Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Chris Anthony Diaz

Posted on December 14, 2016December 15, 2016

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10/25/2018

Caleb OrecchioOctober 25, 2018NewsYour friendly neighborhood Caleb Orecchio here with a public service announcement. ————————————————————————————————— Hello fellow cartoonists, winter is on its way. For some, winter is practically here. Don’t be an Ice Worm this year. Don’t hole up in your lair until some wayfaring stranger comes across your cave to slay you. Get out of the house. Have coffee with a friend. Check in on a relative. Exercise. It is important to take advantage of the cold weather by staying in to work on your comics, but don’t forget that the world keeps turning outside the drawing desk. This has been another message from your friend, Caleb, the cartoonist who cares. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

02/07/2017

Aaron CockleFebruary 6, 2017NewsAaron here today with Roman Muradov; ‘Elitist Empathy’; What we talk about when we talk about ‘A study of issues relating to the collection, care, and accessibility of zines in institutional and alternative collections in the UK’; 2 Robs at TCJ, writing about comics; Ley Lines; INK BRICK; Furie explains Pepe, Pepe explains Furie ————————————————————————————————— Roman Muradov on How I Didn’t Write Certain of My Books To hell with narrative and self-expression! Instead: constraints and repetition (and repetition)! This talk sets Idleness against Inspiration, and namedrops an indecent number of French names in the process. Reader, attend!! The 176th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Roman Muradov is an award-winning illustrator and the author of (In A Sense) Lost & Found, Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art and the End of A Fence, as well as a French collection Aujourd’hui Demain Hier. He has a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators, a habit of long aimless walks, and an imaginary dog named Barchibald. ————————————————————————————————— NOTHING LEFT TO LEARN 13 nearly 60 pages of content regarding race, post-liberal America, and the election. essays and rants from Jason Lee illustrations by Laura PallMall “Things That Kill More Americans than ISIS” SPECIAL INSERT: for the first time in print “Greek Church,” a 15 page comic by PallMall for an extra 25 dollars you can purchase the original drawing of any illustration from the zine. please email laurapallmall at gmail dot com before ordering this option to confirm the availability of your desired drawing. 50% of all proceeds from this zine forever will go to CAIR. NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER. ————————————————————————————————— Zines in the Academy? Siobhan Britton’s University College London’s dissertation, What we do is secret? A study of issues relating to the collection, care, and accessibility of zines in institutional and alternative collections in the UK, has been posted for your downloading/reading pleasure. Here is the abstract: Fanzines, or ‘zines’ are self published magazines with small print runs, where the entire process from creation to distribution is done by the maker and generally not created for profit. Their subject matter can be almost anything. They are distinctly anti-commercial a, often acting as an outlet for alternative or marginalised voices, which are often ignored by mainstream publishing. The UK has a strong zine culture, and an increasing number of libraries here are developing zine collections. There are also a number of alternative spaces such as self organised zine libraries and anarchist social centres which do the same thing. The first chapter sets out the context of the dissertation, and flags up the fact that most of the research and literature about zine collections in both institutional and alternative spaces is very USA-centric. As a result the study of UK zine collections is important in terms of the focus of this dissertation. Chapter two considers the way that zines might be defined. Using a combination of face to face and written interviews with people responsible, and fieldwork in the form of visits, this dissertation examines a selection of both institutional and alternative zine collections located in UK and examines how they collect, care for, and make accessible their collections in the third and fourth chapters. The concluding chapter draws examines the issues that UK institutional and alternative zine collections face, including the argument for and against collecting zines at all. Although this study does not consider every institutional or alternative zine collection in the UK, and therefore cannot be considered comprehensive, it aims to give an idea of the range of collections that exist here. ————————————————————————————————— Dueling Roberts at The Comics Journal Rob Kirby reviews the recent Spanish Fever anthology, edited by Santiago Garcia: The talent roster in Spanish Fever ranges from well-known pros like Miguel Gallardo and Max, to newer artists like Ana Galvañ and Clara-Tanit Arqué. There’s a wide variety of narrative and visual styles, ranging from traditional underground comix to the ubiquitous European “big nose” style to work that would look at home in an American minicomic. In subject matter, the stories range from autobiographical, political, and quotidian to surreal and just flat-out weird. It’s an eclectic stew that comes together agreeably, making a good case for the vibrancy of the Spanish comics scene, though a few weaknesses keep it from being a truly top-notch compendium. In his introduction, Eddie Campbell notes that the new Spanish comics all share the importance of authorial voice, i.e., that they feature characters that are pure expressions of the authors, beholden to no meddling publishers or corporations. Garcia’s forward to the collection extrapolates on this theme, offering a mini-history of Spain’s comics leading to its current artistic renaissance amid the country’s current economic crisis. And Rob Clough gives a characteristically comprehensive run-down of some short-form comics highlights from 2016: 26. Faded Frankenstein, by E.A. Bethea. Bethea’s scratchy, scrawled line is a perfect complement for her poetic and heartfelt prose about missing friends, fading memories, and the images of jobs past. 27. Zebidiah Part 3, by Asher Z. Craw. Part autobio story about embracing one’s identity as a trans person, and part magical realist adventure, the genius of the story is the way Craw wrapped both up together in telling the tale of Zebediah and Eula-Lee, who were pursued by the forces of evil into their modern-day incarnations as Asher and Lillie (Craw’s actual wife) Craw. 28. Paper Pencil Life #4, by Summer Pierre. This is a clearly written and cartooned collection of diary strips about life as an artist, a mother and sharp observer of the world around her. 29. Sorgin, by Amelia Onorato. This is an immaculately constructed and heartbreaking story about genocide and resistance, told with a humane and restrained touch. 30. Self, by Meghan Turbitt. This is a warped, hilarious deconstruction of trashy women’s magazines reorganized around Tubitt’s own personal obsessions. ————————————————————————————————— ART, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY COMICS Ley Lines 2017 Subscription Ley Lines is a quarterly publication dedicated to exploring the intersection of comics and the various fields of art & culture that inspire us. Each issue features a different artist’s take on a different subject matter taken from the larger context of art making, past and present. Our 2017 Ley Lines are: Tommi Parrish on William Blake/Lydia Lunch (February 2017) Eric Kostiuk Williams on Kylie Minogue (May 2017) Shreyas R Krishnan on Abida Parveen (August 2017) Evan Dahm on the Surrealists (November 2017) Price includes shipping!(additional shipping applies for orders outside the US). Subscriptions include new 2″ vinyl sticker designed by Eric Kostiuk Williams. Each issue is 24 pages, 1 color risograph printing by Issue Press, half-letter size, saddle stitch binding. ————————————————————————————————— POETRY COMICS INK BRICK’s FIRST KICKSTARTER IS LIVE! Starting this fall, our journal issues will debut in bookstores across the country! To celebrate this milestone, we’ve invited some of our favorite cartoonist-poets to create a special issue. We’re crowdfunding it, and we need your help to support comics poetry and grow this movement. ————————————————————————————————— The iconic frog’s original creator finally clearly defines his enigmatic brainchild, once and for all ————————————————————————————————— Learn more about the Rowhouse Residency and apply HERE – join us for a week or two in Pittsburgh, PA, and take your comics making to a new level! ————————————————————————————————— The Cosmic Journey – 2-7-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— 2-7-2017 – by Jack Brougham ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 2-7-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 2-7-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— Cozytown – 2-7-2017 – by Juan Fernandez Share this page: [...]

