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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TCAF 2016 – Lookaround

Frank SantoroJune 29, 2016Festivals and ShowsShare this page: [...]

08/24/2018

Sally IngrahamAugust 23, 2018NewsSally here with a look at Anne Simon’s “Song of Aglaia” ————————————————————————————————— I found Anne Simon‘s Song of Aglaia difficult, but in a way, the things I didn’t like about it are what makes it interesting. When I am presented with a female protagonist I want to get behind them 100%. When a female protagonist turns out to be complicated and prone to making decisions that hurt the people around her, I have to adjust my expectations. Such is life, of course. Simon demands many adjusted expectations with Song of Aglaia. She begins by upsetting a number of traditional tropes that are usually found in myths and fairy tales. A water nymph, Aglaia, is presented at the beginning of the comic as a fairly typical victim of male violence and oppression. She wants to be happy and loved, and in the pursuit of that finds herself abandoned and with child, rejected by her father, and then forced into a marriage of convienence in order to avoid a punishment of death handed down by a tyrannical ruler. Switching things up from there, Simon draws Aglaia with more backbone than is usually the case in fairy tales. Aglaia fights back, rescuing her children, killing the tyrant, escaping her loveless marriage – but at what cost? Once she has gained power, Aglaia wields it poorly, decreeing her own opressions and abondoning people who care for her. The moral clarity that many fairy tales lay claim to is definitely blurry in this comic. It’s easy to root for Aglaia to a point, but when her choices continue to lead to heartbreak, reality sets in and I am forced to consider that Song of Aglaia is NOT a fairy tale. It is a story that asks “what happens next?” After the male oppressors are overthrown and equality is achieved, when women in fact gain the upper hand and are free to build the world they wish for…then what? The example that Aglaia provides is an all too possible result. There is no triumph when cruelty leads to more cruelty, when the abused turn into abusers. With interesting artwork and good storytelling Simon offers a thoughtful comic, but one that doesn’t answer the questions she brings up. It’s a fairly heavy reminder that in the fairy tale and in real life there are no easy answers. Everyone is complicated and nursing their own wounds, and we are caught in a cycle that often seems inescapable. At best, we can hope to muddle onward, perhaps with a little more grace than Aglaia manages. Although it may sound as though I didn’t like this comic, I do recommend taking a look at it! Somewhere, hidden between asking these types of questions and imagining the possible answers, there lies the potential for discovering a solution – and examining the “difficult” things always brings us closer to that. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

04/27/2018

Sally IngrahamApril 26, 2018NewsSally Ingraham here with comics by Sophia Foster-Dimino, Glynnis Fawkes, and Rachel Masilamani; a Swedish canon of female cartoonists; plus much more! ————————————————————————————————— The Eisner Award nominations have been announced, and Sophia Foster-Dimino‘s comic Small Mistakes Make Big Problems, from the Comics for Choice anthology edited by Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor, and O.K. Fox, has gotten a nod in the Best Short Story category. You can read the whole comic HERE. Another noteworthy nomination is Nick Sousanis’ essay on Karen Green, Columbia’s first curator for comics and cartoons, which appeared in Columbia Magazine last year. You can read A Life in Comics: The Graphic Adventures of Karen Green HERE. Check out the numerous other Eisner Award nominations HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Juan Fernandez pointed me toward a powerful dissertation by Swedish visual communication design student Stina Sandström, which digs into feminism in Sweden and how comics play a role in the continuing discourse on gender performance there. Looking specifically at three female cartoonists – Liv Strömquist, Sara Granér (her work pictured above) and Nina Hemmingsso – Stina Sandström focuses on how they work independently and yet imitate and expand on each others work, together creating a unified voice that is having an increasingly profound effect on popular culture and cultural norms in Sweden. “The success of these comic artists is reliant on their notion of Sisterhood. They have responded to the fragmentation of feminism by recognizing the power of coalition: that the search for essential female unity is not of gender identity, but of sexual afﬁnity. They’re connected in the realization that current representations of women’s roles, status, as well as the female body are all affected by gender norms which are growing stronger by repetition. By experimenting with 48 sexual transgressions and trying on a variety of gender costumes they try to break and disrupts repetitive gender performances. They have realized that by imitating and expanding on each others work, they share the burden of communicating the entire feminist story. These women make up a choir that, unlike the second wave of feminism, do not make up one united voice but rather sing in canon. A canon is a musical technique where an initial melody is imitated and expanded on by others at different intervals creating a wall of sound without interruption. As one singer takes a break to inhale there are others to ﬁll the gap and so the canon can continue in an endless loop. Like a canon these comic artists’ voices ﬂood the media landscape with provocative female identities and carnivalesque behavior without interruption. They keep repeating them until they lose their provocative nature and start to feel acceptable.“ Read the rest of The Carnival Grotesque: Representations of femininity in Swedish feminist comics HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Glynnis Fawkes takes Charlotte Brontë to yoga. What a concept! It makes for a good comic – read the whole thing on Spiral Bound. ————————————————————————————————— The Lines Drawn collective has a new installment of their project up on MUTHA Magazine. Part of a comic by Rachel Masilamani is pictured above. The collective states: “We are parents and teachers using comics to illustrate how we feel as adults responsible for the care and safety of children and youth in an age of continued school shootings. We hope our comics add momentum to the groundswell of students demanding solutions to end gun violence, not only in schools, but as related to police shootings of people of color, and the criminalization of African Americans. The collective includes Emilie Bess, Adam Bessie, Amy Camber, Sarah Romano Diehl, Ellen Forney, Robyn Jordan, David Lasky, Meredith Li-Vollmer, Mita Mahato, Rachel Masilamani, Annie Murphy, Amy Ongiri, Marc Parenteau, and Rachel Scheer.“ This installment, posted on the anniversary of the Columbine High School Shooting, includes comics by Ellen Forney, Rachel Scheer, Sarah Romano Diehl, Adam Besie and Marc Parenteau, and Rachel Masilamani. See them all HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Extra! Extra! The New York Times weighs into the conversation on the “new” Nancy, as envisioned by Olivia Jaimes – HERE. At The Comics Beat there is a “hits” version of the Nancy buzz – and the anticipation for the reveal of Aunt Fritzi is getting out of control…! Six cartoonists look at immigration – on The Nib. Graphic Novel TK talks to Annie Koyama about her life as a comics publisher – listen HERE. Sloane Leong talks to Nivedita Sekar about her upcoming comic Your Mother’s Fox – on The Comics Journal. I haven’t been reading Natasha Alterici‘s Heathen, but after skimming this article on the upcoming film production, I feel like I need to start. A “lesbian Viking comic” about a gal named Aydis “who is intent on ending the patriarchal and oppressive reign of the god-king Odin“…? YES PLEASE! ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 4-27-2018 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

