Category Archives: Illustration Dept. Events

New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium – November 17, 2015

Bill Griffith
on his new book,
Invisible Ink.

Bill Griffith on his new book, Invisible Ink.
Invisible Ink is about my mother’s secret 16 year affair with a famous cartoonist and how it affected me and my family.
There will be a slide talk on the book’s evolution and why it took me so long to do my first graphic novel.
Digressions into Zippy and Ernie Bushmillerland may occur.

“Are we having fun yet?” This non sequitur utterance by the clown-suited 
philosopher/media star Zippy the Pinhead has become so oft-quoted that 
it is now in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Zippy has in fact become an 
international icon, even appearing on the (former) Berlin Wall. Zippy’s
 creator, Bill Griffith, began his comics career in New York City in 1969.
His first strips were published in the East Village Other and Screw
 Magazine and featured an angry amphibian named Mr. The Toad.
He ventured to San Francisco in 1970 to join the burgeoning underground
 comics movement and made his home there until 1998. His first major 
comic book titles included Tales of Toad and Young Lust, a best-selling 
series parodying romance comics of the time.He was co-editor of Arcade, 
The Comics Revue for its seven issue run in the mid-70s and worked with 
the important underground publishers throughout the seventies and up to 
the present: Print Mint, Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, Kitchen Sink and 
Fantagraphics Books. The first Zippy strip appeared in Real Pulp #1 
(Print Mint) in 1970. The strip went weekly in 1976, first in the Berkeley Barb 
and then syndicated nationally through Rip Off Press.
In 1980 weekly syndication was taken over by Zipsynd (later Pinhead Productions), owned and operated by the artist. Zippy also appeared in the pages of the National Lampoon and High Times from 1977 to 1984. In 1985 the San Francisco Examiner
asked Griffith to do six days a week, and in 1986 he was approached by 
King Features Syndicate to take the daily strip to a national audience. Sunday 
color strips began running in 1990. Today Zippy appears in over 200 newspapers
 worldwide. There have been over a dozen paperback collections of Griffith’s work
and numerous comic book and magazine appearances, both here and abroad.
He became an irregular contributor to The New Yorker in 1994. Griffith’s inspiration
 forZippy came from several sources, among them the sideshow “pinheads” in
 Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. The name “Zippy” springs from “Zip the What-Is-It?”
a “freak” exhibited by P.T. Barnum from 1864 to 1926. Zip’s real name was
 William Henry Jackson (below), born in 1842. Coincidentally, Griffith (as he discovered in
1975, five years after creating Zippy) bears the same name. He was born
 William Henry Jackson Griffith (in 1944), named after his great-grandfather,
 well-known photographer of the Old West William H. Jackson (1842-1941).
Griffith presently lives and works in East Haddam, Connecticut with his wife, cartoonist Diane Noomin.


WHEN

Nov. 17, 2015 at 7pm

WHERE

The 135th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015 at 7pm atParsons The New School for Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium – November 10, 2015

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

Forgotten today, the comics of these three cartoonists were widely published and enjoyed a respectable readership in their successive eras. Presenting rare art and original research, comics scholar and writer Paul Tumey paints a four-color triptych of lost comics masters.
Percy Winterbottom (1866-1901) was a sly comic persona for George A. 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 one of the first meta-parodies in comics: a comic strip that was a lampoon of comics, pre-dating Mad magazine by more than half a century. His strip employs deliberately primitive art and language, and displays a parade of larger than life American archetypes while at the same time skewering them.
Clare Victor “Dwig” Dwiggins (1874-1958) 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, Gibson Girl art and virtuoso screwball comics. Dwig abruptly changed his work in 1913, becoming looser in style and obsessed with recapturing his childhood adventures in syndicated comics like School Days, and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. He drew boyhood comics for the next thirty years, as if he had become frozen in time. Paul Tumey thinks he may have found the reason for this change. Dwig’s later boyhood comics reflect the rise of nostalgia in industrial America, as people began to yearn for a time when life was was simpler and perhaps less stressful.
Ving Fuller (1903 – 1965) worked in syndicated newspaper comic strips from the 1920s to the late 1950s. His work shows how a gifted cartoonist had much less creative freedom in mid-century America than earlier generations. Forced to hew to rigid stylistic formulas and gag formats, Fuller’s work nonetheless offers quirky and interesting moments. He was the barely successful cartoonist brother of famed Hollywood maverick filmmaker Sam Fuller, with whom his work shares a exploitative tabloid newspaper quality. Creator of the first psychiatrist in comics, Doc Syke, Fuller’s screwball strip dealt with a host of post-war American neuroses, including gags about the atomic bomb that first appeared mere weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tumey will make the case that Fuller’s work quietly foreshadowed the Underground comics of the 1960s, with buried undercurrents of sexuality, social breakdowns, and charged political topics.
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 for 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.


WHEN

November 10, 2015 at 7pm

WHERE

The 134th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015 at 7pm atParsons The New School for Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium – November 5, 2015

[above] Illustration by Patrick Crotty

Comics on the Northern Edge of Europe with Tom Oldham, Patrick Crotty, Tommi Musturi, and David Schilter. Moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos.

Bill Kartalopoulos in conversation with Tom Oldham, Patrick Crotty, Tommi Musturi and David Schilter discussing the alternative small press comics in the UK, Sweden, Finland and Latvia.

