The 111th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 at 8 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note 8 pm starting time.

Peter Maresca on Artists and Anarchy, Origins of the Sunday Comics – 1895 to 1915
Discover the first 20 years of comics, a time when there were no set styles or formats for the medium, when artistic anarchy helped spawn a completely new type of entertainment that would influence popular culture for a century to come. Here is a long-overdue examination of the origins of the American Sunday Comic Strip, the art form that gave birth to modern comics. View rare examples of the seminal work of Outcault, Dirks, Swinnerton, McCay, Herriman, and dozens more known and unknown “Founders of the Funnies.”

Peter Maresca  is a lifelong collector of comic strips and owner of Sunday Press. He was a pioneer in digital entertainment when working for Apple and Macromedia in the 1980s and 90s. In 2003, frustrated by forcing comics onto small, monochromatic cell phone screens, he set out to create, on paper, full broadsheet-sized Sunday comics. His proposals were turned down by major publishers and thus he became an “accidental publisher,”  producing his own reprint collections.  The first was the original-size comic strip volume, Little Nemo in Slumberland, So Many Splendid Sundays, and Sunday Press was born. Nine books and 12 Will Eisner Award nominations later, Sunday Press has assembled the first full-size review of the earliest newspaper comics in Society is Nix, Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip.

The 110th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 2, 2014 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. Please note 7 pm starting time.

Marguerite Van Cook will read from and discuss her original graphic auto/biography The Late Child and Other Animals, accompanied by a slide show of images from the book. The book is written and colored by Van Cook and adapted to the comics form and drawn by artist James Romberger.

A decade after Hetty Martin survives the bombing of Portsmouth by the Nazis in World War II, she gives birth to a child out of wedlock, Marguerite. Now Hetty must go before a tribunal to prove that she is a fit mother. From there, The Late Child and Other Animals tells the story of Marguerite’s childhood in the recovering British naval port and the rural beauty of the Isle of Wight and in Normandy, France. The journeys and struggles over decades of this mother and daughter are linked in five episodes that veer between lyricism, wry wit, and harrowing suspense.

“The hallmarks of this remarkable writer-artist team are intensified in this loose, often lovely, personal coming-of-age narrative, haunted by a dark undercurrent, that focuses on Van Cook and her mother.” – Hillary Chute, author of Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists

“Everything feels so very alive in these pages, words and colors and line!” – Mary Ann Caws, author of The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter.

“Reading The Late Child and Other Animals, one experiences how poetic the graphic novel form can be, how memories rendered through sharp lines, soft watercolors, and penetrating narrative prose can immerse you in worlds far, far away.” – Tahneer Oksman, author of Mourning the Family Album

Marguerite Van Cook came to New York her punk with band The Innocents, after touring the UK with The Clash. She stayed and opened the seminal installation gallery Ground Zero with her partner James Romberger. Her own works as an artist and filmmaker have placed her in many museum collections.

Her current generational graphic memoir The Late Child and Other Animals with James Romberger (Fantagraphics) has been translated and published in France under the title L’Enfant inattendue. Her color work on the graphic memoir 7 Miles a Second, a collaborative project with James Romberger and the late David Wojnarowicz garnered her a nomination for an 2014 Eisner award for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist.

Website: http://margueritevancook.com/

James Romberger’s ecological comic Post York was published in 2012 by Uncivilized Books; it includes a flexi-disc by his son Crosby and it was nominated for an 2013 Eisner award for Best Single Issue. Romberger collaborated with Marguerite Van Cook and the late writer, artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz on the critically acclaimed graphic novel 7 Miles A Second, which was first published in 1996 by DC/Vertigo and then released in a revised, expanded edition in February 2013 by Fantagraphics Books.

Website: http://jamesromberger.com/

Check out the pop-up gallery show featuring projects from this semester’s Beyond the Page class, run by Noël Claro. Along with student work, they will be displaying the results of the collaborative project they did with Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Universidad Iberoamericana.

The Crybaby Collective, an online store that was formed by a group of BFA Illustration alumni, was recently featured on the Tictail blog! Learn more about the group of artists and the Collective here.

Alumni within the Collective include:

Sarah Bibel, Vincy Cheung, Ayline De Wilde, Hannah Drossman, Caelina Eldred-Thielen, Sylvia Jun, Aleen Montchal, Jieshan Ng, Josie Stevenson, Steph Tan, Grace Wagner, Pinky Weber, and Justin Yoon.

Hailing from Newcastle Australia, Anna has been living and studying in New York for the past three years. Anna’s work is inspired by childhood nostalgia and the appreciation for all things weird and wonderful. Her work is often autobiographical, and she likes to utilise visual story telling as means to process experiences, and understand the world around her.  She is currently part of Meagan Cignoli’s creative team, where she makes short form stop motion animations for a bunch of different brands. In her spare time Anna enjoys spending time with my wiener dog Alfonso, watching B grade reality TV shows and eating grilled cheese.

Visit her website at annaoutridge.com and her instagram @annaout !

Illustration Faculty Member Steven Guarnaccia will be exhibiting his work in Line-Up at the Tricromia Art Gallery in Rome. Learn more about his exhibition below!

About the Exhibition: Line-Up is a retrospective exhibition of the illustration work of Steven Guarnaccia. The “line-up” is the classic parade of possible perpetrators before the victim of a crime. Guarnaccia works primarily in line, with pen, ink and watercolor. He is above all interested in how, with a minimum of means, line conveys character, and in turn how character conveys an idea.

Learn more about Steven’s work here.

The 108th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, November 18, 2014 at 8 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note 8 pm starting time.

Hanneriina Moisseinen will discuss and show her recent work. A trailer for the documentary Laulu: http://www.tuffifilms.com/documentary

The comic artist Hanneriina Moisseinen (born in Joensuu, Finland in 1978) has an artistic background in fine arts, especially drawing, sculpting and installation, but she has been doing comics since her teenage years.
Moisseinen’s debut album Sen synty (2005) is a collection of illustrated old folktales from the Viena Karelia area. The follow-up, Setit ja partituurit / Sets and Scores (2010), contains more contemporary stories about embarrassing situations in daily life. Isä / Father (2013) tells a real life story how a father of a family disappears with no reason, and is never found again. The themes in her stories are serious, but many times the humor bursts out in unexpected ways.
In the recent years, Moisseinen has been challenging the limits of comic expression by including sewing and embroidery in her work. The technique is slow but produces a strong emotional effect. At the moment she is working on her fourth comic album about cows and other animals in the Second World War.

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