04/24/2017

Caleb OrecchioApril 23, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with projects and new work from Jim Rugg, Dash Shaw, Bill Wehmann, and Alan Moore to start the week. ————————————————————————————————— Jim Rugg will be signing his brand new Image-released Street Angel: After School Kung Fu Special in Pittsburgh at The Phantom of the Attic, Wednesday the 26th from 4 to 7pm. Rugg is a cartooning and book-making master, and his design background really shines through in a big way with this book. When I opened up an advanced copy of After School Kung-Fu Special, my eyes dilated and my brain blew out the back of my head. The complete technical control he has over his craft goes unparalleled except by the cartoonists whose names are synonymous with the medium. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a review coupled with an interview with Rugg by Geeked Gods here. Order Street Angel: After School Kung Fu Special from your local comic book store. ————————————————————————————————— Also in Pittsburgh, Dash Shaw will be rolling in for a sneak preview of his animated film, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea on Tuesday the 25th. Details here. Look for his film coming to an area near you! And check out Dash’s riff on René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet over on Criterion.com ————————————————————————————————— Pittsburgh cartoonist, Bill Wehmann has an interesting comics-related project over on his site called “Death by Comics.” Whether the story is fact or fiction is irrelevant because the sentiments and emotions ring true through the entire history of the comic-book industry. ————————————————————————————————— Pittsburgh again. Over the weekend, it seems that The Toonseum held a comics award ceremony where Ed Piskor won a NEMO Award for “Excellence in the Cartoon Arts.” The ceremony took place at The ToonSeum’s fundraiser K-Blam! 2017. Caitlin Rose Boyle also won a NEMO Award for “Emerging Talent”. Ed’s show at The ToonSeum – “Hermetically Sealed” – will be up through May 21st 2017. ————————————————————————————————— Around the 12-minute mark, the boys over at the Comic Books Are Burning In Hell podcast recently had some thoughts on the final issue of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Lovecraft epic, Providence. I really, really enjoyed Providence, Moore’s latest and probably last graphic novel. It stands among his greatest works like Watchmen, From Hell, Miracleman, V for Vendetta, etc. Once considered the greatest comics writer (though he still is, as far as writers who don’t draw go), Moore’s reputation has gone down the toilet for a lot of folks. It’s a shame. He’s been screwed over by cooperate shadow-people and shunned by finicky readers. Now he’s leaving comics for good and it’s probably too late to apologize. If you’re late to the game, ask your local comic shop about getting Providence Act I, a hardback collecting the first four issues. ————————————————————————————————— Blinkers – 4-24-2017 – by Jack Brougham ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 4-24-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 4-24-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

07/24/2018

Aaron CockleJuly 24, 2018NewsNatural Process; Bell/Porcellino/Duchamp; More ‘R. Mutt’; More Grip ————————————————————————————————— “Will you come see the ‘real’ webpage painting at the museum? Or will you see it ‘virtual’ through the web?” Via Rhizome.org’s Net Art Anthology: Natural Process is an installation that translates the iconic circa-2003 Google search engine home page to the form of a large-scale painting, and then back to digital media via webcam. This double remediation, enacted by Japanese net art duo exonemo (Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa) was exhibited at the Mori Art Museum in 2004, at a moment when artists were increasingly interested in the slippage between art’s circulation online and in the gallery. The painting was purchased by Google, and has not been exhibited publicly until now; it is on view through March 10, 2019 at ICC Tokyo and as part of Net Art Anthology. ————————————————————————————————— A Trip to the Museum With Cartoonist John Porcellino Always nice to see cartoonists visiting museums. ————————————————————————————————— Speaking of Marcel Duchamp… The iconic Fountain (1917) is not created by Marcel Duchamp In 1982 a letter written by Duchamp came to light. Dated 11 April 1917, it was written just a few days after that fateful exhibit. It contains one sentence that should have sent shockwaves through the world of modern art: it reveals the true creator behind Fountain – but it was not Duchamp. Instead he wrote that a female friend using a male alias had sent it in for the New York exhibition. Suddenly a few other things began to make sense. Over time Duchamp had told two different stories of how he had created Fountain, but both turned out to be untrue. An art historian who knew Duchamp admitted that he had never asked him about Fountain, he had published a standard-work on Fountain nevertheless. The place from where Fountain was sent raised more questions. That place was Philadelphia, but Duchamp had been living in New York. … Who was living in Philadelphia? Who was this ‘female friend’ that had sent the urinal using a pseudonym that Duchamp mentions? That woman was, as Duchamp wrote, the future. Art history knows her as Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was a brilliant pioneering New York dada artist, and Duchamp knew her well. This glaring truth has been known for some time in the art world, but each time it has to be acknowledged, it is met with indifference and silence. Via Theo Paijmans. ————————————————————————————————— Grip Vol. 1 If you didn’t get the chance this past Friday or over the weekend, please take some time to read Sally Ingraham’s review of Lale Westvind’s excellent new book, Grip, out now from Perfectly Acceptable Press. ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 7-24-18 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 7-24-18 – by Caleb Orecchio 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

Explore

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: [...]

