Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Aaron Cockle

Posted on September 11, 2018September 11, 2018

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11/07/2016

Juan FernándezNovember 7, 2016NewsJuan here coming at you from the road! Just wrapped up a revitalizing Comic Arts Brooklyn experience. I have tons to say. Bustling, profitable, and inspiring. But I gotta get back to Pittsburgh in time for work!! A HUGE thank you to Gabe Fowler for the opportunity to exhibit with Comics Workbook at THE premiere NYC show. Endless thanks to the CAB team and their tireless team of volunteers for making his explosion of print a reality. As always, thanks to Frank Santoro for letting me step up to the plate and sling our comics and propaganda. The dream is alive folks. Droves descended upon Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Nobody left empty handed and that was a sight to see. For now here’s a quick overview of what we did as Comics Workbook at the show. More photos and reflections to come from me and other fine folks. Holding down the fort throughout most of the day was Jenn Lisa and Ron Wimberly. We had Truth Zone bootlegs, rare comics by Connor Willumsen, new comics by CW alums, zines from Pittsburgh, short boxes with comics rarities for the whole family – a one stop shop, if you will, in the hullabaloo of CAB. The fans saw Wimberly’s bat signal through social media and knew to come out to catch him signing at our table. No surprise to anyone, Ron sold out of Prince of Cats in minutes. The line wrapped around the table and fans we’re elated to meet the comics shinobi himself. It was honor to have him with us at Comics Workbook. Needless to say, I had a blast at CAB 2016 <3 Here are some juicy bits for you to dig from elsewhere on the web: ⚡️New Tiny Report! The great Robyn Chapman has crunched all the numbers from her surveys and has cooked up the latest informational zine on the state of the micro press industry. Order a copy from her today! And be sure to check out the section that includes photographs by thee great Chris Anthony Diaz. ⚡️Forgotten Mother News Interview: Jacob Khepler, beating heart of Providence, RI’s thoughtleading free newspaper, Mothers News, chats with Brian Nicholson on the inspiration for the endeavor and his history working on it through the years – plus what he’s going to do next: “I’m healing, reading, playing music, relaxing my mind, working on some more abstract projects, and thinking about how to do whatever the next thing is without the bad parts of the last thing. I’d really like to do a book collection – I think this would be a good endcap. And the way I see it, I did a good job with the paper on an insane deadline for no money – with time to proofread and someone else doing promotion/logistics, I feel like I could mop a book up.“ ⚡️Rob Clough on Comics Workbook alumnus, Audra Stang: Stang has an exceptional ear for dialogue and has an ability to bring a scene to life (in the case of these comics, either high school or the milieu of a traveling band). Her figure drawing has all the right elements: attention to body language, attention to the way characters interact in space, the nuances of gesture, etc. She also shows an enormous amount of restraint as a storyteller, sometimes even leaving backstories deliberately oblique. Stang has little interest in backstory, except when she’s ready to reveal a detail that has an especially pertinent impact on the story at that moment. ok, until next time!! Juan Share this page: [...]

