Posts Tagged ‘New York’

Out and About: MoCCA Festival 2011

Friday, April 8th, 2011

This Saturday and Sunday is the 10th annual Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival—MoCCA Fest for short—and in addition to a full stable of exhibitors showcasing new work, they also have two tracks of programming running each day. Panels of note:

Sequential Non-fiction
Saturday, 12:30, Room A

Moderator: Heidi McDonald (The Beat)
Panelists: Dean Haspiel (Cuba: My Revolution), Nick Bertozzi (Lewis & Clark), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel), Nick Abadzis (Laika)

Painting real world stories, from autobiographical to historical, through the lens of the graphic novel.

The State of Editorial Cartooning
Saturday, 4:30, Room A

Moderator: Brian Heater (The Daily Cross Hatch)
Panelists: Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug), Tim Kreider (The Pain — When Will it End), Ted Rall (Year of Loving Dangerously)

The trials and tribulations of creating political cartoons in 2011.

Almost True
Sunday, 12:30, Room A

Moderator: Calvin Reid (Publishers Weekly)
Panelists: Gabrielle Bell (Lucky), Joe Ollmann (Mid-Life), Leslie Stein (Eye of the Majestic Creature), Pascal Girard (Nicolas)

Where autobiography and fiction collide.

Pizza Island: The Panel
Sunday, 2:30, Room A

Moderator: Brian Heater
Panelists: Julia Wertz (Drinking at the Movies), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel), Kate Beaton (Hark, a Vagrant), Meredith Gran (Octopus Pie), Lisa Hanawalt (I Want You)

Some of today’s brightest young cartoonists share a workspace in Brooklyn. Here is their story.

YA and Comics: Ever the Two Shall Meet
Sunday, 2:30, Room B

Moderator: Whitney Matheson (Pop Candy)
Panelists: Tracy White (Traced), Lucy Knisley (Stop Paying Attention), M.K. Reed (Cross Country)

Some of comics’ most fascinating titles and groundbreaking artists can be found in the young adult section of your local bookstore.

On Saturday night MoCCA (the actual museum) is hosting a fundraiser wine tasting, sponsored by Corked and Winetasting.com. The tasting is not included in admission to the Art Festival, so tickets will cost $15 for members and $20 for non-members. The wine tasting will be held at the museum, located at 594 Broadway, from 8–10pm.

It’s also worth noting that there’s also a pre-party for MoCCA Fest Friday night at the Sutra Lounge; this one is hosted by Top Shelf and Zip Comics and includes musical and art performances, as well as food. Cover charge is a $5 donation to MoCCA.

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The Vampires of New York

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

New York City has an abundance of bogeymen for New Yorkers to scorn or fear, but there are few that engender as much hysteria as the common bedbug. Apartments, hotels, subway stations, Abercrombie & Fitch—there seems to be no location, no social stratum that these pesky bloodsuckers haven’t penetrated in recent years.

Gabrielle Bell is no stranger to the bedbug menace, having been their victim four times in the past. When she found herself scratching and scratching once more, she realized that her old enemies were back and this time, documented the entire nerve-racking process of discovery, clean up/preparation, extermination, and eventual success/relief/lingering paranoia in her blog. It’s funny, creepy, and even educational, and you might find yourself a little more paranoid by the end.

(via The Beat)

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As Seen Through the Eyes of a New New Yorker

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

One of my favorite columns in the New York Times is the Metropolitan Diary, where readers send in their stories about life in the big city, things they saw or overheard in the course of their daily lives as New Yorkers. Though coming from a wide spectrum of people, the stories tend to follow the same general themes of dry humor, whimsy, and naïveté (the latter not from the contributors, but rather those they encounter).

Kate Beaton has constructed her own “Metropolitan Diary” of a sort, though for a different reason than those Times contributors: she misplaced her latest Hark, a Vagrant! strip at some point during a shopping trip in SoHo, and so decided to run a series of short vignettes about her new life in New York City.

As a New Yorker, a lot of these made me go, “Ha, that is so true!” Because they are.

(via Robot 6)

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A Story in Black and White About Things That Are Grey

Friday, January 21st, 2011

There’s an American Express commercial you may have seen last year, spotlighting the Harlem Children’s Zone, an organization that follows children from birth to college, ensuring that they have the tools to succeed academically. The man featured in that commercial is Geoffrey Canada, the organization’s president and chief executive officer. You may have also seen him on The Colbert Report or in the documentary film Waiting for Superman. He’s the author of the memoir Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, which was just adapted into a graphic novel by Jamar Nicholas and published by Beacon Press.