11/23/2017

Sally IngrahamNovember 22, 2017NewsSally here with Egyptian comics, cartoonists on immigration, and a Happy Thanksgiving. ————————————————————————————————— The Atlantic has a great article about Egypt’s cartoonists – sort of a scene report of the Cairo Comix Festival, which took place in September, and an on-the-ground report of the comics scene as a whole in Egypt, where telling the truth is difficult and increasingly dangerous. “Despite a small readership—or perhaps thanks in part to their relative invisibility—comics in Egypt are blossoming in the shadows. “There is no distribution in Egypt. There are no graphic novel publishers. There is no real way to make a living publishing comics here,” says Sara El Masry, co-owner of an organization called MAZG that runs cartooning workshops throughout the country. But as other means of expression have been shut down, the cartoonist festival has grown, according to its organizer. With few eyes on them, these graphic storytellers are depicting the truth as they see it.“ The article profiles a number of comics makers from the country, including Mai Koraiem whose work is pictured above. “Other cartoonists at the festival approached their subjects with bare fists, particularly when it comes to gender politics in Egypt. In Traveler’s Diary, Mai Koraiem uses a rough, expressive inkwash technique to detail the history of women’s rights in Egypt and the Middle East. Through a journalistic narrative, Koraiem tells the story of the ascendance of a violent misogynist culture, and the unraveling of liberal feminist values she argues first found purchase in Cairo in the 1960s. In a small ongoing thread at the bottom of the page, Koraiem links the personal and political by including a comic strip narrating her own experiences with street harassment and sexual assault.“ Read the rest of the article HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Columbus Alive features the new exhibit at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, which looks back at how the topic of immigration has been covered by cartoonists over the last 150 years. “The resulting exhibit, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: U.S. Immigration in Cartoons and Comics,” reveals that while the particulars of immigration may not have remained constant, the push-and-pull of public opinion as reflected in comics — and shaped by cartoonists — is something that hasn’t changed as the United States has considered the philosophical, political and practical implications of immigration. “There is a very rich history of cartoonists commenting on what’s going on in the world in terms of immigration to the United States, reflecting what people are thinking and saying, but also, we think, impacting how people are thinking about it,” Curator and Assistant Professor Jenny Robb said. “So we wanted to take a look back at the past 150 years and see how cartoonists dealt with it in their work. And not just editorial cartoonists, but in comic strips and comic books and, more recently, graphic novels.”“ The image above is the exhibition’s featured comic. “Robb and Gardner chose Joseph Keppler’s 1893 artwork “Looking Backward” as the exhibition’s featured image because of its timeless message, Robb said. The cartoon depicts “people who have immigrant pasts and have benefited from the opportunities in the U.S. in 1893, are now trying to stop new immigrants from coming over, forgetting their own past,” Robb said. “You could run that today; it would just be a different group of people.” “ Read the whole article HERE. The exhibit is up through April 15th 2018. ————————————————————————————————— On The Nib Rawand Issa details why Being Illegal is Unbearable – for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. ————————————————————————————————— Here in the USA we are celebrating Thanksgiving today – an often controversial holiday, as many cartoonists take note of. Lauren Weinstein‘s weekly Normal Person for Village Voice details the types of politically tense turkeys that grace many tables – HERE. Lauren’s also got a Thanksgiving comic in Seattle’s The Stranger: Here’s Roz Chast for The New Yorker of course: ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 11-23-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