02/13/2017

Juan FernándezFebruary 13, 2017NewsJuan and Sally tag teaming it today: Drew Alderfer’s THE ROOK; Pixels, tones and the aesthetics of granularity; Berliac on Vice; Fantom Comics Signing and Roundtable; Juan Fernandez at the ToonSeum; Frank Santoro’s Comics Corner #2; and much more! Take note! We are featuring the work of Drew Alderfer – or Meaty Comics – on the site this week. His comic The Rook was made for the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers in 2014. Check it out HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Pixels, Tones and the Aesthetics of Granularity Juan here! I wanted to share with you a digital painting method I’ve come across, created by Dan Fessler, where he’s developed for his environment work on Chasm a way of turning Photoshop into the most powerful pixel art tool. What he calls “HD index painting”. What’s interesting about this? It works on the granular level of the pixel and plays with abstraction for story telling and evocation in the way that comics and cartooning does. It also does it in an incredibly robust and non-destructive way. It got me thinking about a lot of things. But first, have a look at what makes this technique tick. Why “HD?”: The backbone of this method that makes all the magic happen is the concept of manipulating higher resolution data than the end result. Instead of painting directly with an indexed color palette, you’re always painting in HD which then procedurally gets mapped to the indexed palette. For every color ramp you define your source data is 8bit allowing for a possible 256 colors, with no limit on the number of ramps you define. Typically when dealing with pixel art you’d map that to 32 colors or less. What’s most important though is the indexing is non-destructive. All of the high resolution detail is retained allowing you to do things that no other index painting tool allows, essentially making this the most powerful “pure” pixel art tool in existence. I’m not, necessarily a pixel artist, but I’ve been working extensively in exploring color and compression across digital file formats. Especially through collaging animations. I don’t know why, but I’m really interested in it. It’s the same way that I’m interested in how Jordan Crane and other master screen printers separate their colors in their prints. All of this has me think about halftone and more generally the voice of a story in a visual tradition. For some examples, I’d like you to think about how certain contemporary comics makers, like Laura Knetzeger, Kevin Huizenga, Dan Zettwoch, Sophie Yanow, Ron Wimberly, Mickey Z, or Berliac all use halftones. While many artists use halftone traditions in ways that are used to evoke an aesthetic of nostalgia (most effectively used by Ed Piskor in The Hip Hop Family Tree) these previous artists use them in ways that break from the print based traditions and the limitations of halftones. Instead, they use the half-tone as a framework that provides an aesthetic tool to help create their sequences. They all do this in different ways that create hums, and musical tones in the work. Different line qualities with different size tone dots that result in different feelings. Different voices for the soundless music of their comics. In a way that harkens back to previous technologies and grounds the work within a larger tradition, but that also side steps certain associations and assumptions related to genre. It’s great to think of these tools in a way that allows for more technologically mediated impressionist painting than commercial illustration. If you’d like a bit of a look into different coloring ideologies at the nuts and bolts level, take a look at this post by Dan Fessler on Pixel Purism. And of course, in the weekly “Please think about contemporary AI” department I have an article for you to read – HERE. ————————————————————————————————— There is a new weekly comic by “the mysterious Berliac” on Vice – titled Asian Store Junkies it is about “MSG-addicted youngsters who crave ramen“. Read it HERE. Follow Berliac on Instagram – @yung_qin_berliac. ————————————————————————————————— Reminder to go check out this signing and roundtable if you are in the Washington, D.C., area this week – catch up with Ronald Wimberly, Chris Visions, Shannon Wright, and Chris Kindred at Fantom Comics on Wednesday, Feb. 15th, 7-9 PM! ————————————————————————————————— PCS’s Artist Lecture Series 007: Juan Fernandez Join Juan and the rest of the @pittsburghcomicssalon this Thursday! Come on down to The ToonSeum to catch Juan talk about strip cartooning, expanding & teaching visual literacy, and comics making systems. He’ll cover principles in youth and adult comics education. He’ll show a little of what he’s making & how he does what he does. We’ll play some keygen tunes, dive into Photoshop, and talk about oblique strategies in comics making. The presentation will be followed by Q+A. You can join the Comics Salon at The ToonSeum (945 Liberty Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15222) – art, conversation, and an atmosphere of solidarity. ————————————————————————————————— Frank’s Comics Corner #2 is here! Gather round one and all. ————————————————————————————————— The Ebb and Flow Enter the lottery for a table at the Small Press Expo this year – the registration form and more details are HERE. You have until February 24th 2017! Get to it. There will be a second issue of RESIST!, due to be released around July 4th. It’s message will be “Picturing the America We Want to Live In.” Submit work. Julia Wertz spoke to Sarah Glidden about her book Rolling Blackouts – via The Comics Journal. Pepe the Frog is making a new appearance in MAD Magazine – the story is HERE on Vulture. And in greater, more personal detail, HERE on the Huffington Post. Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes offer a preview of Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters for The New Yorker – check it out. There is a review of Charles Burns’ Vortex on Just Indie Comics – for those of you who read Italian! ————————————————————————————————— Announcing the Spring Semester of thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers! The course starts March 7th 2017. Apply by February 26th to get 100 bux off! The course is 8 weeks long – payment plans are available. Application guidelines: – 3 figure drawings done on blank 3 x 5 index cards – 3 landscape drawings done on blank 3 x 5 index cards – 3 still life drawings done on blank 3 x 5 cards – draw in a contour line style –think Matisse – no under-drawing – draw directly in ink – just send me small jpgs of images – dont post to your blog pls – send specific url links to any comics work you have done. If you haven’t done comics before that is not a problem. Email santoroschoolATgmail to apply! More details HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Blinkers – 2-13-2017 – by Jack Brougham ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 2-13-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 2-13-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— Cozytown – 2-13-2017 – by Juan Fernandez Share this page: [...]

