Workshop and exhibit in Huntington WV, February 25-28

Jessica and I will next be in Huntington, West Virginia, February 25-28 as Walter Gropius Master Artists, giving a three-day workshop and gallery talk. Jessica will also be giving a public lecture at Marshall University (link is a pdf), all in conjunction with the traveling exhibit Litgraphic: the World of the Graphic Novel.

Litgraphic was organized at the Norman Rockwell Museum, and includes work from a number of excellent cartoonists, as well as Jessica and me. At the Huntington Museum, we'll have a smaller side exhibition of our work, primarily earlier work, as well as minicomics and ephemera. We'll be leading a three-day workshop using our book Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, culminating with a gallery walk and discussion of the two exhibitions. The workshop is open to registration by the public, but it's got a very small cap, so call now!

At Marshall, Jessica will be giving a lecture the evening of Thursday Feb 25 in a visiting artist series, more details to come on her website. It is open to the public as well. Read more...

XXOO

I was sorting through my flat file and came across this mostly-inked page from a short project I set aside a few years ago. There's an oubapian constraint which is pretty obvious I think. More about it after the jump.
The idea of the story, which was going to be 5 or 6 pages, was to use a Tic tac toe board as the basis of a 9-panel grid and then to use a series of real or made-up games to act as story starters: each panel which had an X or O would need to feature that shape prominently. In this case the marks became leitmotifs for a male and female characters. (In fact, I do have a friend who has an O tattooed on her arm. I can't remember if she told me once about meeting a guy with an X or if I made that up.) If a box remained empty I couldn't draw them. The idea was to do a story of a brief barroom romance in a series of one page "games"—the one you see here is a draw (the game itself is sketched on the napkin in the last panel.)
In the end I didn't find the story engaging enough to continue but I was happy with how the drawings were coming along.
Recently I was talking to Tom Hart about constrained jam comics structures and we decided we would try a tic tac toe jam comic where you have a 9 panel grid, each artist is assigned X or O and you "play" the game by drawing a panel featuring your mark somehow. I guess if there are blank boxes at the end we would work together to link up the panels into some semblance of narrative. But then Tom had a baby and now I'm expecting a second one, so I'm not sure when we're going to get around to it. Read more...