Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Chris Anthony Diaz

Posted on January 25, 2018January 25, 2018

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08/30/2017

Juan FernándezAugust 30, 2017los Cómics / NewsEmpezamos el día con Carla Berrocal; Jueves Furioso de Dibujo; Simon Hanselmann; la Convocatoria de Voluntarios de Entreviñetas; La Polola con Brittany Tullis; Graficas Pro Aborto Libre; Alex Fito; Berliac y los tebeos de Cómics Workbook! ————————————————————————————————— Sobre el Proceso de Trabajo – Carla Berrocal Antes de nada, debo decir que no creo que exista un método de trabajo que sea bueno o malo o que sea el método definitivo. Creo, sencillamente, que existen miles de formasdistintas de afrontar un encargo, tantas como dibujantes. El mío es uno más de esos miles de métodos. No creo que sea el mejor ni de lejos, pero si que pienso que puede ser interesante compartirlo con vosotros. Siempre con la idea de establecer un diálogo y aprender cosas que puedan resultar interesantes para todos. Así pues, ¿cómo trabajo? ¿cómo afronto un encargo? ————————————————————————————————— Jueves Furioso de Dibujo con Virginia Abrigo 31/09 – 18:00-20:00 Plataforma Lavardén Mendoza 1085, 2000 Rosario, Santa Fe ————————————————————————————————— Simon Hanselmann: la vida no es bonita, ni siquiera en cómic En tiempos de Tumblr, de bloggers sobrevalorados, de fotos de perfil manipuladas por Photoshop y relaciones interpersonales supeditadas a una interfaz friendly, algunos pensamos que una vuelta al existencialismo honesto y deprimente es algo casi necesario. Por eso nos gusta reivindicar a Simon Hanselmann. Y no es que estemos de acuerdo con eso de levantarnos cada mañana planteándonos la existencia entre lacrimosos accesos de frustración, no. No del todo. Pero en esto coincidimos: empieza a resultar imprescindible un poco de reality bite, una dosis medicinal de realidad sucia que levante la alfombra y deje al aire toda esa porquería que se ha ocultado debajo con insistencia. Porque, sin entrar en discursos grunges, es dolorosamente cierto que la realidad, aunque pretendamos lo contrario, no suele ser algo que pueda retocarse con un filtro trendy ni reconstruir recortando el trozo que queremos mostrar. A pesar de que podamos tener momentos felices, la felicidad no es una imagen y, por lo tanto, nunca podrá permanecer demasiado tiempo. Léanlo todo en Literary Notes. ————————————————————————————————— ENTREVIÑETAS, plataforma cultural colombiana, invita a todas las personas en Colombia con interés en donar su tiempo para ayudar en la navegación del #FESTIVALENTREVIÑETAS como Voluntarios de la *red viñetera*. El voluntariado supone a menudo un desafío, pero significa también adquirir nuevos conocimientos y realizar actividades gratificantes. En el voluntariado no se recibe un pago y se entiende como una donación de tiempo y conocimiento para comprender y atender a los detalles que permitirán llevar el festival a buen puerto en sus sedes de este año: BOGOTÁ Miércoles 20 al domingo 24 de septiembre 2017 MEDELLÍN Miércoles 11 al domingo 15 de octubre de 2017 Convocatoria de Voluntarios ————————————————————————————————— Los cómics y las noticias que me han llamado la atención esta semana: Sol Díaz Castillo y Marcela Trujillo tienen una nueva edicion de La Polola Podcast! Las chicas conversan con la académica Brittany Tullis acerca de sus estudios acerca del cómic feminista latinoamericano (grabado con público en Galería Plop!). Brittany comparte sus visiones acerca de la mujer y su rol creativo, la necesidad de replantear como nos vemos socialmente, críticar los roles impuestos y entrar en nosotros mismos a través del cómic y cómo éste a su vez tiene el poder de generar realidades que terminen en un cambio cultural. Aquí las compañeras de Gráficas ProAborto Libre y su campaña por un aborto libre en Chile. Alex Fito repasa algunos de los tótems de la historia del cómic en su último trabajo, una recopilacion en formato concertina. Una auténtica gozada que mezcla las influencias estética’s de Chris Ware y Max. Berliac‘s got a new Asian Food Store Junkies – Manga is Masturbation. The international fracas digs into the “scene” on an empty stomach… Tereixa Constenla offers a solid and interesting overview of the recent transformations in the Spanish Comics Industry in El_Pais. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 8-30-2017 – by Gabriella Tito Share this page: [...]

