The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival announces programming

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest, top be held November 10, has announced its programming and also satellite events

. The latter is a remarkable mix of openings, talks, films and even a play. The programming comprises only six panels but you’ll struggle to find time to walk the floor. Besides the Ware/McGuire/Spiegelman mega panel, the one must do for us is probably the international panel—so much is happening around the world, and this looks like a good snapshot. It’s gonna be a great week.

Programs will be held at The Knitting Factory, at 361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn , NY 11211

11:00: The Architecture of Comics: Ware, McGuire & Spiegelman
Comics are more than illustrated literature: they are the poetic application of structure to visual art. Their distinct modes of operation permit unique ways of exploring perception and expressing meaning. Richard McGuire, author of the seminal short comics story “Here,” Art Spiegelman, author of the modern classic Maus and works including In the Shadow of No Towers, and Chris Ware, author of Building Stories and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth will consider the architecture of comics in conversation with Bill Kartalopoulos.

12:30: Shape, Line and Color: Blexbolex, Carré & Schrauwen

Comics have traditionally been bounded by a visual approach that privileges a linear, outline-based approach to art that can survive historically poor methods of reproduction. As technology has developed and as comics have gained from contact with other areas of art, contemporary cartoonists have increasingly embraced a greater variety of approaches to producing narrative graphics. Bill Kartalopoulos will discuss developing aesthetics with Blexbolex (Seasons, No Man’s Land), Lilli Carré (Heads or Tails) and Olivier Schrauwen (The Man Who Grew His Beard).

1:30: Art, Comics, Sexuality and Pornography
Traditional notions of taboo have been eradicated by new media and a social culture that permits a broadening range of sexual expression. Art inevitably responds to the increasing prevalence of explicit images and changing mores, raising questions about images of sexuality and transgression, and troubling the line—if there is one—between pornography and art.  Karley Sciortino (Vice, Slutever.com) will discuss images of the erotic with artists Nine Antico (Coney Island Baby), Heather Benjamin (Sad Sex) and Jonny Negron (Negron).

2:30: Roz Chast Q+A

Currently the most renowned cartoonist in The New Yorker’s formidable stable, Roz Chast became the weekly’s first true subversive upon her memorably divisive arrival there in 1978. Boasting a devoted audience that hangs on her every skewed observation of urban and suburban life, Chast will discuss her career – including her most recent book, What I Hate: From A to Z – and magnificently neurotic perspective with The Comics Journal‘s resident New Yorker-ologist, Richard Gehr.

3:30: Emerging International Comics Networks
Comics’ vibrant internationalism is sporadically acknowledged within North America, but is a fact of life for artists and publishers abroad who regularly interact through anthologies, publishing projects and festivals. Bill Kartalopoulos will discuss international comics and collaborations with Carmela Chergui, formerly of France’s L’Association and currently with Belgium’s Frémok; artist Inés Estrada, editor of the Mexican-based anthology Gang Bang Bong; artist Dunja Jankovic, founder of the Croatian Škver! art festival and co-founder of Portland’s The Projects; and Finnish artist Tommi Musturi, publisher of Huuda Huuda.

4:30: The Narrative Collage: Burns, Hensley & Ricard
The mainstream publishing industry has often imposed the standards of conventional literary fiction on the comics form, suppressing comics’ essential status as an assemblage of potentially—and productively—discordant fragments. Charles Burns (Black Hole, The Hive), Anouk Ricard (Anna and Froga) and Tim Hensley (Wally Gropius, Ticket Stub) will discuss the possibilities and pleasures of crafting narratives that capitalize on the collage-like qualities of the comics form—in matters of structure, style and format—in a conversation moderated by Tom Spurgeon.