Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged spx 2018

Sally Ingraham

Posted on September 14, 2018September 14, 2018

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08/17/2016

Juan FernándezAugust 16, 2016NewsJuan here with your Wednesday morning updates! the LAST DAY of the Daniel Clowes Benefit Auction, Jack Davis, John Baldessari, mixing colors, and more! ——————————————————————————————————————— Daniel Clowes Auction Items Up Through TODAY, August 17, 1pm EST All proceeds benefit the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency. Check it aht! ——————————————————————————————————————— Drew Friedman on Jack Davis’ career as a TV Guide cover illustrator “TV Guide’s art director’s had a long track record of using some of the top caricaturists of the day for their covers and for interior work, including many assignments by Al Hirschfeld and more recently Ronald Searle: Jack Davis would eventually create nearly two dozen covers for TV Guide over the next dozen years, plus many interior drawings.” – Drew Friedman Read more about it HERE. (via The Comics Reporter) ——————————————————————————————————————— Wonderfully Offbeat Assignments That Artist John Baldessari Gave to His Art Students (1970) “In 1970, when conceptual artist John Baldessari was teaching studio art at the experimental CalArts campus near Valencia, CA, the assignments he handed out to his class were art in themselves. Humorous, confounding, sometimes very specific but often like zen koans, the assignments must have come as a shock, especially to those students with a more traditional sense of what constitutes art. They probably didn’t know that Baldessari was questioning art itself and in the middle of a crisis. That year he had taken all his previous painted work from 1953 – 1966 and cremated it at a San Diego mortuary. He turned from painting to photography. And he expected his students to rethink everything they thought they knew.” via Open Culture Read the rest of the article HERE. ——————————————————————————————————————— 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book “In 1692 an artist known only as “A. Boogert” sat down to write a book in Dutch about mixing watercolors. Not only would he begin the book with a bit about the use of color in painting, but would go on to explain how to create certain hues and change the tone by adding one, two, or three parts of water. The premise sounds simple enough, but the final product is almost unfathomable in its detail and scope. Spanning nearly 800 completely handwritten (and painted) pages, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, was probably the most comprehensive guide to paint and color of its time. According to Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel who translated part of the introduction, the color book was intended as an educational guide. The irony being there was only a single copy that was probably seen by very few eyes.” – via This Is Colossal More HERE. ——————————————————————————————————————— Listen to over an hour of background music from the 1967 Spider-Man Animated Series “The music from the 1967 Spider-Man animated series is jazzy and catchy. Unfortunately the music has never been released in a format that would allow us to enjoy it completely. I often wondered what it would be like to capture the music from a series that never did a soundtrack, but I don’t have to wonder any longer. YouTube user, 11db11, went through the entire run of the series and attempted to capture the audio in its complete form, removing voice and sound effect when possible. This labor of love, which I imagine took a good amount of time, is over and hour-long and an addicting listen.” – via The Retroist Further thoughts HERE. Dig even deeper with this old article from the radio station WMFU! ——————————————————————————————————————— Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling “These guys have used sentiment analysis to map the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories and then used data-mining techniques to reveal the most common arcs. “We find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives,” they say. Their method is straightforward. The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a story at each instant and how it changes.” – via MIT Technology Review Find out more HERE. ——————————————————————————————————————— until next time! JF Share this page: [...]

Jonny Negron Draws MR. FREEDOM

Chris Anthony DiazJune 15, 2016The Diaz ArchiveJonny Negron’s portrayal of John Abbey as Mr. Freedom and Delphine Seyrig as Marie-Madeleine along with the freedom dancers in William Klein’s MR. FREEDOM (1969, France) for my ILLUSTRATED MOMENTS IN CINEMA/TELEVISION collection. The illustration was completed around November 2011 in marker pen, and Jonny’s candid was taken at MISSION: COMICS & ART, San Francisco, Friday, October 12, 2012 and Graham Willcox did the color on Jonny’s candid Share this page: [...]

