Doodles from a talk on The Best American Comics 2018 with Bill Kartalopoulos, Julia Gfrörer, Julian Glander @awfulland, Kevin Hooyman @hooyman, and Julia Jacquette at @strandbooks 10-3-2018.
Pulp Culture Comic Arts Festival and Symposium is tomorrow! Come see me (I’m a special guest) and a bunch of other cartoonists at the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont. I brought a ton of original art and I want to sell it all. https://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/pulp-culture
I read Black Is the Color via hoopla and… it’s about mermaids & sailors which is usually my thing but…
I didn’t like it. The conclusions felt a bit sudden and there wasn’t really anything surprising happening or new about Gfrorer’s take on mermaids and sailors. I don’t know I was kind of indifferent but I didn’t hate it. The art style is okay. nothing great or horrible just okay. You don’t really get a closer look at mermaids lives or sailors lives. You get nothing except what you know is going to happen there are a handful of tender moments which are interesting but nothing ever evolves from that so….a point for mermaids I guess 2/5
Listen to me talk comics with Zack and Mike– At one point, Zack explains what my comics do better than I ever have– They also ask if there are any contemporary horror comics I like; I can’t believe I drew a blank on my Horror Sister, the great Julia Gfrorer– No one gets down in the dirt like her.
The Sequential Artists Workshop invites you to come plumb the dark depths of your inspiration with a master of the art—Julia Gfrörer. Gfrörer’s comics are unmistakable, singular visions—narratives that ache with longing and despair, as poignant in their silences as in their actions.
Gfrörer captures the humanity in horror and the horror in humanity, whether she’s drawing stories about persecution in ancient Rome (“Palm Ash”), a dying sailor adrift in the ocean (“Black is the Color”), a supernaturally touched widow in a plague-ravaged city (“Laid Waste”) or an excruciating pornographic retelling of Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” (“In Pace Requiescat,” with Sean T. Collins). Reading her comics, alive with nervous energy, is like cracking bones to suck marrow.
March 5-9, 2018 at the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, FL
my girl is at the Sequential Arts Workshop in Florida this week, teaching comics and spreading the disease