06/23/2016

HarrisonJune 23, 2016NewsHarrison’s Daily News for June 23, 2016 starts off in the Salon, drops off midway with Inkbrick 5, and lands with some Busdriver. ————————————————————————————————— Salon Etiquette Your favorite correspondent’s favorite correspondent Juan Fernandez reflects on the latest meeting of the Pittsburgh Comics Salon. Ingest your daily vitamins of theory, modular grids, holding the center, and more below. http://comicsworkbook.com/notes-from-the-salon-june-18th-2016/ ————————————————————————————————— Visions Chris Visions was at Heroes Con last weekend, where Izzy Renzi took this photo. As soon as he got back… “’…all of a sudden, for no pahticulah reason… I decided to go for a little run…’ And draw.” Always moving. Check out The Chris Visions Summer Collection, 2016 ————————————————————————————————— Ink Squad Alexander Rothman: We’re proud to announce that INK BRICK no. 5 is now available for preorder from our online store! Yet again our submission pool brought us more excellent work than we could hope to print, and as a result this will be our largest to date. Part of the book is a special section excerpting Jenny Zervakis’s upcoming book Strange Growths, which will be published jointly by John Porcellino of Spit And A Half and Tom Hart of the Sequential Artists Workshop. ————————————————————————————————— GATOSAURIO Gatosaurio Grab Bags! Each includes one surprise tee, sticker pack, tote bag and enamel pin plus more surprises like zines, 90s tattoo chokers, a pocket notebook or a coin purse! inechi.com ————————————————————————————————— Color is Light I heart kokooma_, you should too. instagram.com/kokooma_ Quang Comics ————————————————————————————————— Thumbs “Po-pos don’t wan’t to follow me, when they see me in sneakers and cotton tees.” Busdriver Thumbs out now. Share this page: [...]

CCC: Group Narrative and Christian Southgate

Comics WorkbookJanuary 31, 2017School UpdatesTyler Landry brings us an update from the Comics Workbook “satellite school” in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He shares one of the projects the Charlottetown Comics Club (CCC) has completed and introduces cartoonist Christian Southgate. (Learn more about the CCC HERE.) ————————————————————————————————— The Charlottetown Comics Club got together (5 attending members, to be exact) to do a group narrative project. The goal of this was to get each participating member familiar with using story cards as a method for churning out ideas, then editing that soft material into a good narrative. All 5 members agreed on a general idea and each produced their own material. We then piled it all up and mixed and matched each others ideas into one solid 2-page spread. Emphasis was on creating clear connections between events – showing the necessities and trimming the fat. Then we did a pass on visual clarity, tweaking the layout, redrawing to better convey motion, etc. After all was said and done, each member snapped a photo of “our” story, and took it home to draw the pages as homework. Yeah, I gave homework. Our process: ————————————————————————————————— Christian Southgate is a programmer by trade, but really, he’s a Jack of a thousand trades, and a master of most of them too. He’s been making comics since the dawn of time, for realz. In recent months he’s been drawing the epic tale of Reheat Raccoon at the Charlottetown Comics Club. Christian comes at you hard with gags and clever onomatopoeia, dressing up funny animal comics with a dark, squelching undercurrent. He also likes to eat cheese. The tale of Reheat Raccoon has humble beginnings (below), but as Christian has been working with story cards over the last few months, it has grown into a sprawling misadventure. See some of his process below: Early days development (above) of a sequence in which RR thiefs a juicy steak, and gets caught in the act – VS – Later (below) concise edit penciled, complete with full-page roof-tumbling action. Notice the beats on the right page, even without the panel divisions, still respecting the same rhythm as the left page. Bold move, Southgate. ————————————————————————————————— We look forward to hearing more from the Charlottetown Comics Club! Tyler will continue to share work by members of the CCC, bios of these Prince Edward Island cartoonists, and details about more of the projects that the CCC complete. If you are interested in joining the club please email santoroschoolATgmail and we will put you in touch with Tyler. ————————————————————————————————— Tyler Landry is a graduate of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers. His recent comics includes Vile 1: Cowards Hole, Vile 2: Lonesome, and Hermit Crab Real Estate. Get copies of his work HERE. Check out work in progress and other cool stuff by Tyler HERE. Keep up with the Charlottetown Comics Club via Tyler’s Instagram – @clavcity. Share this page: [...]

