Posts Tagged ‘George O’Connor’

MoCCA Fest 2011: On the Floor

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

For its 10th anniversary edition, MoCCA Fest may not be in its original location or time of year—through 2008 it was held at the Puck Building and until last year it was always in June—but its spirit of comics and community remains. The crowd was a healthy mix of creators and fans, big names and unknowns, distinguished publishers and self-publishers, young (sometimes very young) and old (not that old).

I arrived at the Armory at 11:10am on Saturday to discover a long line that wrapped around the block. Not unusual for MoCCA, especially so close to the opening time of 11, except that the doors weren’t even open yet, and wouldn’t open for another 10–20 minutes. Moreover, many exhibitors were still entering the building. I later spoke to an exhibitor who said that it was unclear on when and where the exhibitors were supposed to show up, so hopefully that’s a line of communication that can be improved in the future.

After the Sequential Non-fiction panel on Saturday was a panel titled, “Building a Book, From Start to Finish.” Panelists were Ben Katchor, Stephen DeStefano, and Lauren Redniss. We didn’t stick around for the whole panel, but Redniss talked up her recent graphic biography, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. She mentions doing research for the book that included visiting nuclear sites (including, I believe, Three Mile Island) and attending a conference on nuclear power, where she received phone calls from the company (FirstEnergy) that owned the sites she visited.

Walking around the floor revealed a wide variety of styles and people, with some interesting booths.

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A Dutchman in Upstate New York, circa 1634

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Last year I attended a panel at New York Comic Con called “Telling a Story With Imagined Pictures,” where various creators of nonfiction comics talked about their work. One of these was the artist George O’Connor, who worked on Journey Into Mohawk Country, an account of one Dutchman’s trip from Manhattan further into New York State in the winter of 1634. I later picked up a copy of the graphic novel from First Second Books’ table. I recommend dropping by if you see their table at a con; they usually have good sales like “Buy 2 and get a 3rd for free” and the books are priced down to $10 on top of that.

George O’Connor is the artist of the book, but the writer is an interesting case. All of the text is taken straight from the journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, as translated by Syracuse University Press. So there is no narrative flourish, no need to create riveting text. The text is simple and plain, and what happened, happened. The story is not boring and has its moments of levity, and moments of historical interest.

Where there is flourish and room for creativity is in the illustrations by O’Connor. With such a simple, bare-bones narrative to work with, O’Connor must fill in the blanks, connecting journal entries into a continuous story and speculating on what the travelers might have felt and what little inconsequential things could have happened that were not important to be noted in the journal but still add flavor and context nonetheless. There’s an extended “spiritual” sequence toward the end with no text from the journal that is probably all bunk, but it adds an emotional arc that is otherwise lacking from the dry journal entries. Overall, the illustrations might add a bit of fiction to the novel, but they are appropriate and do not take away from the basic character of the original journal.

At the Comic Con panel O’Connor spoke of the research he did, and it shows. The clothes are period-appropriate and the snippets of Mohawk culture we view are “authentic,” vastly different from the claptrap we’re usually fed by our popular culture. These are the Indians I remember from my fourth grade textbook, and I would recommend this as essential reading for anyone studying the rich history of New York State.

Journey Into Mohawk Country
written by H.M. van den Bogaert
illustrated by George O’Connor
color by Hilary Sycamore
published by First Second Books (New York, 2006)
ISBN 1-59643-106-7

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Telling A Story With Imagined Pictures

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

The New York Comic Con was held at the Jacob Javits Center this past February 6–8, and with the number of TV, movie, and video game panels/booths available it’s quickly starting to rival the San Diego Comic-Con in size and scope, though it still lacks the prestige and probably will so for years to come. They’ve had trouble nailing down a date for their first four years, and the next installment will take place in October of 2010, a date they assure us will be steady for the next few years.

Buried in amongst the industry panels and Hollywood premieres were a few nuggets of intellectual or artistic goodness; there was a panel on “Asians and Superheroes” that talked about the role of Asian characters in general in superhero comics, promoting a new anthology that comes out in April featuring the work of numerous creators like Bernard Chang and Gene Luen Yang.

Saturday saw an actual nonfiction comics panel called “Telling a Story With Imagined Pictures,” featuring various panelists who worked on nonfiction narratives for publishers like First Second and Random House. Present at the panel were:

They answered a lot of questions about the creative process, especially the research involved in depicting real events. Both Crowley and Dawson noted it was difficult depicting events that people would have their own memories of. A lot of fact-checking was involved; Jones studied dancing and old travel guides to get the visual look of the book right, and she later had her dance drawings fact-checked to make sure they were correct. O’Connor had a different problem in that photo-reference wasn’t available for his subjects. He mentioned that the book has a whole scene depicting Mohawk armor, except that no visual records existed of the armor for him to accurately depict it. Instead, he had to rely on the cartoony visual style of the book to cover up the specifics of the armor.

When asked about the editorial process for graphic novels, all agreed that their editors have been largely hands-off, and speculated that it might be due to the newness of major publishers (like Random House) to the graphic novel scene.

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