Catch that CAB: Comic Arts Brooklyn

When I proposed additional programming for Illustration Week 2014, it would have been a disservice to include Comic Arts Brooklyn; it’s such a jam-packed, high quality event, it needs its own post to do it justice!

Comic Arts Brooklyn is a comic-lover’s dream weekend, organized by Desert Island comic shop in Williamsburg.  There have been some earlier iterations of this fest, so they’ve really perfected their comic-con-creating craft.  That being said, it’s organized differently this year, with the artist’s alley style convention on Saturday only (at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church), and the high-profile panels and talks, with luminaries like Jaffee, Chast, Spiegelman, Burns, Tamaki and Pettibon, on Sunday only (at the Wythe Hotel).  Free tickets for those talks are available on their site, but they are, of course, all sold out…  😦

Comic Arts Brooklyn is maintaining a lovely little Tumblr showcasing the books, zines, posters, and more that exhibitors will have for sale on Saturday.  They’ve also started to collaborate with a wider range of Brooklyn institutions this year, with concurrent exhibits of original art at Desert Island (collages by Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet), Scott Eder Gallery (Al Jaffee‘s MAD fold-ins), and Cotton Candy Machine art boutique (cheekily edited vintage animation cels by Brooklyn’s own Wizard Skull).

My only complaint is there’s too much to do!  Gotta start somewhere though, so see you Saturday!

MoCCA Fest Review

Hopefully any of my followers who would’ve gone to the Society of Illustrator’s annual Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art convention that happened this weekend didn’t need me to remind them about it, because I am off my game as a blogger lately; sorry!

Vacationland Book 1, by Jon Allen

Anyway, in lieu of a MoCCA Fest announcement, I thought I’d do a quick review of just some of the amazing artists I got to know!  In no particular order (besides alphabetical):

Mercworks, by Dave Mercier

Jon Allen has a pretty depressing funny-animal comic, Ohio is for Sale, up on his website, and I was also very interested in his 3-part book Vacationland, about an in-the-family affair in a Maine vacation town.

Rachel Dukes‘ journal webcomic doesn’t update too frequently, and is mostly about her cat, but it’s adorable, and she has other comic stories up on her website too.

Dave Mercier’s Mercworks webcomic is good clean irreverent fun.

L. Nichols has an earthy style, appropriate for his Gardening Comics; I was especially interested in his Free People comic, combining images from a clothing catalog and found text for a new comic.

Toril Orlesky is a RISD alum and the creator of Hotblood!, a webcomic about centaurs in the old west (genius!).

Also, two poster designers!  Spur Design of Baltimore are the pretty high-brow, Society-of-Illustrators-award-winning illustration firm, whereas Matt Chic of Brooklyn brings his cartooning sensibility to his punky gig posters.

Hotblood!, by Toril Orlesky

And finally, I’ll plug tomorrow’s New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium, featuring Sophie Yanow and Sam Alden, both published by Uncivilized Books which exhibited at MoCCA Fest.

Sophie Yanow will discuss her comics, especially her engagement with urban design, evident in her memoir and collaboration with Canadian Center for Architecture, and Sam Alden will discuss the effect of materials on comics narratives.

from Annie Gave Me Noise (2012), by Sophie Yanow

Brooklyn Invasion

Pardon my absence, school is kicking into high gear, but when I learned about this I figured I needed to post about it!  Tonight at 6, at Columbia University’s Butler Library, is the last event in the year’s graphic novels series of programs, with three preeminent indie cartoonists from Brooklyn:

Maybe see you there?  Maybe if I get enough work done today  😛

 

This Used to be a Fun Home

Fun Home musical poster

I’d read about this years ago and hadn’t heard about it again until today, but Alison Bechdel‘s graphic novel memoir Fun Home has been adapted into a musical by composer Jeanine Tesori and is now up at the Public Theater.  Don’t know how I missed the premiere a full year ago, but better late than never…  Here’s the latest New York Times review.

Fun Home, Copyright Alison Bechdel

Obviously Bechdel is (or maybe was, before Fun Home) best known for her long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and Tesori is known for musicals like Violet and Caroline, or Change, though also for the Shrek musical and for scoring several Disney animated sequels and prequels…  Here’s a clip of the production of Violet at Endstation Theatre in Virginia:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__oiuVMbqgM&w=350&h=300]

In other Tesori news, the score of Caroline, or Change is now available to stream on Spotify!  Good preparation maybe…

Comic Making Potpourri

I’m a sucker for advice from webcartoonists, and promoting your product isn’t something you hear much about, but John Allison of Scary go Round / Bad Machinery fame recently weighed in on the matter briefly;

The best way to get your work popular is to do good work, do a lot of it, and win people over with the force of your lovely personality. If your comics are no good, it doesn’t matter what you do. (source)

That’s sort of the main takeaway from all creative types, including, if you’ll allow this very tenuous segue,  Sarah See Andersen, an illustration student posting hilarious autobio Doodle Time comics on Tumblr on the side…

Copyright Sarah See Andersen

Even more tenuously related, I also enjoyed this Comics Journal interview with cartoonist Simon Hanselmann where he had some interesting things to say about the local Melbourne comics & zine scene and breaking onto the international stage, especially with this bit about Tumblr, his primary platform.