Tom Oldham is a co-founder of Breakdown Press, a comics publisher based in London, UK. Breakdown Press is dedicated to publishing the very best in comics art, whether the cutting edge work of new cartoonists or undiscovered classics of the past.
Patrick Crotty is an artist and the official boss of the Swedish PEOW! studio. PEOW! is a publisher, shop and risograph studio based in Stockholm, publishing intergalactic comics from Sweden and abroad.
Tommi Musturi is an artist and co-founder of KUTIKUTI, a non-profit contemporary comics association and artist collective formed in Finland. KUTIKUTI are ca. forty members who make, teach and publish comics. They operate internationally with an aim to maintain and develop comics as an art form.
David Schilter is a co-editor of kuš!, a small press publisher from Riga. kuš! promotes alternative comics in Latvia and abroad. Next to publishing international anthologies and mini comics, they organize exhibitions workshops and other comic-related events.

Event initiated by Ben Katchor and David Schilter


WHEN

November 5, 2015 at 7pm

WHERE

A special meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposiumwill be held on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2015 at 7pm at Parsons The New School for Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS HAPPENING ON THURSDAY!

Graphic Novelist Riad Sattouf, Lecture and Book Signing – 11/6

 

Riad_Sattouf_Poster

Parsons School of Design’s Illustration BFA presents Riad Sattouf, a bestselling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris, here in New York to discuss and sign copies of the new English release of The Arab of the FutureBooks will be for sale at this event.

arab

November 6th in the University Center Room U L104 (63 Fifth Ave, lower level) at 1:30 pm.

The author of four comics series in France and a former weekly columnist for the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf also directed the films The French Kissers and Jacky in Women’s Kingdom. The Arab of the Future, which has been published in fifteen languages, is his first work to appear in English.

Sattouf’s virtuoso graphic style captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, as Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi’s Libya, and Assad’s Syria – but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation.

The New York Times published a Sunday book review article on Satouf’s The Arab of the Future, which you can read here.

To see more of his published works, visit his personal site here.

 

Graphic Novelist Riad Sattouf Talk and Book Signing 11/6

1018-BKS-Lalami-ALT02-superJumbo

Parsons School of Design’s Illustration BFA presents Riad Sattouf, a bestselling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris, here in New York to discuss and sign copies of the new English release of The Arab of the FutureBooks will be for sale at this event.

arab

November 6th in the University Center Room U L104 (63 Fifth Ave, lower level) at 1:30 pm.

The author of four comics series in France and a former weekly columnist for the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf also directed the films The French Kissers and Jacky in Women’s Kingdom. The Arab of the Future, which has been published in fifteen languages, is his first work to appear in English.

Sattouf’s virtuoso graphic style captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, as Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi’s Libya, and Assad’s Syria – but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation.

The New York Times published a Sunday book review article on Satouf’s The Arab of the Future, which you can read here.

To see more of his published works, visit his personal site here.

 

New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium – November 3, 2015

Marvin Sackner
on this new book,
The Art of Typewriting

Join Marvin Sackner for a celebration of the publication of his new book, The Art of Typewriting (Thames and Hudson) co-authored with his late wife, Ruth. Marvin Sackner will describe the genesis of the project, the process of assembling the book and his wonderful discoveries within the realm of typewriter art.
The book presents over  600 examples of work produced by the world’s finest typewriter artists — from late 19th century ornamental works produced by secretaries to recent works of typewriter art — the book highlights the unique position of the typewritten document in the digital age.

Marvin Sackner is a Word Art collector based in Miami, Florida. Today the Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, created over four decades with his wife Ruth Sackner, is the world’s largest collection of its kind, housing tens of thousands of pieces from hundreds of artists and writers from around the world.


WHEN

November 3, 2015 at 7pm

WHERE

The 133rd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015 at 7pm atParsons The New School for Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Special Guest Lecturer, Animator Ru Kuwahata 11/5

Ru Kuwahata

Ru Kuwahata

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parsons alum, Ru Kowahata will be returning to Parsons to share her experiences as an animator. As a part of the Tiny Inventions duo, Kowahata uses a unique system of 3D models that are integrated into digital animation. Her expertise in mixed media visuals has contributed to her successes in a multitude of film festival awards, publications and contracted work for an assortment of clientele.

Any and all students interested in pursuing a career in production, animation and storytelling are encouraged to join us for this incredible opportunity to get intel on the industry as an independent animator.

The lecture will be held on November 5th at 12 pm at 66 West 12th St., room 407

Invitation to Adrian Tomine – 92Y

“Adrian Tomine has more ideas in twenty panels than novelists have in a lifetime,” wrote Zadie Smith.

The artist behind the comic-book series Optic Nerve, which he began self-publishing at the age of 16, is known for his New Yorker covers and the graphic novels 32 Stories, Sleepwalk and Summer Blonde. His new book, Killing and Dying, is a stunning showcase of the possibilities of the medium and a wry exploration of loss, creative ambition, identity and family dynamics.

Adrian Tomine will sign copies of Killing and Dying and his prints following the event. Books and prints will be available for purchase.

Purchase a ticket and be automatically entered to win a signed print (size 18’”x 24”) of his illustration “Missed Connection,” one of his most popular New Yorker covers!

Click here to purchase your tickets!

TWO NEW EVENTS for New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium

The following events have been added to the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium. Keep an eye out for more updates in the near future about both events!

Nov. 5th at 7pm: Comics on the Northern Edge of Europe with Tom Oldham, Patrick Crotty, Tommi Musturi, David Schilter. Moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos.

Dec. 21 at 7pm: Peter Blegvad: DOPPELGÄNGER, on echoes, shadows, avatars and other singular doubles,
an illustrated talk.

Check below for all events and the recently added ones: