Two quick items of note. (I’m still packing for our move to Iowa.)
First, this from a press release I just received from Drawn & Quarterly about Adrian Tomine’s appearance Feb. 09, 7 to 8 p.m., at my favorite bookstore, the Strand in Manhattan:
A loose, cartoony departure from Adrian Tomine’s previous work, Scenes From an Impending Marriage is a sweet-natured, laugh out-loud skewering of the modern marriage process, including hiring a D.J., location scouting, trips to the salon, suit fittings, dance lessons, registering for gifts and managing familial demands.
Leanne Shapton, author of The Native Trees of Canada and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, will join Adrian on the Strand stage.
You can read my posts on an earlier Tomine graphic novel, Shortcomings, here and here.
Also this from the Daily Cartoonist, about the people who bring you the wonderful Festival of Cartoon Art in Columbus ...:
The Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation has pledged $250,000 over five years to support the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum facility, part of the Sullivant Hall renovation at Ohio State University. In recognition of this gift, the library’s seminar room will be named in honor of Will Eisner. The Eisner Family Foundation gift will be matched dollar for dollar by Jean Schulz, widow of Peanuts’ creator Charles M. Schulz, giving it a $500,000 impact on the project. Ms. Schulz has promised to match donations to the new facility up to $2.5 million.
The Sullivant Hall renovation is estimated to cost $24.4 million and is scheduled to be completed in 2013, at which time Sullivant Hall will house the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum as well as The Ohio State University Department of Dance and the Department of Art Education. Upon completion of the Schulz Challenge, the Sullivant Hall renovation will be completely funded.Read more
here.
In Michael Schumacher’s lively 2010 biography of Spirit creator Will Eisner, Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, he tells of Eisner’s first visit to a comic book convention, in New York in 1971.
Eisner wanted to see what underground comix were all about and to meet some of those cartoonists. Imagine his shock when the 54-year-old child of the Great Depression happened to pick up a copy of Zap that featured an S. Clay Wilson story involving a character whose penis is cut off and eaten.
Kitchen Sink Press publisher Denis Kitchen tried to assure the visibly upset Eisner this wasn’t a typical underground story. But also present was a young cartoonist named Art Spiegelman, who decided to speak up in defense of Wilson’s work.
Eisner left and did not return, Schumacher writes.
Come forward 39 years, to this past month’s Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University — a conference that over the years has brought many established and up-and-coming cartoonists (including Eisner himself in its early years).
Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro entertained the audience during his afternoon presentation with what easily could pass for a stand-up comedy routine. At one point, he told about his flight to Columbus from New York City, during which a male passenger some rows ahead got up while the seatbelt sign was still lit.
A flight attendant turned on the public-address system and ordered the passenger to sit down, which he reluctantly did, muttering something to the effect of, “All right, all right already.” The attendant then stormed over to the passenger’s seat and continued to berate him, according to Piraro.
After the attendant left, the indignant passenger, a la Rodney Dangerfield, looked around to the rest of passengers as if to say, “Did you see how she treated me?”
And that’s when Piraro realized, “Holy ****, that’s Art Spiegelman!”
Some things don’t change, apparently.
Spiegelman, who was in one of the front rows at the conference when Piraro told this anecdote, denied none of it.
See my earlier posts on the conference here, here, here and here. And on one of Eisner’s graphic novels, A Contract With God, here.
You wouldn’t think just pasting up all the pages from R. Crumb’s book, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, would be that great of an art exhibit.
But there is a lot to be said for being able to stand a nose-length from those black-and-white drawings. You can study every stroke — how Crumb drew thinner bands of horizontal striations for his night sky, the “pockets” of hatchings within solid black to depict folds for all-black robes.
The exhibit, officially titled “The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis,” also features a casement brimming with materials Crumb collected for reference — old comic books, children’s bibles and colorful display cards from cheesy Biblical and sword-and-sandals movies.
The show runs through Jan. 16, 2011, at the Columbus Museum of Art. (It probably travels on to some other place after that, I imagine.) I viewed it while back in town during the 10th Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University.
My posts on the OSU cartoon conference can be read here, here and even more here.
Next Monday, Nov. 15, the Columbus Museum will show the documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, with a discussion with the director, Andrew Cooke, and a chat with “Crumb” curator Lisa Dent.
I’d be remiss not to mention how … well, nice everyone was at this year’s Festival of Cartoon Art.
Lynn Johnston on the spot did a marvelous sketch for me to give to a friend who’s been cutting my hair for a year now in exchange for only occasional payoffs in home-baked cookies. (I won’t mention his name, as others who’ve been paying in more than cookies don’t feel abused.) He was delighted.
Gene Luen Yang also did a clever sketch of the Monkey King for my wife. Yang’s American Born Chinese is one of the few graphic novels she’s ever read without my coercion. (Maus is another.)
And curator and emcee Lucy Shelton Caswell remained cheerful throughout. I interviewed her way back when the cartoon library started, I think — and before it was officially called the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. That was for Ohio Magazine (several owners ago). I spoke with her again a few years later for another story I assigned when I was editor at Acclaim magazine, also in Columbus, on the Caniff collection and cartoons in general.
