalidad y la de otros que desconocíamos. También en lo que respecta al amor, ese monstruo tan extraño, que está en todo lo que somos y hacemos y que sin embargo es tan invisible y se le echa siempre tanto de menos. Por eso me gusta considerar la ficción como un remedio paliativo contra esa enfermedad tan difícil de abordar que llamamos la realidad. Puede sonar pretencioso, pero creo que, en definitiva, la ficción nos ofrece las armas para afrontar con ánimo la realidad. Las historias son nuestra fortaleza. Léanlo todo AQUI. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – The Broken Pencil Zine awards are open for submissions. This year the winner will recieve a free subscription to Zine-o-Matic. Lots of categories. $200 + other goodies for winners in each category. $25 to enter. DEADLINE TO ENTER THE ZINE AWARDS IS NOW JULY 15, 2018 Learn more. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Comics Education: Galicia’s “Airtight Garage” Paula Castiñeira – ABC Galicia Galicia’s O Garaxe Hermético, established in 2012 is the first professional center of comic and illustration in Galicia. It offers up a relatively avant garde approach to comics education for Spain. Born in 2012 by the hand of cartoonist Kiko da Silva, who is also its director, this private school is a revolution in terms of the teaching model. When he started with the center, Da Silva brought together a team of friends and professionals of Galician illustration to organize a syllabus from scratch, with a very clear purpose: “To teach our profession in the most realistic way possible,” says the director.With an unconventional training and without evaluating the students with a numerical score – the works are classified as “not publishable”, “publishable” and “publishable collectible” -, what is intended is to show the students “what they are going to find later ». For this reason, apprentices receive classes not only on illustration and comics, but also on what they must do to dedicate themselves to it, from how to register for freelancers to how to make contracts with publishers so that they are not abusive. Learn more about O Garaxe Hermético, HERE. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Cozytown – by Juan Fernandez – 07/04/2018 Share this page: [...]