10/30/2017

Caleb OrecchioOctober 29, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thoughts and ramblings on Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur brought on by reading Brian Evenson’s book, Ed vs. Yummy Fur–and other news.————————————————————————————————— A recent conversation I had with Comics Workbook’s fearless leader, Frank Santoro, about Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur has got me all hot and bothered about the title again. Every so often I go back and flip through my copies and marvel at the energy of Brown’s early strips, and the absolute beauty and power of the later stuff going into Underwater. YF is the promise of the undergrounds fulfilled as a vessel for looking inward and taboo exploitation, and there is virtually limitless aspects of the title to consider and examine as a 21st Century cartoonist. Consequently, I recently read Ed vs. Yummy Fur: Or, What Happens When a Serial Comic Becomes a Graphic Novel by Brian Evenson, published by Uncivilized Books–being their debut title in their line of prose comics criticism, Critical Cartoons. The book compares and contrasts “Ed, The Happy Clown” as a serial within Yummy Fur, and Ed, The Happy Clown the graphic novel. Now, I will admit that the book left a lot to be desired due to the titular focus of Ed which I felt limited the scope of Evenson’s point. However, I was fascinated with Evenson’s consideration of Brown’s Gospels as being inextricably linked to the reading of “Ed” within Yummy Fur. Brown’s Gospels (being The Book of Mark and the unfinished Book of Matthew) are a bit lost on my generation (millennials). This is no doubt due the fact they haven’t been reprinted into a book, but also I think it is simply difficult to understand the significance of such a work during the time of its publication. From what I can gather, no cartoonist had really done a Bible adaption in such a faithful (ha), straight-forward, and non-judgmental way (at least, certainly, for “Mark” this is particularly true). The only other widely-known comics Bible adaption I know of from up to that point is Mayer and Kubert’s, which could basically be considered easily-digestible, white-washed propaganda. In an interview with Brown from Evenson’s book, Evenson says (or writes, because I assume the interview took place over email or at least that’s what it feels like–I wouldn’t be surprised if Evenson just gave Brown a questionnaire to fill out and mail back), “Issue #4 [of Yummy Fur] is one of the few issues of comics I remember being really shocked by. I think it was less because of the sex and murder at the end of the Ed material in that issue and more because we go straight from that to an adaption of the Biblical book of Mark.” I think what Yummy Fur readers were expecting from Brown’s “Mark” was biting satire and exploitation, and obviously the lack of both and the general neutrality of the adaption shocked his fans more than any “parody” could have. However, I think if Brown had published “Ed” and the Gospels in their own separate books, the effect Evenson talks about experiencing would be less severe or memorable. After reading this, and the rest of Ed vs. Yummy Fur, I can’t help but see YF as anything less than one complete work–as oppose to a book containing many serialized stories. All comics in YF from “Ed” to “Showing Helder” to “The Little Man” to “Fuck”, (AND the letters pages) etc. have an interesting give and take with the Gospels they share a book with. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there is an unsevered umbilical chord connecting the early pre-“Ed” material to the later autobio stuff; and going further into Underwater. I see Yummy Fur being the record of a developing cartoonist constantly tinkering with his craft, and a self-aware conscience looking at it’s old-self in the face. When you read the “Playboy” stories, the juxtaposition of the Gospels are impossible to ignore while reading about young Chester’s religious upbringing. It’s like the Gospels and the teachings of Christ are always in the back of Brown’s mind and dictate his actions and motivations for better or for worse. Anyone still here? Well if you are, here is what I’m picturing in my head: A multi-volume, “The Complete Yummy Fur.” Everything reprinted (including Vortex house-ads–like, literally just scan mint copies of Yummy Fur cover to cover and sew them together) even the letters column, aka “The Fur Bag”–of course all this would be done as a bootleg, to Chester Brown’s chagrin I assume. The last volume would be subtitled; the complete Underwater. Unedited, these volumes would contain an interesting insight into an individual’s reckoning with their “conflicting” interests, political views, personal stories, and relationships with readers and “the times”. Something to chew on for 21st Century cartoonists like myself. -CO BONUS: Lookit this! An observant, Tom K from the 90s in the letter pages of Underwater. Tom would go on to publish Evenson’s book in 2014. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Jim Rugg on Paste Magazine talking Street Angel. Fantagraphics has a sale going on until tomorrow! Don’t miss out! Need to know what the program for CAB 2017 looks like?? Here it is. Karl Stevens is the latest guest on Process Party. Campbell White is the latest guest on Inkstuds. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil– 10-30-2017 – by Sally Ingraham —————————————————————————————————Joanie and Jordie – 10-30-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— Cozytown– 10-30-2017 – by Juan Fernandez Share this page: [...]

07/09/2018

Caleb OrecchioJuly 9, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with brief thoughts on Steve Ditko, and other news! ————————————————————————————————— You’ve probably heard by now that Steve Ditko has passed away. Thee great Steve Ditko. I’ve been going through my annual Ditko obsession these past few months which makes his passing all the more surprising. For a while, I’d figured he’d live forever–and he will, being survived by his work. Often, I can’t decide if I’m more in awe of his strange imagination, his incredible storytelling chops, his amazing formalistic skills or his unstoppable work ethic. Ditko is a true inspiration to cartoonists, or at least to this cartoonist. I could go on and on, but am wary of adding to the noise. “What can be said that hasn’t been said before?” I’ve already written multiple columns about Ditko’s work and will continue to do so, so I’ll not exhaust my praise and admiration here. I constantly find new challenges as a cartoonist, formalistically and idealistically, in Ditko’s work. I am constantly blown away by the man’s innumerable innovations. I am sure he is on the Astral Plane, navigating the cosmos with the other long-lost comic book greats. Or maybe not. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d spend the afterlife working in isolation, and mastering his art as he did in this life. Below are three of my favorite Ditko spreads lately. Two of which I’ve written about on this site. ————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Michael Dean has written an obituary for Ditko over at TCJ.com. Also on TCJ.com, an obituary for Harlan Ellison (also by Dean), along with the infamous 1979 Comics Journal interview with Gary Groth. In case you are curious what The Comics Reporter’s latest Five For Friday was… Scott Cederlund on Young Frances by Hartley Lin at Panel Patter. Robin McConnell has read some comics recently, and talked to Mariko Tamaki. Finally, on TCJ’s latest installment of Retail Therapy, we get a look at Mission Comics. Share this page: [...]

Ch 5: The Figure in Detail (FACC)

Juan FernándezJanuary 1, 2016ResourcesShare this page: [...]

09/27/2016

Aaron CockleSeptember 27, 2016NewsAaron here today with Discipline; Dykes in Print/Boiled Angel/CBLDF; Maintenance Art; Nadel/Dunham; Remembering Kim Thompson; Ford/Walden; French Comics in the USA; Portraits & Swinespritzen ————————————————————————————————— Dash Shaw is posting Diary Comics this week at TCJ, where he discusses the process of his work-in-progress, Discipline: This book is a long comic book, but it does not have any speech balloons or panel borders. The illustrations and the hand-written cursive text float on the page. This activates the negative space of the page, which lends the book a spacious stillness, or a quiet, “Quakerly” tone. This spacing relates to Civil War-era illustration, where elements hover inside of articles. Also, this allows me to write and draw all of the elements separately, so the book is easier for me to edit. With the conventional comic approach, usually the insertion of a panel throws off all of the other panels in the book. Because of the collage-like structure of my book, I can easily insert illustrative moments and pieces of text and research/write while still making new drawings. ————————————————————————————————— Censorship: Don’t Do it! In celebration (?) of Banned Books week, Pen.org has a piece by Jennifer Camper, Dykes in Print: And the Guardian revisits the Mike Diana Boiled Angel trial and the origins of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Set up in 1986, the CBLDF exists to fight censorship of comic books, protect the First Amendment right to free speech and, more pragmatically, to provide legal representation for comics creators facing prosecution. Founder Denis Kitchen was running Kitchen Sink Press, a publisher of underground comics, when he heard about a police raid on Friendly Frank’s comic shop in Chicago. Six officers had seized seven titles, including erotic comic Omaha the Cat Dancer, Robert Crumb’s anthology Weirdo and SF-smut comic Heavy Metal, and arrested manager Michael Correa. Friendly Frank’s was shut down for five days, but not before one of the arresting officers told newspapers there was a “satanic influence” in the comics seized. Kitchen was appalled. “I realised immediately that if police officers with built-in Satan detectors could get away with making arrests and seizing objectionable comic books, much more than the comics industry was at stake,” he says. He swiftly raised $20,000 for a fighting fund, helped by comics heavyweights like Crumb and Frank Miller. “It was gratifying to see that sudden unity among the comics community,” Kitchen says. “I was more used to people squabbling.” ————————————————————————————————— Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art at Queens Museum This first survey of Ukeles’ work is organized by the Queens Museum’s Larissa Harris and guest co-curator Patricia C. Phillips, who initiated the project in 2012. The show will span five decades, from her work as a pioneer of feminist performance to a practitioner of public art, in which Ukeles invites us to reconsider indispensable urban systems and the workers who maintain them. Ukeles is undoubtedly best-known for her 36+ year role as the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Department of Sanitation. Unprecedented when it began in 1978, this residency has now become a model for municipalities engaging with artists as creative agents. ————————————————————————————————— Dan Nadel on Carroll Dunham’s drawing at Hyperallergic: Dunham and his peers had emerged from a conceptual and process-oriented New York milieu in which a number of artists were exhibiting and redefining drawing as a primary medium, including Barry Le Va, Dorothea Rockburne (who Dunham and Kendrick assisted), Mel Bochner, and Sol Lewitt. Connecting these and other artists was the removal of both the image and the artist’s sensuous touch, replaced with rigorous conceptual procedures. In contrast, Terry Winters notes that he and Dunham “saw drawing and making things by hand as a way out of or into art. We were reconnecting with gesture and touch, and their capacities to register other kinds of information not available through logic.” They were also finding kinship with artists that were not highly considered at the time, such as the mid-20th century German painter and photographer Wols and the American post-war painter William Baziotes, both of whose work defied categorization and remained outside of the contemporary dialogue. ————————————————————————————————— At the ever-enduring Comics Reporter blog, Tom Spurgeon remembers Fantagraphics publisher Kim Thompson, and looks at the aging of the ‘alt-comics’ crowd: The thing that stuck in my head, though, throughout today, was how many people texted and e-mailed that they thought Kim was older than 60 when he passed away. I think that’s because Kim and Gary Groth and their roughly same-age peers were either the first generation of alt-comics publishers or the first generation since the first generation to enter mainstream comics in a significant way. So you have a lot of people 55-65 with trackable careers two, three, four decades long in an established arts industry, which is rare outside of a few precocious creative talents. ————————————————————————————————— Sean Ford recently conducted an interview with Tillie Walden, posted on Inkstuds. ————————————————————————————————— French Comics Framed Festival NYC, 27 September-5 November Sept 27 – Nov. 5: French Comics Framed – Exhibition The Cooper Union, Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, NY 10003 Oct. 4: Panel by Asaf & Tomer Hanuka The Society of illustrators, 128 East 63rd Street, NY, NY 10065 Oct 6-9: Meet our artists on booth #1558 at New York Comic Con and on the Artist Alley Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, 655 W. 34th St., NY, NY 10001 Oct. 6, 7pm: French Comics On Screen: Film Adaptations of Franco-Belgian Graphic Narratives The School of Visual Arts, 209 E 23rd St, 3rd floor Oct. 7, 6:30pm : How to Draw a Life: The Rise of Graphic Biography in France Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, NY 10029 Oct. 8, 1:30-2:30pm: Drawing From the World: Franco-Belgian Comics in Global Context New York Comic Con (room 1B03), Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, 655 W. 34th St., NY, NY 10001 Oct. 8, 7pm: Reconstructing Comix: The “Architecture” of Franco-Belgian Graphic Narratives, from Tintin to Today The Great Hall of Cooper Union, Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, NY, NY 10003 Nov. 1, 7pm: Panel discussion: Drawing the unspeakable Columbia University 116th St & Broadway, NY, NY 10027 ————————————————————————————————— Help send Connor Willumsen to the UK for The Lakes International Comic Arts Festival in October! He will be teaching workshops with Frank Santoro and Aidan Koch while there – if you’re in the area check it out. To help him get to the show, Comics Workbook is offering two new Connor publications. Portraits and Swinespritzen – both limited editions, both incredible. Share this page: [...]

