Aaron Cockle here today with the final hours of the Composition Competition; Glen Baxter; Shaw/Nadel; Lynda Barry; William Blake; Zines at the Swiss Institute; Poetry Comics Comics Poetry; EA Bethea; Kevin Czap; Sammy Harkham Auction Items
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The last day to submit work for the 2016 Comics Workbook Composition Competition is TODAY, August 30, 2016, at 11:59pm EST. The listing of entries is painstakingly managed and updated, so please take some time to look at this wonderful assortment of work. Thanks to all who have participated in the Composition Competition this year.
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Glen Baxter’s Almost Completely Baxter excerpted at the New York Review
Years later at art school I came upon a similar spirit of anarchy in the work of the Dada and Surrealist poets and painters. I was home, and dry. And yet, I was distinctly out of step with the prevailing ideology. I was surrounded by abstract painters churning out fake de Koonings and Rothkos. The collage novels of Max Ernst, with their haunting dreamlike imagery and absurdity, became my beacon as I tried to escape the prevailing orthodoxy.
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Dash Shaw in Conversation with Dan Nadel
Wednesday, August 31, 7pm, at the Strand, 828 Broadway & 12th Street, NYC. Signing and book release for Shaw’s Cosplayers collection.
Additionally, Dash will be screening a preview of an upcoming animated movie he’s been working on.
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Etelka Lehoczky reviews Lynda Barry’s Marlys Collection at NPR.org
She’s got a surgical instinct for revelatory narrative moments, but her vision of youth can also be too sweet, too nostalgic. If it weren’t for her clashing linework — from thick, sweeping, assertive strokes to disorderly scribbles — to say nothing of compositions that drag the eye around each frame as if to physically shake off old habits of seeing, her reader might be able to nestle comfortably into her stories of childhood.
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In William Blake news: World’s Largest William Blake Gallery to Open in San Francisco
After 50 years in the booktrade and 43 years operating John Windle Antiquarian Bookseller, John Windle will launch his retrospective of the artist in October, 2016, within San Francisco’s historic 49 Geary building. The first physical space exclusively dedicated to Blake’s work in over two hundred years, The William Blake Gallery will display over 1,000 original Blake pieces alongside thousands of reproductions of the artist’s own writings and artwork.
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For Swiss In situ’s very first installation, independent Swiss publishing houses Nieves and Innen will bring their focus on artist-made zines to NY with a presentation of the hundreds of pocket-sized, image-based publications they have commissioned over the past 15 years. In light of the social and community-oriented nature of zine productions, Nieves and Innen have also invited a group of international collaborators and like-minded producers to exhibit their work as part of the library and to speak in workshops and artist talks about their publishing practices.
Featuring work by Aidan Koch, among others.
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Alexander Rothman attempts to provide a working definition of comics poetry (with images)
I’m not trying to answer these questions here, but to help generate the work that will. In outlining such broad definitions of “comics” and “poetry,” I hope to maintain as much expressive openness for the form as possible. This work does not call for a particular kind of content. Comics poetry is not synonymous with “beautiful, meaningful comics” or “self-important comics” or “very thinky comics.” It is work that draws upon the expressive potential of visual language.
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E.A. Bethea has a couple of short pieces at Animal Kingdom Publishing. Shot While Stealing Beer and Uncorking.
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Cartoonist and publisher Kevin Czapiewski recently participated in a podcast over at Inkstuds.
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