02/20/2018

Aaron CockleFebruary 20, 2018NewsAaron here today with Barbara T. Smith + Experiments in Electrostatics; A.T. Pratt; Uno Moralez; Old-Timey Cellphones ————————————————————————————————— Barbara T. Smith: Outside Chance Through Feb 28 at Andrew Kreps Gallery, 537/535 West 22nd St, NYC, USA Smith’s pioneering Xerox work is the earliest series in the exhibition dating from 1965 to 1967, and reflects a pivotal moment in the trajectory of her life and practice. Initially intending to make lithographic prints, Smith discovered the then-new technology of the Xerox copy machine, a mass-printing device that she perceived to be the future of printmaking. Smith leased a 914 Xerox Machine, at the time only in use by large corporations, and feverishly experimented with, among other things, images of her children taken by the artist-photographer Jerry McMillan. Simultaneously, Smith discovered her body as a performative tool by placing it upon the machine. Obsessively repeated and layered, the resulting works form a preemptive, and melancholic reflection on the loss of her family in her subsequent 1968 divorce. Following this, Smith fully devoted her life to art-making, with works that reflected a similar engagement with a burgeoning community of artists in Los Angeles, as well as an exploration of the new relationship between performance artworks and their audience. Experiments in Electrostatics At the Whitney Museum of American Art, through March 25, 2018 Experiments in Electrostatics: Photocopy Art from the Whitney’s Collection, 1966–1986 explores the use of the photocopier as a creative tool, from its public emergence in the 1960s to the dawn of the digital era in the 1980s. Despite the machine’s intended function to reproduce office documents, artists inventively utilized it as a camera and printing press to create original fine art prints. They placed objects on the flatbed, distorted imagery in the process of scanning, and manipulated the exposure, density, and saturation settings to achieve imaginative, often unexpected results. Far from “copies,” these still lifes, portraits, abstractions, and collages reflected the ingenuity of their makers. Focusing on three artists and one collective—Edward Meneeley, Lesley Schiff, Barbara T. Smith, and the International Society of Copier Artists—this exhibition investigates how artists found self-expression through a machine designed for replication. Experiments in Electrostatics is organized by Michelle Donnelly, curatorial fellow. ————————————————————————————————— “the great American Graphic Novel Masterpiece of our time” At Broken Frontier, Robin Enrico looks at A.T. Pratt’s Ink Toby In another way the true target of Pratt’s scorn may be Pratt himself. Ink Toby was drawn under the very constraints that Pratt is mocking. The constant grinding away at making comics in an attempt to move the needle on an artist’s social profile. Reducing art to grist for the content mill. Even if as Pratt admits, the work was not finished during Inktober, it still adheres to that push to rapidly produce pages. This doesn’t always play to Pratt’s advantage, as his pages can be overly dense with at times cramped panel layouts. There are also a few instances where dialogue does, as Toby’s father cautions against, dominate the page. In Ink Tommy’s own words, “You think everyone wants to read all that shit?” Making a joke of the works shortcomings does not completely alleviate them. ————————————————————————————————— ‘This is an internet comic, not a printed volume, after all…’ Matt Seneca on Blue Teeth by Uno Moralez But what Blue Teeth attests to even more than Moralez’s image making expertise is his power as a comics maker. In a way, this is work as formally simple as it gets: a screen that shows one single image at a time, each isolated and complete in itself, yet linked by subject to the others. What’s so impressive is how immersive Moralez makes his work without any page-layout tricks or advanced sequencing or even words, for crying out loud! He gives his trust to the effectiveness of comics at its most basic level, comics as a simple accretion of image after image. It’s like hearing music played along with the strict, ticking beat of a metronome, where none of the power is in the timing and all of it is in the harmonies, the way every new note bounces off the vibration of all the ones that came before to expand the size of the world being created. Anybody can format a comic the way Moralez does here; that’s not the point. It takes someone who really understands the form, who gets that it’s about the thoughts that flicker in the reader’s head between the images as much what’s as inside of them, to make it work this well. The routes Moralez takes through his story’s information are unusual and exciting – in my favorite transition, a sexy stolen glance between Marina and her man’s road dog is followed immediately by a shot of two butterflies hovering above a flaming rose. Moralez’s sensibility is more poetic than literal, always willing to forgo the direct approach to accommodate a moment of beauty or bizarrerie. ————————————————————————————————— Via Myko Clelland / BoingBoing ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 2-20-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— VISION BOX — 02/20/2018 — by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

04/06/2016

Juan FernándezApril 6, 2016NewsJuan here with your mid-week comics news fix. A pair of interesting comics events in the United States, MoCCA Awards of Excellence, Mari Naomi, Gabrielle Bell, Leslie Stein, Retrofit Comics Kickstarter in the final stretch, Rosarium Publishing launches its Indiegogo, the Picturebox Inc. bibliography. Let’s do this. ————————————————————————————————— Small Press events this weekend PMF 7 Building on six consecutive years of growing print celebrations, Baltimore’s Open Space gallery will present PMF VII, the Seventh Annual Publications & Multiples Fair, taking place April 9th and 10th, 2016, from 12 pm – 6 pm each day, at the Baltimore Design School, 1500 Barclay St. This annual exposition provides the opportunity to peruse, purchase, and discuss artist publications, prints, and objects produced in multiple. There’ll be over 130 local and national artists, and on-site programming all weekend. The fair is free and open to the public. There’s a killer line up of really raw work. Meghan Turbitt, Lala Albert, Lale Westving and Aidan Koch will be there among the throngs 😉 Learn more here. SPACE 2016 Now coming up on it’s 17th year, S.P.A.C.E. (Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo) is the midwest’s longest running exhibition of small press,creator owned and art comics. And Columbus’ longest locally owned and operated COMICS show of any kind. Long live the Rustbelt. Read more here. ————————————————————————————————— Gabrielle Bell Instagram In the age of fractured social media, it’s important to know who posts where or you’ll miss out on the beautiful writing or drawing they might do. Now you’ve got no excuse to be missing Bell’s off the cuff drawings. You can follow her here. ————————————————————————————————— Cheerleader by Mari Naomi Mari Naomi’s got a new one for you via Buzz Feed. Lot’s of eyes sure to get on this one. Smart use of the scroll and subtle visual punctuation makes this a satisfying look back on an unexpected friendship. Take a trip down memory lane and read it here! ————————————————————————————————— Retrofit Kickstarter – Last 2 Rounds Retrofit Comics is in its last TWO days of their Kickstarter campaign! They’re in the last rounds of their bout. You can help them win this fight. Support them to make it happen. The crop of books they’re currently publishing is really special. It includes titles by the likes of James Kochalka (Elf Cat in Love), the first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, Eleanor Davis with her an offering (Libby’s Dad), and Kaeleigh Forsyth and Alabaster Pizzo with a team up on Hellbound (here’s a process post from them about the “raw material” the book was sourced from). Also among the comics that may get loosed on the world, should the Kickstarter make it to the stretch goals, are works by Anya Davidson and Tyler Landry. Please support Retrofit Comics by pitching some funds their way, or helping to spread the word.Less than $2,000 left to go. Check out the Kickstarter and make it happen HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Time Clock Leslie Stein is back with the newest installment of The Eye of the Majestic Creature is back! Here’s a link to see some of the pages Stein has posted on tumblr, there’ll be more soon until Time Clock is out. You can snag a copy by preordering from Fantagraphics Books. The book will be out in June. ————————————————————————————————— Rosarium Publishing launches an Indiegogo As Retrofit wraps up it’s big push, ROSARIUM PUBLISHING begins to rev their engines. Rosarium Publishing is a publishing house founded by Bill Campbell that is a space of resistance to the erasure of diverse voices by a saturated public sphere of massive hegemonic media giants pushing the authors they want to the forefront of the market place.f …Rosarium Publishing was started with an idea; it was not, however, started with a lot of money. This has all been funded by the publisher’s day job. So, with the rapid growth we’ve been experiencing, it is now time for us to move away from print-on-demand, which, in the long run, is too expensive for any publisher to rely on, and have to move to offset printing. – Bill Campbell Read more about their campaign here. ————————————————————————————————— Awards of Excellence at MoCCA Fest Chosen by a jury of professional peers including Senior Editor at First Seond Books Calista Brill, artist Cliff Chiang, Editorial Director Charles Kochman, artist Mark Newgarden, and cartoonist, illustrator, and painter Lauren Weinstein. Awards of Excellence are given out to recognize the most outstanding work on view at the festival created by an independent artist. This Award of Excellence year’s winners include: Glynnis Fawkes, “Alle Ego” Pat Dorian, “Lon Chaney Talks Part 2” Shreyas R. Krishnan, “Becoming Rosie” Kate Lacour, “Vivisectionary II” R. Sikoryak, “iTunes Terms and Conditions” The SOI will host this year’s MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellence winners in an exhibit featuring original art from their award-winning books. The exhibit will run from May 06-June 11th. More information here. For a full list of the works awarded recognition by the Society of Illustrators at MoCCA Fest 2016 hop on over to Comics Beat. ————————————————————————————————— The Classics The closing up of Picturebox Inc. isn’t news to anyone but it should never go forgotten. Nadel and company created an incredible publishing legacy and it is of vital importance that comics makers young and old understand the scope of what Picturebox accomplished with comics. Here’s a list of their bibliography so you can dig into the raw material yourself: Study up on the classics. If you can’t find what you want at Copacetic Comics, check your local library. You can thank Bill Boichel and your librarian in advance. Share this page: [...]

