To Top
Last weekend I was invited to talk on the process behind my 50+ page collaboration with the late, great Harvey Pekar on Yiddishkeit, a comics anthology that collects and celebrates the forgotten gems of Yiddish culture, published by Abrams Comics Arts in September (from which the above pages is taken). Many thanks to Paul Buhle for organizing the event, and for fostering my involvement in the project from the outset! Paul is a one-man non-fiction comics powerhouse, responsible for other comics histories covering topics as diverse as the history of the SDS, The Beats, Studs Terkel’s Working and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire. I had no idea about the historical connection between Yiddish and marxism in the early twentieth century – Paul’s reasons for initially studying the language and its literature in the first place was to gain access to the wealth of material on working class movements in the US, which were predominantly written in yiddish. If such things pique your curiosity, then I recommend “the unrepentant marxist” blog, which features one of the most insightful reviews of Yiddishkeit out there.
If you scroll down to the “news” section of this site, you can watch a very brief video (you’ll need to pause it, as each slide only pings up for a few seconds in the “convert to movie” mode of powerpoint) that’ll give you a visual journey of the process I went through in turning Harvey’s script into print-ready comics pages. Plus some other Kickstarter-based drives to honour the beloved everyman of comics. Here are just a few of Harvey’s handwritten script pages, so you can see what I started with. I especially love the “jewish man” and “horse” labels on the last page.
[GALLERY=30]
That’s right, my comics interviews with various partipants in Occupy Oakland is now live at Yes! Magazine. Check out their slideshow here, or enjoy the fully interactive version here.
That not enough for you? Then you’ll want to peruse the latest pencilled pages from my current hush-hush project, now uploaded to the “Extras” section. Don’t know the password? For that you’ll have to subscribe to my newsletter. Them’s the breaks.
Ok, so it’s been a while since my last update – I can happily report it’s because I’ve been juggling deadlines for the past few weeks. That, and being at San Franciso’s Alternative Press Expo and starting a new semester back at Stanford teaching the graphic novel project. For your aural delight here is the recording from the panel I moderated at APE on “Exploring Comics Journalism”. Thanks to Matt Bors, Susie Cagle and Jen Sorensen for their contributions.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/25001907″]
As ever, the fruits of my recent labours will be posted soon, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for now. What better opportunity could you want for perusing the archived non-fiction comics waiting for you behind the tabs at the top of the screen? Hover over them and then choose a comic to read from the drop-down menu.
In the meantime, above are some panels from my current project in progress on Alcatraz – check out the Alcatraz page for more details and the story behind them.
After a week or two off (imagine that!), allow me to showcase some of the incredible talents from the two classes I taught directly after my knight fellowship ended. For more on the classes, click here to read my previous post. The first featured creators aged 14-17 from Stanford’s EPGY program, which ran for 3 weeks, during which time I crammed as much graphic novel know-how into their porous brains as I could. Like any of the workshops I teach, we covered the creative process (writing, thumbnailing, pencilling, inking, scanning, photoshop, indesign) with the invaluable addition of also critically analysing some stand-out examples of the form. This being me I put a heavy slant on non-fiction visual storytelling, meaning we covered Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Photographer by Guibert/Lefevre, Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, Wordless woodcuts from Franz Masereel, Lynd Ward and Giacomo Patri, as well as Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Douglas Wolk’s How to Read Graphic Novels.
For more samples of the students’ final artwork, scroll down.
More news below the fold, and if you like what you see then support Archcomix by ordering a hardcopy today!
As I’m currently working on my Knight project these days, I thought I’d point you towards some of my earlier work you may not have seen – a piece that ran in Bash Magazine a few years back. Go here to read the whole comic, hidden as it is under the US Politics tab at the top of the page. Remember to RT/share it around it if you liked it, or -even better!- head to the Archcomix store to order your hard copy. ($5 plus shipping/P&P). More news after the jump.
Thanks to all of those who came to see Olga and I speak at Stanford’s d.school on Thursday evening. About 40 people showed up to hear about how the project came together and discuss the challenges and obstacles creatives face in using their work to instigate social change. Journalist Cynthia Haven did a great piece about the event for Stanford, which you can read here. You’ll also notice that our fundraising tally is up – we’re at 76%, with less than 24 hours to go! Please RT and share the link to our Kickstarter page on digg, facebook, wherever – if you didn’t already know, Kickstarter will return all funds collected so far if we don’t make it to our $8000 goal by this time tomorrow.
Last week was also my first full week of classes at Stanford, which was simultaneously challenging, exhausting, exhilarating and fascinating. Running around to find my classrooms/lecture halls on the first day was surreal, but a week later I consider myself a veteran, though I’m still wrestling with some of the e-classroom/syllabi that we’re expected to attend or sign up for online. I consider it slightly ironic that my data visualization assignment took me almost as long to post to the course wiki as it did to complete. Teething troubles aside, I’ve really enjoyed throwing myself into new projects and classes that are clearly outside of my comfort zone: Human-Computer Interaction; Data Visualization; Beginner’s German; and Multimedia Production are my main courses this semester. Needless to say, good ol’ introduction to cognitive neuroscience didn’t even get a look in past week one – too many lectures to get to as it is! The project’s also coming along well, especially with the news that the Knight News Challenge is definitely on this year, so expect more about that in the next few weeks as I put my application together.
Part 2 of another comic from the upcoming human trafficking comic, Borderland. Featuring 7 true stories told by human trafficking victims in comics format. Now at 1/3 of our goal! Please order your comic via Kickstarter here – $5 for a digital version, $10 for a hard copy, as well as more luxurious options like signed posters, behind the scenes views of the project’s artwork, and the chance to sponsor a copy for a Ukrainian school or NGO. More news on yesterday’s SF Zine fest journalism panel below.
First panels from one of the stories featured in my upcoming Borderland comic – featuring 7 true stories told by human trafficking victims. I’ll be posting the next panels over the next week, but please order your own copy of the comic through our Kickstarter page to help us raise money towards printing and distribution costs. You can also help us out by sharing the link on FB, Twitter, Digg etc – thanks for your support!
This brings my wordless comic on the economic meltdown to a close, but feel free to click here to read it from the start, tier by tier.
News below the fold, so scroll down. Today’s bulletins: the Iraq withdrawal and a report back on a talk at IDEO Palo Alto on the future of news and storytelling, given by Neal Baer, executive producer of ER and Law and Order, Special Victims Unit.
Please support my human trafficking comic on the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter.com if you haven’t already! Here’s the link to the pledge page, currently at 21% of our goal. Also checkout my new sketchbook uploads to Flickr (right hand sidebar).
