Show at ArtLexis in Dumbo

The original pages of my story "The Others" will be featured in a group show of artists from the Blurred Vision anthology (it ran in BV4) at ArtLexis, the gallery wing of the Pod empire starting Monday June 8, the day after MoCCA. People who have read the story there may be surprised to see that the story was drawn as 16 smallish pages. It is not taken from my sketchbooks, as one review surmised, but it's meant to look that way (and one drawing IS in fact pasted in from a sketchbook).

The reception is also Monday night so if you're still in town, come on by, it's not far from the York stop on the F train.


And Thursday before MoCCA is the closing reception for Andrei Molotiu's show of abstract comics prints. They are large and quite lovely. Andrei's Abstract Comics anthology (which has a great blog) is sure to make a splash when it comes out.

I have been provisionally commissioned to create a "Molotiu Cocktail" for the event per the request of some wise guy on the TCJ.com message board but I'm not sure I'll have time before Thursday... Read more...

Summer Intensive: Day Four, part II

Here are some photos from Tom Hart's afternoon workshop. Using a Power Point presentation and having all the students do a series of sketches and notes on index cards, Tom laid out his ideas about story generation and developing accumulations of images and ideas into all kinds of stories. The ideas and activities come out of his work-in-progress, How to Say Everything, his take on a What It Is kind of book (he's said to me that the closest model is probably John Gardner's Art of Fiction). You can read portions of the work as he develops it here.

Two index cards juxtaposed after having been created in different activities.

Tom talking to Kelly about the six-panel comics we did in class based on the index card activities.

One of Tom's index card boxes that he uses to store and organize all his ideas and images--story ideas, notions, scraps of drawings, and so on. This particular boxes is devoted to a new book length comic he has been developing. I can't wait to see some new long-form Hart!

Discussing the finished one-page comics. They were all quite good and I can definitely see a couple of them getting developed in to longer works.

Over the weekend the students are trying to make a dent in their pencils. Jessica will troubleshoot and critique them on Monday and we hope to get them inking by Tuesday.

Stay tuned.

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Summer Intensive: Day Four, part I

Photos from Friday's morning session.

I arrived to find the students already looking over each other's work, always the sign of a good class: the teacher should ideally start a dialogue that the students continue.

These two show Ya Ting's revised thumbs. She decided yesterday to make her story 8 rather than 7 pages so she has cut out all the panels and spread them out, filling in the gaps with new panels we discussed in the crit.

Richard's working on some character sketches.

We spent part of the class learning how to use the Ames lettering guide, shown here in a slide from Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (being the others, of course, we have convenient pdfs of the entire book. This is something we're considering making available at a later date on our website.)

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Summer Intensive: Day Three

Quick report after a busy day: I aimed to teach laying out a sheet of bristol board for penciling AND teaching the basics of lettering with the Ames guide as well as the basic drafting ink tools. I probably spent too much time rambling on about a quick slide show of short comics I did featuring:
Bill Griffiths' The Plot Thickens
Gabrielle Bell's The Hole
Kurtzman's Corpse on the Imjin
Dash Shaw's Cartoon Symbolia
As I tweeted, layout is simple but full of pitfalls from slipping Tsquares to absent-minded measuring--not to mention dividing up a 15" tall page into three equally sized tiers with two 1/4" gutters!

Laying out a 9-panel grid. The T-square is a life saver.

I decided to save lettering for tomorrow.
Instead four of the students put their work up for critique and all four were in good shape, no major re-writes except maybe whittling down from excessive length. The other three (one absent) were making good progress on their thumbs. I predict everyone in the class will finish their minis for MoCCA Art Festival.

Richard's thumbs. The three pages up top are a revision he is doing where he is trying to condense the 11-page version below to 8 or 9 pages. Thumbnails are crucial because it's so easy to rework stuff this way.

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Summer Intensive: Day Two

Jessica taught the class today and spent the time consulting each student on their story ideas for the minicomic. She also talked about how comics combine panels to tell stories. After talking about the Panel Lottery activity she had them do Pahl Hluchan's activity The Wrong Planet, which we included in chapter 3 of DWWP. Students are given a short wordless narrative and break into teams to break the story down in to panels using Post-It notes. They then add and subtract panels to see how it affects the reading of the story.

Here are a few pictures of today's exercise:






After lunch, Gary Panter came in and talked about his art, about minicomics, and about the challenges of making a living as an artist. Jessica shot some video of the talk and I am having trouble getting a screen capture. I'll try to get one up later in the interest of posting all this now. Read more...

Summer Intensive 09 comics recommendations

What follows is not a definitive list but a collection of answers to the question "what's a good comic you've read recently?" It's an impressive list, both wide and broad. As a teacher I can state that five years ago a class like this would not have had such a diverse selection.

I'm typing the titles from our notes so I apologize if any spellings are wrong. I'm not going to link everything either since most of this you can find with a google search. Feel free to contribute corrections or additions in the comments field.