12/20/2016

Aaron CockleDecember 19, 2016NewsAaron here today with an Upside-Down World; Internet Comics & Free Speech; Broken Frontier Awards; Héctor Germán Oesterheld; Paul Karasik on Gary Groth (and Frank Frazetta); Security of Culture and Culture of Security; Some Olivier Schrauwen for the Holidays; a Riso Lab Missive ————————————————————————————————— Gustave Verbeek, October 4, 1903 ————————————————————————————————— How Web Comics Revolutionized Free Speech Caitlin McCabe at the CBLDF talks about the internet and the ways in which comics can exist there: The internet hasn’t just become a vehicle for free speech in the English-speaking world. Cartoonists around the world — especially in countries where expressing oneself freely can have legal or physical repercussions — are finding their voice on the internet. Sudanese cartoonist Khalid Albaih has built a following online publishing comics that address serious global issues. Chinese cartoonist Badiucao may have left his home country, but uses Twitter and the independent web newssource China Digital Times to reach his audience and sidestep censors. Kanika Mishra, a female cartoonist out of India who has been threatened for her work, describes how social media has enabled her to not only find new audiences, but empower her to continue to spread her cartoons which discuss social injustices in her home country. ————————————————————————————————— Broken Frontier Awards 2016 The comics blog has announced nominees for its annual awards. It includes work from CW favorites Tillie Walden, Simon Moreton, Eleanor Davis, Kelly Kwang and Richie Pope, Anna Haifisch, and Daniel Clowes; as well as publishers: Koyama, Press, Avery Hill Publishing, Breakdown Press, Fantagraphics, and Retrofit/Big Planet. Please consider voting, if you are so inclined. ————————————————————————————————— El Eternauta Dominic Umile profiles the comics writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld, his work with Francisco Solano López, and the fate of Oesterheld and his family members at the hands of the Argentine dictatorship in 1977. “Oesterheld played an important role in the development of the Argentine comic between the 1950s and the 1970s,” University of Iowa professor Ana Merino wrote in the International Journal of Comic Art in 2001. “He unknowingly opened up a bridge between fantastic and comic literature, showing that comics could be as intense as literature, and in turn, can offer alternative aesthetic possibilities.” ————————————————————————————————— ‘Meet Gary’ Via Paul Karasik, excerpted from the recent Fantagraphics history/hagiography, We Told You So: Comics as Art, edited by Tom Spurgeon and Michael Dean. ————————————————————————————————— Security Culture is Good Kade Crockford at The New Inquiry has some information about navigating and negotiating in these current and soon-to-be current times: Take these precautions to protect yourself and your loved ones from the state. When the FBI interviews someone, they send two agents: one person asks questions, and the other takes notes. The stenographer then goes back to the office and types up the notes into an official document known as Form 302. This is the government’s official record of the interview, and it can and likely will be used against the interview subject. If an FBI official writes on the 302 that you said you were at a basketball game Sunday morning at 11, and then you later tell a grand jury that you were at the basketball game at 10, you can be charged with lying to a federal agent. A conviction for lying to a federal agent will land you in federal prison for years. This is how the FBI puts people in a vice, and gets them to inform. The truth doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is what’s written on that Form 302. ————————————————————————————————— Je peux rentrer chez moi maintenant? A grab-bag (or hodge-podge) of writing about Olivier Schrauwen‘s comics work to date, in French, just waiting to be translated into your language of choice. For example: Entre-temps, les extraterrestres lui font assister en miniature et en immersion au spectacle de l’histoire humaine, de plus en plus douloureuse au fur et à mesure que les événements se rapprochent de sa propre vie, déclenchant un stupéfiant moment d’hystérie infantile dans les rues de New-York, le jour du 11 septembre 2001. Toutes ces pages sont les plus belles et les plus fortes de l’album, Schrauwen s’y représentant comme un géant surplombant la destinée des hommes, mais se comportant en réalité comme un gamin détaché du passé et insoucieux du futur (sommet d’ironie : le narrateur, qui vient d’assister à la fin du monde, dit simplement « Je peux rentrer chez moi maintenant ? »). In the meantime, the extraterrestrials make him assist in miniature and immersion in the spectacle of human history, more and more painful as events come closer to his own life, triggering a stunning moment of infantile hysteria On the streets of New York on September 11, 2001. All these pages are the most beautiful and the strongest of the album, Schrauwen representing himself as a giant overlooking the destiny of men, but behaving in reality Like a kid detached from the past and careless of the future (summit of irony: the narrator, who has just witnessed the end of the world, simply says “I can go home now?”). ————————————————————————————————— Dispatch from the Riso Lab Getting ready for tonight’s (or yesterday’s, considering I am posting this news update on Monday afternoon, to be read on a Tuesday, by you, or whenever, it’s not like time has any sort of relevancy any more, here on the internet, or out in the real world, for that matter, if it ever did) Print Slam 4 event, I had booked some time in the Riso Lab at SVA, and was able to print and assemble a mini, Math Comics 2. Print Slam 4 promo poster by Panayiotis Terzis. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 12-20-2016 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