Residency Report: Homemake at the Rowhouse

Comics WorkbookJune 15, 2016Residency Reports / School UpdatesWe kicked off the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency over Memorial Day Weekend with a visit from Matthew Conway and Mahmoud Hashemi. Matt is an architect and very recent Harvard grad (congrats Matt!), and Mahmoud is the lead developer of the Python Infrastructure team at eBay/PayPal. Neither of them had ever made a comic before. However, Matt and Mahmoud were men on a mission. They arrived at the Rowhouse with the clear intention of using its many resources and the full breadth and depth of Frank’s knowledge and techniques to make something great. They were challenged and inspired during their time here, and in return they challenged and inspired the whole Comics Workbook team. And yes, they did end up making their first comic! During his flight home Mahmoud wrote a detailed report of his experience at the Rowhouse, and it offers a lot of insight into what made the experience extraordinary for everyone involved. Below you will find excerpts from Mahmoud’s report along with some commentary from me. There’s a lot to unpack! – Sally ————————————————————————————————— Mahmoud Hashemi wrote: “From May 28th to June 2nd, 2016, I visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I went to work with Frank Santoro on Matt Conway’s game Homemake. Overall it was a great vacation because it wasn’t your typical beachside retreat. Rather, it was mounting an effort to renew creativity and productivity on Matt Conway’s longstanding project, Homemake. The timing was great, as it was right before Ramadan for me, and right after Matt Conway’s graduation from Harvard GSD. Started in 2013 and Kickstarted to the tune of 18,000 in 2014, Homemake is an experimental art game that is unique for its focus on architecture and music, and its lack of traditional game elements like enemies and time limits.” Mahmoud, who serves as an editor, instigator, and cheerleader for Matt and the game, recognized that his friend needed a burst of new energy and that the game itself needed more concentrated story development. Mahmoud continues: “Homemake was designed as a system, meaning that it was designed nonlinearly. It was a procedural way to achieve certain preconceived moments. But there were no sentences between the punctuation. Almost all games, including HM, result in linear gameplay. The player sequential acts or chapters. My goal became to quickly build the best linear structure with what was already there. In a way, there was a middle act, but no opening or closing. So, the goal was to use a comic book as a storyboard to create the opening act.” Sally here – like I said, these fellows arrived at the Rowhouse with a fire under their tails! Mahmoud had known for a while that he needed to sit down with Matt and really hash out a narrative for the game. When he discovered Frank’s Kickstarter for the Rowhouse last fall, Mahmoud knew that he wanted to support this new comic book institution, and guessed that a residency might provide the right sort of space for he and Matt to work. He wasn’t 100% sure that Frank’s methods would be the magic pill they needed, but he was willing to come to Pittsburgh to find out. Back to Mahmoud’s report: “Frank’s own creative methods have a focus on systems, especially jazz-inspired rhythmic systems, making them an exceptional fit with Homemake‘s motivations and goals. I was skeptical at first, but it worked wonders. This effectiveness may have been magnified because half of Homemake‘s vision was disparate moments, a grab bag of mental notes about certain aesthetics. This method allowed Matt to express all his thoughts and editors, like me and Frank, to come through, see the patterns a reader would want to see, and develop the most coherent narrative. Everyone wins.” ‘With Frank’s method, images come first, then words. There should be no script. The images tell almost the whole story, and those images must be allowed to find their own rhythm. A script disrupts that. Similarly, a grid is like an empty script. Frank’s method of modular, card-based creation was as effective as it was simple. Hard-earned simplicity. … Matt ended up drawing 52 cards. I found a cohesive story with 40, and we expanded that to use 48 cards to create 6 pages, 3 spreads. … With this new direction, and Conway’s drive, I expect that development will continue on the comic book and game. For the comic book, we’ll start having real deliverables within a couple months. The game has 80% of what it needs now, and may be approaching a playable version within the year.” Matt and Mahmoud did more work in about three days than most people get through in three weeks. They also found time to explore Pittsburgh a bit, catch a hockey game, and even read a few comics in the midst of drawing their own. However, the majority of Matt and Mahmoud’s time here was spent in a lively discussion which looped back to comics regularly, but ranged all over the place. It was almost a bonus that some work got done, but really it was this discourse, this rapid-fire exchange of ideas and experiences that made the time uniquely valuable. It certainly made the line between “teacher” and “student” very fluid. Mahmoud had incredibly generous things to say about the experience as a whole, and I’ll let him finish this report in his own words. Mahmoud concluded: “Frank is inspirational, completely earnest, and almost totally pure. He is not jaded, not burned out. He is hopeful and hard working. He has lived a lot of places, from Pittsburgh to New York to San Francisco to New Mexico and back to Pittsburgh, just down the street from his mom (who is very nice). Compared to my expectations of independent comics artists, Frank is well-adjusted and well-equipped, with good taste in more than just comics. This expectation is likely skewed by my reading of so many “journal comics” artists. I feel like I learned about creating and collecting in general, not just about comics. Frank never stops relating things to comics, education, and community-building. Passion is fleeting compared to this. His motivation is closer to second nature. This nature was my original hopeful realization with Frank, before I met him. I feel a deep kinship with him, as I think about creating code the same way he thinks about creating comics. Independent, expressive, and individually valuable. Corporate partnerships are inevitable and, while they can be good, ultimately these looming entities don’t care about the potential of comics/code, they just use creators opportunistically. I see Frank doing for independent print comics what E-40 does in hip hop. He seems to know everyone past and present. E-40 and Frank both act upon this knowledge, combining it with the deeply ingrained understanding that respect is the real currency of the business. Money is an inescapable reality, but it’s possible and laudable to address the group as a community first and an industry second. Economies have a tendency to be treated as zero-sum. But respect is not zero-sum. Through his music, E-40 pulls everyone together, adding to their respect, and his own. And above all he respects himself, setting a good example. So it is with Frank. Suffice it to say, we need more creator-mentor-educators like Frank (as well as Sally, who I think recognizes all this and more, and actively assists Frank in the mission). In my ideal world I would be able to spend one week per year with a creator of his caliber, but I feel lucky to even have this one trip. … Long story short, I wish Frank and team the best of luck in “reddin up” the residency in time for another visit in the next year or two.” – Mahmoud Hashemi Many thanks to Mahmoud and Matt for coming to the Rowhouse and contributing their considerable energy and talents to Comics Workbook. We’re humbled and thrilled to have hosted them, and look forward to channeling what we learned from them into future residencies. ————————————————————————————————— Please take a moment to check out Homemake, as well as some of Mahmoud and Matt’s other interesting projects. Homemake (coming soon! – keep up with the progress) Chill Anime Beats (a musical curation collaboration) Matt Conway’s website Sedimental (Accretionary thoughts by Mahmoud Hashemi) Listen to Wikipedia (seriously, check this out it is SO COOL!) Here’s a taste of what Homemake will offer – P.S. Mahmoud and Matt had a funny encounter with Frank’s Mom and a real pap-pap (Mr. Greene) at the airport. Check it out below. Share this page: [...]