With the internet everything is linked up now. Tumblr is just a big zine faire that never shuts down. (source)

From Life Zone, Copyright Simon Hanselmann

Enjoying his Tumblr, which is a sorta scarily life-like depiction of quarter-life crisis suburban anomie…  With a talking owl…

Also gotta shout out to Allison’s current Bad Machinery storyline, which is hurting my head with all the time travel and butterfly-stepping involved…  Waiting to see how all the time tampering turns out for our kid detectives…  Also Lottie’s reaction to microfilm machines is basically how I felt when I first used one over the summer:

Copyright John Allison

Flip Book Comics

Sometimes it takes a publishing deal for a comic freely available on the web to get on my radar…

Copyright Sam Alden

This short comic from Sam Alden of Portland, OR,  will be published next year by Uncivilized Books, paired with a new flip book style story (source).

Despite the rough pencils, it’s pretty masterful, with some impressive shadow play…  I had actually blogged about Alden before, but did not recognize this style at all, very different.

There are other full samples of his work, in both rough pencil & more fleshed out black & white. Household, another flip book story, is very dark, so those shadows come in to play in great form once again.

Copyright Sam Alden

Illustration Whiplash

Looks like I emerged from my summer class frenzy in time to see the Society of Illustrator’s current shows before they close this Saturday.

Henry Patrick Raleigh illustration

It’s an interesting trio, with the obvious headliner being the Maurice Sendak exhibit.  I’m a bit more intrigued by the “high-low” pairing of classy Golden Age illustrator Henry Patrick Raleigh (seen above) and the satiric contemporary cartoonist Bob Fingerman (below).

Copyright Bob Fingerman, from Minimum Wage

 

Should be a neat contrast.

Raleigh seemed pretty under-documented through a basic Google search (no Wikipedia entry!?!), but there is an archive of his work maintained by his grandson, apparently begun after his friends gave him a gift of 8 original pieces by the grandfather he’d never met on his wedding day.  So charming!  Gotta love those one-person archivists…  Labors of love indeed.

The last day to see the Raleigh, Fingerman, and Sendak exhibits is Saturday, so hurry on over.

Bechdel Test Visualized

Bechdel Test in Charts

My sister shared these charts with me the other day, visualizing the proportion of movies that pass the Bechdel Test, which is made up of 3 rules as follows:

1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man

This is of course named after famous cartoonist Alison Bechdel, whose long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For basically always passed the test…  Even though in this case, which may actually be the very first strip, from 1987, it’s two lesbian women talking about women…  Seems like a technicality…

Dykes to Watch Out For, copyright Alison Bechdel

Cartoonist David Willis is always pointing out sexism in the geek world in Shortpacked!, and in his college webcomic Dumbing of Age he has a whole chapter called “The Bechdel Test” in which a Gender Studies class applies it to their own favorite movies:

Dumbing of Age, Copyright David Willis

Data visualization is another big emerging field in the library world apparently, so I was quite taken by those Bechdel charts.  Wish I’d thought about it first…

Clowes’ Chicago

I’m in Chicago this weekend for the 2013 American Library Association annual conference (woo, librarian party!), and lucky me, the Oakland Museum of California-organized Daniel Clowes retrospective that I lusted after from across the country will now be opening in Chicago this Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art!  Will have to see if I have time to see this…  or do anything else besides party hard with all those librarians…

Chicago illustration by Daniel Clowes

This illustration is part of a pair of murals made specially for the Chicago version of the show, depicting as they do his own memories of Chicago, his birth town.  Looking forward to seeing me some Ghost World art!

Comic Con at your Library Con

So tomorrow I’m flying out to Chicago for the 2013 American Library Association annual conference.  Thankfully, there’s a set of events I have to go to, otherwise I wouldn’t have known how to choose…  However, I was excited to see there’s a whole con within a con devoted to Comics, called the GraphiCon!  Click the link to see all the relevant panels, talks, and events.

There’s a whole Artists Alley with big names like Raina Telgemeier, Gene Luen Yang, Faith Erin Hicks, & Paul Pope, and even a Zine Pavilion of local zinesters!  There’s the annual Eisner award for Libraries that provides one lucky library with a full set of Eisner‘s work, works nominated for this year’s Eisner Awards, and a further budget for buying comics.

Individual creators like Dave Roman, Matt Kindt, & Jeffrey Brown get their own spotlight events, there are plenty of panels on new releases, discussions on comics for teens, library collecting of comics, comics in the age of e-publishing, and even talks and events about making comics!

All this on its own would be a pretty excellent con in its own right  😛