Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in School UpdatesTagged artist residency, cartoonists, Comics, comics residency, Comics Workbook, Pittsburgh, rowhouse residency

Comics Workbook

Posted on June 13, 2016January 6, 2019

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01/28/2016

Juan FernándezJanuary 28, 2016NewsHello world, Gotta start off with the big Rowhouse Residency news coming from Frank: That’s right. It’s official. We’ve got keys in hand, and Truth Zone’s in the mail. If you’ve been sleeping on getting your copy of the official limited edition bootleg. Now’s the time. They’re headed out of Comics Workbook HQ, why not have one head your way? Don’t sleep on it, seriously. !!buy thee Complete Truth Zone by Simon Hanselmann!! The second half of Jillian Tamaki‘s latest entry in the Early Stories series has just been publishied on Hazlitt Magazine. Woof! Sit on down and give it a read. Part 1/2 Part 2/2. John Seven reviews Jane Mai‘s latest outing, See You Next Tuesday on the Beat. See what all the hubbub is about for yourself! It’s the intimacy of what Mai covers that makes her work so accessible. A lot of the details are Mai-specific, but she is so giving with those details that a reader is able to think of their own versions, if there’s nothing exactly identical going on. So you may not cry on the toilet like Mai, but you may have some other secret ritual that belongs to you, exhibiting for your own disapproval a fleeting glimpse of your inescapable sadness. Sean Howe just uploaded some raw footage of a thirty-minute video interview with Stan Lee from the mid-1970s over on Youtube. It’s curious to see the Stan act turn on and turn off here and there during this interview. For the history buffs. Julie Delporte, Julie Doucet and Lynn Johnston weigh in on the debacle that is the Grand Prix D’Angoulême at the CBC, Canada’s national public radio broadcaster. Check out the whole article here. Julie Delporte: “Everything in history has been shaped by men,” she says. “If everything is chosen by men, and read by men, of course men’s works will be more appreciated.” Delporte sees inequality in Canada’s comic scene, too. She points to a recent study that shows female visual artists in Canada earn 35 per cent less income than their male counterparts (the overall income gap between men and women, according to the study, is 31 per cent). She also senses resistance within the upper echelons of the comic world. —————————————— We’d be remiss if we didn’t pass on John P.’s news: It’s official Membership cards for the King-Cat Fan Club are at the printers! You can sign up to support John Porcellino by contributing to his new Patreon site if you’re interested. Proceeds go towards helping John make more comics, run the Spit and a Half distro, and save for retirement! Why not support one of the patron saints of the american small press. www.patreon.com/johnporcellino Lastly, non-fiction cartoonists Josh Kramer and Em Demarco as starting a monthly round up of non-fiction comics. The CoJo List. If this sounds like something you want to submit work to, submit links to or stay up to date with, you ought to sign up for the newsletter. Em: The CoJo List is a roundup of recent nonfiction comics, including Comics Journalism (CoJo). They’re all journalism, documentary, or otherwise true. Not so much memoir — but exceptions are encouraged. From seasoned professionals to enthusiastic amateurs, here’s the best our fledgling genre has to offer. Josh: We’re on the lookout for the best true comics stories to tell people about, and we need your help! Email us at thecojolist@gmail.com with your suggestions. We especially encourage submissions by and about women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks. -jf Share this page: [...]

05/02/2018

Juan FernándezMay 2, 2018los Cómics / News Marcela Trujillo, Power Paola, Elisa McCausland, Autoras de Cómic + Digital Comics Museum’s Access Month —————————————— Los cómics y las noticias que me han llamado la atención esta semana: ~ en Español y “sometimes in English” ~ —————————————— Digital Comics Museum – Access Month For this month of May 2018 every user who donates to the Digital Comics Museum, the best site for downloading FREE public domain Golden Age comic books, will be given FTP access as an alternate method to download files from the 21000+ Digital Comic Museum collection. For each dollar donated donors will receive 5 gigs of file downloads over the next 31 days from the day the donation was made. Click on the Donate link here (or at the top of the page) to contribute to the cause and receive your FTP login info in an email. For the last two years our FTP Access Month has been remarkably popular. Donations to the site are vital for keeping our server bill covered. These FTP Access Months help DCM build a reserve fund for those months we come up short in our monthly goal of $288 or if there is an emergency such as a hard drive that needs replacing in our servers. —————————————— De Frente Me Escondo – Cali, Colombia Este sábado 5 de mayo, desde las 3:00 p.m. en el Museo la Tertulia inaugurará la exposición y conversatorio “De frente, me escondo”, que intentará poner en escena el mundo de la artista colombo-ecuatoriana Power Paola con sus dibujos. —————————————— Marcela Trujillo y los Abusadores de Poder – Chile Hoy en el DesconCierto, dibujante Marcela Trujillo revela vergonzoso episodio de abuso de poder y acoso laboral de Rodrigo Salinas, Carlos Reyes y otros editores de Feroces Editores. Me acusaron que me había robado la plata. Llamé y les devolvieron la plata al día siguiente. Y a la semana hicieron programa en Internet donde invitaron a dibujantes y dijeron: ‘Invitamos a una dibujante chilena muy conocida, Marcela Trujillo, que venga Maliki’… y llegó una vedette argentina, casi en pelotas, con plumas, bailando. Estaban todos súper curados en el video. Le tocaban el poto, le ponían la cabeza entre las tetas y en la tele ponían ‘Marcela Trujillo, Maliki‘, ¡todos mis nombres! La hicieron dibujar y ella dibujó un corazón y empiezan ‘ah que dibuja bonito la Maliki’. Yo no lo podía creer, eran mis editores, mis amigos, eso no se puede hacer. Cómo tan machista, tan indigno. Después me llamó la hermana de Rodrigo para retarme porque hablaba mal de su hermano en Internet. Eso fue lo único que recibí de ellos, porque nunca nadie me pidió disculpas. Léanlo todo AQUI. —————————————— Fanzine Magazine – 26/04/2018 Ya disponible el #FanzineMagazine donde Mireia Pérez y Víctor Coyote hablan largo y tendido con Elisa McCausland sobre la trayectoria del colectivo de Autoras de Cómic y de otras cosas ocultas… Además Cynthia Alfonso les recomienda a viva voz sus canciones para dibujar. —————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 5-2-2018 – by Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