Blankets, Craig Thompson
Black Hole, Ch. Burns
Americanelf.com, J. Kochalka
Fart Party, Julia Wertz
Tonoharu, Lars Martinson
works of Julie Doucet (come back to comics, Julie, we miss you!)
Lost at Sea (YA)
Amulet/Flight/Flight Explorer
Robot Dreams, Sara Varon
Professor's Daughter, Sfar and Guibert
works of Dr. Seuss
Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli (apparently it's in stores!!!!!!!!!)
Bone, Jeff Smith
Best American Comics series
What It Is, Lynda Barry
Love and Rockets, Los Bros Hernandez
Achewood, Chris Onstad
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Nana and Paradise Kiss, Ai Yazawa
Mars and Eternal Sabbath, Fuyumi Soryo
Breakdowns, Art Spiegelman
Bitterkomix (!!)
Yoshitosho Abe
Amano (?) Read more...

Summer Intensive: Day One

Today was the first day of our two-week intensive comics class in SVA's Continuing Education division. The class will have a table at MoCCA Art Festival where they will be selling and trading the minicomics (their first) they will have made in this class. We have 8 students with a variety of interests and backgrounds and it looks like it's going to be a great group. I'll be posting photos and updates about the class here every few days as well as tweeting regularly (notice I have put a Twitter module in the righthand menu).

Here's the group (minus one) with Jessica at about 10AM Tuesday. Let's see how haggard they look at the end of all this!


We started the class by having everyone introduce themselves and talk about comics they've read recently (list to follow). Then we dove straight into cartooning by having everyone do jam comics (page 13 in DWWP). The basic idea is that everyone draws a panel and then hands the comic off to someone else, who tries to continue the story. We make it more challenging and productive by providing a list of rules, at least one of which each jam has to follow. "Backwards" is easily the most popular (start the story at the end (the last panel) and work your way back the the beginning)) but variations on one word/one syllable per panel rules also turn up frequently.

The dreaded blank page! Actually, once you have the 9-panel grid you're already headed towards making comics. (Notice she is drawing the last panel first: "backwards" rule.)

Making a swap.

In the end we had 8 one-page comics to look at. I start almost every class I teach with a jam comic. It's a great ice breaker and it's just fun to do (especially when you're fearing some long-winded lecture about what a great comic Jack Survives is (for better or worse they got that too)), plus you create instant comics by the students to critique and discuss. Last but not least, the jam rules introduce my favorite topic of the creative usefulness of constraints and games.

Here are two widely admired panels from today's jam comics:

(That's a kid inside the belly of a dinosaur-type creature inside a painting in a museum.)

(This is the brilliant "first" panel of one of the backwards jams. The open night table drawer is the coup de grâce.)

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DWWP review and Summer Intensive hype!

...from SVA's new continuing education blogger Mike Bilsborough, here.

The Summer Intensive Class still has spots left so if you've been on the fence: give it a shot! Two weeks and you're on your way to being a cartoonist.

And once again: Gary Panter! Tom Hart! Becky Cloonan! Kim Deitch! David Mazzucchelli! Read more...

A page from an abandoned project

This is a sample page I inked a few years ago while trying to figure out the look for a story set in Mexico City (the La Condesa neighborhood in this page). I've abandoned the story, probably permanently, but you never know....

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Pre-MoCCA Art Festival Class: Summer Intensive Comics Workshop at SVA

Starting the day after Memorial Day, Jessica and I are offering an intensive 2-week class at SVA, the goal of which is to learn how to make comics by writing, drawing, and printing a minicomic in time for the MoCCA Art Festival the weekend of June 6-7. We'll teach in the mornings and afternoons will alternate between open studio time and visits from a group of stellar guest cartoonists: David Mazzucchelli, Becky Cloonan, Tom Hart, Gary Panter, and Kim Deitch! Each will have a three hour session that will be a combination workshop/craft talk/crit.

The roster's filling up fast so sign up sooner rather than later. Info below, registration info here.

Summer Intensive Comics Workshop
CIC-3012-A
Mon.–Fri., May 26–June 5
(begins Tuesday, May 26)
Instructional Hours: Mon.—Fri., 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Studio Hours: Mon.–Fri., 5:00 pm–10:00 pm;
Sat., May 30, 9:00 am–10:00 pm
9 sessions; 6 CEUs; $950

Comics, graphic novels, manga: it seems everyone wants to be a cartoonist these days. Yet comics is a complex medium that requires a grasp of drawing and storytelling as well as an understanding of the various tools and technology to prepare artwork for print. A great way to learn how to make comics is to jump in and make a short, printed comic in only two weeks. This intensive comics workshop is geared toward those intrepid students ready to make the plunge. In daily sessions, we will guide students through the process of making a comic, by presenting activities and short assignments on the basics of cartooning and storytelling as well as advanced topics like inking and reproduction. In addition, several afternoons will feature lectures and critiques with visiting professional cartoonists. The workshop will also include participation in the annual art festival of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) held June 6–7; students will have the opportunity to sell and trade their comics at the premier gathering of independent comic artists and small publishers, literally the day after their comics are finished.

PS If you're looking for other options there are a number of other great classes at SVA this summer, among them two taught by Tom Hart which he talks about here.

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