7/20/2016

Juan FernándezJuly 20, 2016NewsJuan here with La edición de libros ilustrados en Chile;Sol Díaz Castillo y Marcela Trujillo’s La Polola podcast; Power Paola in Santiago; and Yɨsɨrihaɨ Healing. ————————————————————————————————— La edición de libros ilustrados en Chile Carlos Reyes y Catalina Infante de Catalonia Libros conversan del proceso de edición de libros ilustrados para el mercado chileno. ————————————————————————————————— Escucha @lapololapodcast, un podcast del cómic femenino con Sol Díaz Castillo y Marcela Trujillo! [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/273564883″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] ————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— Yɨsɨrihaɨ: Healing that rescues the shadow from genocide Bárbara Santos illuminates the depths of an incredible interdisciplinary and intercultural project, the book Los Jaguares del Yuruparí (2015) over at Terremoto.mx . Los Jaguares del Yuruparí presents the outcome of more than 10 years of research conducted by indigenous young people from the communities of Pira-Parana in the Colombian Amazon -under the guidance of the traditional knowledge of their elders- on cultural and sacred knowledge related to the territory and its management.(…) The knowledge or origin of life story of the Hee Yaia Keti Oka ancestors has been recognized by UNESCO as Immaterial Cultural Patrimony(3), in recognition of the spoken knowledge of Keti Oka as a thousand-year-old technology transmitted from person to person through a network of outposts and sacred places in the Great Territory of the Hee Yaia – Yurapari Jaguars. “Keti translates to “news” or “story”; Oka means “tongue” or “jaw.” Keti Oka is “origin story” – ritual singing and knowledge that comes from the body, sacred dance and words at the same time.”(4) In this way, the research, editing and creation of the book was a generous precipitate ofKeti Oka, not only because of the texts narrated, but also because of overlapping temporalities, matrixes and dimensions used for the translation – represented through images, comics, photographs and maps of landmarks or thousand-year-old sacred elements. ————————————————————————————————— hasta la proxima, Juan Share this page: [...]

09/11/2018

Posted on September 11, 2018September 11, 2018 by Aaron Cockle

Jason Lutes; Sharad Sharma; Dash Shaw; Comics Carousel; Brooklyn Book Festival

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‘Otherwise it’s all just a bloodbath, right?’
Josh Kramer talks with Jason Lutes about the new Berlin collection:

[Kramer] What were your main narrative inspirations for Berlin?
[Lutes] From a straightforward, mechanical, storytelling perspective, the comics of Herge, right? All of my basic “Comics 101” self-education that I got was from studying Tintin both growing up and then as an adult. And then once I sort of figured out the conventions that Herge was applying, then tinkering them and changing them and making them my own in a lot of cases. In terms of like tone, for Berlin specifically, tone and technique, I think I was I was thinking a lot about Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, which I had seen in my early 20s, which was very affecting. And the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin which takes a very kind of impressionistic view of the city at the time. And both of those works do a lot of drifting in and out of the consciousness of various people on the street. So those had a big effect on how I ended up telling the story.

And then beyond that I would have to say it’s probably a combination of any number of indie films that I absorbed when I was in art school or after. I remember I watched a lot of Jim Jarmusch. Then I remember there was this one year at the Seattle [International] Film Festival where I had press passes. I would just go walk into a movie theater and sit down and watch movies for four hours, not knowing what they were going to be. I think there was a period there where I kind of just immersed myself in cinematic visual storytelling. I think Herge, Alfred Döblin and Wim Wenders would be the three big ones that were the obvious influences.

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The 222nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, room UL 105 (lower level). Free and open to the public. Skype presentation.

Sharad Sharma on Grassroots Comics: By the people, for the people.

Via Skype, Sharad Sharma, will share hundred of stories of common people using Grassroots Comics that tell a local story. They are a communication tool for all citizens that can transcend the barriers of language, literacy, media access, social classes and even resources. For these reasons, grassroots comics have been extremely successful in both rural and urban, remote and low literacy areas widely in Indian subcontinent. The simple format and participatory methodology made the grassroots comics popular worldwide. In last 20 years his organization World Comics has conducted more than 1200 comics workshop in most remote and disturbed areas of the globe and trained over 1,00,000 common people. He will also share the impact of his work. www.worldcomicsindia.com

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“My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” Screening and Q&A

As part of After School Special: The 2018 School of Visual Arts Alumni Film & Animation Festival, we are pleased to present graphic novelist, animator, writer, director, and SVA alumnus Dash Shaw’s first feature-length animated film, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016). Shaw will be on hand following the film for a Q&A. The feature will be preceded by the short film series Makin’ Things and the world premiere of the short film Noise by another multi-hypenate artist/director and SVA alumnus, Jim McKenzie. The Q&A will be moderated by current student Stephanie Kim (BFA 2019 Illustration).