07/25/2017

Aaron CockleJuly 25, 2017NewsAaron Cockle today with Liana Finck; Warren Craghead; Glynnis Fawkes; The New York Review of Comic Books, and the Comics Workbook Composition Competition 2017. ————————————————————————————————— Sara Berman’s Closet Liana Finck has a piece at The New York Review of Books blog about an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her personal relationship to it. Finck also has an exhibition currently at Equity Gallery in NYC through August 5: Finck presents 80 drawings from a series of work posted on Instagram over the last year. The complexities of life are distilled into seemingly simple ink cartoons. With precision, honesty and biting wit, she explores the highs and lows of living in New York City and how relationships — and we ourselves — evolve. Her work has been described as “gently savage,” “bleakly hilarious” and “transportative” and Finck’s smart authentic voice reminds us of the beauty of experiencing the broad range of emotions that make us human. ————————————————————————————————— Warren Craghead, Political Cartoonist Warren Craghead recently posted about the one-year anniversary of his TRUMPTRUMP comics. Congrats, Warren! I started this TRUMPTRUMP project a year ago, on the night Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president. Every day since then I have drawn and shared a grotesque portrait of him and his minions, trying to document who he is and what he is doing to us. Here’s the first post. Here’s a bird’s-eye view of the drawings. This project started like my other drawing projects LADYH8RS and USAH8RS: I drew quick portraits of Trump paired with the seemingly inexhaustible supply of horrible quotes form him. I thought I’d be done on November 8, but when he won I vowed to keep drawing until, as I wrote when starting this project, “—this nightmare ends.” The drawings have turned more detailed and angry and full. At times I can’t keep up! I’ve drawn from and stolen from Goya, Picasso, Steinberg, Grosz, Kollwitz and, most of all, Philip Guston and his 1970s drawings of the Nixon Administration. In a few weeks Retrofit Comics/Big Planet Comics will be publishing a collection of the first six months of the drawings, from the nomination until the inauguration. I’m so grateful to them and to everyone who has seen and encouraged this stupid endeavor. I’m still drawing, every EVERY day, and posting them. People have ask me if I’m ok, if this is taking a toll and I always answer No. I love it – I get to DO something about all this insanity. ————————————————————————————————— An In-Depth Analysis by Glynnis Fawkes Fawkes on mother/daughter relationships, at the New Yorker. ————————————————————————————————— ‘But since he acts in all purity, without any guile, society is prompt to reject him through its representative, Lucy, treacherous, self-confident, an entrepreneur with assured profits, ready to peddle a security that is completely bogus but of unquestioned effect.’ – Umberto Eco on Peanuts In a recent e-newsletter, The New York Review of Books recently included a bunch of links to reviews of different comics works it’s done over the years, including: A Triumph of the Comic-Book Novel (Chris Ware), Gabriel Winslow-Yost, December 20, 2012 Issue Lost New York (Ben Katchor), Anthony Grafton, November 15, 2001 Issue Lyrics in the Swamp (Pogo/Walt Kelly), Brad Leithauser, April 25, 2002 Issue On ‘Krazy Kat’ and ‘Peanuts’, Umberto Eco, June 13, 1985 Issue Girls and Indians (White Boy/Garrett Price), Thomas Powers, January 2016 ————————————————————————————————— Here it is, thee Comics Workbook Composition Competition 2017 – 6-panel grid, traditional North American comic book proportions – but with a twist! Deadline Sept. 5th 2017. FULL DETAILS HERE. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 7-25-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 7-25-2017 – by Gabriella Tito Share this page: [...]

Tim Hensley Draws L.B. “JEFF” JEFFRIES from REAR WINDOW

Chris Anthony DiazMay 27, 2016The Diaz Archivetim hensley’s portrayal of jimmy stewart as L.B. “JEFF” JEFFRIES in alfred hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954, USA) for my ILLUSTRATED MOMENTS IN CINEMA/TELEVISION collection. the illustration was done in april 2016 Share this page: [...]

Noah Van Sciver’s FANTE BUKOWSKI

Chris Anthony DiazJuly 8, 2016The Diaz ArchiveNoah Van Sciver FANTE BUKOWSKI original art that was unpublished (first, second and fourth photos) and published (inside end covers, third photo) in the book. Plus, a chance to see how Noah colors partially on the original art before completing digitally on the computer. More of Noah’s work can be purchased at Fantagraphics Share this page: [...]

