Parsons Illustration faculty Steven Guarnaccia is having a show in Bologna at Hamelin, Via Zamboni 15, opening on April 1. The show deals with parenthood and sonhood, immigration and rootedness, and male rights of passage. The work was conceived during his sabbatical.
The 119th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 31, 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.
Two presentations:
1. Rick DesRochers on The Family Act Goes to School – The Marx Brothers, Vaudeville, and Americanization.
The link between the Marx Brothers in their vaudeville days and the popular comic strips of the early twentieth century can be seen with the Marx Brothers’ beginnings in the third-tier vaudeville circuit where they formed the core comedic trio of Chico, Harpo, and Groucho – their apocryphal names created in 1910 during a poker game after the comic strip character “Knocko the Monk.” The comic strip Knocko the Monk spawned a fad of nicknames ending in O, prompting vaudevillian Art Fisher to nickname Harpo for his harp playing skills; Groucho for his personality and his “grouch” bag that hung from his neck for safety; Chico for his penchant for “chasing the chickens” – the girls. By bookending the vaudeville performances of the Marx Brothers and their school act beginning in 1910 with Fun in Hi Skule to their highly successful 1932 film, Horse Feathers, this lecture will examine how the Marx Brothers commented on and satirized progressive education reforms through their multiple versions of the school act, and the immigrant experience of being Americanized through public school education reforms.
Rick DesRochers, Ph.d., is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Long Island University Post. He has served as the Literary Director of New Play and Musical Development for the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival and The Goodman Theatre of Chicago, as well as the Artistic Director of the New Theatre in Boston. He holds an M.F.A. in stage direction and dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a Ph.D. in theatre from the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He is the author of The New Humor in the Progressive Era – Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian for Palgrave Macmillan, and The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy – Larry David, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle for Bloomsbury.
2. Ian Lewis Gordon on The Boy Comic Strip: Towards an International History of Comics
Trying to write international histories of comics presents numerous problems including most obviously command of a range of languages. But beyond that what sort of organizing principles would best capture the interplay across countries and cultures. Should people try to write histories that trace artists and influences across national boundaries with attention to whom influenced whom and the extent of that influence and similar sorts of questions? Or perhaps focusing on genres of comics, like various incarnations of the mischievous boy in comics, might show more about similarities and differences across different comics traditions.
In this discussion I will examine a range of “mischievous boy” comics to talk about some of the possibilities of using genres to create international histories of comics. How can we use this cavalcade of kid strips to talk about the history of comics? I think these strips show the similarities and differences across cultures. For instance the mischievous boy is not something that is particular to a given culture. But what these strips tells us is that this plays out in different ways. Some of this is cultural difference writ large and some of it is cultural difference writ small. I will look at comics from America, Australia, the UK and France to suggest a direction for research.
Ian Gordon is an Associate Professor in History at the National University of Singapore. For the academic year 2014-2015 he is a visiting scholar at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He is the author of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, and editor of two collections Comics & Ideology, and Film and Comic Books.
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 Parsons Festival Exhibition is designed to showcase talent from across Parsons. If you’re in a bachelor’s or associate’s degree program and set to graduate this spring, show us what you’ve got!
View from last years all-Parsons show, “Making Meaning”
About you: You’re graduating. You’ve spent the last few years developing an expertise, a way of thinking, a way of designing that builds on your studies but is unique to you. You’ve put that perspective into your work. And you’d like it to be seen within the broader Parsons context. And you’d like it to be seen in one of Parsons’ signature campus locations during graduation.
About the show: Combining works from across all of Parsons’ undergraduate and associate’s degree programs, this exhibition will take place in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, including the Kellen and Aronson galleries, hallway, and lobby. It will be on view as a highlight of this year’s Parsons Festival from May 7 through May 22, 2015.
How to apply: Read below and fill out the entry form. It asks for things like your name and program, along with images, video, or links that’ll give an idea of your work. It’s pretty straightforward and makes sure you provide all the information that’s needed to review your submission.
Important dates and information:
Eligibility — Open to all graduating students in BFA, BBA, BS, and AAS programs
Deadline for submission — March 15, 2015, at midnight
Notification — April 8, 2015
Delivery of work — April 20–23, 2015 (You must be able to turn in your work by April 23.)
Exhibition on view — May 7–22, 2015
Submission form – festival.parsons.edu/2015
For questions about the exhibition, contact parsonsfestival@newschool.edu.
The 117th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 10, 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!
Kent Worcester on Ten Great Cartoonists You’ve Never Heard Of
In recent years there has been a flurry of scholarly interest in comics and cartooning, much of which has focused on a relatively small number of cartoonists. This illustrated talk will make the case for looking beyond the usual suspects and will highlight the “lost art” of ten highly talented creators who are not yet on the comics studies radar. Perhaps one or two of their names will be familiar to devoted fans of political cartooning, but very little has been written about any one of the following: M. Verne Breitmayer, Jesse Cohen, Pele deLappe, Phil Evans, Jimmy Friell, John Olday, Charles Peattie, Donald Rooum, Laura Slobe, and Ben Yomen. This presentation will also feature a “hidden bonus track” – cartoons by a famous nineteenth century writer who was also a capable illustrator.
Kent Worcester teaches political theory at Marymount Manhattan College. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of eight books, including A Comics Studies Reader (coedited with Jeet Heer, 2009) and The Superhero Reader (coedited with Charles Hatfield and Jeet Heer, 2013). His latest book is Peter Bagge: Conversations (2015). He regularly gives public talks on New York City and Comics on behalf of the New York Council for the Humanities’ Speakers in the Humanities series.
Daniel is a Colombian illustrator who gets a lot of satisfaction from making people uncomfortable. He tends to stay within the realm of queerness, sexualities, histories, and end up drawing a lot of bodies as a result, whether as lanky doodles or alcohol-soaked figures. He draws as often as he can on whatever he can find. His illustrations find their place on sticky notes, used pizza plates, and in the index pages of books on queer utopias.
Check out more of his work at danielmarinmedina.com or on Instagram @dannonmarinade.
You can also contact him via email at danielmarinmedina@gmail.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/
ANDThe 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.