Tuesday, September 11, 2018, 7:30-10PM
SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

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Comics Carousel at Society of Illustrators

A special Carousel at the Society of Illustrators for the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Presentations of graphic novels and comics as read by the artists:

Jordan Crane (We Are All Me)
Maria Hoey (COIN-OP Comics Anthology)

Paul Levitz & Tim Hamilton (Brooklyn Blood)
Connie Sun (@cartoonconnie)

Ngozi Ukazu (Check, Please!)
Kriota Willberg (Draw Stronger)
and more! The event will be followed by a book signing.

Hosted by:
R. Sikoryak (Terms and Conditions, The Unquotable Trump)

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2018 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL EVENT

Society of Illustrators
128 East 63rd Street NY, NY 10065

Monday, September 17, 2018, 7-9pm
Tickets: $10 General Admission

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Brooklyn Book Festival

Comics-related Panels:

September 16, 2018, 12pm

Find Your Family

Brooklyn Historical Society Library, 128 Pierrepont St

Refugees, outcasts, inheritors of hard history — whoever we are, we all struggle to find the human connections that make us safe. Caldecott Award-winning illustrator/author David Small (Home After Dark), New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck (Passing for Human), and anthropologist Bessora (Alpha) explore the universal yearning for defining and keeping what we think of as family. Moderated by agent and editor Anjali Singh, Ayesha Pande Literary.

September 16, 2018, 1pm

TV vs. Reality

Brooklyn Historical Society Library 128 Pierrepont St

When on-air celebrity and imagery shape your earliest memories, how do you reconcile it all with the hard realities of adulthood? Catch the wide-ranging experiences, from quiz kids to musicals to stand-up comedy, of comics creators Michael Kupperman (All The Answers), Box Brown (Is This Guy for Real?), and Rina Ayuyang (Blame This on the Boogie). Moderated by Joan Hilty, Comics Editor at Nickelodeon.

September 16, 2018, 2pm

Two-Ways — Weird Romance

Brooklyn Historical Auditorium, 128 Pierrepont St

Two astoundingly accomplished team-ups of authors explore their many attractions to weird romance and speculative fiction, and all the things that happen when you create genre-bending graphic novels in collaboration! Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell (Bizarre Romance) and Alex de Campi and Katie Skelly (Twisted Romance) . Moderated by Tor Books editor Diana Pho.

September 16, 2018, 4pm

The Graphic City

Brooklyn Historical Auditorium, 128 Pierrepont St

In alternately gripping, funny, and tragic graphic novels about urban history, Julia Wertz (Tenements, Towers & Trash), Peter J. Tomasi (The Bridge), and Jason Lutes (Berlin) take us high up to skyscraper views of two great cities flanking the Atlantic — and beyond. Moderated by Publishers Weekly senior news editor Calvin Reid.

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Cement Mixer – 9-11-18 – by Caleb Orecchio

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Aaron Cockle

Posted on September 11, 2018September 11, 2018

Explore

Printing Comics – by R. M. Rhodes

Comics WorkbookJuly 27, 2017EssaysA common topic of conversation among Those Who Remember is the age of the comics medium. Was Richard Occault’s Yellow Kid really the first comic? Or does that honor belong to Rodolphe Töpffer’s goofy satires? Or does it go back even further than that? And how does the Bayeux Tapestry fit into all of this? The answer to all of these questions is “marketing.” It was in the best interests of the New York newspapers to trumpet that the Yellow Kid was the first of its kind because they were fighting over who got to print it – it was that popular. It’s in the best interests of Francophone historians to promote a local Swiss artist who published in French back in the mid-1800s. And the Bayeux Tapestry is an outlier, lovingly handcrafted propaganda. Honestly, any question of what “was the first comic?” must, almost by default, ask the question “what is comics?” What are the elements that must be present for something to be considered “comics”? From there, the theory goes, it’s just a matter of going through the material until you find the earliest example of something that meets those criteria. The reality is much messier than the theory. I am currently working my way through a copy of The Early Cartoon Strip by David Kunzle, subtitled Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 through 1825. (Why I just discovered the existence of a book that was published the year I was born is a mystery for the ages.) Kunzle did a comprehensive deep dive of archives of European art and offered up a consistent definition of the comic strip: There must be a sequence of separate images There must be a preponderance of image over text The medium in which the strip appears and for which it is originally intended must be reproducible, that is, in printed form, a mass medium The sequence must tell a story which is both moral and topical Kunzle starts the introduction to his book with what has become a cliché, but wasn’t in 1973 – the discussion of how comic strips aren’t always funny, so it’s a misnomer. They shouldn’t be called comics, but they are. I believe that’s the underlying reasoning for the fourth criteria for what makes up comics (now and then). Because it really doesn’t make sense that the subject matter or kind of story being told has anything to do with whether something should or should not be considered a comic. You would not argue that a novel is not a novel because the story is a comedy, or vice versa – so why should a comic that had no moral or topic relevance be excluded? Kunzle gives a decent justification that provides a filter that could narrow his search – and thus, his results. But his premise was laughable in 1973 and is laughable today. “Whether it is considered morally harmful or morally useful, progressive or reactionary, the modern comic strip has undeniably strong moral content.” Strong disagreement. But limiting what gets labelled comics due to tone and/or intent ignores the versatility of the medium. Comics can – and should – be anything. One of the intriguing things about Kunzle’s criteria is what’s missing – the lack of proscriptive about what kind of art is used to make the image. This ties in with criteria three – reproducible in a mass medium. Essentially, Kunzle’s research indicates that comics have been around since the introduction of the printing press in Western Europe. And, in the beginning, printing technology was so crude that there really wasn’t room to be picky about what kind of art it was to begin with – it all had to be converted to woodblocks for print anyway. But even a cursory glance at the exhaustively cataloged marginalia by monastic manuscript copyists indicates that cartooning was a well-established skill in the centuries long before the introduction of the printing press. Some of these even look like the Bayeux Tapestry, if you squint. The point being that cartooning and making comics are two distinct, separate skillsets. It is entirely possible to be a cartoonist without ever making comics and it is equally possible to make comics without using cartoons. Which makes this pedant grit his teeth every time someone says that they’re looking forward to seeing “all the cartoonists at SPX,” for example. This begs the question of whether the person making the statement cares about all of the rest of the comics creators in attendance or only cares about cartoonists? I think the requirement of mass reproducibility is the most interesting and least intuitive. It suggests that a solitary page of sequential art that has no intention of ever being sent to print is not really comics. It also suggests the paradoxical concept of copies with no originals – something that seems less and less absurd to artists who have grown up making and sharing their art entirely on the internet with files that can be perfectly replicated with little or no effort. Back in the day, when Kunzle was doing his research, the idea of an entirely digital medium was barely conceived of at Xerox PARC, but was a long way from being evenly distributed. As far as I’m concerned, the mass reproducibility requirement answers the initial question regarding the Bayeux Tapestry – it was never intended to be mass reproduced and, indeed, there was no way for it to be mass reproduced at the time of its creation. In fact, reproducing the entire Tapestry in its current medium would be a major undertaking now. I know from experience that it’s relatively straightforward – if time-consuming – to transform the contents of the Bayeux Tapestry into an eight panel grid. (The whole thing takes up about nine pages.) But that’s not the Bayeux Tapestry, exactly, is it? It’s designed to be read as a continuous strip 70 meters in length. So any faithful reproduction of it ought to be, by rights, in the original format – even a 70-meter-long printout would be a mediated version of the original and lack authenticity. Set aside the question of who would buy it (answer: collectors like me, who enjoy tracking down obscure works) – the real question is “who would have the wall space to display it?” Even the museum at Bayeux has to display the tapestry on three adjacent walls. Kunzle traces the improvements in printing technology as they progress through the centuries in Europe. What’s interesting is how these advances provided greater range and detail for the artists, but that the early works are just as effective as their later counterparts. It’s also interesting to note how similar in process and effect the earliest proto-comics are to the works of Lynd Ward, for example, who produced wordless illustrated novels with one woodblock print per page. In that way, Ward has a more direct connection to the earliest works than contemporary comics creators do today. Kunzle documents how the public’s affection for caricature in the late 18th century drove the adoption of etching over line engraving as a primary means of reproducing art. Engraving was William Hogarth’s medium and his works did a lot to define what engraving and sequential art were capable of. In some ways, caricature, a very informal art style, is a reaction to the excessive formality of Hogarth. One was stodgy and moralistic, the other was quick and simple. Kunzle notes that the emergence of etching…invited the addition of light washes in watercolor. “Sixpence plain, one shilling colored” is a phrase not found upon prints before the advent of caricature. Which begs the question of how Dirk Jansz van Santen became such a prominent and sought-after colorist of engraved prints a century before Hogarth. A major difference is that van Santen did intricate piecework. He hand-illustrated entire atlases, but these were very limited editions. His work could not be mass produced the same way that the original engravings could be. His work became a value add, simply by the nature of the fact that he did them. One of the first superstar colorists, really. By the late 18th century things had changed. JMW Turner did work coloring etchings for the local print-seller when he was a boy. Caricature required less precision to make, print, and color. Every step of the art process was much more accessible to talented (noble) amateurs instead being solely the purview of the trained working class professional infrastructure that had to grow up around the precision required from etchings. In 1787, a younger son of a baronet named Henry Banbury created a seven foot long strip called The Long Minuet as Danced at Bath. Later that year, he produced The Propagation of a Lie, which was only six feet long. These two pieces set of a craze for strips – mostly of much shorter, easier to copy, length. The parallels with the Bayeux Tapestry are obvious, but the medium, subject matter, and technical circumstances were radically different. Töpffer arrived towards the end of this wave of innovation and worked in a caricature style. This was mostly due to his poor eyesight, which kept him from doing the kind of detail work that he might have wanted to do. Töpffer’s innovation was not the caption with the art, nor with the strip arrangement, nor even panel borders, nor even the far more satiric subject matter. Really, Töpffer’s innovation was that he made books – several pages of sequential narrative that were themselves in sequence and had to be read together to make sense of the whole thing. To that point, sequences were constrained to a single page, with multiple strips stacked on top of each other. Or, in the case of Hogarth, they were a series of single page prints, suitable for framing. Sometimes, as in his Before and After series, Hogarth would mount two images on the same page side by side. But if you only wanted one page from his Rake’s Progress, for example, he would sell it to you and be satisfied that you will get the moral message. The rest of the pages made a good complement, but they were not necessary as a set to get the whole story, as it were. Töpffer’s innovation literally changed the context in which sequential art could be presented. Before it was pretty much restricted to single pages, sometimes as a collected set. It was probably inevitable that one branch of printing would collide with another, but Töpffer seems to be the first one to make that connection in a commercially viable context. Ironically, without the encouragement of Goethe, Töpffer probably would not have self-published his works – and even when he did, they were in limited print runs of no more than 500. He was widely pirated in his lifetime and the knock-offs sold far more than the originals ever did. By 1895, when Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid first appeared in the strip Hogan’s Alley in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Stylistically, The Yellow Kid was nothing new, but the technology had advanced to the point where the comic could be printed in color, which is what made The Yellow Kid distinctive, and thus, desirable. Indeed, the popularity of the character meant that he appeared in one, then the other, then both newspapers at once until 1898. Certain American comics historians date the advent of the modern comic strip to Outcault, and they’re not wrong, just chauvinistic. Again, the emergence of better printing technology is really what is being acknowledged, not necessarily the content or the artistic style. Like I said at the beginning, it’s all marketing. The fact that one can trace the advances in printing technology through the history of printed visual narrative is pretty impressive. Frank Santoro is clearly on to something with his ongoing interrogation of Risograph printers. Contemporary comics creators have a large variety of choices they can make with regard to their approach to mass reproduction. Unfortunately, many choose the default option, without realizing that default means there are other options. These days, I make 16 page, 8-panel grid comics, which is not unusual. But mine are digitally printed, which is a quantum leap from old-school industrialized print-making – but digital printing suits the complex nature of my digitally-rendered artwork the best. And I make limited-edition, numbered print runs of 25, which pushes the edges of the intention of mass reproduction. There is no burning commercial demand for what I do, which makes 25 copies optimistic at best. But the limited print run calls back to the days of limited edition print sellers. My point being that if one is going to make choices, it’s important to know what those choices signify and what benefits come with each one. Knowing the history helps with that process. Share this page: [...]

