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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in EssaysTagged fantastic four, Frank Santoro, John Byrne

Comics Workbook

Posted on February 11, 2017May 14, 2019

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Aaron CockleJune 20, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Lauren Weinstein; Jillian Tamaki; Ad Reinhardt; Georgia O’Keeffe; Kriota Willberg; Snail Farm & Friends Book Fair ————————————————————————————————— Normel Person Lauren Weinstein continues her strong run of weekly strips at the Village Voice. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Each story shifts emotional and visual register.’ Jillian Tamaki’s new book, Boundless, receives another solid review, this time over at The Atlantic: An ambitious and eclectic set of tales, it focuses on the interior lives of unexpected subjects: the writer of a pornographic sitcom, a shrinking woman, a plant-nursery employee with an internet doppelganger, even a fly. Boundless uses a constantly varying visual treatment that keeps readers on their toes and mixes and matches artistic styles with a proliferating set of genres, from speculative fiction to domestic drama to magical realism. If a reader comes to Boundless with assumptions about visual storytelling, Tamaki will confound them. ————————————————————————————————— 5. No design. “Design is everywhere.” Via ARTNEWS, Ad Reinhardt’s 12 Rules for a New Academy: Much of today’s discussion of contemporary abstraction is centered on “Zombie Formalism”—Walter Robinson’s coinage for new work that revisits (or apes, one might say) historical forms of abstraction for purely stylistic reasons. Given the intensity of that debate, we thought it would be interesting, for this week’s Retrospective column, to jump back almost 60 years, to 1957, when Ad Reinhardt took up the subject of contemporary abstraction in ARTnews. Reinhardt, who had written for the magazine previously, said that the article—titled “Twelve Rules for a New Academy”—”constitute his last words on art in terms of words.” He sharply criticized his formalist contemporaries, offering instead twelve ways to achieve purity in art. There would be no forms, no texture, no color, nothing—just pure blackness, as in Reinhardt’s most famous paintings. Reproduced in full below is Reinhardt’s article, which takes subtle swipes at Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, the Abstract Expressionists, and more. —Alex Greenberger The Six General Canons or the Six Noes to be memorized are: (1) No Realism or Existentialism. “When the vulgar and commonplace dominate, the spirit subsides.” (2) No Impressionism. “The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.” “The eye is a menace to clear sight.” (3) No Expressionism or Surrealism. “The laying bare of oneself,” autobiographically or socially, “is obscene.” (4) No Fauvism, primitivism or brute art. “Art begins with the getting-rid of nature.” (5) No Constructivism, sculpture, plasticism, or graphic arts. No collage, paste, paper, sand or string. (6) No “trompe-l’oeil,” interior decoration or architecture. The ordinary qualities and common sensitivities of these activities lie outside free and intellectual art. ————————————————————————————————— Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern At the Brooklyn Museum through July 23, 2017: The exhibition is organized in sections that run from her early years, when O’Keeffe crafted a signature style of dress that dispensed with ornamentation; to her years in New York, in the 1920s and 1930s, when a black-and-white palette dominated much of her art and dress; and to her later years in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the surrounding colors of the Southwestern landscape. The final section explores the enormous role photography played in the artist’s reinvention of herself in the Southwest, when a younger generation of photographers visited her, solidifying her status as a pioneer of modernism and as a contemporary style icon. ————————————————————————————————— ‘The Internal Body Interacting with the External World’ New York Academy of Medicine’s Artist-in-Residence, Kriota Willberg, recently concluded a 4-week workshop, Visualizing and Drawing Anatomy, and has a brief recap about it. And in a post from 2016, Willberg looks at some historical anatomical drawings: The images of Jacopo Berengario da Carpi’s Anatomia Carpi Isagoge breves, perlucide ac uberime, in anatomiam humani corporis… (1535) powerfully emphasize the fiber direction of the muscles of the waist. This picture in particular radiates the significance of our “core muscles.” Here, the external oblique muscles have been peeled away to show the lines of the internal obliques running from low lateral to high medial attachments. The continuance of this line is indicated in the central area of the abdomen. It perfectly illustrates the muscle’s direction of pull on its flattened tendon inserting at the midline of the trunk. ————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 6-20-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-20-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-20-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