Comic Arts Los Angeles 2016

Posted on December 14, 2016December 15, 2016 by Chris Anthony Diaz

Comic Arts Los Angeles 2016 (CALA) at Think Tank Gallery, Sunday, December 4, 2016, Los Angeles. All photos colored by Graham Willcox

Downtown Los Angeles fashion district

Lisa Hanawalt

Inés Estrada and Hellen Jo

Hope Larson

Arlin Ortiz and Kris Mukai

Chris Pitzer

Ryan Cecil Smith

Ryan Cecil Smith risograph print

Ryan Cecil Smith risograph mini-comics

Benjamin Urkowitz

Sam Alden

Patrick Crotty

Patrick Crotty and Valentin Seiche

Kevin Czap

Sophie Yanow

Ben Sears and Dustin Harbin (bottom right)

Dustin Harbin

Dustin Harbin

Ric Carrasquillo

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in The Diaz Archive

Chris Anthony Diaz

Posted on December 14, 2016December 15, 2016

Explore

06/13/2017

Aaron CockleJune 12, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with The ClairFree System; Pope Hats; Blind Spot and Black Paper; The Republic of Samsung; Printer Steganography ————————————————————————————————— ‘Here, she explains the inspiration behind her images and what she hopes readers to take from her work.’ Sally linked to this piece this past Friday, Claire Landsbaum asked Jillian Tamaki to dissect some of the panels from her story ‘The ClairFree System’, which is included in Tamaki’s new book, Boundless. Tamaki talks about incorporating found objects into the art-making process: This is another sculpture from the Art Gallery of Ontario, but the original artwork was just the child — I created the rest. A lot of this story is about reframing context: taking a classical sculpture or a photograph, which is a specific instant in time, and stripping it of its information to make it universal, which is what I did here. The image itself is about someone’s hopes and dreams for their child — about everyone’s idea of a great parent, which is that they can give their kid everything they want. I’ve heard people say that a new child is a pure, unsullied human being who hasn’t ever made a bad decision — that they’re without sin. I find that extremely hopeful. I don’t have children, but I would imagine the desire to prolong that state is an emotion every parent feels. ————————————————————————————————— ‘I keep returning to this notion: that the best feeling in the world is working really hard at creating something with no guarantee of a positive outcome.’ Ethan Rilly talks about his process for making Pope Hats #5, over at the AdHouse Books blog: Enough people have asked me whether I’m a lawyer that it might be useful to answer here: No, and I never was. Never stepped foot in a law firm. This story might be autobiographical in all the regular faintly embarrassing ways but the lawyer stuff is a good distance outside of me. I did research and interviews. ————————————————————————————————— ‘I pray to Tarkovsky, Marker, and Hitchcock.’ Teju Cole will be exhibiting work June 15-August 11 at Stephen Kasher Gallery in NYC, photos and text from his new book, Blind Spot, as well as an installation piece, Black Paper. The exhibition features over 30 color photographs from the series Blind Spot, each accompanied by Cole’s lyrical and evocative prose. Viewed together, these works form a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel. In these photographs, we see what Cole has seen, from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; and we are drawn into the texts—which function as voiceovers—with which Cole complicates his already enigmatic images. At stake here is the question of vision, an exploration Cole began following a temporary spell of blindness in 2011, and which he presents here in a photographic sequence of novelistic intensity. The exhibition also presents Black Paper, a visceral photographic response to Cole’s experiences following the election of November 2016. This continuously evolving, large-scale work explores buried feelings, haunted space, and all that can be seen through darkness. ————————————————————————————————— “ABOUT MY WORK AND MYSELF AND ALL THE REST I USED TO SAY:/,” “I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I’M SAYING IT:.” As a continuation of its online Net Art Anthology exhibition, Rhizome features and discusses Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s piece, Samsung. The piece Samsung addresses the complex nature of the corporation—its existence not only as an economic entity but also as an emotional phantom, reaching its incorporeal fingers into relationships, daydreams, and fantasies. The text of Samsung, demonstrating many of the formal qualities of poetry, is interspersed with conversational breaks that establish intimacy with the viewer. The tone becomes conspiratorial as the narrator asks, “CAN/I CONFIDE/IN YOU?” There is no option to decline. The viewer is rendered complicit in the narrator’s confession of their adoration of Samsung. ————————————————————————————————— ‘The printouts contained invisible dot patterns added by the printer to identify the worker who sent the print job’ I posted about Video Steganography, the imbedding of hidden information within electronic files, a few weeks back. Recently, the Boingboing blog posted a piece about one of the ways the National Security Agency was able to determine the source of leaked information about potential hacking involving the Russians in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, by examining the hidden dot patterns that are used with color printers. There’s been much speculation on exactly how NSA leaker Reality Winner was exposed after giving The Intercept documents that showed the extent to which the security agency suspects Russian meddling (previously) in last year’s general election. On one hand, the filing against her talks of the “creases” seen in the scans The Intercept posted, tipping them off to it being a workplace printout from an insider–an insinuation of casual sloppiness on the reporters’ part. On the other hand, it seemed clear Winner did everything at a work computer anyway and was surely doomed once the story came out and internal investigations began. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 6-13-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-13-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-13-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