Bucket of Blood

MardouSeptember 8, 2016EssaysWomen self-censor. Think about all the non-pregnant women of childbearing age that you know. A quarter of them are probably menstruating right now. So what? Is that statistical fact even a big deal? Yeah. Kinda. I think so. You’re sat here reading these words on a screen because a woman once had a functioning menstrual cycle many years ago. The thing is, for something that’s so common and abundant and ordinary (PERIODS), we don’t see or hear much about it. Which is quite odd and antiquated if you think about it. I mean, how does society benefit to be so shielded* from our menses? Or for that fact, from our lactating breasts or our miscarriages or our ‘women’s troubles’, etc etc? (*I don’t mean literally. I don’t want anyone to have a tampon thrown at them, thanks.) This little essay is a personal response to the comics of Julie Doucet, which, since I first encountered them in my early twenties, served to rock my world. They forced me to question the kind of comics I wanted to make, my attitudes towards the female experience on and off the page, towards biology, sex and shame. All that stuff factored in my response to Julie Doucet’s comics. Plus they look and read great. They still hold this timeless, glorious power for me. I’m so freaking glad she made the comics she did! Let us take a look! I love these panels from Doucet’s Leve ta Jame, Mon Poisson Est Mort (pictured above). So serious and elegant, the details of the bathroom perfectly rendered, that toilet paper! (Julie draws the toilet quite a lot in her comics. Deal with it). Look at the little sweattels on her beatific forehead. This is about using imagination and humor to dealing with a familiar, tiresome fact of life (tampon overfull in the night). The ‘I succeed’ makes me chuckle, the gush of blood is not so terrifying, is it? It’s rendered in black ink after all. It’s cute even. Well it got me thinking, this comic does present an unusual sight, does it not? A relieved woman, legs akimbo bleeding it to the toilet bowl from her levitating hover. Where are all the other women getting their periods in comics, or on screen? Sure, there’s Stephen King’s Carrie. She once had her period. I also seem to remember Brook Adams rummaging for a Tampax in Gas, Food Lodgings in 1992. Well so what about literature? Uterine bleeding was never fully acknowledged by the literary establishment until 1957 when Anna Wulf famously forgot her tampons in the novel The Golden Notebook, which ultimately won Doris Lessing a Nobel Prize, so groundbreaking was this depiction. Doris described the smells, stained sheets, the nebulous grotty feeling, the worry of accidentally bleeding through her dress in front of her male colleagues. The Golden Notebook unleashed a free-for-all spurting of literary menstrual blood from Sylvia Plath all the way to Philip Roth (hey, Roth, want to really shock? Lovingly whip a tampon out of your female protagonist. She probably won’t mind). Those creators recognized some latent dark power when they needed it. It’s a useful taboo, creatively. It speaks to those dark fears and misunderstood feminine powers right? And then there’s Julie, baring all with a shrug and a grin. God, how I love comics…. When I was in high school a girl from another grade bled through her skirt and obliviously walked through the teenage crowd. A female teacher came up behind her with her sweater outstretched, tied it around the unsuspecting girl’s waist and hustled her away. There it was the biggest fear in all my years of high school in plain sight. I saw it! It happened to that girl I saw, it can happen to you too, teenage female! Never relax, never let down your guard! And…OH JULIE, you can’t do that! You can’t grow to King Kong proportions and drown the streets in your inky period blood whilst on the rampage for a box of Tampax. You just can’t do that! This page (above) is the equivalent of a teenage air punch and I wished I owned the original. I would put it on the wall in my dining room in a heartbeat. The comic strip ends on sweet note. I don’t feel like the menstruating women of the world ask for all that much. Tax-free sanitary products and a little understanding would be a start though. In Jedi terms our menstrual cycles can be understood to have two aspects, the waxing of the full moon, the ‘light’ and wonderful powers of the fertile period and the dank, smelly and scary shadow world of the menses. The ‘Dark’ side. This is known to us, albeit unconsciously. “Researchers at the University of Mexico…concluded that the financial reward for being a topless-lap dancer are far greater during the fertile part of the menstrual cycle with dancers earning nearly twice as much a peak ovulation time.”1 The same pattern played out with waitresses at truck-stop café diners, researchers discovered. Waitresses found their tips peaked during ovulation (the pleasant part) and waned as the cycle moved towards menstruation (ew gross!). In other words, according to Earth Feminist writer, Uma Dinsmore-Tuli: “Our culture has a clear message to us: that we are rewarded for ovulating and devalued for menstruating…that menstruation is worthless to men and thus should be disregarded and rendered invisible.”2 Julie Doucet’s comics don’t ‘render invisible’ this aspect of her biology but nor is she just letting it all hang out. She renders the female existence (and female-as-artist) experience in a relatable, funny, transformative way. Sex, masturbation, miscarriage, dreams of pregnancy are not held as taboos. Taboos can harm us, repress us, and shame us. And for what? To be stiffed on tips when you get your period (read: men know anyway). Why are we hiding all this bleeding?) This page (above) from Julie is a dream comic from her 2007 book 365 Days. It’s personal to her so I’m not going to attempt to interpret it – but I do want to point out that it’s full of imagery familiar to many women. Here she dreams of a liquefied baby in a yogurt cup called ‘Liberte’, a line of women with their successfully acquired babies, and getting your period yet again. These are familiar symbols for any woman who’s given thought to pregnancy, either wanting or not wanting it. Or both. It’s perfectly simple, complex, elegant, dashed off – it’s the absolute mastery Doucet has with pen and paper that makes difficult things look easy. And she writes with a clarity and honesty about themes with are common to many women, specifically perhaps, to women who want to create things and not just babies. Here’s a fetus and a fashion model! I mean, woah! She takes bullshit women’s magazines and turns them into something transcendentally awesome. And this (above). It’s so funny, pretty, ironic. And smart. We the ladies, are the expansive force of the universe, are we not? Women’s lives contain many interconnected cycles. And we overlap – put us in a house together and our menstruation will become synchronous. We’ll bleed together, more or less. And things have changed, generationally. I’m personally having more periods than my grandmother who birthed and nursed six babies ever did. All this bleeding is the new normal, at least in the Western world, for now. All this latent creative female energy and we’re so embarrassed about it? We should own our cyclic power. That’s what I get from Julie Doucet’s comics. She connects to her inner forces, laughing and with a self-assured shrug, over many, many accomplished pages. 1 Hallinan, Joseph T, 2009 Errornomics: Why We Make Mistakes and How We Can Avoid Them, p.47 2 Dinsmore-Tulli, Uma, 2014 Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra, p.259 ————————————————————————————————— Sacha Mardou is a Brit making comics in St Louis, Missouri. Sky in Stereo is her most recent comic. Share this page: [...]