Printing Comics – by R. M. Rhodes

Printing Comics – by R. M. Rhodes

Comics WorkbookJuly 27, 2017EssaysA common topic of conversation among Those Who Remember is the age of the comics medium. Was Richard Occault’s Yellow Kid really the first comic? Or does that honor belong to Rodolphe Töpffer’s goofy satires? Or does it go back even further than that? And how does the Bayeux Tapestry fit into all of this? The answer to all of these questions is “marketing.” It was in the best interests of the New York newspapers to trumpet that the Yellow Kid was the first of its kind because they were fighting over who got to print it – it was that popular. It’s in the best interests of Francophone historians to promote a local Swiss artist who published in French back in the mid-1800s. And the Bayeux Tapestry is an outlier, lovingly handcrafted propaganda. Honestly, any question of what “was the first comic?” must, almost by default, ask the question “what is comics?” What are the elements that must be present for something to be considered “comics”? From there, the theory goes, it’s just a matter of going through the material until you find the earliest example of something that meets those criteria. The reality is much messier than the theory. I am currently working my way through a copy of The Early Cartoon Strip by David Kunzle, subtitled Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 through 1825. (Why I just discovered the existence of a book that was published the year I was born is a mystery for the ages.) Kunzle did a comprehensive deep dive of archives of European art and offered up a consistent definition of the comic strip: There must be a sequence of separate images There must be a preponderance of image over text The medium in which the strip appears and for which it is originally intended must be reproducible, that is, in printed form, a mass medium The sequence must tell a story which is both moral and topical Kunzle starts the introduction to his book with what has become a cliché, but wasn’t in 1973 – the discussion of how comic strips aren’t always funny, so it’s a misnomer. They shouldn’t be called comics, but they are. I believe that’s the underlying reasoning for the fourth criteria for what makes up comics (now and then). Because it really doesn’t make sense that the subject matter or kind of story being told has anything to do with whether something should or should not be considered a comic. You would not argue that a novel is not a novel because the story is a comedy, or vice versa – so why should a comic that had no moral or topic relevance be excluded? Kunzle gives a decent justification that provides a filter that could narrow his search – and thus, his results. But his premise was laughable in 1973 and is laughable today. “Whether it is considered morally harmful or morally useful, progressive or reactionary, the modern comic strip has undeniably strong moral content.” Strong disagreement. But limiting what gets labelled comics due to tone and/or intent ignores the versatility of the medium. Comics can – and should – be anything. One of the intriguing things about Kunzle’s criteria is what’s missing – the lack of proscriptive about what kind of art is used to make the image. This ties in with criteria three – reproducible in a mass medium. Essentially, Kunzle’s research indicates that comics have been around since the introduction of the printing press in Western Europe. And, in the beginning, printing technology was so crude that there really wasn’t room to be picky about what kind of art it was to begin with – it all had to be converted to woodblocks for print anyway. But even a cursory glance at the exhaustively cataloged marginalia by monastic manuscript copyists indicates that cartooning was a well-established skill in the centuries long before the introduction of the printing press. Some of these even look like the Bayeux Tapestry, if you squint. The point being that cartooning and making comics are two distinct, separate skillsets. It is entirely possible to be a cartoonist without ever making comics and it is equally possible to make comics without using cartoons. Which makes this pedant grit his teeth every time someone says that they’re looking forward to seeing “all the cartoonists at SPX,” for example. This begs the question of whether the person making the statement cares about all of the rest of the comics creators in attendance or only cares about cartoonists? I think the requirement of mass reproducibility is the most interesting and least intuitive. It suggests that a solitary page of sequential art that has no intention of ever being sent to print is not really comics. It also suggests the paradoxical concept of copies with no originals – something that seems less and less absurd to artists who have grown up making and sharing their art entirely on the internet with files that can be perfectly replicated with little or no effort. Back in the day, when Kunzle was doing his research, the idea of an entirely digital medium was barely conceived of at Xerox PARC, but was a long way from being evenly distributed. As far as I’m concerned, the mass reproducibility requirement answers the initial question regarding the Bayeux Tapestry – it was never intended to be mass reproduced and, indeed, there was no way for it to be mass reproduced at the time of its creation. In fact, reproducing the entire Tapestry in its current medium would be a major undertaking now. I know from experience that it’s relatively straightforward – if time-consuming – to transform the contents of the Bayeux Tapestry into an eight panel grid. (The whole thing takes up about nine pages.) But that’s not the Bayeux Tapestry, exactly, is it? It’s designed to be read as a continuous strip 70 meters in length. So any faithful reproduction of it ought to be, by rights, in the original format – even a 70-meter-long printout would be a mediated version of the original and lack authenticity. Set aside the question of who would buy it (answer: collectors like me, who enjoy tracking down obscure works) – the real question is “who would have the wall space to display it?” Even the museum at Bayeux has to display the tapestry on three adjacent walls. Kunzle traces the improvements in printing technology as they progress through the centuries in Europe. What’s interesting is how these advances provided greater range and detail for the artists, but that the early works are just as effective as their later counterparts. It’s also interesting to note how similar in process and effect the earliest proto-comics are to the works of Lynd Ward, for example, who produced wordless illustrated novels with one woodblock print per page. In that way, Ward has a more direct connection to the earliest works than contemporary comics creators do today. Kunzle documents how the public’s affection for caricature in the late 18th century drove the adoption of etching over line engraving as a primary means of reproducing art. Engraving was William Hogarth’s medium and his works did a lot to define what engraving and sequential art were capable of. In some ways, caricature, a very informal art style, is a reaction to the excessive formality of Hogarth. One was stodgy and moralistic, the other was quick and simple. Kunzle notes that the emergence of etching…invited the addition of light washes in watercolor. “Sixpence plain, one shilling colored” is a phrase not found upon prints before the advent of caricature. Which begs the question of how Dirk Jansz van Santen became such a prominent and sought-after colorist of engraved prints a century before Hogarth. A major difference is that van Santen did intricate piecework. He hand-illustrated entire atlases, but these were very limited editions. His work could not be mass produced the same way that the original engravings could be. His work became a value add, simply by the nature of the fact that he did them. One of the first superstar colorists, really. By the late 18th century things had changed. JMW Turner did work coloring etchings for the local print-seller when he was a boy. Caricature required less precision to make, print, and color. Every step of the art process was much more accessible to talented (noble) amateurs instead being solely the purview of the trained working class professional infrastructure that had to grow up around the precision required from etchings. In 1787, a younger son of a baronet named Henry Banbury created a seven foot long strip called The Long Minuet as Danced at Bath. Later that year, he produced The Propagation of a Lie, which was only six feet long. These two pieces set of a craze for strips – mostly of much shorter, easier to copy, length. The parallels with the Bayeux Tapestry are obvious, but the medium, subject matter, and technical circumstances were radically different. Töpffer arrived towards the end of this wave of innovation and worked in a caricature style. This was mostly due to his poor eyesight, which kept him from doing the kind of detail work that he might have wanted to do. Töpffer’s innovation was not the caption with the art, nor with the strip arrangement, nor even panel borders, nor even the far more satiric subject matter. Really, Töpffer’s innovation was that he made books – several pages of sequential narrative that were themselves in sequence and had to be read together to make sense of the whole thing. To that point, sequences were constrained to a single page, with multiple strips stacked on top of each other. Or, in the case of Hogarth, they were a series of single page prints, suitable for framing. Sometimes, as in his Before and After series, Hogarth would mount two images on the same page side by side. But if you only wanted one page from his Rake’s Progress, for example, he would sell it to you and be satisfied that you will get the moral message. The rest of the pages made a good complement, but they were not necessary as a set to get the whole story, as it were. Töpffer’s innovation literally changed the context in which sequential art could be presented. Before it was pretty much restricted to single pages, sometimes as a collected set. It was probably inevitable that one branch of printing would collide with another, but Töpffer seems to be the first one to make that connection in a commercially viable context. Ironically, without the encouragement of Goethe, Töpffer probably would not have self-published his works – and even when he did, they were in limited print runs of no more than 500. He was widely pirated in his lifetime and the knock-offs sold far more than the originals ever did. By 1895, when Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid first appeared in the strip Hogan’s Alley in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Stylistically, The Yellow Kid was nothing new, but the technology had advanced to the point where the comic could be printed in color, which is what made The Yellow Kid distinctive, and thus, desirable. Indeed, the popularity of the character meant that he appeared in one, then the other, then both newspapers at once until 1898. Certain American comics historians date the advent of the modern comic strip to Outcault, and they’re not wrong, just chauvinistic. Again, the emergence of better printing technology is really what is being acknowledged, not necessarily the content or the artistic style. Like I said at the beginning, it’s all marketing. The fact that one can trace the advances in printing technology through the history of printed visual narrative is pretty impressive. Frank Santoro is clearly on to something with his ongoing interrogation of Risograph printers. Contemporary comics creators have a large variety of choices they can make with regard to their approach to mass reproduction. Unfortunately, many choose the default option, without realizing that default means there are other options. These days, I make 16 page, 8-panel grid comics, which is not unusual. But mine are digitally printed, which is a quantum leap from old-school industrialized print-making – but digital printing suits the complex nature of my digitally-rendered artwork the best. And I make limited-edition, numbered print runs of 25, which pushes the edges of the intention of mass reproduction. There is no burning commercial demand for what I do, which makes 25 copies optimistic at best. But the limited print run calls back to the days of limited edition print sellers. My point being that if one is going to make choices, it’s important to know what those choices signify and what benefits come with each one. Knowing the history helps with that process. Share this page: [...]

Aaron CockleAugust 21, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Graphic Medicine; Santoro PDFs; Eclipse Comics ————————————————————————————————— Excerpts from Graphic Medicine #1 Due to the generosity of anonymous benefactors, CW has acquired a copy of the comic published in support of the most recent Comics and Medicine conference. ————————————————————————————————— Santoro Treasure Trove Please consider supporting Frank Santoro’s Indiegogo project. As a way of raising funds, he’s collected the past 10+ years of work he’s posted on various blogs, including Comics Comics. 666MB and counting. I took some quick screenshots from the first 3 PDFs that have been sent out. BEST OF COLD HEAT BLOG Layout Workbooks, Color Workbooks, and Notes on Scroll Comics BEST OF COMICS COMICS ————————————————————————————————— Eclipse Comics, not to be confused with Eclipse Comics ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 8-22-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 8-22-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 8-22-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

Juan FernándezMay 2, 2016NewsMaggie Sutrov’s plein air comics, Dan Nadel chronicles Paper Radio; Clean Sweep; Creators For Creators; Koyama Press in the news; Rokudenashiko; Jason Moran; Remembering Harold Cohen. ————————————————————————————————— New Comics – Maggie Sutrov Comics Workbook is featuring a collection of comics drawn and painted by teacher and artist, Maggie Sutrov this week. Made on site and in the moment, these comics represent an under-examined mode of comics making. Join Maggie for a walk on the page. Here’s hoping her work gets you inspired to make observational comics of your own. Check it out here! ————————————————————————————————— Inside front cover of Christopher Forgues’s Low Tide #5, November 2001. Punk and Hippie Dan Nadel has put together a killer reflection on the collaborative work Ben Jones and Christopher Forgues(CF) did as Paper Radio over on Art in America. It’s something else. A Comics Comics boomerang that smacks you hard across the face. Nadel explores the roots of their comics, growing up in Massachusetts, subversive fan fiction, and the monumental impact of their short lived collaboration in the early 2000s. So many great details in this piece: Jones and Forgues found their own ways into making comics, but neither made a hierarchical distinction between mediums.Everything was fair game, except perhaps the remote-seeming New York art world. As Forgues recalls, “The idea of being an artist seemed absurd.” The venues, audiences, and markets for gallery art appeared totally foreign. “I’m going to do an installation? Where? I’m gonna paint on canvas? How? Where am I gonna show? At a coffee shop? Art seemed like the past, and a zine was the present and tangible . . . a way to proceed.” And this one: Both Jones and Forgues drew, as they still do, in pencil, which was unheard of at the time in professional circles but appropriate for Paper Radio’s primary printing technique: photocopying. Without the need for the photostat process by which older comics were created, there’s no need for ink. They produced flat and open figures through their airy, calligraphic approach. Paper Radio never attempted illusionistic realism; instead, the drawings invite projection from readers, which the artists saw as a way of initiating an intimate exchange with their audience. As Forgues puts it, “I was thinking about how to make this work with the least amount of stuff possible. That sounds easy or lazy, but it’s actually incredibly hard. The whole mission of cartooning is, with a few lines, to bring something across that’s real in the mind. The whole magic of what it is to represent something on a surface. The space is there, and you fill it with your brain.” By foregrounding, and deepening, the interaction that happens in all kinds of reading, Forgues and Jones understood Paper Radio as connected to performance, which was integral to so much of the culture pouring out of Fort Thunder. Read it all here on Art in America. ————————————————————————————————— Clean Sweep CF has released 3 new works that you don’t want to sleep on: THERMAL PRINTED RECEIPT MAGAZINES PRINTED ON 25ft LONG BPA FREE PAPER Dumb, beautiful and soon to be out of stock. CF takes on the scroll. Minds are sure to melt. See what it’s all about over on the Free-CF site. ————————————————————————————————— A Neo-Xeric Grant Image Comics and Iron Circus Comics have teamed up to create the Creators For Creators grant. Seems like good stuff for makers who feel they have the chops to get a big break from two independent publishing powerhouses. The goal of the Creators for Creators grant is to help pave the way for the next generation of comics creators by supporting their work financially and through mentorship, as well as providing opportunities for their creations to reach a wide audience. We plan to give $30,000 to a single cartoonist or writer/artist duo in order to support the creation of a new and original work of a length between sixty-four and one hundred pages over the course of a single year. The recipient will be selected by committee according to rigorous criteria. Submissions opened yesterday. Learn more here. ————————————————————————————————— Koyama Corner Koyama Press has been featured in the culture section of FADER, the music magazine. It’s great to see Koyama Press, and Annie in particular, getting profiled for audiences outside of comics circles. Zainab Akhtar puts together a nice profile of the publisher for folks outside of the very comics publishing bubble that Koyama press has spent it’s existence trying to bust. From the article, here’s Michael Deforge on Annie Koyama: “She was a comics reader, but Koyama Press didn’t start out primarily as a comics publisher, so she didn’t have that weird, insular point of view that some people who’ve spent too long in comics can develop,” says DeForge. “She didn’t have preconceived notions about what a ‘proper’ comic looked like, what a sellable one looked like, or the formats they should be printed in.” Check it all out here. MANKO MANKO MANKO Robert Kirby takes a good look at Koyama Press’ What is Obscenity by Rokudenashiko over on The Comics Journal. It’s great to see this book make it through people’s hands and gain momentum as a vessel for Rokudenshiko’s thoughts and experiences as a Japanese woman. Ultimately, Rokudenashiko’s greatest weapon is her refusal to capitulate to the attempts at belittling and dismissing her: when she claims “Rokudenashiko”/”Good for Nothing”, as as her own, she ties herself to a long and noble activist tradition of reappropriation (for example, feminists reclaiming “bitch,” to express strength and independence, and the LGBT community’s use of “Queer” to connote solidarity among its different factions and to state opposition to sexual binaries). Also, she tells us, “I’ve always liked to fight.” The fact that the authorities prove utterly clueless about crowdfunding, among many other things, only strengthens her resolve and defiance. Read it all on The Comics Journal. ————————————————————————————————— STAGED in NYC The work of musician/composer/artist Jason Moran is being exhibited in Bushwick gallery, Luhring Augustine through July 30th. Moran’s work links music and visual art in a way that deeply explores racial entanglements in American cultural production. This exhibition is an especially notable one for how it explores the flow of music through space and time via architecture and the performance of remembered music. It’s jaw dropping stuff. STAGED will include a range of objects and works on paper, including two large-scale sculptures featuring audio from Moran’s STAGED series that were recently exhibited in the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Based on two historic New York City jazz venues that no longer exist (the Savoy Ballroom and the Three Deuces), the sculptures are hybrids of reconstructions and imaginings. Works on paper and smaller objects will be in dialogue with the stage sculptures on many levels: citing performance and process, employing sound, and exploiting the visual history of jazz in America. It’s interesting to see how the history of Jazz is treated in the world of fine Art, when it’s not just seen as an ancillary development to the narrative of arts movements. It’s really striking when Jason speaks in the above video about the role and Jason Moran’s body of work speaks to how the music transforms from healing to hurt. Makes you think. ————————————————————————————————— Harold Cohen Has Passed Away Last week, on the 27th of April, code artist, Harold Cohen, passed away at age 88. Cohen, a computer scientist and artist, developed AARON, code which could generate unique visual compositions autonomously in 1973, starting with abstract and later with more representational subjects. Interestingly in the 1990s, Cohen’s compositions were translated to the physical realm, drawn and painted by plotters onto canvas. The blog, Prosthetic Knowledge, has a good look at his AI and its evolution for those interested in his legacy. ————————————————————————————————— That’s all for today. Until next time. Stay dry. Share this page: [...]

Juan FernándezOctober 24, 2018NewsJuan and Andrew with an invitation to participate in 2018’s #30dayscomics Juan here! November is right around the corner which means that not only will I finally let myself turn on the heat at my apartment in Pittsburgh, but #30dayscomics will soon be upon us! As the weather chills and most of us become indoor creatures in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s good to come together by working on and sharing comics making challenges, connected by the internet. For those who don’t know, 30 Days of Comics is a month-long challenge. The parameters are pretty simple: Make 1 comic a day for the month of November. They can be anything you like, any format, any style, though most people do 1 page or 1 strip. Just do it everyday. This November, I’m excited to be able to allocate some time (likely at work) to working on my esperanza00 series and to see where these neurotrash digital collages of drawings, jpegs, clippings from articles, poems and facebook posts take me. The idea will be to create a 4 panel comic composed of 3-6 colors in this fashion daily: Needless to say, I’m excited. Here at Comics Workbook we’d like to invite you to participate in this year’s comics making journey. With me today is Andrew White to tell you more about a little this year’s #30dayscomics. Take it away Andrew. Starting on November 1st, I’m going to draw and post one comic per day for a month. I’ve done this almost every year since 2012, with varying success in terms of getting to the end of the month and in terms of the work itself. The cartoonist Derik Badman first took on this challenge, which he called 30 Days of Comics, in 2009 and invited others to join him in 2011. Derik describes the month as, “a time for experimentation, exploring short forms, and a great way to produce work.” That sounds about right to me. Often participants work with some kind of constraint, using the month to experiment with different approaches or new materials. See for example Kevin Czap’s A Lesson in Survival (2012), which appropriates text from Joni Mitchell and is visually very different from Kevin’s other work; or Simon Moreton’s set of printed zines produced near-daily; or Alyssa Berg’s Open Letter to Sleep (2016), an extended meditation on a single topic. Making one comic per day is of course a constraint itself. Personally, I’ve found the month most fruitful when I’ve gotten at a topic that I’ve been turning over in my mind for a while, which hopefully means that it will benefit from a rapid outpouring of work. The 30 Days of Comics Tumblr archive is another place to see how others have approached the month in the past. On that note, the community aspect of 30 Days has been essential for me. We encourage each other to keep going, and I’m still happy with the year when I riffed on the work of other participants. I’ve first met some dear friends thanks to 30 Days. Finally, implicit in the call to make comics daily for a month is the idea that making comics daily might not be possible through the rest of the year. We all benefit from a different balance between thinking about comics and making comics – and sometimes that balance is imposed externally by a day job or other life circumstance. We’re all affected, often negatively, by the idea that productivity is essential to our success as an artist, but we might wish we were more productive as well. For me, 30 Days helps with the difficult project of maintaining that balance. One comic per day isn’t too much work, but 30 comics in total is also significant. It’s okay if you miss a day. It’s okay if you aren’t happy with some of your work. This year I’ll be making four panel comics, inspired by people like Juan Fernandez and Madeleine Witt. My strips will be loosely based on this paper in the academic journal Science. I hope you’ll join us, and that you’ll use the hashtag #30dayscomics so that we can all find each other’s work! 10-24-2018 – Fifi Martinez 10-24-2018 – Niall Breen Share this page: [...]

Frank’s Comics Corner #1 – Fantastic Four #233

Posted on February 11, 2017May 14, 2019 by Frank Santoro

Frank’s Comics Corner 2-4-2017

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Posted in EssaysTagged fantastic four, Frank Santoro, John Byrne

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in EssaysTagged fantastic four, Frank Santoro, John Byrne