03/27/2018

Aaron CockleMarch 27, 2018NewsAaron here today with KGB Easter Reading + Paper Rocket Minicomics; Anna McGlynn & Hannah Kaplan; Yvan Alagbé; Comics Appropriation; Protest Comics; Sally Ingraham Birding Comics ————————————————————————————————— Annual Comix and Graphic Novel Night Spring is in the air! Join us for the annual Easter Sunday KGB Comix Night, a free night of live comics readings. Five local cartoonists will offer slideshow readings that are sure to entertain, bewilder, and amuse. Co-hosted by Robyn Chapman and Robin Enrico. Sunday, April 1, at KGB Bar in NYC. Readings by: Emily Flake, Katie Fricas, Alabaster Pizzo, Bishakh Som, Vreni Stollberger ————————————————————————————————— Paper Rocket Minicomics 2018 Spring Line Robyn Chapman is putting out 2 books, issue #3 of Colin Lidston’s The Age of Elves, and issue #5 of the Chapman-edited The Tiny Report. This is our most ambitious issue of the Tiny Report yet, with 60 full-color pages of minicomic reviews, interviews, and bibliographies! We have profiles of two groundbreaking, but very different, comic artists. We start with an interview with Eleanor Davis and an overview of her early minicomic work. And we follow that with Haleigh Buck’s in-depth interview with Mike Diana, the first American artist to be convicted of obscenity. We also have a bunch of minicomic reviews by Robyn Chapman and Robin Enrico. And as always, we chronicle the output of micro-publishers in the Micro-Press Yearbook fold-out. ————————————————————————————————— Anna McGlynn and Hannah Kaplan in Philadelphia. ————————————————————————————————— A Comic Book Artist Who Makes the Invisible Visible Tobias Grey on the newly translated Yvan Alagbé book, Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. France has continued to shape its former African colonies in its own image by erasing the past as it sees fit. In “Yellow Negroes” he reported on a collective of undocumented workers striking in Montreuil who put up a photograph of Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s revolutionary president from 1983 to 1987, in the window of their headquarters. Inserting himself into the narrative, Mr. Alagbé remarked that when he once looked up Sankara’s name in France’s famous Larousse dictionary there was no entry for him. However there was an entry for Blaise Compaoré who led the 1987 coup d’état during which Sankara was assassinated. “I thought that was incredibly violent,” Mr. Alagbé said. “Not only was Sankara assassinated but he was also erased from French history.” ————————————————————————————————— At the Mountains of Madness Austin English continues a strong run of art/comics essays: Let’s make no mistake though: cartooning, artistically speaking, is doing fine without the validation of museums or influential art writers. It’s part of the hard to explain magnetism this medium has for the artists who devote themselves to it. ‘Ok, the offer, as I understand it, is I devote myself to this medium, trying to decipher its complexities, accepting how complicated and demanding it is… and in return, you’re giving… nothing? No money, no acceptance or consideration from the world at large. Sounds good to me!’ As silly as this sounds, this describes countless artists involved in this field, all making work using the full power of their hearts and minds. Is this part of what makes cartooning so beautiful, its lack of prestige or ‘career’ path, thus enforcing an art for art’s sake default mode? Perhaps. But art can provide important things to the public. Cartooning may be doing fine on its own, but I do think those who appreciate art (and whose only understanding of how to experience the story of art is to go to institutions to self-educate) might benefit a good deal from a confrontation with cartooning on the walls of their favorite museum. ————————————————————————————————— Be Heard! A Comic For Student Rights From CBLDF & NCAC “Whether students choose to participate in this national movement or not, whether they walk out into the hallway or march to their Senator’s office, whether they wear orange or write an op-ed for the school paper, this moment is the ultimate First Amendment lesson,” said Abena Hutchful, coordinator of NCAC’s Youth Free Expression Program and Kids’ Right to Read Project. “We hope that teachers will engage with their students in productive ways and we want to make sure that students know what is–and is not–protected protest speech in schools.” ————————————————————————————————— How to Take Pictures of Birding CW News contributor Sally Ingraham has a short comic posted at the American Birding Association blog, a preview of a longer piece in the upcoming issue of Birding. Congrats, Sally! ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 3-27-2018 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 3-27-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio 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: [...]

“How we were thinking” – The Zeitgeist and The Complete Wimmen’s Comix

MardouMay 26, 2016EssaysMystic novelist Doris Lessing interspersed her autobiographies with news clippings and thought-snippets that she’d saved from the years she was writing about. It’s not something you see very often in personal biography; history books are preferred when pulling in contextual ‘fact’. Instead Lessing supplies us with flavors of 60’s London (such as “in cinemas and theatres we stood up for the national anthem”). There’s something so evocative about how she pulls on that shared current of her time. Some of ‘the times’ get culturally hardened and recorded in history books, but lots of it doesn’t. In a similar vein, singer Ian Svenonius notes the transient attitudes of the Then-and-Now, using The Velvet Underground as an example , “…groups that failed in their own era despite catchy tunes, cool shades, turtlenecks and solid connections might have ‘felt’ bad to their audience…conversely, groups which might have felt ‘right’ at the time (the Grateful Dead, Grand Funk, Free etc) may seem confusing to listeners of a later era who are not privy to the pheromones said groups were releasing at their concerts.” Reading the two-volume release of The Complete Wimmen’s Comix made me think about those sort of cultural assumptions and blank spots. The first volume in particular feels like a powerful raw gust of real comics history. The pretty pink and black covers (with inset blue, bruise-like half moons) kicks off with Trina Robbin’s anthology It Aint Me, Babe (1970) and then the complete run of Wimmen’s Comix. I’ve read individual issues before and was somewhat ambivalent. Getting to read the whole gamut is a much different experience, especially the aforementioned first volume (1970-1985). The second volume contains a lot of great stuff too (and more of the artists I’d cite as direct influences on my own work such as Julie Doucet, Phoebe Gloeckner and Alison Bechdel) but the first volume stands out. It seems more experimental, wilder and much less conventional. I wouldn’t have name checked any of these artists in the 70’s/early 80’s as personal influences but this book has made me look with fresh eyes. There’s bold storytelling, some crazy comics layouts and lewd, unapologetically sexy content. It’s in stark relief to the relative lack of risk-taking I permit myself. (And yeah, I’m going to keep thinking about that one). Another aspect that occurs to me is that volume one is essentially my mother’s generation making those comics (I was born in ’75) which makes the lack of respect for cultural niceties and cartooning norms seem even more punk rock and revelatory, as well as being somewhat nostalgic. It reminds me of looking though my aunt’s closet in the early 1980’s and finding all her old platform shoes and boots. My childish trespassing got me yelled at after the event, but I’m glad to own that childhood memory of trying on and walking around in those beautiful and weird, too-big-for-me ‘space’ shoes. It’s not just surface and style though, the content is a match to the macho mores of its time. I’m old enough to remember the casual chauvinism of early 80’s primetime TV shows, as much as I remember seeing housewives with black eyes in the supermarket on Saturday mornings. Though, I was in 1980’s Northern England and not 1970’s San Francisco – yet it’s close enough to spark that consciousness. It’s kind of the thrust these feminist cartoonists were aiming at I think. This volume has also made me re-evaluate Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s work. I found her book Need More Love a little tiresome in tone but reading her juxtaposed with other women artists in this context is such an enjoyable experience. Set amongst her generational peers it’s easier to see the frank humor and flippant skill in her work. She’s so great! A lot of the comics here do miss their mark artistically but it’s not important overall. There was enough I found exciting (and fun!) in these volumes to remind me of the direct power of comics in print – a single cartoonist to a single reader through ink and paper, sharing the highs and degradations of the female experience. This is a big, beautiful, door-opening book and I’m really glad it’s out there. ————————————————————————————————— Sacha Mardou is a Brit making comics in St Louis, Missouri. Sky in Stereo is her most recent comic. Share this page: [...]