Sean Ford’s SHADOW HILLS

Chris Anthony DiazJuly 9, 2016The Diaz ArchiveSHADOW HILLS 1-8 by Sean Ford in new square format versions. Looking forward to the conclusion in issue 9, due out this fall and a forthcoming book collection of the series! Photo of Sean Ford taken at CAB 2014 and colored by Graham Willcox 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: [...]

03/22/2016

Aaron CockleMarch 22, 2016NewsNew York Public Library Digital Collections; the tyranny of the cloud; comics journalism in the 1950’s; new interviews to read/read aloud and/or listen to; random word informatics. ————————————————————————————————— NYPL Digital Collections Recently, the New York Public Library posted an amazing amount of content to its digital collection. Work above is from Indian coloured drawings: a collection of 177 original paintings on “talc,” etc., with 17 engravings, illustrating costume, vehicles and trades in India and Fred Carlo, Works Progress Administration, respectively. ————————————————————————————————— Exercises in Scrolling Colonising the Clouds, an essay about Internet/institutional power structures, physical and virtual territories, ‘memory’, ETC. ————————————————————————————————— Mid-20th Century Comics Reportage Featuring work by Noel Sickles (‘The immediacy of a direct drawing or sketch seldom breaks through in the more static nature of other forms of art.’) and Austin Briggs. Essay by Daniel Zalkus. ————————————————————————————————— Recent Interviews of Note Aidan Koch + Tyler Landry ————————————————————————————————— Random Word/Phrase/Sentence/Paragraph Generator This is a good site if you’re in a pinch for words. For illustrative purposes, the Random Paragraph Generator has been utilized above with the following keywords: ‘Frank Santoro’ + ‘Golden Age of Comics’ and ‘Frank Santoro’ + Comics Instruction’. Share this page: [...]

