The ninety-sixth meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Monday, August 25, 2014 at 7 pm at BHQFU, 34 Avenue A (near 3rd Street).  Free and open to the public.

Presentations by Juliacks and Alexandra Atiya & Salman Toor.

Presentation 1: Juliacks
Comics: Art, Narrative, & Time
This talk is all about looking at the stories and art of the previous millennia to talk about the comics narratives of today. Human understanding and language is based in the creation of stories. Still, each story is like a math formula whose variables and structure can be manipulated. The stories, they reaffirm, reject, deny, and reconstruct our past, our identity and our values. Presenting a mirror, our stories foretell a kind of future. As part of the talk, Juliacks will discuss her current work in progress, the comic book Architecture of an Atom. http://www.archatom.org

Presentation 2: Alexandra Atiya and Salman Toor

Work-in-Progress: Electricity Thieves
Pakistani painter Salman Toor and American writer Alexandra Atiya discuss their collaboration on a graphic novel set in contemporary Pakistan. Toor and Atiya began collaborating on the project earlier this year, after Toor suggested certain scenes of life in Lahore that he wanted to capture in a visual narrative form. Atiya responded by developing a plot that could include a number of these scenes. The plot of the graphic novel revolves around the kidnapping of the adolescent son of an upper-middle-class family. Most of the action takes place during a mid-summer electricity crisis, when power can be out for hours each day. Toor, a figurative painter who received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, will also discuss representations of Pakistan in other media, such as photojournalism, and the dearth of graphic novels representing everyday Pakistani life. salmantoorart.tumblr.com