05/24/2016

Aaron CockleMay 23, 2016NewsBerliac Week Continues at CW; Venn Diagram Panel; Kirby Gridz; Safari Festival 2016; Dueling Book Release Parties; Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum; Juan Fernández Comics ————————————————————————————————— Featured this week: Gwai-Lo of the Heart by Berliac. Made for Comics Workbook in 2015. ————————————————————————————————— Venn Diagram Panel from MoCCA Festival 2016 Painter and cartoonist Keith Mayerson once called his 1996 graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged “too arty for comics” and “too comics for art.” The boundary between those two fields, however structural and arbitrary, may be weakening, but is it happening quickly enough to accommodate the rapidly growing number of artists who are now so productively working in this seam? Moderator Bill Kartalopoulos will investigate these questions and more with three leading lights of contemporary artcomics: Austin English (Gulag Casual), Aidan Koch (After Nothing Comes), and Blaise Larmee (3 Books). ————————————————————————————————— Via Micheal Oeming’s Facebook page. ————————————————————————————————— Safari Festival: New waves in contemporary comics and art. 11am to 6pm, 27 August 2016 Protein, 31 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EY safarifestival.tumblr.com | @safarifestival | info@safari-festival.com Safari Festival is a celebration of the new wave of alternative and art comics from the UK and beyond. Taking place over one Saturday at the end of August, the festival is an opportunity for a curated group of cartoonists and publishers to exhibit and sell their artwork, prints and, primarily, comics, and for attendees to experience the best of UK comics’ avant-garde. The artists exhibiting have been selected for their innovative, fearless, diverse approaches to making comics; approaches to cartooning that Safari intends to champion. The festival will be free to attend, and will take place at Studio 2, the Shoreditch gallery space of London-based creative agency, Protein. ————————————————————————————————— Thursday, May 26, 7-pm in Providence and/or NYC ————————————————————————————————— Henry Darger at the Folk Art Museum ————————————————————————————————— I Can See the Birds by Juan Fernández 5.5″x8.5″, Color & Risograph, $6 postpaid (International Shipping). This one is my Yo La Tengo comic on the shoulders of the poetry giant, Mary Oliver. The words are excerpted from her poem, Wild Geese. All drawings are first takes on location here in Pittsburgh. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

