Comics Art Tidbits

Robert Boyd

Here are a bunch of items and links have little in common except that they have to do with comics and art.

Call for Papers on the subject of Fine Art and Comics for a proposed panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 9-12 Jan. 2014, in Chicago. Are you a scholar who thinks about comics and art, sometimes at the same time? If so, whip up a paper proposal for the MLA. They want proposals by March 8. Among the recommended subjects--the Chicago connection (the Hairy Who, for example). (Above: Karl Wirsum, Screamin' J Hawkins is on my Mind.)

I wish I was going to Vancouver this spring because Art Spiegelman's exhibit, CO-MIX:A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, will be at the Vancouver Art Gallery through June 9. Well, I have to be satisfied with the catalog--which unfortunately won't be available until May 28th! (Above: Spiegelman's cover for Raw 7, 1985.)

"Six great but forgotten comics anthologies" by Chris Mautner (for his January 28 post in the Robot 6 blog on Comic Book Resources) was a listicle on some of less well-remembered art comics anthologies. The ones that all serious art comics fans know are Zap Comix, Arcade, Raw, and Weirdo, and most would also include Kramer's Ergot and Mome in there, and if you read French, you would have to include Lapin at the very least. Mautner lists a few that haven't made it into institutional memory, including a single issue I edited of an anthology called Mona. Mautner writes, "Here was Kitchen Sink’s swan song, one of the last great things published before the company gave up the ghost for the more financially solvent shores of candy bar sales. Mona promised great things, but sadly was only able to get one issue out of the door before Kitchen Sink shut down. But as sad as the unfulfilled promise is, at least there’s this great first issue to gaze fondly upon." Fourteen years later, that's very gratifying to read. (But the typo on the cover--above, image by Jaime Hernandez--still nags me.)

Microgrants for cartoonists: The Sequential Artists Workshop, a school for comics in Gainesville, Florida, is offering two $250 grants for cartoonists. Applications are due March 15. So what kind of work are they looking to support? As a school, they come out of the world of small press/art comics (the founders are Tom Hart and Leela Corman). And the previous two grant recipients were Jess Ruliffson and Julie Gfrörer. (The page above is from Black is the Color, the project that this microgrant is supporting for Julie Gfrörer.)

Did you ever wonder what happened the instant before A Bigger Splash by David Hockney? One of my favorite cartoonists, Jason, suggests one scenario.