05/04/2018

Sally IngrahamMay 4, 2018NewsSally here with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Hillary Chute, Roz Chast, Jennifer Camper, and many more! ———————————————————————————————————— Hillary Chute takes a look at comics in black and white for The New York Times, reviewing Eleanor Davis‘ most recent work, Why Art?, and John Porcellino’s From Lone Mountain, concluding with a mention of Jennifer Camper. Hillary Chute suggests that there is nothing simple about these comics, although their appearance may lead you to believe otherwise. About Eleanor Davis’ book she writes: “Eccentric and visually inventive, answering all the many questions it raises, “Why Art?” is about the power that comes from creating. The art that we mold with our own hands shows us how to be strong; it shows us how to live.“ Chute notes the “zine-style” display of Porcellino’s work, and the quiet power behind his lyrical and sweet comics. She ties Davis and Porcellino to Jennifer Camper on the basis of their shared dedication to “the punk-inspired world of self-publishing” and references a new comic by Camper that appears in the April/May issue of The Believer. “Camper’s piece is devastatingly timeless and current at once. It includes hard-to-look-at scenes of assault, rendered in a black and white much less airy than either Porcellino’s or Davis’s. The discomfort it produces is its strength — another potent answer to the question “why art?”“ Read the whole article HERE. I highly recommend both Davis and Porcellino’s new books – and you can get a copy of The Believer HERE. Here’s the first page of a comic from 2003 by Jennifer Camper – you can read the rest HERE. ———————————————————————————————————— The Gothamist is running a series called Sketchy Interviews – visual interviews with cartoonists, illustrators, and graphic artists currently working in NYC. First up is Roz Chast! As you might guess, her answers to the interview questions are both funny and personal. See them all HERE. ———————————————————————————————————— The book (above) is out and Aline Kominsky-Crumb has been on tour and is FINALLY getting a lot of press and hype, and the recognition that she deserves! Called “the whiny grandmother of tell-all comics” by CBC Radio, she has been long-overlooked and even hated by fans of her husband, Robert Crumb. The recent Drawn & Quarterly reissue of her 1990’s collection – expanded to include 40 pages of new work, and sporting the hefty title Love That Bunch: Food, Sex, Death, Pain, Romance, Joy – is her only solo work in print. The Montreal Gazette writes: “A thread connecting all of Kominsky-Crumb’s work, and a quality especially evident in Love That Bunch, is the dynamic tension between self-deprecation and self-assurance. Yes, she’s hard on herself, but it takes real strength to reveal so much. “That was one of my arguments with the early feminists — that to learn to reveal your weaknesses and ugliness, you have to feel OK about yourself,” she said. “They thought I was being a poor role model. They didn’t understand that it’s a gift to other people, to allow them to get rid of it and live with it better. Even now, some people will say ‘Why do you draw yourself so ugly? Do you really feel that bad about yourself?’ I say: ‘Not really, but I’ve been there and I’ve lived through those feelings. Everybody does sometimes.’ I feel confident enough to expose that about myself and be willing to live with the results of it.” “ Read the rest of the article HERE. ———————————————————————————————————— Weekend Brunch The Comics Journal is running another A Cartoonist’s Diary, this time with Fiona Smyth sharing a week in her life – check it out HERE. John Seven reviews Jessica Campbell‘s new comic – XTC69 – (out from Koyama Press in a week!) for The Comics Beat – read the review HERE. Here’s a nice check in with Pénélope Bagieu, whose recent book Brazen tells the stories of dozens of female rebels and heroes – on MSN News. Rob Kirby reviews Love That Bunch – the deluxe hardcover reissue of Aline Kominsky-Crumb‘s original 1990 comic – on The Comics Journal. San Francisco Magazine has a list of famous female creators (of comics, film, and TV) who are the direct “Nasty Gal” decedents of Aline Kominsky-Crumb – HERE. Hillary Brown interviews Vera Brosgol, during which they discuss Brosgol’s new comic – Be Prepared – for Paste Magazine. ———————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 5-4-2018 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

Two-Ways — Weird Romance

The Graphic City

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