Comic Arts Brooklyn 2017

Posted on January 25, 2018January 25, 2018 by Chris Anthony Diaz

Comic Arts Brooklyn, Saturday, November 11, 2017, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York (clicking image will take you to the cartoonist’s link)

Connor Willumsen, Anna Haifisch, Dash Shaw and Joe Kessler

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in The Diaz Archive

Chris Anthony Diaz

Posted on January 25, 2018January 25, 2018

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11/08/2018

Comics WorkbookNovember 7, 2018NewsSam Ombiri on Men’s Group The Video by Ben Jones ————————————————————————————————— I find I am often longing for a great comic. This longing has the feeling of a hole with a specific shape that only allows a corresponding shape to fit in. I suppose there’s no sense in wondering why I want to read a good comic; I mean I don’t want to read a bad comic as far as I know, although I don’t mind reading a bad one. There’s a lingering dissatisfaction that often comes from reading good work, taking it for granted how good the work is, and then moving on to the next good work to take for granted. There’s something rather depressing about it. It seems to me that Ben Jones’ work is often consumed along in this manner. It’s apparent when I run into a knock off of Ben Jones’ or Paper Rad’s work that it’s being done by someone who totally missed the mysterious and vague point of Ben Jones’ work. Which to be fair seems mysterious even to him. In an interview in his book, Men’s Group The Video, Ben Jones says “I don’t get Gumby. You can’t say he’s well animated. I didn’t even watch Gumby all that much as a kid. I’m not trying to call back to some 1970s nostalgia. I’m not using characters for their pop iconographic value. I’m using them as language.” He later says “I’m trying to use Gumby for what Gumby was intended for…” to which he adds “I’m deadly serious about my characters. I don’t mean this as a joke: I feel like Shakespeare, and I’m using star-crossed lovers. I’m very much interested in my characters as much as Shakespeare was interesting in using cheesy things like lovers and kings to tell interesting stories.” Men’s Group The Video benefits by not being jam packed with a lot of comics. This allows the comics to be more closely examined by the preceding text casually asking questions about the comics. In the case of Gumby, Ben finds himself optimizing what Gumby’s presence in Ben Jones’ work represents or invokes or communicates. There’s an interview where Kevin Huizenga says “Ben Jones has always been really inspiring to me, I think it’s because- this sounds stupid- he is very creative. He just comes up with amazing things. His work is unified in a strange way, too. It’s hard to explain. The way he’ll just draw a comic about muppet babies as if it’s no big deal and they’ll be rapping or something. It’ll be really funny but beautiful and scary too.” Men’s Group The Video is packed with what appear to be, metaphorically speaking, a magnifying glass to what Ben Jones is doing with the comics language (as well as other mediums). He has created this mythology of this collective called Men’s Group The Video that in a certain sense exists. The idea or the impression of the existence of the collective is used as a language of sorts to communicate a certain feeling Ben Jones is trying to get at. It also allows him raise new questions in this mode of communicating. Some “members” of this collective write essays, some, like the painter Joe Bradley, write poetry. Some “members” like Dan Nadel interview Ben Jones. Reading these texts are important in relation to the comics, because while the comics are immensely strong on their own, the comics are even more so felt with a certain depth. They also give loads of clarity, and somehow create more mystery simultaneously to the comics and art Ben did in Men’s Group The Video and the work he did with Jessica and Jacob Ciocci in the past. Ben’s work often seems to be about solving the mystery of him drawing what he did at the time that he did it. Ordinarily with most other comics, it would seem goofy to question the drawings in this way. It seems fitting to ask the question despite the goofy nature of the question, but the ingrained nature of what he’s drawing is goofiness. Ben doesn’t have a big answer to this question he just keeps circling it with more art and comics that don’t cease to be compelling. ————————————————————————————————— Cement Mixer – 11-8-18 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