09/14/2018

Posted on September 14, 2018September 14, 2018 by Sally Ingraham

Sally here – in Bethesda, MD, for Small Press Expo 2018, that is! Once again Comics Workbook is running a series of free comics workshops for the show – see the details HERE and come check them out if you’re at SPX on Saturday or Sunday this weekend!

Follow our Instagram – @comicsworkbook – for updates and news from SPX, and maybe a sneak peak of some of the comics holdings at the Library of Congress.

I’ll be back with the regular comics news next week!

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged spx 2018

Sally Ingraham

Posted on September 14, 2018September 14, 2018

Explore

06/19/2018

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

09/27/2018

Caleb OrecchioSeptember 27, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here, and I’m headed to CXC ————————————————————————————————— Hi folks I’m about to head out the door to head to the Billy Ireland to check out the programming for CXC (though I feel like I’m still recovering from SPX). If you are attending CXC on Saturday come visit me at the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Room 2-A where I’ll be holding an hour-long workshop at 3:30 pm. We will be breaking down some of the basics and fundamentals of comics together. Come ready to draw! No pressure. Some of the best comics made in my workshops have been made by people who never draw and have never made comics. Meanwhile, I’ve been flipping through Andrew White’s comic Yearly 2018, and I have to say I’m very impressed. I’ll be reviewing it later next week so be on the lookout for that. Talk soon. Take it away Niall. ————————————————————————————————— 09-27-2018 – by Niall Breen Share this page: [...]

01/02/2018

Aaron CockleJanuary 1, 2018NewsAaron here today with the New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium Schedule; Käthe Kollwitz and Sue Coe; Whit Taylor; Imagined Communities, Nationalism & Violence ————————————————————————————————— The 2018 schedule of the Ben Katchor-organized New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium has been posted. This line-up looks great, including presentations by Joe McCullough (on Steve Ditko), Julia Gfrörer, Eleanor Davis, Keren Katz, and Matthew Thurber. ————————————————————————————————— ALL GOOD ART IS POLITICAL: Käthe Kollwitz and Sue Coe At Galerie St. Etienne until February until February 10, 2018. ALL GOOD ART IS POLITICAL: Käthe Kollwitz and Sue Coe will present more than 30 drawings and prints by Kollwitz (1867-1945) and more than 30 paintings, drawings, and prints by Coe (b. 1951). The exhibition borrows its title from writer Toni Morrison, who once noted, “All good art is political! The ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’” The exhibition coincides with the publication of a book of woodcuts by Sue Coe entitled The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto (OR Books, New York and London). Despite their differences in background – Kollwitz was born in East Prussia in the 19th century and lived in Berlin, Germany; Coe is an American born in the U.K. and living in upstate New York – both artists share a career-defining attraction to social issues, undergirded by the belief that art can inspire constructive change. Each is considered among the most important political artists of her time, unmatched in her fearless approach to profoundly difficult subject matter, unerring humanity and eloquence, and an uncanny ability to disturb the viewer’s complacency. ————————————————————————————————— Alternative to Avocado Toast for 2017 Whit Taylor at the NY-er. ————————————————————————————————— Imagined Communities, Nationalism & Violence At Rubber Factory until January 31, 2018. Benedict Anderson’s seminal text “Imagined Communities” investigates the origins of Nationalism as a modern condition and serves as the starting point for our group exhibition. From the influence of rationalist secularism to the conception of homogenous, empty time, Anderson outlines the convergence of factors which led to nationhood as a vehicle for the creation of meaning and ultimately self-sacrifice. As Nationalism is revitalized through increasingly extreme rhetoric whether it is nativism or protectionism, the exhibition explores this new wave of anxiety around nation-hood and ways nation-ness is constructed. Whether it is through the oblique nature of our informational channels which function as echo chambers reminiscent of the earliest ways Nationalism spread through print media or the conflation of meaning with sacrifice, it is clear that there are precedents for how Nationalism as a construct has led to and sustained cycles of violence. ————————————————————————————————— The Winter Semester of thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers starts January 16th 2018! 8 weeks – 500 bux – coaching for as long as you need. The course is hard, but Frank will push your comics making practice to a new level, getting you to think about timing and color in new ways. His experience and ideas have influenced the likes of Connor Willumsen, Michael DeForge, and Simon Hanselmann (quote “I consider Frank Santoro to be my L. Ron Hubbard”) among many others. Dig into something new in the new year! Full details and how to apply can be found HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 1-2-2017 – by Cameron Arthur Share this page: [...]