03/07/2018

Juan FernándezMarch 7, 2018los Cómics / NewsJuan with some thoughts on examining what it means to write when making comics! ————————————————————————————————— The other night, over dinner here in Pittsburgh, Jenn Lisa and I were talking about making autobio comics and she asked “Are comics mostly writing? Only?”. It made me stop in my tracks. That’s a good question. To me, comics are more writing than they are drawing. That writing process though, is one that far different from this common notion: And the drawing? In comics, the drawing is really just about the recording of images. To clarify, the writing – tt’s how those recorded images are arranged and presented. I just heard someone say that the dirty secret of comics is that it is mostly writing and if you haven’t done good writing all you made was a pretty picture. And everything in me wants to dispute that. It isn’t that cut and dry to me. – Jenn Lisa I agree and disagree. Yes, the dirty secret is that comics is mostly writing. That is true. I firmly believe that. But the only people that I ever hear touting that idea usually have a very narrow definition of writing. So how does that affect you as a comics maker? Well, indulge me in a tangent. This one is for all you folks that hate the planning and foresight that you see kill joy and beauty in many comics makers practices. It’s an idea you might already be familiar with, but I just want to sing the song more fully into the ether. We don’t hone in on meaning by having a creative process that follows a straight line, the reality is that most of us spiral in on that meaning, by diligent work. But what if you don’t know what you’re trying to say? That’s ok. You can still make comics without knowing what you’re trying to say, so long as you know that you’re trying to say something. Your comics will still have an impact, even if you’re not communicating exactly what you intend. How do you get to that meaning? There’s this thing that happens, in comics making, and art in general that I’d like to talk about. What is the nature of the back and forth between the work a reader does and the work a writer does? Writer here being the operative name for the person making the comic. Sam Ombiri and I have talked about it at length during the Pittsburgh Comics Salons monthly meet ups. If I take 14 random drawings from my pile of post it notes and arrange them across 4 pages, and I give it to you in a little booklet, your brain, the readers brain, stitches together a patter of cohesion. That pattern will vary connect disparate elements. Make order out of chaos. They try to figure out a pattern. Why are these images together? The reader does all this work without trying. They can’t help it. As a comics maker, that is a tool that we are using. A reader is naturally going to be interpreting what we assemble together. As a result, we can be playful, intuitive in what we draw and how we arrange what we draw. It will be stitched together by the reader. You don’t need to shove the connective tissue of narrative and symbolism down a reader’s throat. You don’t need to know everything you are trying to do. That’s all pretty explored territory conceptually among many comics makers. The part where my conversations with Sam get interesting is when we talk about signal processing a little more in depth. The signal interpreted by the listeners brain CAN be the same one that you are making. BUT, it can also not be that, while still being an interesting signal. The meaning you intend can be communicated, and you can work at figuring out how to effectively communicate that meaning so that they get what you intended them to get out of the written sequence. There’s a beautiful dance between signal and noise that we are working through when we create art for others to interpret. But no matter what, their brain is going to interpret a signal. The realization was a breakthrough. You can choose how intentional you are about the signal you are transmitting. With that knowledge, you can allow the process of drawing and writing and editing to flow more intuitively. Allowing yourself. You can choose to simply be a radio antenna with your drawings on the page, and how you arrange those drawings on the page in ways that feel intuitively, “right” or “good” to you – your comic will beam a signal to the brain of the other through the reading experience, whether you are aware of that signal or not. This is a model of aural communication, just swap out aural for visual 😉 Don’t be afraid to allow the process to be a Rorshach test of your subconscious. You can see what comes out in your drawing, your arranging. Allow for the accidents! Keep moving. Keep making marks, keep tracing, keep moving your index cards. You don’t have to know what you’re looking for, you just need to know that you’re looking. The paper trail you leave in your search for truth in your comics, that’s your writing. All that said, in a more grounded sense, the process of editing, that traditional refining that we do as cartoonists, that’s where writing is also happening. Every step of the way, where you change, add or subtract meaning, that’s writing. Color blocking is writing. How you scoot images, how you erase, what you add after initial drawings and after you let work sit for a little while, that’s all writing. The intentional arrangement of anything, to be parsed and understood a certain way, that’s writing. So yes, comics are mostly/only writing. But not in the way you think they are. * It’s funny to me that the “writing” in panels and across pages in comics found as lettering is fundamentally drawing. That’s a point Kevin Huizenga drives home to his students. More on that, another day. ————————————————————————————————— Los cómics y las noticias que me han llamado la atención esta semana: ~ en Español y in English ~ En el último #FanzineMagazine Paloma García Zúñiga habla de “Necrópolis del Este” y el gran MAX les cuenta su música para dibujar con Victor Coyote y Mireia Pérez. Escúchalo aquí. Having trouble with anxiety attacks? Well fret no more! Kat Fajardo offers up an illustrated guide on remedies and why it works. Check out this Pay-What-You-Wish publication and consider sending it to a loved one! Esteban Hernández charla en Cafe con Vistas sobre tebeos y su Moneda músical. Podrá ser miercoles, sí, pero también hay nuevo número de Revista Cactus. Lo puedes leer ya enterito y gratis, aquí: http://bit.ly/2Fbz6CW Inés Estrada gives you the low down on How to Avoid Boredom over on vice.com ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 3-7-2018 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

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