Sunday News Desk- September 16th, 2018

Panel

From Wimmen's Comix by Lee Marrs

Previously on Panel Patter

Cover of the Next Week




Just because I don't think I ever appreciated Bongo Comics enough when they were around, here's Matt Groening's cover to Chief Wiggum's Felonius Felonies.  I can't really tell you when the last time I read a Simpson's comic or watched a new episode of the show but they'll always have a soft spot in my heart.

And when is someone going to put out a niche archive of Matt Groening's Life Is Hell cartoons?

SPX News

On Saturday night at SPX, the Ignatz winners for 2018 were announced.  Below is the complete list of nominees, with the winners highlighted in bold.

OUTSTANDING ARTIST
Yvan Alagbé – Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
Ivy Atoms – Pinky & Pepper Forever
Tommi Parrish – The Lie and How We Told It
Richie Pope – The Box We Sit On
Sophie Standing – Anxiety is Really Strange

OUTSTANDING COLLECTION
Beirut Won’t Cry – Mazen Kerbaj
Blackbird Days – Manuele Fior
Language Barrier – Hannah K. Lee
Sex Fantasy – Sophia Foster-Dimino
Super Late Bloomer: My Early Days in Transition – Julia Kaye

OUTSTANDING ANTHOLOGY
La Raza Anthology: Unidos y Fuertes – ed. by Kat Fajardo & Pablo Castro
Comics for Choice – ed. by Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor and Ø.K. Fox
Ink Brick #8 – ed. by Alexander Rothman, Paul K. Tunis, and Alexey Sokolin
BOTTOMS UP! Tales of Hitting Rock Bottom – ed. by J.T. Yost
Lovers Only – ed. by Mickey Zacchilli

OUTSTANDING GRAPHIC NOVEL
Why Art? – Eleanor Davis
Run for It: Stories of Slaves Who Fought for Their Freedom – Marcelo D’Salete
Uncomfortably Happily – Yeon-sik Hong
The Lie and How We Told It – Tommi Parrish
Anti-Gone – Connor Willumsen

OUTSTANDING SERIES
Ley Lines – Czap Books
Nori – Rumi Hara
Bug Boys – Laura Knetzger
Gumballs – Erin Nations
Frontier – Youth in Decline

OUTSTANDING MINICOMIC
Dog Nurse – Margot Ferrick
Greenhouse – Debbie Fong
Common Blessings & Common Curses – Maritsa Patrinos
Mothball 88 – Kevin Reilly
Say It With Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food – Shing Yin Khor

OUTSTANDING COMIC
Recollection – Alyssa Berg
How to Be Alive – Tara Booth
Hot Summer Nights – Freddy Carrasco
Whatsa Paintoonist? – Jerry Moriarty
Baopu – Yao Xiao

OUTSTANDING ONLINE COMIC
Woman World – Aminder Dhaliwal
The Wolves Outside – Jesse England
A Fire Story – Brian Fies
Lara Croft Was My Family – Carta Monir
A Part of Me is Still Unknown – Meg O’Shea

PROMISING NEW TALENT
Yasmin Omar Ata – Mis(h)adra
Tara Booth – How to Be Alive
Xia Gordon – The Fashion of 2004
Rumi Hara – Nori and the Rabbits of the Moon
Tommi Parrish – The Lie and How We Told It


OUTSTANDING STORY
Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures – Yvan Alagbé
Why Art? – Eleanor Davis
Rhode Island Me – Michael DeForge
How the Best Hunter in the Village Met Her Death – Molly Ostertag
The Lie and How We Told It – Tommi Parrish


Interviews


*** “It’s Going to Be 600 Pages Long”: An Interview with Jason Lutes (The Comics Journal)-- I'm still in the process of reading Jason Lute's complete Berlin but it really is quite an accomplishment and I don't think I can recommend it highly enough.  In some ways, I wish it hadn't taken Lutes 20 years to complete this because it's just taken that long for him to be able to do this victory lap for the book.
And then I got, you know, 24 pages in and thankfully, once I was in that story and I had these characters and I was paying attention to them as characters, those bigger ideas just kinda dropped away. And I was just dealing with the people. So any time I wrote a scene I would just imagine being each of the characters in that scene and imagine how they would interact with one another. And then I would look after I drew, I would look at the actual, physical space they were in. Sometimes that would trigger the next part of the story. Even though I was drawing everything and thinking of everything myself, I wanted it to be a kind of lively and active environment where I could pay attention to anything I wanted to. And in the beginning of the book there's this scene with a police officer in a traffic tower. The first traffic light in Europe. And that just came out of me actually drawing that. I drew that street scene and I drew that traffic tower and after I drew it I thought, "Well, who's in that?" So I had a little one-page digression where we go in there and pay attention to that guy and that couldn't have happened if I hadn't drawn the physical space and then considered my relationship to it or the relationship of the characters to it.


*** Gabrielle Bell Wants to Change the Convo About Women in Comics (What Should We Do)-- John Seroff talks to Gabrielle Bell about the work of comics.
Bell: I think it’s great that women artists are being embraced, but “willingness”? I find the use of that word kind of ridiculous. With Kominsky-Crumb, you’re talking about a great comics artist who has dedicated her life to the work and has changed the field in fundamental ways. Why wouldn’t she be canonized or embraced? To be frank, I am just tired of having the conversation in those terms.

*** Cartoonist Jim Woodring Talks Poochytown, Hallucinations & Los Angeles in the ‘60s (Paste)-- Hillary Brown interviews Jim Woodring about the latest Frank book.
My latter-day hallucinations were mostly misreadings of real situations. One of the most recent was in Seattle; I looked out the window and saw Thomson and Thompson from Tintin, real people but in grayscale, walking with what looked like a nine-foot-tall hooker in fuschia hotpants and python thigh boots. I watched them walk down the block towards me for about 10 seconds, crystal clear in every detail. I thought they was absolutely real and I was trying to figure out what they were got up for. When they passed out of sight and I went to another window to see them they were a mother and her two children.

This and That


*** “Locked in the Trunk of a Car": Matt Vadnais on the Subversion of American Mythology in Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins’s GRASS KINGS (Your Chicken Enemy)-- I really liked this review of Grass Kings (which I reviewed the first volume here earlier this year.)  Vadnais approaches this book as a piece of modern Americana.

Part of what makes Grass Kings work is that for a book about a pseudo-Utopia threatened by “the Feds” and other wolves at the gate, the biggest threats to these characters’ sense of self is internal: Jenkins paints this world so that everything in the Kingdom barely holds onto the distinctions that define it. Because this world is only seen through the murk of memory, regret, and loss experienced by its residents, the infamous anger and resentment that launched a thousand think pieces following the election infuses the Grass Kingdom itself. Jenkins’s art is the primary way that Grass Kings rises above the contradictions implied by its existence and attempts to chronicle the struggles of an oft-chronicled population; Grass Kings becomes a compelling story because it never attempts to justify the angst of its protagonists, choosing instead so ask readers to care about characters trying to survive a hostile world created, at least in part, by their own emotions.

*** COMICS PORTAL: WRITERS SHOULD BE POPULAR, TOO! (Major Spoilers)-- I've had this piece from August saved for a bit because it seems very strange to me as it seems to argue that writing is being overlooked as all of the credit for comics right now is being given to the artists which just seems years out of date to me.  It's making the big mainstream conventions its petri dish for how we value the breakdown of labor in comics which is frankly just silly.
Despite the lines at conventions, I want to implore you who are reading this column to pay more attention to the comics writers. I mean, people like Scott Snyder and Mark Waid, well, those are some of the best known (and also “best” in my opinion) writers in the industry today. Yes, folks like these do get longer lines than other writers, but we could do better!



*** So Long, Farewell... It's Goodnight From Me... - Forbidden Planet Blog-- I was going to link to Richard Bruton and Joe Gordon's send-off of Forbidden Planet's International blog but it seems that the blog has already been removed as FBI reorients its online strategy.  Luckily Instapaper captured the text for me.

From Bruton's piece:
If you’re looking for somewhere to get a regular fix of UK comics stuff, do make sure to check out Broken Frontier, Down The Tubes, and if you’re wondering where to find me, well, I’m still writing about comics, whether it’s for Comicon.com, Comicscene UK, 2000AD, or wherever else my freelancing life may take me. But the FPI blog was my first proper comics writing gig and will always have a fond place in my heart. If you want me to talk to you about comics, I’m easy to find – @richardbruton on Twitter, or email at rlmbruton@hotmail.com.
From Gordon's piece:
We loved being able to use the blog for something like that and other things, and as we’ve been seeing with certain sad groups attacking women, LGBT and ethnic creators virulently, it’s important those with a decent platform use it to defend diversity: more diverse voices means more intersting and unusual reading for us, which is a win-win situation. And, simply, it is the proper and decent thing to do; comics and scifidom are communities, and communities support and celebrate one another, and when we do that, we all win. Many are continuing that push, and all power to them; the blog here may be going quiet, but those of us who worked on it still have your back in the comics and SF community.

Current Mood


Tags
Scott Cederlund

Scott Cederlund

Missing.
Presumed having a good time.
https://twitter.com/scottcederlund

You may like these posts

Show more