04/27/2016

Juan FernándezApril 27, 2016NewsFumetto 2016; Begoña García-Alén’s El Espectador; Dr Fausto Fanzine 10; Daryl Seitchik’s Missy for sale; a first look at Tim Hensley’s Sir Alfred No. 3 ; Al Jarnow & Edwin Rostron. ————————————————————————————————— FUMETTO 2016 Fumetto, one of Europe’s leading international comics festivals wrapped up this past weekend in Luzern, Switzerland. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the festivities lasted from April 16-24. Among the many guests this year were Lorenzo Mattoti, Joost Swarte, Gabrielle Bell, Caroline Sury, Fremok, Max and Ben Katchor. Fumetto has captured glimpses of all the lectures, workshops, pop-up studios, gallery exhibitions, market places, and parties in a recently posted archive of photos. (If you want to get lost into the nitty gritty of the social media coverage of Fumetto, explore Fumetto’s social media wall here.) Among all of the goings on this year was Fumetto’s annual competition exhibition. The theme this year was “Temptation”. View the winning entries from the 2016 competition here. For those of you really hungry for more of Fumetto’s competitions, you can read all of the winning entries from 2014 and 2015. ————————————————————————————————— (the spectator) The fourth installment of Begoña Garcia-Alen‘s El Espectador (the spectator) is now up over on TikTok cómics. Her spectator series is a nice collection of work that explores the idea of observation and reflection. It’s done in a playful, formalist Koch/CF hybrid. Check it out here. ————————————————————————————————— Llegó nuestra Décima Edición. 10 Autores de Colombia, Argentina y Chile. Toda la info en: https://t.co/0OsmwQUpyN pic.twitter.com/Qhq901Nfmf — Dr Fausto Fanzine (@DrFaustoFanzine) April 25, 2016 Dr Fausto The 10th edition of the Colombian publication, the Dr Fausto Fanzine is here! This edition comes out thanks to the support of Editorial Universidad de Caldas. Ya llegó! It’s now available in cities throughout Colombia, starting in Bogotá. This is issue features 10 cartoonists from Colombia, Argentina and Chile: Edward Muñoz (Editor) http://eddmunoz.tumblr.com/ Un reptil http://relampagarto.tumblr.com/ Truchafrita http://www.truchafrita.net/ Wil Zapata http://wilcomix.blogspot.com.co/ Lutocorps http://lutocorps.blogspot.com.co/ Pablo Bofelli (https://www.facebook.com/PUNCH-590883774340172/?fref=ts)http://felipunch.com.ar/ Toto Duarte https://www.flickr.com/photos/sergalletas/ Javier Fabregas http://www.javierfabregas.co/ Pablo Pérez http://periodistailustrado.tumblr.com/ Jko Sánchez http://jkosanchez.net/ ————————————————————————————————— Digital Missy Daryl Seitchik has collected and made all of her issues of her comic Missy available digitally over on gumroad. Check it out. The first one’s free 😉 ————————————————————————————————— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJZjfcMR2fc Comics Movie Tie-in Fantagraphics has just shared a detailed look at Tim Hensley’s latest book, Sir Alfred No. 3. It’s beautiful stuff, full o hyucks. Sir Alfred No. 3 is an oblique biography of the world’s most famous film director, Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, despite being numbered “No. 3,” no other issues exist. The comic book is composed of multiple gag strips based on anecdotes found in tomes of film lore in the public library and used book shops. As Hensley’s previous work Wally Gropius referenced the ’60s teenager genre, Sir Alfred pays homage to ’50s personality comics and movie tie-ins. It ends up being something of a cross between Marge Buell’s Tubby, who bears an unforeseen resemblance to the famous director, and Miss Beverly Hills of Hollywood. Have a closer look at the book over on Fantagraphics’ site. ————————————————————————————————— Asymmetric Navigations Take a walk and join Al Jarnow in conversation with Edwin Rostron over on Edge of Frame as they reflect on his life of creation that has move seamlessly across artistic mediums. Paintings, animations sculptures, software, exhibits – his ideas have taken every form you can imagine. Tune into his frequency for a little energy and inspiration. EoF: In the documentary Asymmetric Cycles you describe your process onCelestial Navigation as “setting up an experimental environment in which I could more or less improv and riff off of different ideas to do with time, the passage of time and the passage of light.” Was this typical of how you worked with your animations? Did this kind of experimental process relate to how you worked as a painter? Was there a lot of material generated through this kind of process that didn’t make the cut? AJ: Yes, always! In painting as in film, the process has always been a dialogue. What happens with the first stroke is a determining factor in what happens with the next. An experiment is an act in which you don’t know the outcome. It’s a learning process. You might have expectations and anticipate your results, but those can color your results. In film, a lot of snippets ended up on my cutting room floor (or at least in cans still stored in my attic). In painting, pieces ended up in re-cycling, painted over, cut in half, and again stored in my attic studio. ————————————————————————————————— Have a good one and see you soon. Here’s one some reverie for the road. Share this page: [...]

Michael Deforge’s Sticks Angelica: Folk Hero Release Tour

Chris Anthony DiazApril 6, 2017The Diaz ArchiveMichael Deforge signed his awesome new book from DRAWN & QUARTERLY at Comix Experience, Wednesday, April 5, 2017, San Francisco. All photos colored by Graham Willcox Share this page: [...]

The Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency

Posted on June 13, 2016January 6, 2019 by Comics Workbook

The Rowhouse doors are open! We are accepting applications for 2018 and 2019 Residencies!

The Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency was founded by Frank Santoro in the spring of 2016, thanks to the incredible support of the comics community and a successful Indiegogo campaign in 2015.

Check out the Indiegogo campaign video HERE!

Now in it’s 3rd year, the Rowhouse is a busy place, as we run residencies for aspiring and experienced comics makers alike, and host certain master cartoonists who are making a point of coming through Pittsburgh to spar in the Comics Workbook dojo. Facilitated by Sally Ingraham, with the assistance of Frank Santoro, Juan Fernandez, and other members of the Comics Workbook crew, the Rowhouse Residency is a transformative place of discipline, study, and creative energy.

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Email santoroschool@gmail.com for more info about how to apply for a residency and find more details about the program below!

Check out our School Updates and News – Read the Residency Reports

Follow our Instagram (@rowhouseresidency) – Visit the School Store

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Rowhouse June-July — **L-R top** – Audra Stang hard at work during her residency in July 2016 – Frank Santoro with Lale Westvind, June 2016 (above) – Frank with Mahmoud Hashemi and Matthew Conway, June 2016 (below) – Lale Westvind making a comic at the Rowhouse, June 2016 **L-R bottom** – Sammy Harkham and Kevin Huizenga stop by, May 2016 – Matthew Conway during his residency, June 2016 – Sally Ingraham (above) and Juan Fernandez (below) working on projects at the Rowhouse, July 2016

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Application details are below –

visit Pittsburgh and make comics in 2018 or 2019!

Please email santoroschool@gmail.com to apply.

The application process is more like a conversation – please kick it off by telling us a little bit about yourself, sharing some of your comics or art work, and detailing what your goals might be for your time at the Rowhouse.

Folks have enjoyed residencies that were a weekend to a month long, and we provide different fee structures for the various lengths of stay. You are guaranteed a private room in our comfortably furnished Rowhouse, space and time to work, instruction and mentoring from Frank Santoro and other members of the Comics Workbook team, plus access to Frank’s extensive comics library and the resources of the greater Pittsburgh comics community.

We are currently accepting Residents for a minimum of a week and longer.

Email santoroschool@gmail.com for more details!

