Orion Martin on The Largest Comics Industry Ever: China’s Pulp Comics

Beginning in Shanghai in the 1920s, a vibrant culture of mass produced comics developed in mainland China. These pocket-sized comics, called lianhuanhua, became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the country and were printed in tremendous quantities. In 1985, the peak year of lianhuanhua production, more than eight billion comics were printed in genres ranging from historical parables to adaptations of Star Wars. Demand for the comics has decreased since the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands continue to circulate in antique stores and online.

R. Orion Martin is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn, New York. He writes about comics, art, and the ways new understandings of comics can make them more meaningful to our lives. His work has been featured on Hyperallergic, The Comics Journal, and The Hooded Utilitarian. You can find him on Tumblr or Twitter.

The 174th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, January 24, 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.

Closing Reception: Todd Lambrix | A Broken Taxonomy

LIU Humanities Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
1 University Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Please join us at the opening reception of A Broken Taxonomy Thursday night, December 8th from 6-8 pm at The Humanities Gallery at LIU Brooklyn. We will have a limited edition, signed book from the show available for sale.

The individual specimens in A Broken Taxonomy are part alien spacecraft part stuffed toy, never quite crossing into cartoon character territory, however close to that line they might get. Instead they seem almost to belong closer to the world of miniature furniture: little modern ottomans or chaise loungers, with crafted wooden legs or wire stands, and however closely they skirt the edge of whimsey, they are still rather serious. – Glenn LaVertu | excerpt from the forthcoming book on the exhibition.

Cynthia Roman on “Hogarthian Progresses in Eighteenth-Century Graphic Satire”
 

Sequential narration in satiric prints is most famously associated with the “modern moral subjects” of William Hogarth (1697–1764): Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress(1735), Marriage A-la-Mode (1745), and Industry and Idleness (1747) among others. Less well-known is the broad spectrum of legacy “progresses” produced by subsequent generations drawing both on Hogarth’s narrative strategies and his iconic motifs. James Gillray (1756–1815), celebrated for his innovative single-plate satires, was among the most accomplished printmakers to adopt Hogarthian sequential narration even as he transformed it according to his unique vision. Gillray’s forays into Hogarthian progresses kept the idiom relevant for further development by later graphic satirists including G.M. Woodward, Richard Newton, Charles Williams, Williams Elmes and George Cruikshank whose works will also be considered in this talk.

Cynthia Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. She is editor and contributor to Hogarth’s Legacy distributed by Yale University Press, 2016.

The 172nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 6, 2016 at 7pmat Parsons School of Design, The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Congratulations to Parson’s Illustration’s Ben Katchor and Gabriella D’Alessandro for being featured in The New York Times Weekend Arts Gift Guide.

In the November 25th issue of The New York Times, class of 2010’s Gabriella D’Alessandro created the cover art for the two Weekend Arts sections and Illustration program director Ben Katchor’s “Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay”, published by Drawn and Quarterly, is one of the recommended books in the Weekend Arts Gift Guide.

Two talks by Warren Bernard

1. Training The Armed Forces: The Work of Lt.  Robert Osborn and Sgt. Will Eisner

Some of the first large scale institutional training utilizing comics was by the Army and Navy in WW2. Lt Robert Osborn for the Navy and Sgt. Will Eisner for the Army created materials used to teach pilots, mechanics and front line troops how to properly use and care for their equipment. Both of them used their work on training materials during the war to refine their craft that was integrated into their post-war work.

2.  Before Pearl Harbor: Cartoons and Comics Respond to The War In Europe

This lecture focuses on how cartoons and comics reacted to global events during the run-up up to the opening of World War Two, as well as the two years of the war that the United States was a neutral power, prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.  We will look at the movement  of the response to these events from the world of political cartoon on the editorial page to the pop culture worlds of comic books and comic strips, by looking at works by Milton Caniff, Milt Gross, Peter Arno, William Gropper, Herblock, Alex Raymond, Joe Shuster, Alex Schomberg, Winsor McCay, David Low, Jack Kirby and many others.

