Weekend Pattering for October 18, 2015-- Odds and Ends

** So, what kind of pattering have we been up to lately?  Glad you asked because it was a haunted Halloween type of week.



** This week, Noah Van Sciver has been doing a daily comic at The Comics Journal about his residency at Center For Cartoon Studies.  You can check out all of this weeks comics (as well as the week of comics he did in August, 2014) at TCJ website.  

I remember first hearing Van Sciver talk about this a couple of months ago on an interview with Robin McConnell on the Inkstuds podcast and thought it sounded like a great experience as Van Sciver finished his Johnny Appleseed book and worked on a second Fante Bukowksi comic.  Hopefully he'll do some more comics like this.

** John Porcellino has some thoughts on this year's SPX and how it's changed over time.
Again, as I took pains to say in my last post, this isn't a bad thing. It's good! Comics has grown so much, so quickly, that now there are a zillion different people coming at it from a zillion different angles. But it does make it kind of hard for old-timers to keep up. I say old-timers with my tongue in cheek a little, but damn, let's face it, a lot of us are pushing 50 now, not to mention those fogies like the Hernandezes and Cloweses.



** David Gallaher and Steve Ellis The Only Living Boy V1 is available for presale and Gallaher has information on how you can help out The Hero Initiative by preordering this comic off of Amazon.

** Benjamin Bailey at The Nerdist highlights 6 horror comics you've got to read.  


I’m not delusional enough to think public discussion of harassment will affect those who are doing the worst harassing. Individuals like that will not respond to reasonable appeal. But by making it a bigger topic, one (of hopefully many) outcomes is that we can reach the middle ground- men who accidentally harass women due to ignorance, or just bad judgment. This is a grey area, and often happens unwittingly. I sometimes get emails and drawings in which the sentiment expressed is that the sender saw a photo of me in real life and was surprised they found me attractive. I understand that telling someone you find them pretty is relatively harmless, and sometimes even complimentary, if you know the person. However, being told by strangers that they’re surprised by my face is disheartening. It detracts from my work, and has a subtle demeaning undertone, as if to suggest that since anyone who spends all their time and energy on faceless endeavors should be unattractive. But my work has nothing to do with my face, so discussing it is mostly unnecessary, occasionally offensive, and a total non sequitur.
** Matt Bors tweets with Martin Shkreli, the guy who bought the AIDs medicine and then jacked up the price.  


And it just gets weirder and better from there.




Yeah. I did. I mean, when you’re doing everything from beginning to end, and you’re working with a script and you’re very clear on the story and the idea of it, you can make those kinds of decisions, and those kinds of decisions can be very important to the storytelling process. Like on Supreme, with all the scratches and marks, I wanted that to bring about a sense of Diana’s mental state. When she’s feeling unsure about things or she doesn’t know what direction to go in or when things are very confused. The reader is kind of distracted, and that distraction is part of how she’s feeling, so they remind the reader hopefully that things aren’t quite right in her head at this point. And then at later points maybe she’s feeling a little bit calmer about things
** And speaking of Tula Lotay, at Paste Magazine she created a comic around the song Demon by Bear in Heaven.


** Steve Lieber writes about doing research in the digital age.


Hernandez: That’s what I’ve always found interesting – and I’ve learned this more from movies than from comics – when you’re studying film, they show you foreign films. And I’d watch something from, say, Sweden, and think This could be Latin America, or this could be Canada, or this could be Japan. I learned that you can be universal without sacrificing the culture. I learned that the closer to the culture you are when telling a story, the more universal the story becomes, instead of watering it down. That’s why The Twilight Children is going to work perfectly with a wide audience, because even though it’s specifically these people living in this little town, the characters are universal, and the things that happen to them – their feelings, or their reactions to things – anyone can relate to it.