**L-down** – Caleb Orecchio hard at work, July 2016 – Ben Sears taking a look at his comic, August 2016 – Frank working with Gabriella Tito, August 2016 **Middle-down** – Audra Stang at the ToonSeum (with Pittsburgh comics makers Sam Ombiri, Lane Milburn, and Em DeMarco) during her 2nd residency, January 2017 – Kate Harmon copying Elektra, August 2016 – Adam Griffiths ticking off comics tasks, January 2017 **R-down** – artwork by Emil Friis Ernst, an exchange student from The Animation Workshop in Denmark, December 2016 – Ronald Wimberly visiting Copacetic Comics, February 2017 – Sam Ombiri stopping by the Rowhouse to print a comic, February 2017

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So what exactly is the Rowhouse Residency? And who the hell are we, anyways?

The Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency is facilitated by Sally Ingraham, with the assistance of Juan Fernandez and local members of the Comics Workbook team. However, it all begins with Frank Santoro. In his words:

“I’ve been making and writing about comics since 1988. My work has been exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Allegedly, I’m a good egg and one of the most passionate proselytizers for comic books and visual literacy that you will ever meet.

I’m from Pittsburgh, PA and I want to make this city the best place in the world to learn comic book making. Beyond that and closer to home I want to improve the neighborhood I am from. I grew up in this neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Swissvale – and my family has been on this tiny little street since 1933. This was a booming steel town hamlet and then it went into decline. Now, the city and the neighborhood are on the upswing. I want to be a part of that change and now my schoolhouse residency is anchor on this street and in this neighborhood.

I’ve traveled all over the world and there is something special about Pittsburgh besides my own nostalgia or hometown pride. The Rowhouse Residency is now a part of the incredible ecosystem of learning institutions here in Pittsburgh. We are such an interesting city, I think, because we have this combination of a hard working blue collar mentality and a broad appreciation of the arts. I know it’s because of the ecosystem of museums, libraries, universities and independent learning institutions we have in Pittsburgh. Everyone from here has been to the Carnegie Museum and a Steeler game. City of Champions in more ways than one.

Even if you know very little about comic books please consider that comics are where many kids learn to read. Comics are words and pictures. And words and pictures are the internet. So the artform of comics promotes “visual literacy”. Learning comics is like learning music or learning how to communicate with more than just words. And that’s the world we live in today.

We are creating a dojo for students much like a martial arts academy. The beginner student will learn from more experienced students. We run the school like a sports clinic. What’s wrong with your swing? We can fix it. The dojo sparring sessions (so to speak) are recorded and broadcast. We have a “broadcast booth” and a radio show. We interview veterans and rookies and make room for friendly competition in order to push the boundaries of what is possible in the art form. This is not your regular comic book academy. This is a ninja academy, a samurai school, a Jedi academy. I do a really good Yoda impression.

The student can live for a day, a weekend, a week or a month at a time in the same space. That way, the student-resident can have a total immersion in the process. Most cartoonists work out of their home, so why have an expensive school building and make the student live in a crappy dorm or apartment off campus? Why not just give them a desk and their own bedroom? The residents take classes with me in the living room of the house. And my mom lives up the street and makes great spaghetti sauce and lasagna. So it’s a family affair. We broadcast lessons and publish the work of residents through the local powerhouse, Copacetic Comics. Bill Boichel, the proprietor of Copacetic Comics in the Polish Hill section of Pittsburgh, is my Yoda. I want to pass on the lessons he taught me to a new generation of Jedis.

The circle is now complete.”

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Email santoroschool@gmail.com for more info about how to apply for a residency

Check out our School Updates and News – Read the Residency Reports

Follow our Instagram (@rowhouseresidency) – Visit the School Store

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**Top row, L-R** – Matt Rhodes working, March 2017 – Gloria Rivera and Sally Ingraham, March 2017 – work made at the Rowhouse by Jackie Kirby, June 2017 **L-down** – Connor Willumsen reading Zap comics, April 2017 – Patrick Bonato going over his nearly completed comic with Frank, May 2017 **Middle-down** – (L-R) Lale Westvind, Connor Willumsen, Audra Stang, Kate Harmon, and Phil Dokes in “the Batman alley” during PIX, April 2017 – Jason Robinson and Frank on the porch at Copacetic Comics, June 2017 **R-down** – Caleb Orecchio and Audra Stang working on comics the night before PIX, April 2017 – Dash Shaw and Frank at a Pittsburgh screening of My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, April 2017 – Frank in the Comics Work”boat” (canoe) on the Monangahela River, May 2017

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in School UpdatesTagged artist residency, cartoonists, Comics, comics residency, Comics Workbook, Pittsburgh, rowhouse residency

Comics Workbook

Posted on June 13, 2016January 6, 2019

Explore

04/20/2017

Sally IngrahamApril 19, 2017NewsToday Sam Ombiri looks at work by GG and Gloria Rivera, and Sally shares new work by K. L. Ricks, updates from Yona Harvey, Shannon Wright, and more! ————————————————————————————————— Sam Ombiri here, going through š! #25 ‘Gaijin Mangaka’: GG’s comic in š! #25 ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ (above) had a poetic, slow, rhythmic passage of time, with a mystery unraveling – and simultaneously, less clarity is achieved as time progresses. Even so, there is density present in the simple things going on, and elements of the story are moving towards something unrelenting. We come back to our senses with a very grounded comic from Gloria Rivera (above). It almost feels like it does not fit in this book. It certainly does not stick to the gimmick of recycling manga tropes for alt comic readers, as I initially anticipated. It is then surprising in how sincere it is about this simple interaction – someone’s terror of the complications of being. The work was explained by Gloria Rivera in the introduction of Gaijin Mangaka – “The more you do research, the more you end up at the ‘weird part.’ ” For her, this included the special genre of Josei manga, made by and for adult women, which Rivera considers an alternative form in itself, in which “women are no longer in the background, or victims. They are given their own stories with true breadth. Although sometimes they can seem villainized, the discourse that comes attached with those characters has a profound effect on its audience.“ I’d like to think that Gloria’s success in her comic is independent of the manga she read. I’m sure the manga helped her, but at the end it was all her. I mean, am I just reading this work because there are artists who make compelling work somewhere else? I highly doubt it, otherwise I wouldn’t be compelled myself by the work. While the introduction of the book is great, there are points where you are being told which aspects of the work to be compelled by. It then proves to be a challenge to engage with the work, because a foreign entity has entered the work and proceeded to guide you, the reader. It places the reader in the role of someone who is there to regurgitate the feelings of the one who is contextualizing the work. The real exciting moments of the anthology are the points at which the selling point of Gaijin Mangaka – being manga themed – is almost entirely ignored, or not prioritized at the expense of the comic. This happens with Gloria’s contribution, or Mickey Zacchilli’s contribution. I hesitate to say, but it’s the work itself turning into the selling point, as opposed to the way it’s being contextualized in the book. It is more that at the end of the day, I like the work. I like all this stuff in the book – I have my preferences, but it is not motivated by a simple idea like, “Because the manga has influenced the comic, it means I like the comic.” When I was getting into alt comics, what I saw as “alt” was really unspecific. One of the main attitudes I saw as “alt” was whatever the crazy thing might be, “it’s not such a big deal” – and that even applied to artists appropriating the typical manga drawing styles. The works that I really responded to in Gaijin Mangaka were the ones where manga’s influence wasn’t so apparent, or it wasn’t what was carrying the comic. I probably felt that way because the work felt like it was being sold to the audience as “alternative cartoonists” doing a bunch of manga-influenced work. Manga’s influence is increasingly present. In fact, the book gags you with this influence, and overloads you with it. The problem is that it almost distracts from the work – but still it’s a great anthology all together. – Sam Ombiri ————————————————————————————————— Sally here – K. L. Ricks has a new comic up on her site – Nesting (first page is above). It was made for the Critical Chips anthology, edited by Zainab Akhtar. You can see the rest of this, and plenty more of her work HERE. ————————————————————————————————— There’s a good piece on Fusion about the new Black Panther & The Crew, co-written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Pittsburgh’s Yona Harvey. The first issue kicked off recently, and has been garnering admiration and excitement. It is proving to be quite topical as well, but this shouldn’t be surprising. “While Coates and Harvey might not have set out to write Black Lives Matter: The Comic, it’s obvious that they’re writing from perspectives shaped, in part, by their experiences as black Americans. Black Panther & The Crew isn’t a “black story” solely meant to appeal to black fans. It’s a story written by black authors, centered around black characters, and featuring themes that reflect the lived experiences of real black people. That distinction is important.“ Read the rest of the article HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Ebony ran a feature on Shannon Wright recently, focusing in a series she did on the hairstyles of black women. Although her work has been leaning toward illustration more so than comics lately, I’m hoping she will direct her energy and passion back into the medium soon. Regardless, her word of advice to other creatives holds true: “Make work that you’re passionate about because people can definitely tell when you’re not in it. Be kind to people. Don’t create work that’s going to make people feel like they don’t belong. Honesty goes a long way in your work. People notice when you stand by your values.“ Read the rest of the feature HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Check out the Cartoonists of Color Database. Built and maintained by MariNaomi, you can find the names and information of almost 1,000 cartoonists of color. ————————————————————————————————— Everyone wants to spend time outside as spring pulls itself together in earnest – you need good books and comics to read on blankets spread out in the sun. Consider adding The Art of Vanesa R. Del Rey to your picnic basket, for a compelling afternoon read that will also inspire you to head back into your studio to try and make new and better comics yourself! Check it out HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Blinkers – 4-20-2017 – by Jack Brougham ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 4-20-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 4-20-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