Warren Bernard is a comics historian as well as the Executive Director of Small Press Expo. Warren has written for The Comics Journal on the influential cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, as well as an extensive article with newly uncovered information about the Senate Comic Book Hearings. Last year Warren co-curated, with Bill Kartalopoulos, the successful and critically well-received retrospective on Alt-Weekly Comics at the Society of Illustrators. He has contributed research and images from his own extensive collection to over a dozen books on comics history. Warren has lectured on comics history at the The Center for Cartoon Studies and the Library of Congress, where as a long-time volunteer, he has cataloged over 1300 political cartoons. He recently released his first solo book, Cartoons for Victory from Fantagraphics, which is the story of the home front in the United States during World War II as told through comics and cartoons. His first book, Drawing Power, the story of cartoonists work in the advertising field, was co-written with Rick Marschall and nominated for an Eisner Award.

The 171st meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposiumwill be held on Tuesday, November 29, 2016 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.

Angela Stempel on Picturing Worlds: abstraction, rhythm and “reality” in animated spaces.

In this presentation, Angela will present her works of experimental animation that explore abstract shapes, the dissolution of the physical form and of photographic certainty in narrative and non-narrative pieces. She’ll discuss her influences, contemporary work and how she deals with the representation of time and energy.

Angela Stempel is an animator, illustrator and director from Caracas, Venezuela. She’s been living and working in the US since 2006, when she attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her personal work has screened at the Ottawa International Animation Festival (Canada), at the International Film Festival of Cartagena (Colombia), and in various other festivals around the world. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Experimental Animation at CalArts.

The 170th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, November 15, 2016 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby).

Free and open to the public.

The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium Presents:

David Kunzle on Chesucristo. The fusion in word and image of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ: the poetry.

Amid the manifold means by which this fusion was made, in narratives of the life of Ernesto Che Guevara, in word and in image, the poetry stands out, likening Che to Jesus in various moments of Jesus’ life and especially death. In the substance and words of various actions recorded in the Gospels parallels are drawn to Che’s sacrificiality; to his embodiment of the creative forces of a “divine”nature; to his omnipresence post-mortem, even his (spiritual) omnipotence. Extracts from the poetry are intoned simultaneously with projection of some of the infinite variations made of the famous, so often christified visage of Che.  Based on Kunzle’s recent book , Chesucristo, The Fusion in Word and Image of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ.

David Kunzle was born Birmingham England in 1936 and educated at universities of Cambridge and London (PhD 1964, in art history). British Universities Combined Events Olympic Gymnastics champion 1961 and 1962. This taught him to hang on, a life-lesson.  Member of British Universities Gymnastics team at first International Student Gymnastics championship, Moscow 1959.Official Lecturer National Gallery, London 1962-64. University of Toronto 1964-65,  University of California, Santa Barbara 1965-73 (fired). AFT-supported lawsuit  against UC Regents, alleging wrongful dismissal for protesting Viet Nam war, drags on 1973-77 until rehiring at UCLA 1977.
The Viet Nam war inspires beginning of poster collection from 1965.  Organized first exhibition of US posters of Protest in Italy 1968, in US 1971 (UCSB, then New School, New York), subsequently travelled UK, Italy and France and Cuba (1973). Sporadic vandalism and theft enhanced his motivation to give entire collection to the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. Professed History of Art at UCLA from 1977 until retirement 2010 at rank of Distinguished Professor Emeritus.Kunzle has written about 135 articles and 12 books in realms (mostly) of popular, public and revolutionary (anti-imperialist) art, including several books on the History of Comic Strip, large and small; Fashion and Fetishism (Chinese ed. pending); From Criminal to Courtier, the Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550-1672;  Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua 1979-90); Che Guevara, Icon Myth and Message (1997). Recent books are on the Father of the Comic Strip, Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846, two vols), Gustave Doré, Twelve Comic Strips, and the large well-illustrated Chesucristo: the Fusion in Word and Image of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ (De Gruyter 2016). A book on the graphic novelettes on Cham is with the publisher, and he is working on the Birth of Modern English Comic Strip 1847-1870.

The 166th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, University Center, 63 Fifth Ave., room L105 (lower level). Free and open to the public.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS HAPPENING ON A TUESDAY EVENING at 63 Fifth Ave!