The 118th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 17, 2015 at 7pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

William H. Foster III on The image of African Americans in early American Comic Books: 1940-50.

William H. Foster III has been a writer since the age of 8 and published since age 11. Poet, essayist, playwright, and editorialist, he has written 15 books and 10 plays. He is presently a Professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, Connecticut. Professor Foster holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA, and a Masters degree from Wesleyan University.
A long-time comic book collector and researcher, Professor Foster has been an expert commentator for both CNN News and National Public Radio. He was a consultant on the historical image of Blacks in both comic strips and comic books for the Words and Pictures Museum of Fine Sequential Art in Northampton, MA, and also a consultant to the 2004 exhibit, “Heroes, Heartthrobs, and Horrors: Celebrating Connecticut’s Invention of the American Comic Book” presented by the Connecticut Historical Society.
His exhibit on the “Changing Image of Blacks in Comics” has been displayed at a number of venues across the country, including Temple University’s Paley Library, the 1998 Comic-Con International Comic Arts Conference, the 2000 Festival of Arts and Ideas and in 2012 for the Texas Visual Arts Association in Dallas.
He presented his research at the 2001 conference of The International Association for Media and History in Leipzig, Germany and at the 2002 Conference on Analyzing Series & Serial Narrative at John Moores University in Liverpool, England.
In 2007 Professor Foster’s exhibit was displayed at both the Geppi Entertainment Museum in Maryland and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York. He was an invited speaker to the 2007 International Symposium on Langston Hughes at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, China.
In 2008 he was appointed to the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Comic Art. In 2010 his research was sited in the Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture. In 2011 he appeared as an expert on the PBS series, History Detectives. In that same year he spoke at the International Popular Culture Association conference in San Jose, Costa Rica. In 2012 he was an invited speaker at the Atl.Com Festival in Malmo, Sweden, and the Comics Forum in Leeds, England. In 2013 he lectured at the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA., the New School in New York, and at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He also appeared as an expert commentator in the PBS documentary, Superheroes: A Never ending Battle. He was also tapped to be a judge for the 2014 International Comic Con Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.
He is the author of two collections of essay on Blacks in Comics:  Looking for a Face like Mine (2005) and Dreaming of a Face like Ours (2010). He is currently at work on the third book in the series. Website: finallyinfullcolor.com

The 117th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 7pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Paul Tumey on Forgotten Funnies: of America in the Comics of Percy Winterbottom, Dwig, and Ving Fuller

Forgotten today, the works of these three cartoonists were widely published and enjoyed a respectable readership in their successive eras. Presenting rare comics and original research, comics scholar and writer Paul Tumey paints a four-color triptych of lost comics masters:

Percy Winterbottom was a pen name for George Beckenbaugh, a humorist/cartoonist who had a brief career in comics in the late 1890s until he died in 1901 at age 36. He conceived of Klondike, a strange, satirical comic strip, presented in deliberately comically primitive art and language, about a parade of larger than life American archetypes that reflect what American music scholar Greil Marcus has called the “old, weird America.”

Clare Victor “Dwig” Dwiggins came of age in idyllic rural America in the late 1800s and worked in comics from 1900 to the 1950s. He enjoyed a boyhood much like that of Mark Twain’s characters Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Working at first in whimsical illustrations and screwball comics, Dwig later sought to recapture his magical childhood in syndicated comics like School Days, and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, reflecting the rise of nostalgia in industrial America.

Ving Fuller’s career spans the 1920s to the early 1960s. He was the barely successful cartoonist brother of famed Hollywood maverick filmmaker Sam Fuller. Creator of the first psychiatrist in comics, Doc Syke, Fuller made urban screwball comics that dealt with a host of post-war American neuroses, including gags about the atomic bomb that first appeared mere weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When juxtaposed together, the lives and work of these three obscure cartoonists tell a larger story that helps shed light on American comics and culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

Paul Tumey was a co-editor and essayist for The Art of Rube Goldberg (Abrams ComicArts 2013). He was also a contributing editor and essayist of Society is Nix (Sunday Press, 2013). His essay on Harry Tuthill appears as the introduction to The Bungle Family 1930 (IDW Library of American Comics, 2014). His work can be read regularly in his column, Framed! at the online Comics Journal (www.tcj.com).

