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An old Marvel house ad for subscriptions by Marie Severin (1929-2018)
Previously on Panel Patter
- She Could Fly | Mid Series Review & Reflections (Sean C.)
- Fantagraphics to Hold Back to School Sale August 27th to 31st (Rob M.)
- SPX Spotlight Season is Here! (Rob M.)
- Catch It at the Comic Shop August 29th, 2018 (Rob M., James K., Kirk M.)
- Black Hammer 4: Age of Doom | Single Issue Review (Sean C.)
- It Came Out on a Wednesday #1 by Alterna Comics (Rob M.)
- Here, Have An Existential Crisis- a review of Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew's Eternity Girl (Danny Z.)
- George Perez Covers 2000AD 2100, the Newest Jumping On Point for Sci-Fi Thrills (Rob M.)
- Graphic Nonfiction: Maki Naro on AIM's Passing (Rob M.)
- A Little Something for Letterer Appreciation Day (Rob M.)
Cover of the Next Week
Someday I'll be able to write about Druillet but I'll admit that right now, I'm still just in complete awe of his work.
SPX News
In a fantastic bit of news this week, SPX is starting a fund for the defendants of this case, seeding it with $10,000 to start and foregoing the $10,000 to CBLDF and instead adding it to the fund, for a total start of $20,000 in the fund. SPX will also be establishing a fundraising vehicle to accept additional donations from the public.
“For many years, SPX has quietly extended financial support to cartoonists in need, but there is no being quiet about this case,” said Warren Bernard, Executive Director of the Small Press Expo. “Our community must come together in support of its members who are facing unprecedented challenges—and to defend the kind of community we wish to be. From the very beginning, our two organizations agreed that we must do whatever we can to help.”
Ignatz by Bianca Xunise
*** IGNATZ AWARD NOMINATIONS (SPX)-- SPX has announced the nominees for this year's Ignatz awards.
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
This and That
Though I was banned from sketching in many immigration facilities, ICE and CBP have no control over the McAllen bus station, where I sketched most evenings and listened to migrants tell their harrowing stories. Every day, this squat station in McAllen’s faded Art Deco downtown serves as a waystation for approximately 100 newly released immigrant families. After being released from detainment, they catch their breath at the nearby Catholic Charities shelter and then wait for buses to take them to relatives already settled in America.
Classes have started up again, and with that I’m sharing my syllabi from my new courses – alongside many of my past classes on the Education part of my site. There you can find details on those classes, plus in-depth looks at past courses with breakdowns of what we did over the term, exercises, examples of student work, and more. I’ve been making a point of making a more drawn version of my syllabus the last couple of semesters, and I’ve included my visual syllabi for my F18 Comics & Culture and F18 Making Comics courses above and at the Education tab. One bonus – my F16 Visual Communication class is posted in great detail, and while I’ve not done so yet with the Spring 2018 version of the course, I documented that class’s take on Stefanie Posavec & Giorgia Lupi’s brilliant Dear Data project – and those results are really cool and I posted many of them here. One further note related to teaching, as our Comics Studies program continues to grow at SFSU – I’m pleased to announce, the university is now the home of The Thomas Bentley Rue Collection of Golden and Silver Age Comic Art. This is the boyhood collection of the late Thomas Rue, which spans the late 1930s to early 1950s. This gift was made possible by his wife Virginia Rue, and includes a copy of Superman #1, Plastic Man #2, and many, many more really cool finds I’m excited for my students to start exploring!
Odd – would someone say movies or prose books aren’t for everyone? I doubt it, but maybe. Given how many people of all ages read comics and manga as well as comics-like things (memes, picture-books, etc.), it’s an odd claim. Is he talking about ‘comic books’ but instead uses ‘comics’? That’s a familiar, but pretty imprecise use of words. Maybe he means ‘my kind of superhero comic books aren’t for everyone’? That’s true. But the medium - comics - is everywhere, all over the internet, in newspapers, magazines, etc., and especially in the form of the near-universal ‘visual sequential’ instructions on product packing (there are many in every grocery store I've been in). In this way and many others, comics is/are literally for everybody (at least as much as anything can truly be said to be 'for everybody,' which, to be accurate, it can't.)
*** ComicsGate Won’t Be Defeated by Well-Intentioned Tweets Alone (Paste)-- The rhetoric against ComicsGate hit a high point this week as larger pop-culture sites like Paste and Vulture took on this movement that wants comics to be what it thinks it was rather than what it is evolving into.
Pieces also showed up at Vulture (written by Abraham Riesman who's also been accused of personally attacking a female critic online) and Medium (where David Uzimeri sings the praises of the late Comics Alliance as the last defense against ComicsGate, ignoring any number of other social and political changes in our culture that empowered this movement and those who use it to attack any non white male straight comics creator.)ComicsGate’s most visible personalities include a rabidly transphobic self-published creator who believes himself unfairly shut out of the mainstream industry and a former A-list superhero artist with a long history of online bullying and harassment. We’re not going to name them here because they don’t deserve the publicity and we don’t deserve a legal headache. It’s difficult to say that ComicsGate aligns perfectly with alt-right ideologies, but the group shares many of its trolling tactics and rhetorical devices with fringe conservatives, and one of ComicsGate’s common complaints is that “conservative” (i.e. openly bigoted) voices aren’t more prominent in mainstream comics. At least two outspoken right-leaning creators with successful runs at Marvel and DC went on bigoted Twitter rants in the last year, cried censorship when they faced backlash and parlayed the attention into successful crowd-funding initiatives. When angled the right way, it seems that being “shut out” of mainstream comics can be very lucrative for the men of ComicsGate.
*** How White Feminism Drove Me Out of the Valkyries (MNT)-- As The MNT moves more of their newsletter content onto their website, they posted this piece by Jazmine Joyner about her troubles with a popular female retailer group.
I brought this up with one of the Valkyrie founders, the woman who recruited me. I told her how insensitive it was for them to blindly follow this hashtag without realizing that it erases the black women and women of color who get harassed in comics every day without a hashtag or a hoard of white women coming to their rescue. She seemed to understand, especially after I said that, as a black woman, The Valkyries didn’t seem to be a safe place for my voice. I told her that I might leave the group. She admitted to me that the Valkyries admin team was completely white and the group was predominately white as well. I saved my decision for the next day. I wanted a night to think about it. The next day I decided to leave. That same admin had taken our conversation and my grievance with the group and turned it into an article published on a large comic website. She was praised for writing about the exact concerns I brought to her.*** WHEN THE ANTI-HARASSMENT BODYGUARD IS THE HARASSER (Graphic Policy)-- Logan Dalton (a former editor of mine) covers accusations against the man who was "bodyguarding" DC writer Tom King at this year's SDCC. You may remember that after Batman #50, King supposedly received death threats and someone at the convention felt like King needed someone watching out for him at all time. The bodyguard David Wray is involved in the leadership of a Cincinnati comic convention and is accused of being an online harasser as well as blackballing convention guests that he viewed as "feminists," such as Gail Simone.
At an executive committee meeting, Goodier brought up the fact that the Expo had not invited many female comics creators as guests. Guests are paid an appearance fee and have their travel and lodging covered by the Expo whereas artist alley creators pay for their tables/exhibition space at the convention. She brought up writer Gail Simone (Batgirl, Wonder Woman) as a possible guest, but this was immediately shot down because she talked about being a feminist a lot. Goodier mentioned that she self-identified as a feminist, and Wray responded by saying, “I will never book her for my show.”
Current Mood