Comics Workbook

Posted on February 11, 2017May 14, 2019

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Aaron CockleMay 30, 2016NewsKurt Ankeny Comics; Blank City; Saltz-on-Guston; Louise Bourgeois; Rokudenashiko; Kartalopoulos-on-Manouch; Robyn Chapman/Paper Rocket; Pigeon Anarchy; Spectacle of the Situation ————————————————————————————————— CW continues its look this week at Kurt Ankeny’s In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home. ————————————————————————————————— Wei Shao’s Blank City via Socks Studio Being built is no limit to the multi-dimensional world, everything is a standardized city. Space is normalized into a single cube, the cube is given the function, the function must comply with the specification. Life has been standardized in size cubes, they are given the same rhythm of life, follow the simple life, with all copied. Supreme goal, everyone in the “right space” to do “the right thing.” –(Hazardous translation by g.translate from Japanese original) ————————————————————————————————— Philip Guston Hauser & Worth Review Guston must have known the return to figuration couldn’t be denied any more. And still he refused. He was in a battle of wills with his art. It must have been nightmarish. So much so that he stopped painting altogether for three years after the last canvas in this show. He didn’t show his work again until 1970. Critics had slammed that work as “displeasingly raw”; the canvases were said to have “unpleasant texture.” His colleagues were shocked, suspicious, and thought he was trying to hop on the Pop bandwagon; one painter friend asked why he had “to go and ruin everything.” Lee Krasner was said to find the work “embarrassing.” New York Times critic Hilton Kramer lambasted Guston as “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum,” dismissing the work as “cartoon anecdotage … funky, clumsy and demotic,” and concluding “We are asked to take seriously his new persona as an urban primitive … and this is asking too much.” But the die was cast. While Pollock was the first to truly break through to pure non-objective painting, it was Guston who was the first to break out. And yet nobody seemed to understand. He’d risked everything and lost. – Via Dan Nadel at TCJ ————————————————————————————————— Louise Bourgeois at Hiram Butler Gallery ————————————————————————————————— Rokudenashiko And, lucky for her, the police and media continue to give Rokudenashiko a platform on which to promote her art. “I mean it when I say I am grateful to the police,” she said. Without them, she knows not nearly as many people would have seen her work. “Kind of ironically, they had to take all of these pictures of my art for their case. The prosecution had like a $90,000 camera to take these really specific pictures of my work from every imaginable angle, 16 slides per piece. I wouldn’t have ever been able to pay for any of that on my own, so now I have these amazing gelatin prints of my work. They’ve performed an act of art themselves.” – Dayna Evans at NY Mag ————————————————————————————————— Ilan Manouch: Defamiliarizing Comics with Bill Kartalopoulos But “l’affaire Katz” was not quite over. In 2011 Spiegelman had published MetaMaus, a book about the making of Maus. Manouach and his publisher burned the shredded remnants of Katz and had the ashes mixed into printer’s ink that was then used to publish MetaKatz, a 2013 book about the brief life and destruction of Katz and the issues raised by the experience, including contributions from a variety of artists and critics. MetaKatz “had a lot to say about different things such as resampling in comics, or the history of rip-offs in comics, or the problem of using animal metaphors,” said Manouach. “I think this for me is the prototype of a book form. It’s a book that creates discussion, that creates polemics, and another book that responds to these polemics. I think it’s a perfect example of how I imagine dialectics to be.” -via Bill Kartalopoulos at World Literature Today ————————————————————————————————— Robyn Chapman & Paper Rocket Comics ————————————————————————————————— Katie Fricas Comics ————————————————————————————————— Tino Sehgal at Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin His eponymous show at Martin-Gropius-Bau is beyond a doubt entertaining and spectacular, but it is neither radical nor subversive. These situations that entertain the crowds and are sold for substantial profit would make Guy Debord turn in his grave. On the surface, the lack of objects in combination with politically infused content make his work look novel and insurgent. But Sehgal is only formally employing devices of the radical practice of the avant-garde, and he is using them with very different intentions. His brand of “immaterial art” is not about the dematerialization sought by those who coined the idea and wanted to oppose the creation of commodities in a capitalist system. With his version of immaterialism, he has managed to create a new type of commodity that is highly sought after in the art market and, by doing so, has apparently filled a void. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

Summer 2016 Rowhouse Update

Summer 2016 Rowhouse Update

Juan FernándezJuly 29, 2016School UpdatesShare this page: [...]

Sally IngrahamJanuary 12, 2017NewsSam and Sally here to share info on the 5th Annual Black Comic Book Festival, work from Derick Jones and Shannon Wright, a whole pile of comic strips, and thoughts from Sam on influences in film. ————————————————————————————————— Sally here – This Friday and Saturday the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library will be hosting the 5th Annual Black Comic Book Festival. You can register to attend HERE. Expanded this year to fill two days, the schedule of events includes panels with Kyle Baker, Trevor Von Eeden, and Ronald Wimberly among others, a tribute to Jackie Ormes, and a number of “how-to” workshops including “How to Draw Afrakan Superheroes” with Akinseye Brown. There will be a comics exhibition both days as well. More details on the event HERE. Ronald Wimberly is pumped about going – he reported via Instagram: “Of course white people are welcome! Who’d exclude white commerce after the opium wars?! …. This weekend I’ll be at the Black Comics Festival (@schomburgblackcomics) at the Schomburg Center. I’ll be selling and signing copies of Prince of Cats, the Attack on Titan Anthology and maybe something else… On Saturday 5:30-6:45, I’ll be on the Comics and Hip-Hop panel moderated by Jonathan Gray featuring Andre Leroy Davis, Eric Orr (@orrdesigns), and Sole Rebel in the Langston Hughes Auditorium.“ Be there! ————————————————————————————————— Shannon Wright drew this cute comic about “A proud father recording his son demolish DDR” and went on to comment on these rare cool Dads: “…in a lot of cases it’s shocking because we don’t see that involvement, especially when the hobby or interest doesn’t revolve around a sport or a prominent musical instrument. It was refreshing to see.“ I love when Shannon makes these quick comics – her skill set is incredible and I enjoy her more illustrative work – but her 4-panel strip comics and work like the piece above really capture moments in a special way. More please! ————————————————————————————————— Derick Jones is publishing a webcomic called Dead Days in Kowloon – he’s been at it since October of 2016. He updates it twice a week – read it from the beginning HERE. I really like the work Derick has been posting on his Instagram recently – check it out @skudsink – straight inks, no midtones is his tune for the year so far! ————————————————————————————————— Sam Ombiri here: The quote of the week comes from Jafar Panahi – “Every film is worth watching.” This is from his last risky movie that he “didn’t make”, using a security dash cam, called Taxi. (Editor’s Note: Jafar Panahi has been making films while under house arrest in Iran since 2010…!) He’s more optimistic than his buddy Abbas Kiarostami was. I read somewhere that Abbas Kiarostami was optimistic about the idea up until he realized, eventually, that the public having cameras wasn’t enough, and the promise he had felt about the general population having easy access to the camera didn’t yield what he had hoped. What Jafar Panahi says reminds me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s whole thing of “zen in art”, that it can be something like nature – you can choose to interact with it or not. I think it’s really interesting the amount of danger both directors put themselves in for their movies. (They also each made great movies called The Mirror.) At the beginning of Powr Mastrs 3 CF says, “I see you all imitating me – Disappointing – Follow your own star.” One hope with looking at how movies are made – it’s something like what Robert Bresson said, something along the lines of “I’m often influenced by other mediums.” (He was actually quoting someone else whom I can’t remember. He was about to walk off the interview because he thought they were going to ask questions that he didn’t want to engage in. or in the context with which they were asking.) Anyways, I’m thinking about the way people like Lynne Ramsay, Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Michael Haneke process their Bresson/Tarkovsky influences. (With Panahi I’m only guessing that he’s influenced by them – the other two I know for sure, and with Ramsay I only sense Bresson). Whereas there are others who are processing that influence in a way that can feel… I don’t really know the right word. I don’t want to be more harsh than necessary. I think Haneke’s work studies the relationship between projected reality and reality as it’s happening. In White Ribbon, which I haven’t seen for a long time, I think it’s the relationship between the photos taken in that time in relation to what could have been going on in those photos, that could suggest that this generation of kids will be the ones that accept Hitler. There is the ideal image being imposed…or, well…because of being caught up in these ideal images that are being imposed, the adults remain naive and too blind to see this other mysterious “behavior” rise from their romanticization of their children. The behavior is only being suspected, as you can’t tell whether or not the children are lying. – Sam Ombiri ————————————————————————————————— Adam Griffiths brings us another ‘Zine Tree Interview – this time with JB Brager – a Philadelphia-based cartoonist and writer, and a PhD candidate in Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Tarantula by Alexis Ziritt & Fabian Rangel Jr. & Evelyn Rangel is coming out via AdHouse Books any minute now – and they have released a gorgeous full color preview for us to drool over – HERE. ————————————————————————————————— From the Comics Workbook school store – Zona #3 – all student work – 40 pages of comics – stories by Kurt Ankeny, Jacqueline Huskisson, Paddy Lynch, and Tyler Landry. Covers include an additional unique hand drawing by Frank Santoro – edition of 100 – signed and numbered. Get a copy of this book HERE! ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 1-12-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 1-12-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— 1-12-2017 – by Juan Fernández ————————————————————————————————— Dungeon Lollers – 1-12-2017 – by Tyler Landry Share this page: [...]

Juan FernándezApril 18, 2016NewsNorth American independent comics focus today; Comics Workbook Benefit Auction in its final days; Submitting comics to VICE; Marc Bell reflects on the past couple of months; Jay Lynch Collection joins the Billy Ireland; The Garden of Earthly Delights invites you in. – Juan Fernández —————————————————————————— Ecuadorian Earthquake Victims I wanted to take the time before we talked comics to ask for your help after the 5.1 magnitude earthquake in Ecuador that happened yesterday. There are cities that are completely devastated, people trapped under debris waiting to be rescued, towns without electricity, running water or communication. There are some initiatives receiving donations to send help to those in need. Here is a link to one of them that my friend Luis Eduardo is involved with: https://www.gofundme.com/hqzjghm4 Also, here’s an article where you will find other organizations at the end that are also receiving donations: http://www.bustle.com/…/155170-how-to-help-the-ecuador-eart… Any and all help is appreciated. If you are not able to donate, please help us by sharing these initiatives. Thank you so much for your help! —————————————————————————— COMICS WORKBOOK BENEFIT AUCTION ENDS SOON There are ONLY TWO DAYS left for our benefit auction. Take a gander at the INCREDIBLE AUCTION of original Chris Ware artwork that is being held to benefit the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency.You don’t want to miss this opportunity to make this incredible art yours. Check it out: The auction is live HERE, and will continue through mid-day Wednesday. We need your support and you need this art! —————————————————————————— VICE | Comics | Accepting Submissions If you are looking for a good venue to publish some stand alone comics work, take not that VICE is taking submissions. You get a regular deadline, to make work in color, get an audience and they pay. From Nick Gazin: I need new comics for VICE. The basic guidelines of Vice Comics is that the comics should all be: -in color -at least a page -have characters, dialogue and stories -not serlialized or to-be-continued -each page should be a 2000 pixel wide jpeg no larger than 1mb. -no racism, sexism or homophobia -no comics about VIce or “hipsters” -no genitals or sex acts -should contain dialogue and moment-to-moment panel transitions -should not rely heavily on narration. Actions and interactions should tell the story. Show, don’t tell. Check out what I’m running at vice.com/comics If you have stuff that’s already done or samples of comics you’ve made send them as low resolution email attachments to nick.gazin@vice.com This might be a good opportunity for you. Shoot Gazin an email if you’re interested. —————————————————————————— Pouring Melted Snow in a Pan Marc Bell does a couple life recap posts a year, he’s just posted his first one for 2016. Catch up with Marc Bell here. —————————————————————————— Jay Lynch Collection finds Home The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum has acquired the Jay Lynch Collection. This collection includes original art, comics, correspondence and other material from Lynch, who is now 71. Lynch is best known as the creator and editor of “Bijou Funnies” in the 1960s and 1970s. This collection is a real underground gem. And it’s a huge one! The collection totals to nearly 250 cubic feet of manuscript materials, original art, underground comix, merchandise from Lynch’s work at Topps, and letters from R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, and other icons of the popular culture dating back to 1956. Additionally, the collection is home to an extensive number of fanzines and college humor magazines, often offering the earliest look at work from Harry Shearer, Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton, and more. Also in the collection are some famous (and infamous) publicity campaigns, including groundbreaking satirical work such as Oingo Boingo’s anti-clown movement, Ed Sachs’s Irreverent Newsletter, Alan Abel and Buck Henry’s Society for Indecency to Naked Animals press releases, and early press kits from Jay Ward Productions. Get into the nitty gritty here. —————————————————————————— Visit Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights https://tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch.ntr.nl/en Here’s a site that offers an interactive online adventure through Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. There are two ways to virtually visit. You can choose to take a fifteen-step museum style tour, narrated by Redmond O’Hanlon, or you can “freely explore,” an option that allows you to zoom in on any part of the painting at will, clicking here and there to hear O’Hanlon discuss its motifs. Your choice! Don’t get too lost. The Garden of Earthly Delights is a story about moral and sin in a particular time. The painting however is timeless. The journey that the visitor sets out on in the interactive documentary is a personal one. Beneath the surface we aim to invite the visitor to reflect upon and question their sins and morals. The interactive documentary Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Delights is part of the transmedia tryptich: ‘Hieronymus Bosch’. The transmedia tryptich consists of the documentary film ‘Hieronymus Bosch, touched by the devil’, the interactive documentary ‘Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights’ and the Virtual Reality documentary ‘Hieronymus Bosch, the Eyes of the Owl’. Website: http://jheronimus-bosch.nl —————————————————————————— I’ll see you Wednesday with South American happenings. I’ve got a ton of things I have to share! Share this page: [...]

Sally IngrahamSeptember 7, 2017NewsSally here with new work from Hannah K. Lee, and Sheree Domingo, plus other comics and news! ———————————————————————————————— I was excited to perused the advanced review PDF of Hannah K. Lee‘s book debut, coming out from Koyama Press next week. Language Barrier collects several of Hannah’s zines and comics, as well as a new piece. The design of the book looks beautiful, from the end papers, to the full color comics and the scans of zines (I really like the aesthetic of scans of existing books, for some reason!) The new comic is great (no spoilers allowed yet) and it’s nice to revisit some of the riso printed zines that Hannah made in 2012/2014 which are long out of print. I love her Shoes Over Bills zine, which is contained in this collection, and is a striking visual game of balance between wants and needs… Hannah’s work as a commercial illustrator and letterer comes into play nicely in this collection. I like when the text in a comic or zine is as much an artistic and visually stimulating part of the work as the drawings are, and Hannah definitely plays with her words in these pieces. Check out more of Hannah K. Lee’s work HERE, and keep an eye out for her book in shops around Sept. 12th 2017, or at the Koyama Press table at SPX next week! ———————————————————————————————— Electrocomics (Ulli Lust’s online comics publishing platform) just released a comic by Sheree Domingo called Omegawolf (above). You can download the comic HERE. I like Sheree’s use of watercolors, with a 3 color palette and no blackline. The story is about a brief connection between a boy and a wild “omegawolf”. You can find more of Sheree’s work HERE. ———————————————————————————————— Women Who Draw organized an international art project last month, which Topic recently compiled and published. “On August 13, 2017, at precisely 12:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, 88 artists all over the world stopped what they were doing, looked up, and drew the sky. What each artist saw was unique to the time, the weather, and the place. The locations ranged from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn, Buenos Aires to rural Georgia. Some saw different hues of blue. Some saw black, pink, or gray. Some saw stars or clouds or fog or rain. Here it was summer. There it was night. In one place a fire left a heavy brown haze. Whatever sky the artist saw, they captured it on paper in their own unique style. They were, at that exact moment, separate skies. But when we view these drawings together, they become one far-stretching, simultaneous world view. They become a portrait of one shared sky.” —Wendy MacNaughton and Julia Rothman, co-founders of Women Who Draw See the entire One Sky project HERE. ———————————————————————————————— Boundless by Jillian Tamaki is reviewed on the LA Review of Books – HERE. Paste Magazine‘s “Required Reading: Comics” roundup for the week reminded me that I want to read Bombshells United #1, which is written by Marguerite Bennett and drawn by Marguerite Sauvage, and just came out. The A.V. Club took a look at a preview copy recently, which you can check out HERE. Arianna Margulis‘ Instagram comic But Like Maybe is something of a phenomenon, earning her a nod from The New Yorker this week. There’s a review of Anna Haifisch‘s new book Drifter in the German Art Magazine – read it here. Ulli Lust is having a book release party in Berlin this month – here are details for the party on Sept. 10th 2017 – and here’s a look at Ulli’s new book courtesy of Lauren Weinstein! Liana Finck explores “who does a story belong to?” when it comes to loved ones, and making comics about them – on Topic, HERE. ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 9-8-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ———————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]