NICE ART
§ Did everybody recover from the onslaught of San Diego Comic Con comics news? Because get ready for a ton more news from the Small Press and indie comics world. And if this isn’t better than an Aquaman movie trailer, I don’t know what is. This month’s nice art feature is by Sung Hyun Kim, a Korean-American illustrator based in Los Angeles. Kim’s work is quite lovely, a sort of mix between minimalism and tertiary colours. Kim’s work will appear in the latest issue of Klub Zin. You can still get the latest issue as part of their crowdfunding effort until tomorrow! You can also find Sung Hyun Kim’s work on Instagram.
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PLUGS
§ I rarely point out crowdfunding campaign, my colleague Andrea Ayres does a much better job of it it, but I wanted to point out the latest offering from Montreal’s comics artists collective Tabulit. Afar: A Comic + Fiction About Distance is an anthology whose theme is “distance”. This looks quite nice and I enjoy the work of most of the creator included such as Jade Armstrong and Kristina Luu
§ Aatmaja Pandya has a new short comic called Fork in the River and is available online now. She’s raising funds for charity and all profits go to RAICES
§ There’s a new book published by Peow Studios. It’s called Sim Sim Magica, by Toronto-based artist Chu Nap. It looks quite lovely.
§ Anders Nielsen is taking pre-orders for the second part of Tongues, his latest series.
§ Joy San has a new Patreon page you can support
§ Maggie Dreadful has a new comic coming out soon called Horror Hospital School
§ Final plug of the day, Camilla Sucre, an artist we’ve featured for this monthly column’s Nice Art feature in the past, is taking commissions for a reasonable price. Encourage her if you can. Below is an amazing Samus Aran commission she did for me
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NEWS
§ Great news! Richie Pope is the new winner of the annual Columbus Comics Residency. He’ll be doing a three-week residency at the Columbus Museum of Art and will have an opportunity to develop a work-in-progress and to exhibit their work at CMA. Richie Pope has done illustrations for The New Yorker, The Atlantic and many other publications in addition to his comics work, which included an amazing issue Frontier with Youth in Decline as well as Super Itis and That Box We Sit On. This also means he’ll be a special guest at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus.
§ Comic artist and children’s book illustrator Jay Odjick’s wrote a moving piece on Canada Day about the need for Canada to be about more than an ideal for reconciliation to be possible. It’s a very affecting opinion piece about the way racism still plays a part in Canadian society and how we can and need to do better in order to move forward with reconciliation. It’s a wonderfully hopeful piece.
§ One of the big news of the month may have been that Rumour Network started speaking out about alleged abusers and poor business practices. Tee Franklin and Hayden Myers we called out for their abusive behaviour. I found Corissa Haury over at Women Write About Comics did a fantastic job in summarizing the situation that occurred with Tee Franklin. The rumours about Hayden Myers were also spoken aloud by many on Twitter. There’s no easy way to parse through these situations, freelancers don’t have a yelp page where people leave reviews of their work or attitude towards others, nor is there a registry that tells people who has been
§ Anders Nielsen talked about finishing the late Geneviève Castrée’s final graphic novel A Bubble
§ Anna Haifish has a new comics to be released later this year via Perfectly Acceptable Press
§ If you haven’t listened to the podcast Graphic Novel TK series, this latest episode is a great starting point. Graphic Novel TK episode 11: How to make a graphic novel
§ Now this is interesting, CBR reports that Matt Furie has scored a big win on his battle to reclaim his character of Pepe the Frog from being used as a white supremacist meme. Brandon Staley at CBR has a very thorough account of the latest news development in this ongoing story.
§ Congratulation to Kat Verhoeven on finishing her webcomics Meat & Bone. Conundrum Press is releasing the collected edition of Meat & Bone in May 2019 (right on time for TCAF!).
§ The Comics & Medicine Conference is taking place from August 16th to 18th at the Center for Cartoon Studies. David Macaulay, Whit Taylor and Susan Merrill Squier are the keynote speakers this year
§ Pow Pow Press translation of Sophie Bédard’s young adult comics Almost Summer is almost complete. I’ll have a review coming shortly about those latest comics
§ La Pastèque is publishing a new children’s comics by Kerascoët called Je marche avec Vanessa
§ An interview with Jeff Lemire by the Toronto Goethe Institute
§ CBC’s 100 Canadian Writers You Should Know include some cartoonists such as Kate Beaton, Guy Delisle abd Mariko and Jillian Tamaki
§ The CBC also has a list of 60 facts to know about Calvin & Hobbes on the occasion of the cartoonist’s 60th birthday
§ Jon Klassen, the children’s writer and illustrator. is becoming a Member of the Order of Canada
§ There are a whole bunch of new episodes of Cathy G. Johnson’s podcast Drawing a Dialogue that I missed pointing out. The latest episode is on Fatphobia in media.
§ Reimena Yee’s announce her new project on Twitter. It will be a sequel to her webseries The Carpet Merchant of Konstantinyya
§ Kim O’Connor points out the contradictory stories about Steve Ditko’s personality and how they may be more connected to those telling the tale, rather than Ditko himself. He seemed to have a relatively recluse, or quiet life, putting out work until his final days, but by no means did he appear to be the curmudgeon he was depicted as by so many. O’Connor delves into the construction of Ditko’s persona and how his absence prevented the records from being set straight.
§ A BlackSad video game is coming out in 2019. Pendulo Studio released a few images and I have to say, this looks pretty good. We should have more information as we get closer to the release of the game.
§ Fiona Smyth was on Inkstud to talk about her career and her latest release Somnambulance
§ Katrina Magolis talks about Jessica Jones and the superhero noir over at Flow Journal
§ Women Write About Comics talk with Taneka Stotts (Beyond Press), Steenz Stewart (Lion Forge), Marcos Martin (Panel Syndicate), Spike Trotman (Iron Circus Comics) and Michael Sanchez (Scout Comics) about their approach to publishing. It’s a really interesting dive into the different approaches valued by
§ Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan talks about the influence of punk on zines, posters and alternative, outsider’s art. It’s a pretty interesting read.
§ I don’t usually comment on TV News, however, this seemed relevant. Supergirl cast Nicole Mains as TV’s first Trans hero
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COMICS
§ Carta Monir made another excellent comic about video games for Polygon
§ Ben Passmore’s four panel comic Run so I Can Shoot You over at The Nib is devastating
§ WCPO Cincinnati created a comics reportage about immigration called Living in the Shadows, a current hotly debated issues in the United States. The comic by comics journalist Kevin Necessary and reporter Breanna Molloy is aiming at showing the complicated story of a Cincinnati family whose life is clouded by the complicated laws and opinions around immigration. It’s an odd place for such an affecting comic, but it’s worth following. You can read part one, part two and part three over at WCPO Cincinnati’s website.
§ Andrea Leigh Shockling has an excerpt from her ongoing comics series Subjective Line Weight, where she illustrate stories about women’s bodies that are not typically told. This particular story was written by Casey Gilly
§ Anuj Shrestha and Nazia Kazi have a very interesting comic called Countering Terrorism with Racism over at The Nib.
§ Mutha Magazine has a wonderful comic by Lisa Lim about her relationship with her grandmother. The title, A Comic About My Bad Ass Grandmother aka Nag Finger, is a really affecting look at family bonds. Here’s Lim’s description of her comic:
It’s about a long Chinese tradition of loving boys over girls just because they’re boys. It’s about the horrific custom of foot binding that debilitated women all over China and kept them close to home. It’s about how one bad ass grandmother raised three boys on her own, ran a laundry mat in Washington Heights, and learned to speak absolutely no English. It’s about a woman who scares the sh*t out of me, and the world, but who inspires me every day to be just as bad ass.
§ A lost Tim Hensley’s comic from a 2003 anthology that was never released
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REVIEWS
§ Angelica Frey talks about Eleanor Davis Why Art over at Hyperallergic
§ Etelka Lehoczky over at NPR reviewed two comics, Michael Chabon’s The Escapist and Vero Cazot and Julie Rocheleau’s About Betty’s Boob
§ A few reviews of interest over at Your Chicken Enemy; Ryan Carey reviews Anneli Furnark’s Red Winter, Francesca Lyn looks at Whit Taylor’s Wallpaper and Nick Hanover did a thorough review of Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark’s Cartoon Dialectics #3
§ Sally Ingraham on Lale Westvind Grip Volume 1
§ Tegan O’Neil on Nate Powell’s Come Again
§ Rosemary Kiladitis has a short review of Geneviève Castrée’s A Bubble
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§ If you see something I should know about, tell me in the comments or tweet at me @Leblanc_Phil
§ The CBC also has a list of 60 facts to know about Calvin & Hobbes on the occasion of the cartoon’s 60th birthday.
July 5 was Bill Watterson’s sixtieth birthday. The strip “Calvin & Hobbes” debuted in 1985, not 1958.
Awesome set of links here! Curated seems a word of choice at the moment, but quite happy to go through a lot of this stuff later.
Thanks Andrew, I missed that typo. I updated it.
Thank you very much Philippe. Like Kaleb said, this is a great list of stuff and one mighty indeed say, awesomely curated. Please keep doing this and we’ll keep reading.
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