Lyn Hejinian and Open Comics

Comics WorkbookDecember 4, 2017Essaysby Jackie Kirby I. INTRODUCTION, or an Apology to Charles Olson OPEN COMICS (dynamic (plural (contradictory vs. CLOSURE (Or what Charles Olson called “The NON-Projective,” those comics which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Frankie: it led “the alt”, over a half-century ago now, to see it (DC’s, Marvel’s) in the light of “the Egotistical Sublime”; and it persists, at this latter day, as what you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall) II. OPEN SUPERMAN, an introduction to Language Poetry and open form in poetry and comics “A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple—though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity. The better things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed by white gauze curtains which were never loosened. Here I refer to irrelevance, that rigidity which never intrudes. Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition.” This opens the first section of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1980), “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” Hejinian is a founding member of the Language school of poetry, whose work emphasizes theory-based writing, finding it’s foundations in poststructuralism as well as earlier avant-garde movements such as Russian Futurism. In its original composition, My Life comprised thirty-seven prose paragraphs, each comprised of thirty-seven lines. Each section dealt with a year of Hejinian’s life (She was thirty-seven, as you may have guessed). My Life serves as an excellent example of Hejinian’s notion of an “open text,” which she writes about most notably in “The Rejection of Closure.” The open text, in short, invites active participation from the reader, and provides a space where author and reader may meet as equals, collaborating in the production of meaning. A “text,” of course, may be used to describe all sorts of cultural productions. In this article, I wish to examine Hejinian’s poetics of an open text, and their use in the comics medium, while pushing towards an aesthetic of open comics. Henjinian’s theory of the open text promotes a poetics where the author willingly relinquishes her authority over the reader, and instead sees the two as equals in a collaborative project of producing a text-as-meaningful. The open text recognizes the incompleteness of all texts, and the impossibility of achieving closure. She distinguishes this from a “closed text,” which already knows and contains (or at least claims to know and contain) everything. The closed text requires no work from the reader; it already knows everything so it needs only to impart knowledge. It is static, as it has no connection outside itself—it is complete within and need not change. Though the perfectly closed text is “unimaginable” to Hejinian, she remarks that if it could exist, “it would be insufferable.” The open text, on the other hand, does not claim to know anything, it is curiosity. It generates knowledge rather than imparting it. It is desire for knowledge, not knowledge itself. In its generation of knowledge, the open text produces new meanings each time it is read, even by the same reader. This plurality of possible meaning is what makes the text “open.” The openness of a text corresponds directly to its capacity to provide a dynamic plurality of possible meanings. Hejinian gives no examples of closed texts in her essay, but in a later introduction notes: “The coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry can serve as a negative model, with its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth. And detective fiction can serve as a positive model, presenting an ultimately stable, calm and calming (and fundamentally unepiphanic) vision of the world. In either case, however pleasurable its effects, closure is a fiction, one of the amenities that falsehood and fantasy provide.” Additionally, in a lecture on the subject, she mentions Superman comics along with detective fiction as “positive examples.” This reference to Superman is primarily taken from Umberto Eco’s analysis of early Superman comics in The Role of the Reader.(1979). This is perfect, then, for our purposes as makers of comics. Comics have already been inaugurated and validated within this theory of literature, setting precedent to continue the analysis. Understanding the aesthetic merits of an open text is perhaps made easier by looking at Hejinian’s work in tandem with sociologist Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach to reading (1972). Iser views the meaning and totality of a literary object to be a virtual, dynamic and contradictory thing. Its gestalt, or the perceived unity and oneness from a configuration of parts, does not exist in the text itself, nor in the mind of the reader, but in the co-operation of the two: the act of reading itself. The text is a set of raw materials provided by the author. In a text, information is presented in the form of discretely separated units (in comics, panels; in prose, sentences; in verse, lines) juxtaposed in a pattern according to the author’s artistic desires. Iser writes, “The sentences are ‘component parts’ insofar as they make statement, claims, or observations, or convey information, and so establish various perspectives of the text. But they remain only ‘component parts’—they are not the sum total of the text itself.” These sentences are building blocks of a not-yet-existing meaning, which will be produced through the act of reading the text. Through the reading process, the reader assembles the “component parts” into a coherent whole. In comics, we can think of this as the way a reader navigates through panels to produce meaning. The reader’s imagination and memory give shape to the interaction of distinct parts “foreshadowed” by the sequence and structure of panels. The information present in the material comic is processed through the reader’s imagination and experience, the result being the production of the comic-as-meaningful. If I may make an analogy: consider the comic an unopened box of Ikea furniture. The author has provided the parts needed to construct the furniture she has in mind, and has provided a set of instructions on their assemblage as well. However, once bought, the customer has no obligation to follow the instructions. Her assemblage of the furniture is affected by her knowledges and imagination. She is limited only in the material she has with which to construct. It is her own decision to follow the instructions or not. Regardless, her finished product will inevitably be different from that of any other customer who bought the same piece. In this way, the comic’s gestalt is not created solely by the author, as she only provides panels and data, nor is it entirely produced by the reader, as she must use the material provided by the author to realize the text. It is a dynamic relationship between material (the author’s work) and aesthetic (the reader’s realization) productions of meaning. The open text is dynamic, and interactive, as reading is most pleasurable when it is active, and incites the imagination. In “opening” a text, the author has at her disposal several tools: literary, technical, aesthetic etc. The open text’s dynamism, as opposed to the closed text’s stasis, is what incites pleasure and plurality of meaning in the reader and the gestalt respectively. Hejinian and Iser provide examples of these in their poetry and criticism. The primary techniques I will describe here, as well as providing examples from My Life, and Hejinian and Iser’s critical analyses, finally examining the use of each technique in the making of comics. III. OMISSION, it’s about what you’re not seeing A major aspect in reading pleasure for both Hejinian and Iser is the use of intentional omission by the author. If a text is built out of discrete, intact units, then the author may place gaps between each unit (not literal, physical gaps—or maybe—but informational gaps). Each unit both presents data and foreshadows a future meaning. It creates a sense of anticipation in the reader. The following units then either realize the previously foreshadowed meaning or don’t. This non/realization then forces the reader to look retrospectively at the previous unit, its foreshadowed meaning now changed with the advent of new units of data. For example, take the opening sentences of Sam D’Allesandro’s short story “Electrical Type of Thing” (as collected in The Zombie Pit (1989): ““There’s more to a relationship than acquisition.” Scott was busy trying to talk me out of something.” “There’s more to a relationship than acquisition.” This sentence presents a statement on relationships which foreshadows a further statement on relationships. Anticipation: If there is more than acquisition, what is it? But further, the sentence is surrounded by quotation marks. It is a spoken statement, and the quotation marks incite further anticipation: who is speaking, and to whom? Scott was busy trying to talk me out of something. This sentence relieves the reader’s anticipation of the nature of the speaker (Scott) and the one being spoken to (me). Retrospectively, the phrase previously read is now a phrase coming out of Scott’s mouth. However, it does not realize any of the anticipated statements on the nature of relationships, other than its literal enactment of a relationship between Scott and the narrator. In fact, it adds more anticipation, a “something” is mentioned. Scott’s previous statement is now read as an attempt to talk the narrator out of “something,” presumably having to do with a relationship. However, the nature of that “something” remains dubious. D’Allesandro, a brilliant writer, uses multiple layers of anticipation and retrospection in only two sentences, setting the stage for a reader to actively engage with his work. I chose this passage to showcase how even in a seemingly linearly structured prose passage, a talented author makes use of omission and the anticipation/retrospection process. Turning back to Hejinian’s poetry, however, we may see what results when the enactment of this process is brought to the foreground of a text’s aesthetics. D’Allesandro omits bits of data in between his sentences (in the passage we have read), but the relationship between each subsequent sentence is relatively apparent. In My Life, contrastingly, Hejinian’s sentences have almost no immediate correlation. A passage from “A pause, a rose, something on paper” reads: “I was in a room with the particulars of which a later nostalgia might be formed, an indulged childhood. They are sitting in wicker chairs, the legs of which have sunk into the ground, so that each is sitting slightly tilted and their postures make adjustment for that.” In an initial reading, one may try to link these sentences as describing a single scene, however the disconnect of the verb tenses (“I was” and “They are”) discredit that connection. Therefor the onus is entirely on the reader to “complete” the text. The “I” and “they” are connected by juxtaposition and repetition of the sentences’ opening structure (Pronoun verb), but the reader must decide exactly how they are connected. Hejinian writes: “The reader (and I can also say the writer) must overlap the end stop, the period, and cover the distance to the next sentence. Meanwhile, what stays in the gaps, so to speak, remains crucial and informative. Part of the reading occurs as the recovery of that information (looking behind) and the discovery of newly structured ideas (stepping forward).” Therefore, the amount of work a reader must do to “overlap the end stop” and produce meaning from the text increases as the gaps of information between subsequent units increases. A greater burden of work for the reader corresponds to a larger capacity for meanings in a text. By intentionally omitting large amounts of data from unit to unit, an author opens her text up to a multiplicity of meaning. Let us look for similar examples in comics. Taking a four-panel strip from Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek (1979-2003), I will break down the first two panels as I did D’Allesandro’s prose. (Ignoring the title and by-line) Caption: An opossum, says Freddie, has 50 teeth and 13 nipples. My aunt says ‘For the love of God I’m trying to eat.’ Image: A boy sits holding a cup, sitting in front of cabinets. The text informs us of a conversation going on, one speaker is established: Freddie, and then two more, as the phrase “my aunt” introduces not only the “aunt” character, but a speaker as well. It also establishes a relationship between the speaker and their aunt. A conflict is set up between Freddie and the speaker’s aunt. The pictured boy the reader assumes is Freddie, though that is not explicitly stated, and only through juxtaposition of the caption, which highlights Freddie’s action (speaking) and the image of a single boy is the reader led to think the boy pictured is the Freddie in question (unless, of course, they are familiar with the strip and its cast). The image of Freddie sitting with a glass in hand in front of cabinets combined with the speaker’s aunt’s exclamatory “I’m trying to eat” imply the setting of a meal around a kitchen table. This information is again not textually explicit, and adds to the anticipatory nature of the panel. Anticipation: Freddie’s relationship to both the speaker and their aunt are unknown. The setting is implied but not stated, and may be realized as something else. Additionally, conflict has been set up, and its continuation and resolution are now anticipated. Caption: My aunt is his mother. She says the correct word is ‘teats’ and they must never be mentioned at the table. Marlys says “13 teats sounds unlucky.” Image: a girl sits holding a spoon in one hand and holding up the other with her fingers spread. She is in front of cabinets, a sink, and what is possibly a dishwasher. The opening sentence relieves the anticipation of relationality. Retrospectively, we understand Freddie to be the speaker’s cousin. In the following sentence the aunt’s speech locates them “at the table.” This, in addition to the image of a girl holding a spoon and sitting in front of a sink, confirms the reader’s anticipated setting. The aunt’s declaration sets up for a possible end to the conflict, were a new character not introduced immediately after. Marlys, whose relationship with the other three at the table is unknown, does exactly what the aunt had just prohibited. The image of the girl is then assumed to be Marlys, as a) she has just been introduced and her actions along with the aunt’s are the focus of the caption and b) it is clearly an image of a child and not an aunt/mother. The two images of children eating are, in their juxtaposition and relation to the captions, which place all actors in the same location, seen as both sitting at the same table. Anticipation: Marlys’ relation to the other actors is in question, and her blunt remark implies she has a close familiarity with the rest of those at the table, who we know to be related. Marlys’ statement heightens the conflict previously set up, and new complications must be worked out before its resolution. Barry’s formal style requires a more simplistic, linear execution, but even in two relatively unassuming panels, we see the process of anticipation and retrospection used in a variety of ways. It is also worth noting that because I am equating the prosodic sentence with the comic panel, a degree of slippage occurs. Each of the panels above includes multiple sentences, and were I to parse them one by one it would reveal even more subtle layers of activity within the text. Most notably, though, in dissecting these panels, the notion of juxtaposition becomes increasingly complex, and the reader is required to do much more work in producing meaning from juxtaposed images and words (e.g. identifying Freddie and Marlys, locating them at a kitchen table together). Spatial placement and juxtaposition are among the most essential elements of comic making. Fortunately for my purpose, they are also critical to Hejinian’s theories of openness. IV. SPATIAL PLACEMENT/JUXTAPOSITION, or a brief look at the page In “The Rejection of Closure,” Hejinian notes the openness of poetry where “words and lines are distributed irregularly on a page,” something she calls “field work.” Field work, for Hejinian, is a prime example of poetry where “the order of reading is not imposed in advance,” the reader must use her own faculties of imagination and connection building to improvise a method for reading the text. She uses as example Robert Grenier’s Cambridge M’Ass (1979), which presents for her a “mind’s eye view of Cambridge, Mass. and environs.” (Reproduction of Cambridge M’Ass, high resolution version here) Grenier’s piece clearly subverts the traditional English reading process. Looking at Cambridge M’Ass, the reader quickly realizes it is impossible to read the poem line by line, left to right and downwards. She may choose to approximate this as much as possible, but the boxed units discourage it, they present themselves as discrete and separate. The physical size of the piece enforces this as well. The first block the reader is confronted with will be different depending on where and how one is reading/viewing it and the physical size and shape of the reader. The work, then, brings immediately to light the process of reading itself, and asks its reader to make an active choice from the very beginning of her reading. This is an element shared by both poetry and comics—the reader’s initial visual impression of the page is an essential element of her reading. When reading a piece of pure prose, each page looks more-or-less identical, and the placement of text on a page rarely informs the reader of anything. In a comic or poem, however, the layout of the page and the page seen at a glance in its entirety imparts immediate data to the reader. Consider, for instance, the thumbnails from M Norbese Phillips’ Zong! and Ikeda Ryoko’s Oniisama e… and the immediate information received from them as opposed to an average page from a novel, which may only imply certain publishing and marketing demographic information based on the typeset. My Life is a book of prose poems though, and I do not mean to discount its merit as a brilliantly