The seventy-seventh meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 7:00 PM at The New School, Room A404 at 66 West 12th St., New York City. Free and open to the public. PLEASE NOTE: This event is taking place at Johnson/Kaplan Hall of The New School.

Presentation: Matthew Thurber on “Secrets of INFOMANIACS, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud.” Matthew Thurber started posting a webcomic about the internet in February 2011, starring Ralph, an online-addicted youth with a hard drive in his forehead, and Amy Shit, an activist rapper whose parents have mysteriously vanished. INFOMANIACS quickly developed into a densely layered spy thriller dealing with issues of privacy and control. Eerily foreshadowing headlines with Snowden and Wikileaks soon to be splattered everywhere, INFOMANIACS was released in October 2013 by PictureBox (soon to cease publishing…coincidence?) Learn the intriguing backstory of this comic strip: the shadowy meetings with librarians, the influence of unlikely muses such as  Dave Berg, the dropboxes that “fell off a truck”, clandestine schemes for embedding real people into the strip, and plotting techniques which nearly caused a nervous breakdown!

Matthew Thurber is an artist and musician living in Brooklyn. He is the author of numerous comics including 1-800-MICE and INFOMANIACS. Thurber is the co-founder of Tomato House gallery and of the Potlatch, I Gather books-on-tape label. He performs as Ambergris, and with Brian Belott as Court Stenographer and Young Sherlock Holmes. http://www.matthewthurber.com