Please note:  Two meetings of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held this week!

The 116th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 24, 2015 at 7 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Frank Santoro on “Comics as Music: borrowing compositional strategies from music and applying them to comics.” Frank Santoro will present works from various cartoonists to illustrate how comic book layouts can be thought of in musical terms.
Frank Santoro (b.1972) is the author of Storeyville, Pompeii, and numerous other comic books (all published by PictureBox) and is also a columnist for The Comics Journal. He co-founded the comics criticism magazine ComicsComics with Dan Nadel and Timothy Hodler. He has also created a correspondence course for comic book makers and has taught drawing at Parsons School of Design. Santoro maintains and edits the Comics Workbook tumblr blog as a showcase for his students as well as new and under-appreciated comics work. His comics have been published in Kramers Ergot, Mome, and The Ganzfeld. He has exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, The Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, and at The Fumetto Festival in Switzerland. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. http://franksantoro.tumblr.com/

 

 

 

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The 112th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 7pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note: This event was snowed-out in January and is now rescheduled! Please note Wednesday date and 7pm starting time!.

Nick Thorkelson on Herbert Marcuse and Pedagogical Comics
Nick Thorkelson will talk about his projected book-length nonfiction comic on Marcuse, the German philosopher who was a mentor to the 1960s radical movements. The talk will also survey the field of pedagogical comics, from Rius and Rifas to Gonick and Sacco, and Nick’s contributions to that field which include The Underhanded History of the USA, The Comic Strip of Neoliberalism, Economic Meltdown Funnies, and short comics about Mr. Block, Kenneth Patchen, Yiddish poets, radical Christians, and the origins of modern jazz.
The Marcuse book situates Herbert Marcuse in the world of German anti-fascist refugees (Brecht, Adorno, Fritz Lang, Walter Benjamin, etc.), their debates regarding “high” and “low” art, and their contributions to American culture, which arguably include film noir and its poor relations, Crime Does Not Pay and The Spirit.  The book will incorporate Nick’s latest comics story, “You Had to Be There,” about the German historian George Mosse who excited midwestern college students in the 1960s and 70s with his explorations of the detritus of European popular culture.

Nick Thorkelson is a former editorial cartoonist for the Boston Globe who creates comics and cartoons for groups working on industrial safety, worker rights, social welfare, peace, and the environment. For the last ten years he has worked closely with historian Paul Buhle on a series of nonfiction comics, including a 4-pager on the 50th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man which appears in the current issue of Jewish Currents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 115th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 7 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. See the Spring ’15 Schedule here.

Presentations by Archie Rand and Alexander Rothman on Poetry Comics

1. Archie Rand on hisPsalm 68 project and other poetry-image works.
   Artist Archie Randwas born in Brooklyn and studied in New York City. He received a B.A. in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute in 1970, later studying at the Art Students League of New York under Larry Poons. In 1966, he had his first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, launching a career of over 80 solo exhibitions and 200 group exhibitions thus far in the U.S. and abroad.
   A frequent collaborator with artists and poets, Rand has worked as draughtsman with Robert Creeley and John Yau exploring such subjects as jazz, the Bible, and Jewish history. In 1974, he completed murals for the 13,000 square foot interior of B’nai Yosef Synagogue in Brooklyn, a monumental three-year project. Rand has administered and taught at numerous graduate art programs and appeared in major art journals and newspapers for over three decades. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, Rand is Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College.
   http://www.archierand.com/

Image by Archie Rand from Psalm 68 project

2. Alexander Rothmanon Close Reading Comics Poetry.
   If a cartoonist sets out to make “comics poetry,” what tools are available to her? How is her work likely to relate to other kinds of comics, or to poetry for that matter? Through close readings, this talk will explore how creators have answered these questions over the last fifty years, with an emphasis on the present day. Specifically, we’ll look at work by Joe Brainard and the New York School Poets, Warren Craghead, John Hankiewicz, and Marion Fayolle.
   Alexander Rothmanis a cartoonist and poet whose work has appeared in venues including The Indiana Review, Drunken Boat, The Brooklyn Rail, and š! He is publisher and co-editor-in-chief of Ink Brick, a micro-press dedicated to comics poetry, and he cohosts Comics for Grownups, a review podcast available on iTunes. See more of his work at inkbrick.com.