spatialized literary work. The imposition of prose into poetry, which has been dominated primarily by verse until the last century or so, and still dominates the popular notion of what “poetry” is, is a radical visual act. The compression of “the line” into “the paragraph” imparts both contradictory feelings of contraction and freedom as well as cuing the reader to adapt her reading method to fit the poem’s form—something nearly all well-crafted poems do. “A pause, a rose, something on paper” is written as a single paragraph, taking up the entire page, with no indentations. The text is so densely packed together that the reader is confronted with a massive amount of information at once, and must improvise a method of reading to comprehend the work. The text is democratized on the page, no one word is given more significance than any other by the form, and in fact every word is entirely reliant on its surrounding words to attain meaning. The compression of the poem into a single paragraph also allows the reader to draw more connections between words and phrases. While in a poem with shorter lines and multiple line breaks the referential action of the language is primarily vertical, in Hejinian’s work the motion is both horizontal and vertical. Returning to my epigraph, “A pause, a rose…” begins with this sentence: “A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple—though moments are no longer so colored.” Reading “a moment yellow” at the top, the reader’s eye is immediately drawn not horizontally to the next word, but vertically to “the moment of greeting him” below, before moving back to “just as four years later” and continuing horizontally from there. The repetition of “moment” in “though moments are no longer so colored” is notably separate from the two, earlier, “colored” “moments,” not only in its literal description but in its placement on the page. The third “moment,” then, breaks the reader’s anticipation of what a “moment” is, and forces her to reassess the earlier “moments”, now knowing their colors (yellow and purple) are no longer present. The “moment” is opened to the reader: what has colored the previous moments and why are they no longer colored? Are questions she must ask herself as she reads. Looking this way at a page from Alyssa Berg’s “No Man is an Island” (2017), yellow is again a prominent element of the part—but this isn’t particularly relevant, what’s relevant is Berg’s use of space with regards to multiple trajectories of reading. Immediately, Berg’s spatial presentation allows the reader to forego a traditional reading method. Though the text in the top panel technically precedes the second, the black outlined “you say” in the middle of the page is the most immediately legible phrase, due to its placement and the boldness of black outlines against yellow. Conversely, the text in the top panel is produced through negative space, printing blue around the space where the text should be. A reader may choose to move up and read these, willed by the perceived obligatory nature of reading top to bottom. Even then, though, the eyes move up, and to reach the top of the page one must pass, even if only half-perceived, the yellow text, “when I look somewhere else.” Two green shapes fill the top left corner of the page, the traditional starting point for reading. The first, smaller shape, points downwards, while the second, larger one points right to the first (spatially) text on the page. The greenness of these shapes incites notions of plant life, and their form could be considered that of a leaf. Similarly outlined green shapes pull the readers eyes down on the right half of the page, arranged in a way that could be considered a tree. Blue repeats itself at the bottom, pushing right. The bold black human shapes which foreground the page’s imagery pulls along with the blue, down and left, onto the next page. Because the reader’s velocity has multiple trajectories, pulling her eyes up down across and back, and it is up to her to decide how to read the page, the page must also re-connect with the reader and cue her to move forward. As the reader moves her eyes across the page, the process of anticipation and retrospection becomes incredibly dynamic and complex. Because Berg has opened space for the reader to make her own decisions regarding the text’s production, the order in which each unit elicits anticipation/retrospection will be different for each reader and upon each reading. V. REPETITION, repetition Repetition, an integral aspect of comics, holds a similar place within Hejinian’s open poetics. Repetition, Hejinian argues, while traditionally understood as a tool for unification, in her own work is used to challenge “our inclinations to isolate, identify, and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line).” Through repetition, the difference between seemingly identical words and phrases is emphasized, and their reliance on relationships to other words, phrases, and emphases becomes clear. Repetition is used not only in single words (as seen previously with “moment”) but in syntactical composition of phrases. In a later section of the poem, Hejinian writes: “The better things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed by white gauze curtains which were never loosened.” Here, there is repetition of construction: subject—were—verb—prepositional phrase in the first to phrases and additional phrase in the second sentence “which were never loosened,” which breaks the form while still repeating the use of “were.” This draws connections between the subjects (“the better things,” “the windows,” and “white gauze curtains”), which in isolation would seem entirely different, but the reader is forced to connect them in her mind, and justify that connection with her own imagination. The prepositional phrases begin with “in” and “by.” “In” is locational while “by” gives accountability to the “white gauze curtains,” which are the only thing in these phrases with any agency. The placement of accountability on the “white gauze curtains” in the second sentence makes the reader reassess the earlier sentence, noticing the lack of any agent who gathers “the better things.” Here, repetition points towards omission and draws new connections and distinctions. In comics, the author’s ability to repeat certain aspects of each unit is increased immensely and brought to the forefront of the creative process. As the spectrum of visual representation and abstraction is opened, so are elements of visual composition that can be repeated or changed. On the most basic level, the contrast of image and word is heightened when one of the two is repeated. In this page from Michael Deforge’s Lose #4 (2012), the images’ similarity is made apparent, while the movement of the text stands out in contrast (visually, the two have been markedly separated as well). The motion of the text propels the repeated images through time, while the stasis of the images’ repetition pulls counter to that motion, producing a sense of anxiety, boredom, or impatience. Repetition of words force the reader to retrospectively re-evaluate the previous uses of said word, as well as its relationship to the image it corresponds with. In “Pretty Smart” (2015), Andy Burkholder emulates a stream of consciousness by carefully repeating words, which build upon each other becoming intermixed phrases. The evolution of these phrases is through the literal repetition of them, and through repeating, language changes, in the tradition of Gertrude Stein. Burkholder’s images present an extremely short timeframe in contrast with the amount of words on the page. Forcing the mass of repetition into a small temporal space speeds up the progression of language. The words begin to overlap, even as they are physically separated, as the movement, the most notable change, is not the water dropping, or the phrases evolving, but the repetition of the words themselves. VI. GOOD-BYE, vain wishes Hopefully, by unpacking the literary and aesthetic techniques of some of Language Poetry, and revealing its use in the comics medium, I have shown how the “open text” is not limited to writing with only words—in fact it requires the author to see the words as more than words. By taking a phenomenological approach to authorship and reception, new connections can be made across mediums, and new approaches to authorship can be developed. Simply because comics have historically been a medium for incredibly closed works (situational comedies, superheroes, detectives, westerns, war, romance etc) does not mean they lack potential for openness. The power of a technology to close knowledge is equal to its power to open. ————————————————————————————————————— Jackie Kirby is a poet and comics maker living in New York City. A recent graduate from The New School with a BA in Cultural Studies, she has been making comics and writing poetry seriously for three years. Check out work by Jackie on her website, and follow her on Instagram. Read Jackie’s Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency Report for more thoughts on comics and poetry, and her article on Meter, Geometry and Comic Form. Share this page: [...]

