Randall Enos: A Life on the Slanted Board.

Randall Enos talks about his 60 year career of explorations into new directions for comic art.

Known for his unique linocut illustrations, Randall Enos has been drawing “funny pitchers fer the peeple for 60 years.” His work has generally been lurking in the pages of practically every magazine and lots of newspapers in America but forays into the land of comic strips, animation and children’s books have also been noticed.
He lives on his horse farm in Connecticut with his wife of 60 years (who is starting to get on his nerves).

Mohammad Sabaaneh on The Art of Political Cartooning in Palestine

The Art of Political Cartooning in Palestine
Mohammad will discuss his craft, including his production methods and artistic choices, and his artistic influences and how he navigates the challenges of editorial cartooning in Palestine. He will discuss, accompanied by slides of his work, his own development as an artist and cartoonist – from how he started out, to how his techniques and style evolved over time.

Mohammad Sabaaneh is a Palestinian graphic artist based in Ramallah in the West Bank. He is the principal political cartoonist for Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the Palestinian Authority’s daily newspaper, and has published his work in many other newspapers around the Arab World. He is a member of the International Cartoon Movement, as well as the VJ Movement connecting visual journalists across the globe. Sabaaneh’s work has been displayed in numerous collections and fairs in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. He won third place in the Arab Caricature Contest in 2013.

A special meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Wednesday, April 26, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A WEDNESDAY NIGHT EVENT!

Kent Worcester on Ten Great English Cartoonists You’ve Never Heard Of.

Two years ago Kent Worcester gave a talk on ten great – or at least very good – obscure leftist cartoonists. He returns to the Symposium to present an illustrated lecture on ten witty and engaging English newspaper and magazine cartoonists whose work has been largely or entirely overlooked on this side of the pond.  Kent Worcester is the editor or coeditor of six books on comics and cartoons, including The Comics Studies Reader (2008), The Superhero Reader‘(2013), and, most recently, Silent Agitators: Cartoon Art from the Pages of New Politics (2016). He is a professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College.

The 185th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday,  April 18, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Jules Feiffer Honors Will Eisner at 100.
A Will Eisner Week Event
with Paul Levitz & Danny Fingeroth
[Jules Feiffer will appear live via Skype.]

Will Eisner (1917-2005) innovated and pioneered comics in two different eras. Eisner helped invent the comics industry in the 1930s and created The Spirit in the 1940s as a heroic crime-fighting figure who appeared in a Sunday newspaper comics insert. The Spirit walked through a world of noir-inflected, urban drama, one suffused with humor and insight into the human condition, a world not afraid to essay the occasional Yiddish in-joke or Bronx social drama vignette.  Then after producing comics for training and education, Eisner, in 1978, re-invented himself―and the medium of comics―with his first graphic novel, A Contract With God, followed, until his 2005 passing, with many additional graphic novels and textbooks.

From 1946 until The Spirit’s end in 1952, Eisner counted as part of his close-knit, talented staff, a precocious teenager named Jules Feiffer, who worked on The Spirit and Clifford for Eisner, and also took on the self-appointed role of Eisner’s social conscience and resident smart-ass. In the years since, Feiffer’s own multifaceted career as satirical cartoonist, screenwriter (Carnal Knowledge), playwright (Little Murders) and children’s book author (The Man in the Ceiling)―and most recently, creator of his own trilogy of graphic novels (so far Kill My Mother and Cousin Joseph have been released, with the third volume in the works)―has blossomed in a unique and spectacular manner. But he did get his start with Will Eisner, with whom he was friend and colleague―and admirer―through the rest of Eisner’s life.

Jules will speak about his experience working for Eisner, what he learned from him and how Eisner influenced his own work, and why Eisner, a century after his birth, is still an important figure in the past, present and future of comics and graphic novels and in our culture as a whole.

Jules will speak and present via Skype, and will be joined by in-person panelists, including Paul Levitz (author of Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel) and Danny Fingeroth (co-editor of The Stan Lee Universe and Chair of Will Eisner Week).

The 182nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 at 8pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

Mort Gerberg on The Magazine Cartoon: Telling a Story in Only One Panel

The magazine cartoon is said to be the most challenging to create of all the cartoon forms, because it must communicate a complete narrative in the space of only a single, motionless frame, in about four seconds – contrasted with multi-panel pages, comic strips, animations and graphic novels.  A cartoon is instant visual/verbal communication of a funny idea, designed so that a reader gets its message in a glance – during the flip of a page.  A cartoon is a split second in time – the one precise moment during some continuous action that not only perfectly describes that action, but also tells what immediately preceded it, and perhaps implies what will happen next.  To be successful, this split second must be the correct freeze frame chosen from the imagined movie, that tells the whole story.  The drawing itself does not move, but it is not a still life.  In creating a single panel cartoon, the challenge is not only to envision the correct moment, but to reproduce it so that readers can see it, too.  To do this, the cartoonist employs a number of elements commonly associated with art and drama.  These include, among others, cast, dialogue, gesture, setting, composition, and clichés.  In Mort Gerberg’s presentation, Gerberg will show examples of works of his own that abbreviate this as well as others’ cartoons, chosen from two familiar subjects.

Mort Gerberg is a longtime multi-genre cartoonist and author best known for his magazine cartoons in The New Yorker, Playboy and numerous other publications.  He was voted as Best Magazine Cartoonist of 2007 and 2008 by the NCS, and was a six-time finalist in other years in other categories.  He was also a founding member and president of The Cartoonists Guild.  Gerberg has drawn several nationally-syndicated newspaper comic strips and has written, edited and / or illustrated 43 books for adults and children, including Cartooning: The Art and the Business, which has been the most respected instructional / reference work in the field for over 30 years.He also has written and drawn for television, online and home video and he taught cartooning for 15 years at New York City’s Parsons School of Design.  For clients in the business world he creates customized art and humorous writing for their advertising and public relations, and is a creative consultant for ideation focus groups.  Gerberg is also a popular public speaker, particularly on the subjects of creativity and positive aging.

The 179th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 28, 2017 at 7pmat Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

Exploring rhythm in everyday life and finding obscure inspiration for animated films.

Daniel Savage is an independent designer and animation director based in Brooklyn, NY. He has created projects such as Yule Log 2.0 and mixed.parts. His work has been recognized by Wired Magazine, The Webbys, and One Show to name a few. In 2012 he was named a Young Gun by the Art Directors Club. He has taught design and animation at SVA, NYU, and guest lectured at a wide variety of schools and events.

The 178th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

Spring is right around the corner, and so is the MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Arts) Festival. This year, there is a  student committee with Illustration faculty Steven Guarnaccia to organize the Parsons’ presence at the festival.

This is a self-publishing, as well as a cartoon and comics festival, so all submitted work should be:

• Narrative or content driven
• Reproducible (zines, prints, shirts, badges etc)
• Available in a minimum quantity of 10

When submitting your work, don’t forget to include:

• Your name
• Your New School email (and/or other contact information)

If you are submitting three dimensional artwork (such as dolls, figurines or other sculptures), please include an estimate regarding the number of copies you’d have available for sale.

Please drop off your submissions in an envelope LABELED WITH YOUR NAME AND CONTACT INFORMATION at the Illustration office on the 8th floor of 2 West 13^th Street by Thursday, February 23rd, 12:00 pm. No late submissions will be considered. Please include one physical copy of each work you would like to have reviewed.

An email will be sent out by Friday, February 24th to notify you if your work has been accepted.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me (putrm576@newschool.edu) or Steven Guarnaccia (guarnacs@newschool.edu.)

This submission is open to all years and majors.

To hell with narrative and self-expression! Instead: constraints and repetition (and repetition)! This talk sets Idleness against Inspiration, and namedrops an indecent number of French names in the process. Reader, attend!!

Roman Muradov is an award-winning illustrator and the author of (In A Sense) Lost & Found, Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art and the End of A Fence, as well as a French collection Aujourd’hui Demain Hier. He has a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators, a habit of long aimless walks, and an imaginary dog named Barchibald.

The 176th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

Peter Burr will present and discuss his work over the past decade.

Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn, New York, specializing in animation and installation. His work has been presented at venues across the world including Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid; and MoMA PS1, New York. His recent work explores the concept of an endlessly mutating death labyrinth and is being expanded into a video game. Previously, he worked under the alias Hooliganship and in 2006 founded the video label Cartune Xprez, through which he produced live multimedia exhibitions showcasing artists working in experimental animation.

The 176th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday,  January 31, 2017 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

“Strobe Warning”

Illustration faculty member Wendy Popp has received a grant to coordinate an external project on Climate Change.  The Illustration program will be collaborating with  350.org, the international environmental organization on visual interpretaions that go beyond the scope of the polar bear and melting ice flow. 

All faculty members are invited to incorporate this project into their syllabus for the spring semester. 

All students are invited to develop ideas in any manner of interpretation from GIF to storyboard, comic to puppetry, animation to static image, poetry to musical interlude.

The first meeting and presentation with 350.org will be on Wednesday, January 25th in room D 1103 in 6 east 16th from 4:45 – 5:30pm.

The work that is generated will be presented in exhibition during Earth week and during a presentation for The Tishman Environmental Design Center in late April. 

It is our hope that the quantity and quality of the work that is generated will further the enhancement of the 350.org social media campaign. 

The project is open to all departments of Parsons The New School for Design.

If you can’t attend this meeting, please contact Wendy Popp for more information. poppw@newschool.edu