Sally here with your Friday comics roundup. Let me see, what do we have for you today…OH YES!
The Cartoonist Studio Prize shortlist was released! Now on it’s fourth year, the prize comes from the Slate Book Review and The Center for Cartoon Studies, and there are two categories – Best Print and Best Web Comic. As you can see above, the nominees for Best Print Comic are fantastic, with such lovelies as Sacha Mardou‘s Sky in Stereo, Sophie Goldstein‘s The Oven and Jillian Tamaki‘s SuperMutant Magic Academy, among others. In the Best Web Comic category, the nominees are just as rad.
Yep, that’s Ronald Wimberly‘s amazing, important Lighten Up, and Comics Workbook’s own Andrew White with Cavities! How will the judges choose…? We’ll find out the results in the April issue of the Slate Book Review.
It was International Women’s Day on Tuesday, March 8th, and a list popped up via The A.V. Club that is worth taking a gander at. Even folks outside the comics community have heard vague rumblings about such cartoonists as Fiona Staples, Emily Carroll, Kate Beaton, Eleanor Davis, and Noelle Stevenson, but the purpose of this list was to draw attention to other contemporary ladies of comics who fly under most people’s radar so far. Gals like Mathilde Vangheluwe, Aatmaja Pandya, and Tillie Walden, along with seven others. Check out the complete list HERE.
MariNaomi talked to Unicorn Booty this week about her comic Turning Japanese, which will be published by 2dcloud in May of this year.
MariNaomi: Turning Japanese is a comics memoir about working in illegal Japanese hostess bars and searching for my cultural identity as a mixed-race twenty-something.
They also get into what it’s like to be a mixed-race, bisexual woman working in comics today, touch on the two databases that MariNaomi compiled – the Cartoonists of Color and LGBT Cartoonists databases – and there is a nice long excerpt from the book offered up.
Check out the full interview HERE.
I have more interviews for you! Lucie Ebrey talked to Dirty Rotten Comics yesterday about her daily diary comic and why she draws herself as a blue dog (see above). And, from last November, (but I met her this past weekend at Staple! Austin) an interview with Jessi Jordan, who currently draws Musings. She delves into self-care:
Besides art, what else do you do for your self-care?
I do a lot of yoga and some meditation, which is a cliché but I think it’s a cliché for a reason—because it’s really helpful. I do other creative things that aren’t necessarily for work, like cooking and gardening. When I’m feeling stuck creatively, I have to do other types of things to loosen up. Sometimes you have to let that part of your brain rest a little because you can’t always force yourself through things by doing it repeatedly. Given that I’m self-employed and work from home, knowing when to step away is a really big thing [for me].I think it really helps to have a significant other to sometimes call me out on some of these things, like, “You need to go to bed right now.”
Below is a one-off comic from Jessi, but do check out Musings if you come across it. The story is a Doctor Who-like adventure where the characters travel in and out of literature. I picked up the first issue at Staple! Austin and was delighted with it – although I’m a sucker for anything that hates on the Twilight series that hard…! 🙂
Finally, I just discovered Kadak, a collective of South Asian women who use graphic storytelling to investigate and illuminate their rapidly changing subcontinent.
The artists that comprise Kadak are:
Please check out their work!
That’s what I’ve got for you today. Have a nice weekend, and see you back here Monday. – Sally