Rachel Masilamani – Foundational Works (2000-2013)

Juan FernándezJanuary 12, 2017EssaysThere’s things you can’t do with words and there’s things you can’t do with pictures, that’s what’s so exciting about the form. It’s constantly pressing against your limitations. – Rachel Masilamani 2013 A veteran self-publisher, Rachel Masilamani has been making comics since 1997. Her first comics collection, RPM Comics #1, received a grant from the Xeric Foundation and was named “Best Comic Book” by the Baltimore City Paper. Since then, her comics have appeared in Meathaus, Street Runoff, Graphics Classics, The Indiana Review, Dog City, MUTHA Magazine and in other anthologies and in her own publications. This is a look at her body of work as a whole through 2013. An accomplished story teller, Masilamani is hard pressed to categorize her work. Endlessly fascinated with people, Masilamani draws inspiration from her own life and the behaviors of those around her to create stories that burrow themselves deep into the minds of her readers. Her stories elegantly blend naturalistic storytelling with expressionistic visual representation. In much of her work, Masilamani explores notions of local and universal truth by blurring the line between fact and fiction. In so doing, she makes her inner life palpable. She walks this tightrope in ways similar to the memoir work of Carol Tyler, Mardou and Gabrielle Bell. Although Masilamani grew up reading newspaper comics, she didn’t start making her own comics until she was a student at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD in the late nineties. Her first formal forays into the medium were under the guidance of Baltimore based cartoonist and instructor, Tom Chalkley. One of the stories made under Chalkley’s guidance, Pen Bandit, appears in Masilamani’s first collection of comics, RPM #1. Originally planned to be a short film that she wanted to propose to John Hopkin’s film club, Masilamani decided to make Pen Bandit a comic on her own to avoid the inevitable frustrations she foresaw of having to compromise her vision. Classic comics maker. After she graduated from John Hopkins University in 1999 with a degree in Anthropology and a minor in Art History, she didn’t go looking for a job or head off to graduate school, rather she attempted to make cartooning a full time job. She knew it would be hard but she stuck to her guns. For months she dedicated herself to improving her cartooning and honing her ability to translate her observations to paper. It was a bold move as a young cartoonist. Her efforts paid off when she received the Xeric Foundation Grant. The grant provided her with $5000 to print and distribute her first collection of comics, RPM #1 in 2000. With the help of the grant, she hit the ground running. The first issue of RPM featured uniquely original, personal stories, carefully rendered in pencil and pen & ink. Though the work might not have been fully developed, it was a promising collection of stories that offered a fresh perspective. After continuing freelance work and putting out the occasional minicomic, Masilamani published RPM #2 in Baltimore. RPM #2 retained the same ingenious sense of observation and personality that made RPM #1 stand out, but revealed the hand of an artist who had tighter storytelling mechanics and a greater confidence in draftsmanship. Comprised of memoir, folk tales, and urban fantasies, the variety of genres in RPM #2 placed Masilamani’s narrative chops center stage. After publishing RPM #2, life caught up with Masilamani. Though she’d given the life of a free-lance cartoonist and illustrator a go, it wasn’t meant to be. Masilamani returned to school to study Library Science and began a series of relocations that wound up taking her to Pittsburgh, PA. During this time, Masilamani slowed down her release of comics. While it would seem that Masilamani had taken a hiatus from her cartooning, the truth was that she continued to work and re-work new comics privately. This new period of cartooning saw Masilamani put out two self-contained mini-comics, Singing Contest and Las Cuerpas. While both stories take place in the same physical landscape, the Mexican-American border, Singing Contest and Las Cuerpas explore radically different emotional landscapes. Singing Contest tells the story of a young woman who leaves her home to participate in a televised singing contest. The comic is a playful experiment that cleverly uses the iconographic power of the comics medium. In Singing Contest, Masilamani allows the animals that aid the protagonist on her journey to speak in words, while all of Masilamani’s human characters speak in icons. As a result of this formal decision, Masilamani creates a smooth, but idiosyncratic reading experience that lends the story an air of heartfelt whimsy. Las Cuerpas, which Masilamani published in 2010, is much heavier. It deals head on with the femicides of Ciudad Juarez Mexico. A wordless comic inked expressively in pen and ink, Las Cuerpas swiftly moves across the city of Juarez and builds to a feverish crescendo. Las Cuerpas is the result of Masilamani living in New Mexico and experiencing first hand the constant news about women and girls being murdered in Ciudad Juarez with no discernible follow up. Though at the time she felt powerless to do anything about the murders, Masilamani couldn’t stop imagining that something could make the femicides unignorable. Las Cuerpas is her attempt at making the horrors impossible to ignore. Since Las Cuerpas, Masilamani has self-published two more collections of stories, Odds Are in 2012 and No Words in 2013. The two collections document a graceful evolution in the poetics of Masilamani’s story telling. Odds Are contains 9 stories, each of which, in their own way, experiment with the semiotic relationship between words and pictures. Comprised of explorations of sensory experience, feminine identity and gender politics, Odds Are shows Masilamani handle extremely nuanced material. No Words consists of 3 longer stories, which focus on semiotics and trust, race and ethnicity, and urban disenfranchisement. In these stories Masilamani allows herself more time to slowly create dense, inhabitable yet challenging narrative spaces. These stories, though rooted in traditional narratives, make one think of the comics poetry of Tom Neely and John Hankiewicz, mainly because of Masilamani’s mature poetic, highly symbolic, dense and at times abstract, language that takes readers out of their comfort zones. Attentively tuned to the mechanics involved in the co-mixing of abstract languages, Masilamani achieves a certain alchemy with these comics. It’s thrilling to read. In 2013 I published a collection of short stories by Masilamani in Dog City #2, the box anthology I co-edited with Simon Reinhardt and Luke Healy. It was called Selfies. It was an honor to work with her in this capacity and to bring her work to the anthology’s audience. Here’s what Rob Clough had to say about it on The Comics Journal: “See What I’m Saying” is one of my favorite stories of 2013, as she reflects back on a childhood dare to shut up for five minutes, how she found herself as a child with the constant urge to tell stories, and how she is facing the concept of mortality. The heavy narrative bent of the text nonetheless lightly plays around its images, commenting on them in oblique ways while never directly addressing the fear of breast cancer. “Selfies” is a series of amusing, marvelous drawings of women taking photos of themselves with their cameras. “Move It” is all about a series of interactions between a zaftig teenager and the new boy in her building. Her verisimilitude and restraint regarding the way teens act is remarkable, and she quickly manages to create a youth-dominated world in the way that the Hernandez Brothers might. There’s a sense of getting all the details right, which gives the reader trust before the story’s final, painful payoff. Since these works, Masilamani has been working with MUTHA Magazine on an incredible series of comics, her NONPARTUM series. You can read her work there here. As a fan of her work, I’m constantly inspired by her doggedness as a creator, balancing fulltime work as a librarian and family life to create insistent and timeless comics. It is a joy to see her continue to revel in the liminal spaces of comics in her latest work over at MUTHA. You can purchase Rachel Masilamani’s work online from her site, RPM Comics. You can read some of her comics online for free on her zco.mx page. Share this page: [...]

03/02/2016

Sally IngrahamMarch 2, 2016NewsMarch is Women’s History Month, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is celebrating female cartoonists. First up was Barbara Hall, the main artist for Girl Commandos, which appeared in issues of Speed Comics in the 1940s. Read a bit more about her HERE, and check the CBLDF throughout the month for more biographical snippets of women in comics. How about a female cartoonist who is working today? Anna Mancini, or Manzanna, is a Brazilian artist. Click on the image above for more info about that particular comic. You can find much of Anna’s work on her tumblr, but it is nice to experience her comic Sadnesses HERE. A simple slideshow format brings a different rhythm to the panels, forcing, or allowing, you to slow down and really see it. This different type of viewing experience leads to a discussion of Stela, a subscription-based iOS app for reading comics that just hit the stores. The app was reviewed over on Polygon. Stela is experimenting with a variation on a format known as…the Infinite Canvas, a term coined by that mad scientist of sequential art, Scott McCloud. For obvious reasons, comics on screens don’t have to obey the physical limitations of print, and in his 2000 book Reinventing Comics, McCloud proposed that the screen could be treated as a window. Will it work or won’t it? That’s probably up to personal preference and the quality of the content. Fortunately comics like Ronald Wimberly’s GratNin are trying the app on for size, and if Ron can make the endless scroll bend to his will then there’s probably hope for it. On a somewhat related note, Simon Reinhardt has just released Mystery Town #4 and announced that it is going to be “officially a monthly thing for 2016″…! Who else is excited? Follow the link above to check out the whole thing, and read issues 1-3 as well. Tyler Landry has finished publishing The Jaundiced Eye on Comics Workbook. Stumble into a shadowy state that mesmerizes and terrifies almost equally. If you’re hungry for more CLAV after this, Tyler just loaded all of Shit and Piss #3 on Ello – check it out HERE. I hope these bits and bobs help you get through hump day! Cheerio – Sally Share this page: [...]

Ch1: The Comic Head (FACC)

Juan FernándezJanuary 1, 2016ResourcesShare this page: [...]

03/26/2018

Caleb OrecchioMarch 25, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thoughts on A. Degen’s Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters, and other news. ————————————————————————————————— A. Degen’s work is always enjoyable and fun to look at. The drawing is loose, but not sloppy. The images are dense, but not overwhelming. The wordless narratives are simple, yet not unsophisticated. Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters, from thee Koyama Press (May 2018), continues the trend. Degen’s work often brings to mind Moebius’ Airtight Garage, specifically the element of spontaneity and worlds-within-worlds locations, with a dash of early Tezuka minimalism. In the case of this book, particularly in scenes concerning virtual reality, I sniff a whiff of Frank Miller’s Ronin. Like Ronin, or it’s most famous exploitation, The Matrix, Mindhunters is all about dreams versus reality and the dreams within dreams. I think. It’s a big fat book, weighing in at nearly 400 pages. Would I have preferred if it was serialized over 4 or 5 floppies? Yes. I think the amalgamation of separate-yet-intertwining stories would have benefitted from some time between them, some tension. However, I am painfully aware that a comics publisher is more likely to publish a giant tome, rather than a handful of pamphlets these days. Despite my preferences, the big book delivers the goods. To me, the love for one’s work really comes off these pages and emits a warmth and comfort akin to Brandon Graham’s best comics. Degen’s strengths as a cartoonist is that the work is always consistent and fully developed. I don’t sense that anything has been accidentally left out. Humor and imagination come together to make cotton candy for the eyes. I am seldom let down by an A. Degen book. The work is always worth its salt. Look for Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters in May 2018. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Tom Spurgeon talks to WonderCon spokesperson, David Glanzer. Rob Clough reviews Present by Leslie Stein at Your Chicken Enemy. Box Brown is the latest guest on Process Party. ————————————————————————————————— 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. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 3-26-2018 – by Frank Santoro Share this page: [...]

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