02/19/2016

Sally IngrahamFebruary 19, 2016NewsRight out of the gate on a Friday – Connor Willumsen has a new comic up on Study Group! Sweet Love is the last chocolate in the box, leftover from Valentines Day revels. A sticky treat for modern lovers wrapped in pink and red. READ IT HERE. Connor’s past work includes Calgary: Death Milks a Cow, which punched us in the gut with it’s visual detail and fierce movement. On the move himself, Connor is hoping to supplement the cost of his transit – “I am currently selling drawings, accepting commissions, skype portraits, etc. email mail@connorwillumsen.com for all inquiries – thanks” You can find an extensive list of Connor’s work HERE. Check it out! The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is celebrating Black History Month by spotlighting Black comics makers and cartoonists “who made significant contributions to free expression“. It’s high time to learn about Larry Fuller – Larry Fuller—a.k.a. A. Christian White—with his quick wit, eye for innovation, and keen sense of opportunity is regarded as one of the indisputable kings of the 1970s underground comix movement. From Ebon to White Whore Funnies, Fuller wrote comics, drew comics, published comics, and would become one of the premier businessmen in an industry characterized by its fast, loose, and decidedly un-business-like attitude that arose out of the aftermath of the 1954 Comics Code. Fuller’s ability to effectively use satire to comment upon social issues such as race and sexuality would make him an influential and important icon not only in the Black, but also the LGBTQ comics communities. Read all about Larry Fuller HERE! The world is losing Sparkplug Books…! This news hurts the heart… Virginia Paine wrote on the Sparkplug blog: It is with mixed feelings that I must announce that I will be shutting down Sparkplug this year. I appreciate the opportunities that running Sparkplug has given me and the wonderful people it has introduced me to. I know Sparkplug means a lot to many people and I want to assure you this is not a decision I’ve made lightly. Read the rest of her letter HERE, and see what amazing stuff this publisher still has to offer for the next few months HERE. Don’t mess around – value and support for as long as you can a part of the community that meant a lot to so many. Hey look! It’s an excerpt from Luke Pearson’s comic in š! #24 ‘Urban Jungle’. These Latvian comics anthologies bring together comics makers from around the world, and their latest offering – due to be released on February 23rd – looks like mad fun. Pre-order it HERE. Frank recently caught up with Wayne Wise at Phantom of the Attic in Pittsburgh, PA, to get the low down on how Wayne became one of the first Xeric Grant recipients. During the grant’s long cycle (1992-2012) over $3,000,000 was awarded to comic book makers and non-profits. Pretty brilliant! Check out the video below. Keep up with Wayne Wise over on his blog – Notes From the Playground – and get a taste of his comic Grey Legacy Tales HERE. (You can also get to know him better and hear more great stories via this episode of The AP Collection hosted by another cool Pittsburgh artist, Genevieve Barbee.) Check out the web comic Lovely’s (story so far HERE), now on it’s 10th episode on Pulp Deluxe HERE. LOVELY’S is a graphic novel / cookbook in the making, by Val Gallardo and Jonathan Beaton. The story follows a group of old friends who haven’t seen each other since they graduated from art school. Older but none the wiser, the ‘Brush Monkeys’ are reunited after they all receive an invitation to dinner from the mysterious philanthropist and burger tycoon Bingo Lovelett, owner of the Lovely’s Heavenly Burgers empire. New pages every Sunday 6 p.m GMT+1 Weird and funny, like all reunions of old friends should be, this comic is worth following. There’s a mystery to be solved after all…! A new collaborative comic from Zach Mason & G.W. Duncanson – Team-Up Comic #3, pictured above – just rolled into town! G. W. Duncanson has a history of these team up comics and they’re all interesting in their own right. Check out Team-Up Comic #1, made with Laurie Piña – and Team-Up Comic #2, made with Karissa Sakumoto. And finally, the fountain of knowledge is running over – another video from Bill Boichel and Comics Workbook, this time dishing up Melody by Sylvia Rancourt. You’re going to want to drop whatever you’re doing and get yourself a copy after watching this! Share this page: [...]

The Drawing Power Report (2013)