06/27/2017

Aaron CockleJune 27, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with New Chinese Comics; Zadie Smith on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; Clowes @ Cracked; Philip Guston; Something Unusual is Happening at Printed Matter; Matthew Thurber’s Cartoonist Run-down ————————————————————————————————— If you can’t make it but would still like to buy a book, they will be available at Desert Island after the 29th and through our website: paradise-systems.com ————————————————————————————————— Under-Song For A Cipher Zadie Smith looks at the Lynette Yiadom-Boakye exhibition currently on view at the New Museum. In many of Yiadom-Boakye’s interviews, she is asked about the source of her images, and she tends to answer as a novelist would, citing a potent mix of found images, memory, sheer imagination, and spontaneous painterly improvisation (most of her canvases are, famously, completed in a single day). From a novelist’s point of view, both the speed and the clarity are humbling. Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes. But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative. The type of questions prompted by, say, Holbein (What kind of a man was Sir Thomas More?) or Gainsborough (What was the social status of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews?), or when considering a Lucian Freud (What is the relation between painter and model?), are all short-circuited here, replaced by an existential query not much heard in contemporary art: Who is this? The answer is both literal and liberating: No one. Nor will the titles of these paintings identify them. ————————————————————————————————— ‘MAD Magazine in the 80’s seemed staid and a former ghost of itself, but Cracked seemed exciting and filled with new blood (and old) that spoke to my budding anarchic mind.’ At the Last of the Spinner Rack Junkies blog, Isaac Chance has uploaded a bunch of comics Daniel Clowes did at Cracked Magazine in the 1980’s. Clowes would produce work for Cracked from 1985 through 1989. During this period he was also writing and drawing his own comic book Lloyd Llewellyn for Fantagraphics. After six issues, Llewellyn ended with a Special in 1988 and Clowes began Eightball in 1989. ————————————————————————————————— Philip Guston and the Poets At Hyperallergic, Cara Ober looks at Guston’s work and the role that poetry played in its making, on exhibit at the Gallerie dell’Accademia (Campo della Carita, 1050, Venice) through September 3. The exhibit is loosely curated around the five poets who are said to have had the most significant impact on his work — Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence — and this structure provides unusual opportunities for thematic, rather than historical or formal, groupings. But at the core of the exhibit is an idea that’s both cohesive and revolutionary. The show argues that Guston’s staying power — grounded in fresh oddness, compelling authenticity, and dodgy compositions — was a direct consequence of his relationship with poetic language and form, as well as the ideas of the poets who wrote them. Rather than a romantic inevitability, Poets offers a pragmatic and collaborative handle to Guston’s career as a prolific artist and maker; it attests to the power of verbal and metaphorical language in nourishing his visual oeuvre. The exhibit also argues that silence is necessary for a visual artist’s development; it suggests that Guston’s leaving New York, the epicenter of the art world, was not only helpful, but essential to his work. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Why were there no comics in the Whitney Biennial, again?’ Matthew Thurber discusses work by 10 Cartoonists Every Art Lover Needs to Know Including Austin English:. Comics-as-poetry is an established thing: See the work of Juliacks, Sarah Ferrick, and publishers like Sonatina and 2dcloud. English’s work was influential on this branch of comics-making. Unlike commercial comics—which traditionally convey emotion with simplified facial expression—the muddy, creased faces of English’s characters are opaque. I see a lot of George Grosz, Francis Bacon, and Willem de Kooning when I look at his drawings, which tend to be small and heavily worked with watercolor and colored pencil. Lale Westvind: The cartoonist’s background in traditional oil painting, video art, and animation led to her creating self-published comics at a heroic pace. In HAX, Amazonian warriors battle airplanes under Lichtensteinian Ben-Day dot skies. Her early animation Organism Test (2009) is a key to later work. Thousands of hand-drawn frames depict blob-creatures writhing in the desert, while hybrid motorcycle creatures race towards each other to collide at incredible speed: a copulatory act that generates new life. If Jack Kirby adapted J.G. Ballard’s Crash into a Captain Pronin cartoon, it might begin to resemble Westvind’s filmic oeuvre. Recent animations for the band Lightning Bolt and Morpha! Utila!, for the online TV channel Super Deluxe, are psychedelic masterpieces. And Keren Katz: Katz’s work, like that of Matthew Barney or Mika Rottenberg, has its own logic. Her storytelling voice seems to link the divine nonsense of authors like Daniel Pinkwater, William Steig, or Edward Gorey with surrealist writers like Leonora Carrington. Her comics are Truly Weird, the highest compliment I can give. With drawings executed in confident colored pencil, her figures stretch, bend, and topple in a manner reminiscent of contemporary choreography. (Indeed, Katz studied dance and has mentioned Pina Bausch as an influence.) ————————————————————————————————— The publications included in Something Unusual is Happening share a common interest in non-conventional storytelling, with each artist crafting a distinctive form of visual language that departs from the familiar narratives and formats of traditional comic art. The works explore a range of interests and fixations; allegories of personal transformation and enlightenment, cautionary tales of advanced technology, voyeurism and computer surveillance, as well as meditations on the act of comic-drawing itself. At Printed Matter, June 30-July 31, 2017. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 6-27-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ———————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-27-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-27-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

12/06/2016

Aaron CockleDecember 5, 2016NewsAaron today with The Partnership Between Comics & Healthcare; “Hogarthian Progresses in Eighteenth-Century Graphic Satire”; More RESIST!; Opportunities for Cartoonists; Hart/Corman/SAW; Best of 2016; Correspondence Course Early Application Deadline Looms Largely ————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— The 172nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Cynthia Roman on “Hogarthian Progresses in Eighteenth-Century Graphic Satire” Sequential narration in satiric prints is most famously associated with the “modern moral subjects” of William Hogarth (1697–1764): Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1735), Marriage A-la-Mode (1745), and Industry and Idleness (1747) among others. Less well-known is the broad spectrum of legacy “progresses” produced by subsequent generations drawing both on Hogarth’s narrative strategies and his iconic motifs. James Gillray (1756–1815), celebrated for his innovative single-plate satires, was among the most accomplished printmakers to adopt Hogarthian sequential narration even as he transformed it according to his unique vision. Gillray’s forays into Hogarthian progresses kept the idiom relevant for further development by later graphic satirists including G.M. Woodward, Richard Newton, Charles Williams, Williams Elmes and George Cruikshank whose works will also be considered in this talk. Cynthia Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. She is editor and contributor to Hogarth’s Legacy distributed by Yale University Press, 2016. ————————————————————————————————— More RESIST! The Washington Post gives the Gabe Fowler, Françoise Mouly, and Nadja Spiegelman’s RESIST! publication. The editors say they have received more than 500 submissions for the 40-page tabloid. Contributors so far include such noted cartoonists as Roz Chast and Carol Lay. (Submissions can be made at www.resistsubmission.com.) “With this project, I knew that there must be people who felt as crushed as we were, and that they needed to not just say it but shout it, and make it into a physical object,” says Mouly, who previously teamed with her daughter on the Blown Covers blog. “That howl of protest needed to be gathered, preserved, and therefore vindicated — the first step toward building a future where we can feel more included.” Check here if you would like to support this endeavor or pre-order a copy. ————————————————————————————————— Opportunities for Cartoonists! A resource for open anthologies, calls for submissions, and other comics-related opportunities. Curated, but can’t make promises; please be careful with your work! Submissions welcome but are subject to our discretion. ————————————————————————————————— The art of following a dream and surviving great loss The Gainesville Sun profiles Tom Hart and Leela Corman and their Sequential Artists Workshop. “The moon in Florida follows roughly the same path as the sun — from east to west in the Southern sky,” writes Hart in “Rosalie Lightning.” “I don’t remember it being so reliable in New York.” ————————————————————————————————— Best of 2016? The lists of comics are starting to proliferate, I guess people (the writers) are still writing these sorts of things, and we (the readers) are still reading them. Rachel Cooke at the Guardian blog Andy Oliver at Forbidden Planet International blog Paste Magazine ————————————————————————————————— The Winter Semester of the Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers Starts December 29, 2016. 8 week course, $500, 10 spots available, apply by December 13, 2016 and get $100 off course fee. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 12-6-2016 – Sally Ingraham (@suzy_and_cecil) Share this page: [...]

03/22/2018

Sally IngrahamMarch 22, 2018NewsSally here with work by Shequeta Smith, E. Simms Campbell, and CM Campbell, plus much more! ————————————————————————————————— A recent article on the Los Angeles Sentinel celebrated Women’s History Month with a terrific roundup of Black Women in Comics. One creator whom I was excited to discover is Shequeta Smith (pictured above). She is a powerhouse, making the Rayven Choi series, running Shero Comics, and digging into the screenwriting industry as well. You can see a preview of Rayven Choi Chapter #3: The Bounty Hunter HERE. The L. A. Sentinel article also lists Micheline Hess (creator of Malice in Ovenland), Myisha Haynes (The Substitutes), Taneka Stotts (Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comic Anthology series), and familiar names like Marguerite Abouet (the Aya comics), and Jackie Ormes (Torchy Brown, etc.) Check out the whole list HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Here’s an article on Slate from 2016 about E. Simms Campbell – one of the first successful black cartoonists. His work appeared in numerous magazines of the day, many of them in Esquire, which launched in 1933. I thought the map pictured above was terrific, and if you are a jazz fan it is worth noting that Cab Calloway’s band appears at the bottom left-hand corner. ————————————————————————————————— CM Campbell shares a lengthy and interesting comic on Hyperallergic for “anyone who has ever asked, “How do I draw a black guy?” ” Read the full thing HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Extra, Extra! Check out Ronald Wimberly on the Comicidal Podcast – he talks about new and ongoing projects like Sunset Park, and LAAB Magazine. Listen HERE. Ta-Nehisi Coates (the writer behind two successful years of Black Panther) is going to start writing Captain America. He scribbled a brief essay for The Atlantic that announced the new project, and details why it “scares the hell out of me“. The Nib has a feature called Comics By Response, where they pose a question or concept and cartoonists respond – here are Four Cartoonists on Their Favorite Unsung Black History Heroes – with work by Keith Knight, Robyn Smith, Ben Passmore, and Mariah Rose-Marie. Illustrated PEN on PEN America’s guest editor Robert Kirby showcases the work of fellow guest editor Whit Taylor, throwing light on the final story in her collection Ghost Stories – the story is called Maker and you can see it HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Announcing the Spring Semester of thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers 8 weeks! $500 bux! 10 spots available! Rolling start date because of spring break – start as early as March 30th 2018. Deadline to apply is April 12th. Read all about the course HERE and email santoroschool@gmail.com for more details or to apply. ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 3-21-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