03/22/2018

Sally IngrahamMarch 22, 2018NewsSally here with work by Shequeta Smith, E. Simms Campbell, and CM Campbell, plus much more! ————————————————————————————————— A recent article on the Los Angeles Sentinel celebrated Women’s History Month with a terrific roundup of Black Women in Comics. One creator whom I was excited to discover is Shequeta Smith (pictured above). She is a powerhouse, making the Rayven Choi series, running Shero Comics, and digging into the screenwriting industry as well. You can see a preview of Rayven Choi Chapter #3: The Bounty Hunter HERE. The L. A. Sentinel article also lists Micheline Hess (creator of Malice in Ovenland), Myisha Haynes (The Substitutes), Taneka Stotts (Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comic Anthology series), and familiar names like Marguerite Abouet (the Aya comics), and Jackie Ormes (Torchy Brown, etc.) Check out the whole list HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Here’s an article on Slate from 2016 about E. Simms Campbell – one of the first successful black cartoonists. His work appeared in numerous magazines of the day, many of them in Esquire, which launched in 1933. I thought the map pictured above was terrific, and if you are a jazz fan it is worth noting that Cab Calloway’s band appears at the bottom left-hand corner. ————————————————————————————————— CM Campbell shares a lengthy and interesting comic on Hyperallergic for “anyone who has ever asked, “How do I draw a black guy?” ” Read the full thing HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Extra, Extra! Check out Ronald Wimberly on the Comicidal Podcast – he talks about new and ongoing projects like Sunset Park, and LAAB Magazine. Listen HERE. Ta-Nehisi Coates (the writer behind two successful years of Black Panther) is going to start writing Captain America. He scribbled a brief essay for The Atlantic that announced the new project, and details why it “scares the hell out of me“. The Nib has a feature called Comics By Response, where they pose a question or concept and cartoonists respond – here are Four Cartoonists on Their Favorite Unsung Black History Heroes – with work by Keith Knight, Robyn Smith, Ben Passmore, and Mariah Rose-Marie. Illustrated PEN on PEN America’s guest editor Robert Kirby showcases the work of fellow guest editor Whit Taylor, throwing light on the final story in her collection Ghost Stories – the story is called Maker and you can see it HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Announcing the Spring Semester of thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers 8 weeks! $500 bux! 10 spots available! Rolling start date because of spring break – start as early as March 30th 2018. Deadline to apply is April 12th. Read all about the course HERE and email santoroschool@gmail.com for more details or to apply. ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 3-21-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

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