Two Chicago events, August 1 & 2

from a comic by Bianca Stone in the show Verse, Stripped

On Wednesday, August 1, Poetry Foundation is bringing me to Chicago to do a talk about poetry and comics in conjunction with their exhibit of comics by poets, Verse, Stripped (be sure to page through the generous slideshow). A bunch of the cartoonist-poets will be in attendance at the talk so it's going to be a great event. It starts at 7PM.

The next evening I'll be doing a seminarlet and signing at Chicago Comics from 5-8.

[post-trip update: many thanks to my hosts and to all of you who came to both events, I had a really fantastic time in Chicago (as always)]

More specifically, I'll be doing a talk called "Checklist for a New Comic" and I'll walk you through some of the creative, technical, and planning decisions you can make to help you start—and finish—a new comic. The talk will be about an hour and then I'll be signing books and maybe we'll have some drinks and all take funny pictures with the store mannequin.

Both events are free but the Poetry Foundation is asking people to register on line for a ticket. Chicago Comics also has a Facebook event page set up if you want to invite your friends (resisted the temptation to put that last word in scare quotes).


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Another exercise in style

Oubapo member Gilles Ciment came across these three strips while doing some research at La Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l'Image, where he is General Director. They are from the 1960s and Gilles says they probably ran in the magazines Pif or Vaillant. Three different authors—Gotlib, Jijé, and Poïvet—were apparently given the same format and the same bit of text and came up with three different stories, each in a classic film genre: western, spy movie, and silent film (not a genre in the same sense but...). The text can be translated as "I forgot to put it out/turn it off", depending on the context.

Here's the first, the other two are after the jump:

The Oulipo has a concept called "Anticipatory Plagiarism" with which they retroactively claims as one of their own (by way of a whimsical accusation) predecessors who used formal constraints, word games, or notions of potentiality, among other things. These strips would then certainly qualify as anticipatory plagiarists of my Exercises in Style, then. Of course, we were all in turn plagiarized by Raymond Queneau, who in turn was totally ripped off by J.S. Bach a few hundred years earlier.
Color me flattered!
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A proto exercise in style?

I've been sorting through old sketchbooks in preparation for packing up for our big move to France in September* and I was very surprised to come across this little sketchbook comic I did in 1989:

I have no memory of drawing this and I've hardly looked in this sketchbook since I finished it in college.

Weird, right?


In case you need to refresh your memory, here's the "template" page I ended up coming up with almost ten years later and which served as the basis for my Exercises in Style:

*you hadn't heard? I'm overdue for a blogpost about that but in the meantime you can read Jessica's post about it. Read more...