11/14/2016

Juan FernándezNovember 14, 2016NewsJuan here with the good stuff: Juan Fernandez on CAB 2016; Heidi Macdonald’s CAB recap; Ben Jones interviewed; Angela Stempel at the NY Comics and Picture-Story Symposium; Four takes on Noah Van Sciver’s Blammo #9; Eleri Mai Harris on the American election; CBLDF on Rayma Suprani. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️I went to CAB with Jenn Lisa last Saturday. I had a ball and I wrote about my time here on the site. Seeing everyone come together in a gymnasium like that lit a flame that very few things are going to be able to stamp out in the coming months. I’m ready to face the coming winter. Gabe Fowler’s got the market place down to a science. So, naturally, I’m interested to see the ways in which CAB continues to evolve. Will it stabilize into being an amped up zine fest and wild style art book fair that focuses exclusively on the marketplace? Will someone step in to lend a hand to the team to develop some track of programming during the weekend or the week before? To return to it’s BCGF format. Does that matter? Who’s ready to step up to the plate? On the floor I heard some people discuss this being the last CAB. And damn, that’s a little pessimistic. For what it’s worth, CAB can’t be beat for a lot of reasons. Easy access via transportation. Trains, plains, buses, cars all make their way easily to NYC. For the most part either you know someone in the City or there’s an affordable place to stay for a night or two. The crowds are great. People are squeezing CAB into their busy Saturday. It’s just one of many things they’re doing so they bring an incredible energy into the space. Most people likely just heard that there was something cool with comics going on in that one church in Brooklyn. That’s a good place to be. Gabe’s curation can’t be beat. You wan’t to find the coolest books published in a year? You can’t do any better in the US than coming to CAB. Oh and people come ready to spend money. Real money. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️Heid MacDonald shared her CAB Coverage over on Publisher’s Weekly. Her big take away was similar to mine: Though scaled down in Size, robust sales. Because the show was planned a bit later than usual, there were fewer debut books. Indie mainstays Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly were represented by artists like Drew Friedman and Adrian Tomine, but did not have booths. Nevertheless the books that did make it sold out quickly, including several very limited editions from even smaller publishers, such as the third volume of Connor Willumsen’s Treasure Island, an experimental comic from Breakdown Press; and Charles Burns’ Free Shit from French art publisher Le Dernier Cri. Although the event served to spotlight the number of talented cartoonists who still call New York home, many of the same artists cited the difficulty of maintaining a small press comics scene amid the rising costs and rents of New York City. “It’s harder to have a scene when everyone is broke and stressed out about money,” Skelly observed. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️ Ben Jones did a killer interview over on HyperAllergic with Nicole Rudick focusing on his recent exhibition at The Hole NYC. Very inspiring, very enlightening. It cuts across all artistic disciplines and argues for drawing as a fundamental practice in the 21st century. My words, not his 😉 Nicole Rudick: Are these paintings of new comics? Ben Jones: I want to give you the two narratives. There’s the concept of the show, which is hopefully how the audience perceives it and how I approached it creatively — to make a zine first and then to have a meta-art show where I’ve hung the “originals” from the zine. Typically, you’d show the originals in this way at a comic-con or a coffee shop or something like that. I intentionally wanted to present the show in that conceptual context, as a novelty. I took that to the furthest extent by adding the fake red dot you’d see at a coffee-shop art show, to indicate that the work had been bought. As a painter, I’m constantly chasing that magical, ethereal line or stroke or gesture that is half muscle memory or trance action. You get a lot of that with handwriting and with quick sketching. I’ve fabricated ladders and furniture and video installations that take months of concepting the installation and executing the animation. This is something entirely different — it’s a one-to-one connection with an idea or a drawing or a mark. There’s a narrative to a lot of these pieces and a linear way to think about them, but then we also get to think about comics and about the formal aspects of comics, because comics aren’t just linear storytelling and gags. There is a nuanced, visual-language fuckery that I think is important. Think of Saul Steinberg changing the way people draw in the 1950s or Robert Crumb in the sixties — there are one or two people who have really changed the way we think and draw and understand line drawing. So this is also me firing a shot across the bow. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️ Have you seen Bill Kartalopoulos’s Instagram? He’s posting a lot of protest art from the last 50 yrs or so. Find something that moves you and research it. There’s extremely fertile ground in these images. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️Eleri Mai Harris is coming back to America. Thank god. In this political climate, comics stateside need her more than ever. She’s got a new comic on identity, politics and patriotism over on the NIB. Don’t sleep on this Australian-American journalist and cartoonist. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️ CBLDF on Rayma Suprani, Venezuelan Cartoonist’s Political Exile Rayma Suprani has long been one of the best-known and most fearless political cartoonists in Venezuela, but for almost a year she and her work have only been “in” the country virtually, through social media. After El Universal, the newspaper where she had worked for more than 20 years, was bought by anonymous supporters of President Nicolas Maduro in 2014, Suprani was fired in short order and eventually forced to flee to Miami where “I can be more useful because my creativity can flow without worrying.” Suprani had often skewered Maduro’s now-deceased predecessor Hugo Chavez and stood up to the oppression of his populist movement known as Chavismo, but journalist Cesar Miguel Rondon tells PRI’s The World that Maduro’s government is even worse: They behaved like punks on a street corner. You don’t have the rule of law here. Every single day it’s more openly the exercise of a dictatorship instead of a democracy. So, ‘we don’t like Rayma. Rayma, you should go.’ It’s as simple as that. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️Angela Stempel on Picturing Worlds: abstraction, rhythm and “reality” in animated spaces. This Tuesday at the NY Comics and Picture-Story Symposium! In this presentation, Angela Stempel will present her works of experimental animation that explore abstract shapes, the dissolution of the physical form and of photographic certainty in narrative and non-narrative pieces. She will discuss her influences, contemporary work and how she deals with the representation of time and energy. ————————————————————————————————— ⚡️ Four Shots get fired at BLAMMO #9: Alex Mansfield, Daniel Elkin, Justin Giampaoli, Keith Silva blast through Noah Van Sciver’s latest release. Enter the dude zone, haha. It’s good to see a single issue of comics get unpacked to this degree. More of this, please! For the past decade, cartoonist Noah Van Sciver has been publishing his one-man anthology series, BLAMMO. Kilgore Books has recently released the latest in the series and we here at Comics Bulletin were so impressed with it that we knew we had to devote some time and energy into unpacking our reactions. Each of the following writers were tasked with choosing a single page or panel from Blammo #9 and use it as a platform for talking about the book as a whole. None of the writers read what the other was working on during this process (Ed. Note: Except for Elkin — he sees everything). As testament to the thematic unity of Blammo #9, the writers all ended up talking about the same ideas of spirituality, artistic integrity, and the human desire to connect. ————————————————————————————————— In case you missed it, our indefatigable Sally Ingraham started an eBay store to help out the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency and also her own comics-making projects. Check it out HERE! ————————————————————————————————— until next time! Juan Share this page: [...]

The Rowhouse doors are open! We are accepting applications for 2018 and 2019 Residencies!

Application details are below –

visit Pittsburgh and make comics in 2018 or 2019!

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