Juan FernándezMay 15, 2016Festivals and ShowsThis article was co-written with Simon Reinhardt. It originally appeared at Dog City Press. This past weekend a couple of us from Dog City trekked down from Vermont to Pittsburgh, PA for the Drawing Power conference at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The museum setting established a wonderful tone for the conference. It was a breath of fresh air to go to an intimate event with such a clear focus on discussing comics. A big thanks is due to Jude Vachon, zine librarian at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Vachon was the core organizer of this event and responsible for steering it toward such a success. The days events ran from 10 AM until 5 PM. Each panel was a jam packed 45 minutes. The first panel of the day was moderated by Bill Boichel, owner of the Copacetic Comics Company. It focused on the idiosyncrasies of the local Pittsburgh comics scene. The panel consisted of Lizzee Solomon, Andy Scott, Paulette Poullet and Nate Mcdonough. The panelists spoke about their experiences self-publishing and the role that the Pittsburgh community played in their work practices. Scott spoke about his anthology, Andromeda and the restructuring of the publication in late 2012 from a monthly to a quarterly format. Solomon spoke about cartooning being at the core of her multi-disciplinary work practices while Nate McDonough retold the beginnings of hisGrixly publication. McDonough, Solomon and Scott spoke of their times drawing together during the early issues of Andromeda and the competitive one-upmanship that their drawing parties would foster. The panel explored the inroads that the four cartoonists had made into self-publishing and the external factors in their lives that had driven them to continue to self-publish in Pittsburgh. Following the Pittsburgh cartoonists panel, French cartoonist, Boulet (Gilles Roussel) , author of the 24-hour comic Darkness took the stage to give a lecture on the evolution of his cartooning practices. He spoke about streamlining his creative process and the increased emphasis on improvisation that he had developed in his work. He spoke about working with Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim on the series, Dungeon along with the exquisite corpse comic, Chicou Chicou, that he developed with several French cartoonists. The aim of Chicou Chicou was to create a fictional “auto-bio” group comics blog. The cartoonists would pass strips back and forth over the internet adding pages until they were complete. Each of the cartoonists involved created a persona and crafted a drawing style that suited their character. Boulet played a small, geeky girl named Ella. Besides discussing the subtleties of drawing stories from the perspective of a female character, Boulet talked about the harassment he received online when writing under a female pen-name. He reported receiving unsolicited love letters and invitations on dates and noted that when he got into disputes people would ask “are you on your period or something?” At the end of his talk, Boulet spoke succinctly of his influences and of his current project, a 200 page improvised story in which he is neither pencilling nor scripting. He showed several of the 60 pages that he’d completed and the audience was in awe. Freelance writer, illustrator and graphic designer, Joan Reilly then took the stage and talked about her work editing the forthcoming feminist anthology, The Big Feminist But. Joan presented the book’s contents and the genesis of the project. The Big Feminist But arose from Reilly and O’Leary’s attempts to learn why so many of us, women and men, couch discussions around feminism with the phrase “I’m not a feminist, but…” or “I am a feminist, but…”. They decided to embark on the journey of making a comics anthology as the first step in starting a conversation about the issue. The result is a promising book that features “graphic musings on life, love, lust and liberation,” by talents such as Jeffrey Brown, Gabrielle Bell, and Lauren Weinstein. The book’s list of contributors is especially notable for including a number of couples working together, as well as single men and women. Reilly mentioned that a number of Kickstarter backers expressed their gratitude that men were involved with the book as well– an observation that highlights The Big Feminist But’s drive to create an expansive and inclusive conversation about feminism. Subsequently, John Porcellino, took the stage to talk about the story of his life of zine-making and distribution. He talked about the story of King Cat, and the Spit and a Half zine and comix distribution service. Porcellino touched on his artistic development and the early years of King Cat (focusing on the first 50 issues, collected in King Cat Classix). Porcellino has created books, comics, and publications since he was 7 or 8, and was creating zines for years before he discovered Factsheet 5 and learned that other people were doing it too. He read some highlights from early King Cat issues and talked about his work processes and goals in creating that work. One revelation from this portion of the talk was the influence of Marvel’s monster comics from the 50s and early 60s. While the relationship between these fantastic stories and Porcellino’s chronicles of everyday life might not be immediately apparent, Porcellino emphasized the drab, repetitive nature of the monster stories as well as the alienation of their typical mad scientist protagonists. “As an artist I’m very interested in repetition and boredom,” he said. Porcellino also talked about the sales and distribution history of King Cat, which was instructive for the many self-publishers in the audience. Gesturing to the cover of the first issue of King Cat to be sold in stores, Porcellino noted the 35 cent cover price and remarked “in true zine fashion, I probably charged 35 cents because it cost me 36 cents to print.” He also talked about his history of working bizarre or menial jobs to support his comics, and pinpointed King Cat issue 42, which he wrote, drew, and edited entirely on company time, as “the point I became a professional cartoonist, because I was being paid to draw comics.” Porcellino spoke about his interest in the idea of real life and the ineffable experience of being alive. One thing he mentioned—and we think this is a big part of what makes King Cat so special—is that he tried not just to describe the event of his experience, but to communicate the feeling of that experience. Porcellino characterized the subject matter of his comics as “this weird feeling I had… the underlying mystery in every moment,” a description we think King Cat readers will agree is quite fitting. Caitlin McGurk, librarian at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum moderated the following panel on self-publishing. Porcellino remained on stage to join Ramsey Beyer, Rachel Masilamani and Bill Boichel to chat about their experiences self-publishing in the United States. Similar to the first panel of the day, the panelists spoke of how they’d found their way to comics and more generally towards self-publishing. Masilamani recounted first encountering zines through Christina Kelly’s zine of the month column in Sassy magazine. She spoke about the experience of receiving the Xeric grant and the consequences that it brought along with it. It allowed for her to get her first comics into the world and to hit the ground running with her first collection of RPM, but from the get go she was on her own. The panelists thoughts on the pricing of mini comics were particularly interesting. Not surprisingly, Boichel as a vendor and Porcellino as a distributor had a lot to bring to the discussion of the relationship between self-expression and the commodification of desire. Boichel mentioned that artists sometimes come to him with $20 minicomics, reporting that they sold a lot of copies in New York, but he knows they won’t sell at that price point in Pittsburgh. Beyer emphasized the importance she placed on the ethics of the production process and mentioned having worked with 1984 Press in Oakland California. Boichel, suggested that aspiring cartoonists always pick someone to write to; a friend, an acquaintance, a stranger, someone. By thinking of their audience’s interests and their budget, they could be more likely to create works that would move through the world more freely. Dash Shaw followed the self-publishing panel. He began his talk by showing some recent animation work. One of the most striking animations that he played was the music video,Seraph, which he had made in collaboration with Frank Santoro and other artists for Sigur Ros’ valtari film experiment. Shaw took the audience through a brief survey of his cartooning work, starting with his three current publications– the minicomic New Jobs, published by Uncivilized Books, the pamphlet3 New Stories, and the graphic novel New School, both published by Fantagraphics– and working his way backward to the mammoth graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button. One through-line of Shaw’s talk was his thoughts regarding line and color. “I could talk about color forever,” he said, and it’s hard not to get excited by his original and distinctive ideas. Many of the pages Shaw showed from New School use color in ways that are entirely divorced from traditional comic book coloring. Shaw rarely uses colors to simply fill out the drawing, preferring instead to use the collision between the color and the line-art to create meaning and emotion, often in oblique and subtle ways. This unwillingness to spell things out directly for the reader was evident in Shaw’s discussion of line and drawing as well. He spoke of being inspired by David Mazzucchelli’s idea of the “dumb line,” (which he describes in more detail here) and by trying to push back against the conventions of “good” illustration. “So much illustration is about telling people what something is and how to feel about it,” Shaw said, adding that he wanted to make drawings that don’t tell their reader how to feel. He also spoke about his fascination with the house styles found, among other places, in manga and Archie comics, speculating about an ideal, impossible Archie style. In Shaw’s conception, even the best Archie artists fall short of this Platonic style, and their own personal style would be the accumulation of their failings at achieving a true Archie drawing. All in all, it was a dense, stimulating talk, and we can’t wait to dive into New School and read it with the attention Shaw’s work demands. The final panel of the day, “A Career in Comics” was moderated by Caitlin McGurk and featured Jim Rugg, Ed Piskor, Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw. The fluidity of the discussion was really satisfying. Without much effort it hopped from discussions of style (and avoiding “style”) to explorations of narrative collapse. Of course, a highlight of the panel was the discussion of the differences between making money around comics and making money in comics. Career development and survival were recurring topics, and every member of the panel had a different way of approaching making a living as a cartoonist. The common thread was work ethic and hustle. Santoro half-jokingly described himself as “basically a used book dealer at this point.” Rugg spoke about doing design work and also discussed the Flight School fellowship , a professional development program for Pittsburgh artists he recently participated in. To see the comics medium getting the attention of an established institution like the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and for it to occur at the Carnegie Museum was inspiring. Here’s hoping for more small events around the country with this level of intimacy and intensity of dialogue. all in all, you could say… Share this page: [...]

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