04/09/2018

Caleb OrecchioApril 9, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thoughts on Plop! and other news. ————————————————————————————————— A couple of months ago, I wrote about a 1979 article in an issue of The Comics Journal where the cover story by Steve Skeates calls for the death of the superhero and the further advocation of comics like Howard the Duck and Plop! Read all about it here if you want. I was recently flipping through my copies of Plop! with new eyes due to Skeates’ insistence that this was the title that could have saved comics. Friends, I must say, the comics industry had to have been in such a sordid state if Plop! and Howard the Duck were the ponies to bet on. I mean, I kinda like Plop! It’s silly, but rarely funny. The best part about the books are usually the covers (a la Basil Wolverton and Wally Wood). I enjoy Sergio Aragonés’ strips that ring-in each issue and then cap it off. There is also enough Bernie Wrightson comics within the series to encourage my forgiving attitude. But ultimately, Plop! is a bust. It’s not funnier than MAD or any other fellow rip-off like Cracked. It might be funnier than Crazy (Marvel’s hat in the ring of MAD rip-offs). I love Aragonés’ strips he writes and draws himself, but typically he is charming up some boring script intended to be clever. Plop! is almost 100% void of cleverness. Wrightson’s comics often are interesting to look at, but in the end are illustrating a really stupid script that doesn’t stick the landing. Each story fails, unlike its EC Comics predecessor, to end each story with a cherry on top or in a neat little bow. Oh and when the art is not drawn by Aragonés, Wrightson, Wally Wood, etc., it’s drawn by the worst cartoonists in the business. I can only assume they were in between jobs at DC and trying to make it in the newspaper one-panel strip business. Yikes, it’s just plain bad comics half the time at Plop! Not the kind of comic I’d encourage more of if I’m trying to save the industry and kill the superhero. But why do I really buy the back-issues if they suck so bad?? The covers! ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know The National Cartoonists Society has announced their Cartoonist of the Year 2017 nominees. Sloane Leong is the most recent guest on Process Party. At TCJ.com, Tegan O’Neil on Crisis on Infinite Earths and Brian Nicholson on Dalston Monsterzz by Dilraj Mann. Todd Allen at The Beat informs us of a presentation and signing for Mark Burstein’s book, Dave Sheridan: Life with Dealer McDope, The Leather Nun, and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Fransisco, on April 24th. Dayton’s son, Mike Peeters is celebrating 50 years of strip making in Dayton, Ohio. Amelia Robinson has the scoop at Dayton Daily News. I would be remiss not to mention Isao Takahata has passed at age 82. Probably made one the most difficult and emotional movies ever in my opinion. ————————————————————————————————— 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 NOW! Deadline to apply is April 12th. Read all about the course HERE and email santoroschool@gmail.com for more details or to apply. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

10/08/2018

Caleb OrecchioOctober 8, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with some brief initial thoughts on Andrew White’s Yearly 2018. ————————————————————————————————— What follows are some initial thoughts on Andrew White’s comic, Yearly 2018. I will write a more in-depth review later on. Yearly 2018 glorifies minutia. Every panel smolders and melts into quiet moments that are psalms of contemplation. There is pleasure in merely flipping through the book. Beautiful, soft colors make an arrangement of bloomed flowers that you can look at for hours. White’s compositional choices give the book weight. Each spread has something to offer separate from the stories they are part of. You can look at the spreads in any order you like and you will come out on the other end experiencing the whole without undermining the books integrity. White seems very comfortable, I see no hesitation in his cartooning. Yearly 2018 is the start of a new brilliant comic I will look forward to every year. More on this comic later. 10/08/2018 – by Niall Breen Share this page: [...]

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