On that second occasion, she allowed us to use some Terry and the Pirates art to go with the magazine feature. (We also managed to get Bill Watterson to speak for the story about the reduction of cartoon panel size in daily newspapers.) Then as now, Lucy was generous with her time and knowledge.
See my earlier posts on the conference here and here. One more post to come, on the Columbus Museum of Art’s astonishing R. Crumb exhibit, “The Bible Illuminated” and its Nov. 15 showing of the documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist.
Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts, wasn’t the only animal lover who spoke at the 10th Festival of Cartoon Art this past week. Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro showed a slide of him, cigar in mouth, proudly holding a rather large chicken.
He and his wife, he noted, are board members of an animal sanctuary that, along with the usual dogs and cats (and hopefully rabbits, too), also rescues chickens. Who would have guessed?
Other things I learned at the Ohio State University four-day event:
• Robert Harvey, speaking of his 952-page Milton Caniff bio, Meanwhile …, told me, “Believe it or not, what got printed was only 60 percent of what I wrote.”
• James Sturm, whose The Golem’s Mighty Swing was Time magazine’s best graphic novel in 2001, said: “Cartooning is a calling first, a career second.”
He talked a bit about the Center for Cartoon Studies, the cartooning school in White River Junction, Vt., for which he is director. Seth did the catalog cover.
• Dave Kellett, whose book, How to Make Webcomics, I picked up at the Wexner Center shop during the conference and have been reading (and could have used two years ago before I my own online strip, Slipped), contended newspapers and comics are parting ways. This is because, he said, “In the mind of the average consumer, the newspaper comic strip” — such a small percentage of the daily paper’s content — “has always been free.”
In fact, he continued, the medium of comics is dying, though the art form of comics is not
• Speaking of the topicality of editorial cartoons, Jen Sorensen, of the weekly alternative editorial cartoon Slowpoke, noted many readers are “ahistorical” — meaning they know little about history, not that they don’t exist within history, of course.
One more post on the conference to come, I think, plus a post on the Columbus Museum of Art’s astonishing R. Crumb exhibit, “The Bible Illuminated.”
See my earlier post on this conference here.
This year’s sold-out Ohio State University event was very much as I recall the very first Festivals of Cartoon Art — lots of speakers and panelists covering comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, editorial cartoons and animation (plus, this year, much talk about online comics), as well as professionals who weren’t presenters but came anyway.
So along with the presenters such as Art Spiegelman (Maus), Matt Groening (Life in Hell and The Simpsons), Jen Sorensen (Slowpoke), Dan Piraro (Bizarro) and Bill Griffith (Zippy), also milling around between sessions was Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Jeff Smith (Bone), editorial cartoonist J.P. Trostle, New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly and Jeff Keane (The Family Circus). And those are just the ones I happened to spot.
Here are some bits of wisdom I picked up during and between sessions:
• Comics, declared James Sturm (The Golem’s Mighty Swing), are not a combination of writing and drawing, but of poetry and graphic design. Nicely put, right? Read that again.
• Jan Eliot (Stone Soup) draws how people “feel, not how they look.” She added it’s hard to come up with kids-outdoors ideas — in the woods, playing in snow — not already done by Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes).
• Roz Chast, one of The New Yorker’s 20 staff cartoonists, submits five cartoons a week for consideration.
She noted an idea evolves as she draws it. She confessed to resubmitting rejected ideas, months later and after “some reworking.” “Everybody does it,” she added.
• Gene Luen Yang, discussing his American-Born Chinese graphic novel, recalled his mother told him not to draw the Monkey King barefooted. The centuries-old character always wore shoes, she claimed, because he didn’t want “people to know he’s a monkey.” Which, of course, dovetails beautifully with Yang’s primary theme of cultural ambivalence.
• Dave Kellett, creator of Sheldon and one of the authors of the book How to Make Webcomics, discussed the benefits of disintermediation — how, for online comics, there is the artist and audience, and all the people in the middle of the traditional food chain are gone.
More to come on this year’s very worthwhile event ….
A link to the Festival’s site is here.
Speakers have been announced for the 10th triennial Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University. They will include Art Spiegelman (Maus), whom I saw give a lively albeit smoky lecture when he was in Michigan a few years ago touting In the Shadow of No Towers; Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead); Patrick McDonnell (Mutts); Matt Groening (The Simpsons, Life in Hell); Roz Chast (lots of cartoons in The New Yorker and elsewhere); and Dan Piraro (Bizarro), among others.
Registration opens June 1, with events running Oct. 14 through 17 in Columbus. Attendance allegedly will be limited to 275.
Two additional highlights: an exhibit for the 100th birthday of Krazy Kat and a retrospective of Billy Ireland’s work. (Ireland was the editorial cartoonist at the Columbus Dispatch who mentored two of sequential art’s most influential cartoonists, Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, and Noel Sickles, who wrote and drew Scorchy Smith.)
I attended a few of the early Festivals and found them phenomenally informative and entertaining, and cock full of surprises. At one of the forums, an attendee in the audience got up during a Q&A session to ask the panel an involved question about contracts. A wave of amusement rolled through the auditorium as we realized the questioner was Berke Breathed, creator of the then-popular Bloom County, who wasn’t even on the agenda, if I recall correctly.