The graphic novel presents a series of 10 short vignettes, short stories each illustrating a “lesson” learned growing up on the streets of the South Bronx in the ’50s and ’60s. The stories are for the most part unconnected from one another, sharing little but their protagonists and setting, with the occasional recurring cast. This makes it a fairly easy read, something that can be picked up and put down as the reader feels comfortable, and also ideal for using this book as a teaching tool in class. The downside is that it lacks a sense of urgency, lacking the build up promised by the title. Though there is a moment where Mr. Canada definitively turns his back from a violent solution, it’s disconnected from the previous chapters and functions more as an epilogue than as a integral piece of the working story, which mostly takes place on Union Avenue.

Though I did not grow up in the South Bronx, nor was my childhood as violently fraught as Mr. Canada’s, it did get me thinking back to my own experiences with what most people would term “bullying.” I remember how frightening it could be sometimes, and the shame that comes when you don’t fight back. While I was able to simply disengage myself from my bullies, avoiding those who made my life hell, not everyone has that luxury, and when you have to live like that all the time, it’s no wonder things get so screwed up. Reading the book was admittedly depressing, because it comes from a very harsh place, where even the bits of kindness come from a need for communal protection. It gives meaning to the phrase “cruel to be kind” when he explains that the other kids forced him to fight so he could hold his own again outsiders, or even in the very first story, when his mother chews his brothers out for letting another kid take one of their jackets.

A lot of the heavy lifting in this graphic novel is done by the words and not the illustrations; what the adaptation did was condense the memoir down to a more digestible form. The art is very heavy on faces and figures displayed on blank backgrounds, using some establishing shots and sparse lines to suggest the setting but for the most part relying on the text to give you a sense of place. The figure work isn’t exceptionally fluid; it’s the jagged nature of it that suggests movement and violence.

Ultimately, the subject matter is an excellent choice for a graphic novel adaptation, and the book itself makes for a quick, enlightening read. Few outside that world will ever know exactly what goes on in there, but this graphic novel does a good job of helping us understand.

Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence: A True Story in Black and White
adapted by Jamar Nicholas
from the memoir by Geoffrey Canada
published by Beacon Press (Boston, 2010)
ISBN 978-0-8070-4449-0

A complimentary copy of the book was provided to me via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

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Out of Sync

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

There’s a pretty big divide between what we know as mainstream comics (mostly superhero books) and the small press/indie stuff. Not to say that there aren’t people who read both, or that creators don’t cross over from one to the other, but comparing the crowds at say, New York Comic Con and Alternative Press Expo; they’re very different. And there’s mutual disdain—a mainstream fan might find indie/small press stuff boring or pretentious, and an indie/small press fan might find a superhero book idiotic or uninspired.

The disconnect is a real shame, because sometimes it feels like the people on the indie side of things have dismissed all superhero books outright, without looking at what they have to offer. I’m not talking about plotting or characters—let’s face it, sometimes they are pretty stupid—but the actual construction of the comic, the way they use panel layouts to create pacing, the way they integrate the text and images into a cohesive whole. The nuts-and-bolts that hold the medium together. The superhero genre has been around a long time, and they generally have the “how-to” part down.

The “how-to” part is the biggest problem with Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays, edited by Brendan Burford with a very diverse field of contributors. The term “picto-essay” is perhaps more correct; it is Burford himself that uses the word “comics” in his introduction and on the back cover. Many of the stories in this volume are reminiscent of photo essays, which are generally slideshows where each photo is accompanied by a caption. I have nothing against photo essays, or even these picto-essays, I just find the actual “comics” component weak. Two of the segments (“Portfolio” and “Subway Buskers”) don’t even have text; they’re simply sketch galleries of Washington Square Park and subway buskers respectively.

It also feels like the definition of “essay” gets muddled at times; a few segments lack a solid narrative structure that would have strengthened what they were trying to achieve. “What We So Quietly Saw” by Greg Cook presents segments from prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo without making the transitions from incident to incident clear. “Like Hell I Will” by Nate Powell presents various scenes from the Tulsa race riot of 1921 in a confusing jumble, not clearly connecting the captions to the panels with dialogue; what exactly are the latter type of scenes showing us?

Even with its weak points, Syncopated does have its bright spots. A few of the stories integrate text and images and follow a cohesive narrative flow, the result being some very excellent comics work. “West Side Improvements” by Alex Holden made for a very strong essay, teaching the reader a bit of New York history while also making a point about urban renewal. “A Coney Island Rumination” by Paul Hoppe and “An Encounter With Richard Peterson” by Brendan Burford also follow similar threads and themes. My favorite story is “The Sound of Jade” by Sarah Glidden, where she accompanies her father on an adoption visit to China. Another strong point was “Dvorak” by Alec Longstreth, who we’ve covered previously here in the blog.

For an early attempt at a comics essay anthology Syncopated isn’t bad, but it is wildly uneven.  Most essay anthologies follow a theme, something that ties all the disparate contributors and narratives together, something that this volume lacks. Future editions of Syncopated would definitely benefit from more direction.

Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
edited by Brendan Burford
published by Villard Books (New York, 2009)
ISBN 978-0-345-50529-3

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Big Apple, not New York

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

There’s been a lot of confusion in the New York area lately; when you say “Comic Con,” do you mean New York or Big Apple?

Aren’t they the same thing?

No.

Big Apple Comic Con is kind of a long-standing, low-rent stalwart, a biannual collection of dealers housed in an empty church or on a pier or like this year’s edition, at the Penn Plaza Pavilion. It wasn’t anything spectacular—maybe a special guest or two signing autographs—but it was what it was, a place to pick up back issues at low cost and a lot of other media product, like toys and posters, at possibly inflated cost. A standard convention mix, though I’d be hard-pressed to call it a proper “convention” despite the name; it wasn’t really a social event.

New York Comic Con is a lot newer, and it started out with grand ambitions—to be an East Coast Comic-Con International. They rented out the Jacob Javits Convention Center, filled out the programming slate with tons of programming, and got lots of major companies from various media to exhibit in their “exhibition hall.” And for the most part, it’s worked—the first year broke fire codes and led to a near-riot outside the convention center as people who had pre-registered and people who had not tried to crowd their way into the at-fire-capacity building.

When things started to get really interesting is when Wizard World decided to expand its convention empire to New York City. They had decent success running conventions in Chicago and Philadelphia, buying already-existing conventions in those cities and re-branding them with the “Wizard World” name. Gareb Shamus has been on a real tear lately, buying up shows across the country in places like Connecticut, New Jersey, Nashville, and Cleveland.

When Wizard bought Big Apple Comic Con, it promised to lend a new veneer of respectability to the show. The location was moved to a larger venue at Pier 94, the guest lineup was expanded greatly, and actual programming was added, taking a wider view on pop culture. Last year’s edition might have had its bumps, including bad weather, a hard-to-reach location, and a slate of guests that really only appealed to a small subsection of fandom, but it wasn’t outright bad. At the least, the shopping selection was good, with aisles and aisles of back issue bins at fantastic prices.

What did the greatest service to last year’s Big Apple was that New York Comic Con was in state of dormancy, with 19 months to wait between their last convention in February 2009 and this coming weekend in October 2010. Not only was there no competition, but there was actually a need for something to keep fans occupied in the interim. But then came the shocking announcement, listed on the Big Apple Comic Con program book: the 2010 show was scheduled for the same weekend as New York Comic Con #5. Everyone was stunned, as it was kind of obvious which convention would win the big showdown. Eventually Wizard blinked, and a new date was announced, along with a new location.

(more…)

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A Fall Romance

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Every season has its own style and fashion, and you can always count on New York Magazine to tell you what’s hip and hot in the “Capital of the World” in quarterly issues that lay out the latest and greatest in apparel and accessories. Perhaps their usual photos of models all dressed up or accessories laid out on neutral backgrounds grew tiresome, because for the Fall ’08 issue they decided to try something a bit different, hiring Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca to create a little comic that showed off the season’s styles.

The story is a short romance tale that gets a little strange; it’s entirely possible to read the entire thing without even realizing its true purpose. But that purpose is there nonetheless, with each featured item and its price listed below each page of the comic, labeled according to the panel they appear in.

The purpose of the comic calls to mind the Perry Ellis campaign from a few years back, but as the title indicates, the twist is something else entirely.

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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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