Weekend Pattering for February 20, 2015

Friday I do have travelling on my mind so here are a handful of things you can read this weekend while you wait for Monday to start everything over again.

Retrofit's Class of 2015
** You still have a week to subscribe to Retrofit's 2015 Subscription series.

** Rob Clough on the best comics of 2014.  Use this list as your next shopping list for finding comics.

** Comics Alliance previews an upcoming new book by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.  De: Tales is a great book and Daytripper is pretty good as well so their Two Brothers is a book that needs to be checked out this year.

** All I should have to say here is that IDW is publishing more Alex Toth comics.  That should be enough for you.

** A couple of years ago, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis was pulled out of the libraries of Chicago Public Schools.  Now a graduate student, having requested information through the Freedom of Information act, has discovered the paper trail that lead to Persepolis being cut from those libraries.  
The first e-mail was sent at 12:54 AM on Saturday, March 9, 2013, from Chandra James to Annette Gurley. James was the network chief for a group of elementary schools on the west side. And Gurley is the chief officer of Teaching and Learning, which oversees curricula. 
"I've attached a copy of 2 pages from the book 'Persepolis' that was sent to schools," James wrote. "In my opinion it is not appropriate at all. Please let me know if I can pull the book from my schools." 
Her e-mail included attachments to an image from Persepolis that showed a prison guard urinating on a prisoner, and parts in the book where the words "bastard" and "fucked" are used. 
At 10:13 AM on Saturday, Gurley responded: "By all means, pull them."


** A twofer of Katie Skelly.  First up, Sequential State talked to Katie about her new comic book Tonya.
From my research on Tonya Harding, it seems like she has an altered version of reality in her mind. So I wanted to get to the emotions and sensations instead of the straight history. We all (kind of) know what happened, but I don’t think anyone can really answer quite why it happened other than in some tabloid, sensational way. It’s not normal to see any athlete get cracked over the knee because they were too good- either you train harder to try to beat them or you accept fate. Tonya would not accept fate. This was a revenge fantasy come to life, on a national scale. Nobody plans for the aftermath in a revenge fantasy, and that’s what she had to deal with.
And if reading about her Tonya Harding comic wasn't enough, Skelly wrote about Walter Scott's Wendy over at The Comics Journal.
While it makes sense to look at Wendy as the story of a young woman making her way in the world, it also functions as a nice little critique of the art world and the art school system that feeds it. When we first meet her, Wendy is describing her artistic practice using the clichés of any contemporary art gallery press release; intellectualizing a way of ultimately saying, “hardly working.” It’s established that Wendy wants to be part of the capital “A” Art World, but what role she will play is up for grabs. The deepest irony of the book is that we never see just what kind of artist Wendy is: she never even specifies a medium.
** And to catch up with our Pattering Panellers in action: