Parsons Illustration Alum Danielle McManus recently took part in a sailing trip from Mystic Seaport to New London, CT to celebrate the homecoming of the ship Amistad. Danielle was invited by the non-profit organization Amistad America and took the opportunity to draw up a storm. Above and below are a couple of her pieces from the trip, but you should hop over to her blog, A Love of Drawing, and check more of her work. Thanks for keeping us updated, Danielle!
Parsons Illustration Alum Jonathan Jay Lee dropped us an email recently with some REALLY exciting news. Straight from his email, here are the details:
Just wanted to drop a note and mention that Strange Tales MAX hardcover book came out! It’s the short 4 page story I did while in my senior year (2007) for the anthology and should be available in Forbidden Planet or Jim Hanley’s.
Also, I’ve got a 3 spread article in the latest Peninsula Magazine, the issues focuses on Beijing Shanghai and HK, and they also specifically mention me graduating from Parsons in the article. It’s available from all the Peninsula Hotels…
Jonathan is right on the money that Strange Tales is available at Forbidden Planet and you can read the feature on him in Peninsula Magazine online (a screenshot is below)—it starts on page 40! Of course, it goes without saying that you should check out Jonathan’s work on his website.
Congratulations, Jonathan! Keep up the amazing work. And Illustration Alumni, keep us in the loop so we can feature your accomplishments on the blog. Stay in touch!
[top image: courtesy of Jonathan Jay Lee and Marvel Comics; bottom image: from Peninsula Magazine]
Parsons Illustration Alum Maria Berrio recently took part in a wonderful project to create art with children. Here are some of the details:
Youth from Harlem RBI’s REAL Kids Summer Program worked with Colombian-American artist Maria Berrio to create the piece, entitled “Windows to the Future”. The mural is an expression of the youth’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations. It depicts a youthful, colorful city in which children are playing together reaching towards the sky, with the words “Dreams Come True” written across the scene. During the creative process, the young artists were encouraged to visualize their dreams for the future, and I truly believe that through this meaningful artwork, they learned that dreams can come true. Indeed, Rich Berlin agrees that this notion is “a familiar theme for both CITYarts and Harlem RBI, whose missions both focus on empowering youth.”
You learn more about the project and see more pictures here.
Congratulations to all the children involved and to Maria for being part of such a valuable project.
The 2009 Harvey Awards Nominees have been announced with the release of the final ballot, presented by the Executive Committees of the Harvey Awards and the Baltimore Comic-Con. Named in honor of the late Harvey Kurtzman, one of the industry’s most innovative talents, the Harvey Awards recognize outstanding work in comics and sequential art. They will be presented August 28, 2010 in Baltimore, MD, in conjunction with the Baltimore Comic-Con.
Parsons Illustration Alum and Faculty member R. Sikoryak has been nominated for “Best Previously Published Graphic Album” for his book Masterpiece Comics.
Congrats to Bob on his continuing success with this fantastic piece of work!
The Attleboro Arts Museum presents
Seeing Double, a national juried exhibition.
featuring work by Parsons Illustration Alum Jake Messing!
Open from 7/7/2010 – 8/4/2010
Partners, duets, Noah’s animals, diptychs, mates, symmetry,
reflections, twins, bicuspids, echoes, bookends, the
Attleboro Arts Museum presents a national juried exhibition that
will prompt you to think twice – Seeing Double.
Congrats on your inclusion, Jake!
R. Sikoryak
How Classics and Cartoons Collide
June 15 – August 29, 2010
Original drawings from the book “Masterpiece Comics,” which adapts literary classics in the styles of famous cartoons.
Curated by Bill Kartalopoulos
Sikoryak and Kartalopoulos in Conversation
Thursday, July 15, 7pm
Comics chameleon R. Sikoryak inventively adapts canonical Western literature using the visual styles and characters of historical American comic books and comic strips. Among his many works produced over the past twenty years, Sikoryak has adapted Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in the style of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in the style of Tales From the Crypt, and the Book of Genesis in the style of Chic Young’s Blondie. “More than a gag or a parody,” said exhibit curator Bill Kartalopoulos, “these thoughtful and intricately constructed dual adaptations suggest resonances that reflect upon each story’s pair of sources.”
R. Sikoryak: How Classics and Cartoons Collide: examines the artist’s intensive process by showcasing a selection of notes, sketches, and reference material from one of his longest and most ambitious narratives, 2000’s “Dostoyevsky Comics,” which adapts Crime and Punishment in the style of a mid-century Batman comic book. The exhibit also includes all ten original art boards for the final story, recently collected alongside Sikoryak’s other adaptations in his book Masterpiece Comics, published in 2009 by Drawn and Quarterly.
There will be a conversation between Sikoryak and Kartalopoulos on July 15 at 7PM. Admission for this event is $5, free for members of MoCCA.
About R. Sikoryak
R. Sikoryak is the author of Masterpiece Comics (Drawn & Quarterly). His cartoons and illustrations have appeared in The Onion, The New Yorker, Nickelodeon Magazine, Mad, Fortune, and many other publications; he’s drawn for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Ugly Americans. Sikoryak teaches in the illustration department at Parsons The New School for Design and is an alum of the program. Since 1997, he has presented his cartoon slide show series, Carousel, around the United States and Canada.
About Bill Kartalopoulos
Bill Kartalopoulos teaches classes about comics and illustration at Parsons The New School for Design. He is a frequent public speaker and is the programming coordinator for SPX: The Small Press Expo and the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. He writes about comics for Print Magazine, where he is a contributing editor, and reviews comics forPublishers Weekly. He is a member of the Executive Committee for the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), an annual academic conference devoted to comics. In 2008 he curated Kim Deitch: A Retrospective at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York, NY. He lives in Brooklyn.
About Masterpiece Comics
Masterpiece Comics adapts a variety of classic literary works with the most iconic visual idioms of twentieth-century comics. Dense with exclamation marks and lurid colors, R. Sikoryak’s parodies remind us of the sensational excesses of the canon, or, if you prefer, of the economical expressiveness of classic comics from Batman to Garfield. In “Blond Eve,” Dagwood and Blondie are ejected from the Garden of Eden into their archetypal suburban home; Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is reimagined as a foppish Little Nemo; and Camus’s Stranger becomes a brooding, chain-smoking Golden Age Superman. Other source material includes Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, bubblegum wrappers, superhero comics, kid cartoons, and more.
Post-It Show 5 open through July 7, 2009
Giant Robot Gallery
437 East 9th Street Between 1st Ave. & Ave. A,
in the East Village New York, New York 10009
(212) 674-GRNY (4769) | grny.net
Giant Robot is proud to present Post-It Show 5 at GRNY. Curated by artists Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson, the show is slated to feature roughly 1,000 works by noted contributors for only $20. These pieces will be on standard-sized 3″ x 3″ Post-It notes. (Larger sizes of 4″ x 4″ and 6″ x 6″ will cost a bit more.) The pieces will be cash-and-carry.
Thus far, the ever-expanding list of contributors includes the following:
Trevor Alixopulos, APAK, Andrice Arp, Scott Bakal, Melinda Beck, Mike Bertino, Tim Biskup, Jon Boam, Pakito Bolino, Michelle Borok, Aaron Brown, Jude Buffum, Chris Buzelli, Christine Castro, Martin Cendreda, Kris Chau, Louise Chen, Marcos Chin, Chris Clayton, Tim Cochran, Eric Collins, Jen Corace, Matt Curtius, Kelsey Dake, Eleanor Davis, Vanessa Davis, Nathan Doyle, Seth Drenner, Susan Fang, Korin Faught, Nina Frenkel, Shannon Freshwater, Matt Furie, Nick Gazin, Frieda Gossett, Katherine Guillen, (Parsons Illustration Adjunct) Peter Hamlin, Jon Han, Jaime Hernandez, Andrew Holder, (Parsons Illustration Alum) David Horvath, Patrick Hruby, Rama Hughes, Mari Inukai, Yellena James, Hellen Jo, Nathan Jurevicius, Andrea Kang, Dan-ah Kim, Hawk Krall, Lamour Supreme, Travis Lampe, Blaise Larmee, Sarah Lavoie, Jesse LeDoux, Dongyun Lee, Eli Lehrhoff, Bill Main, Jacob Magraw-Mickelson, Ben Marra, Ted McGrath, Mark Allen Miller, Mike Miller, Brendan Monroe, Mark Murphy, Andrew Neyer, Tru Nguyen, Anders Nilsen, Saejean Oh, Saelee Oh, Martin Ontiveros, Sidney Pink, Luke Ramsey, Ron Rege, Jesse Reklaw, Martha Rich, Joe Rocco, Brooks Salzwedel, Anna See, Raymond Sohn, STO, Deth P. Sun, Gary Taxali, Team Macho, Gina Triplett, Twerps (Greg Mishka), Edwin Ushiro, Jing Wei, Steven Weissman, Gillian Wilson, Calvin Wong, Jaime Zollars, Trevor Alixopulos, Peter Arkle, Matthew Bandusch, Karen Barbour, Angie Clayton, John Cuneo, Bob Dob, Nathan Doyle, Austin English, Jason Fischer, Anne Ishii, Claire Johnson, Terri Fry Kasuba, Phillipe Lardy, Sarah Lavoie, James McShane, Dave Plunkert, Jason Polan, Jarret Quon, Deth P. Sun, Francesca Tallone, and more!
For more information about the artists, the show, GR2, or Giant Robot magazine, please contact: Eric Nakamura Giant Robot Owner/Publisher eric@giantrobot.com (310) 479-7311.
Parsons Illustration Alum Gareth Hinds was interviewed by School Library Journal back in January. With a final release date (October 12th!) set for his upcoming graphic novel adaptation of The Odyssey, we thought it would be great to revisit that interview. Here’s a snippet:
Are there some stories that won’t work as graphic novels?
There are stories that don’t lend themselves quite as well to the graphic novel medium, but there are no stories that can’t be done. I’ve put off doing certain books because they were just too huge—War and Peace, for example, is not only incredibly long, it covers a very long period of time, includes a lot of characters, and would require a tremendous amount of historical research. I may adapt War and Peace someday, but not in 2010!
I’ve never hit an actual dead-end once I started working on a book, but occasionally difficult scenes can bog me down, and I have to walk away from them and work on something else for a while. For example, the very end of The Odyssey is rather abrupt in the original. I wanted to somehow slow down the last few pages and tie up some of the themes and plot threads, but I didn’t want to add any new material or change the story. That took a while to figure out.
…
What’s special about your version of The Odyssey?
For one thing, at 256 pages it’s a lot longer than anything else I’ve done, or most graphic novels for that matter. It has a more expansive, epic feeling than my other books, with a lot of landscape, open ocean, and crowd scenes. What I think distinguishes my books from other graphic novel adaptations is the way I approach the classics. It’s very important to me that my adaptations do justice to the originals, and to me that doesn’t just mean not changing the story too much, it also means bringing a high level of art, craft, and sophistication to the way the story is told in the new medium—like the original author did. That’s a tall order, of course. I don’t think it’s enough to give a classic story the gloss of a modern comic or dress it up with special effects. To whatever extent my adaptations succeed, it’s because I have equal dedication to the source material, the craft of telling a story in pictures, and the creation of a beautiful book.
Read the rest of this interview here. And over on his blog, Gareth has posted tons of progress updates about The Odyssey so can follow his creative process. Definitely check them out here.
Congrats to Gareth on his new book!
Parsons Illustration Alumna Danielle C. McManus (2003) emailed us recently and let us know the scoop on her latest project. Here’s a snippet of what she wrote, along with a little more information from her website:
In honor of Earth Day’s 40th anniversary my studio, A Love Of Drawing, is selling a series of limited edition earth day prints. They are entitled “Celebrating Mother Nature”…As an illustrator I would love to use my talent to raise awareness about the importance of our planet. These particular posters depict a cultural illustration of Mother Nature and display how she has created many of the elements that are present in the world that we live in today. Elements that we can not re-create such as the many species of flowers, birds, and trees that are slowly becoming extinct. With this series I hope to show humanity that it is important to embrace and celebrate the beauty of our world. These prints will be on sale throughout the month of April.
Beautiful work, Danielle!