SevenDaysVT featured a story about Resist! and my contribution, a comic about Miriam, a Syrian archaeologist I worked with in Homs in 2002.
I ordered a box of 50 copies of Resist! that I'll distribute around Burlington, starting with Phoenix Books. If you're in town and would like a free copy--and you're quick--you will be able to find them there in the next few days. Or order on line (for $10) while supplies last!
The last few days I've taken a break from digitally editing my Greek Diary to make the watercolors of Egyptian and Minoan patterns. Working out the patterns on graph paper and painting in watercolor are a vacation in themselves. Happy holidays to all!
The comic below will be part of Resist!
RESIST! will be published as a special issue of Gabe Fowler's tabloid newspaper, Smoke Signal. 30,000 copies will be distributed for free on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, in Washington D.C. Further distribution will occur at the Women's March on January 21st and throughout the United States.
It is guest-edited by Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, and writer Nadja Spiegelman.
I plan to write more about my time in Syria in the future.
I've just created a Patreon account in order to post my Greek Diary project! Every week I will post pages from diary comics I kept in Greece: part about working as illustrator on an excavation, part about traveling to islands with my family. I will post pages I drew while traveling and continue to create new pages that add context and memories of my first and many subsequent trips to Greece over nearly 20 years, especially Santorini, the site of the beginning of the romance with John 13 years ago. This book is currently around 160 pages. I plan to add to this number over the next months.
This project feeds Alle Ego, another book (in progress) about friendship and romance on my first trip to Greece as a grad student.
I’m excited to be illustrating the latest book by Eric Cline, best selling author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), Princeton, NJ. For Three Stones (also to be published by Princeton) I’ve drawn many sites I’ve visited (Troy, Mycenae, Delphi, Saqqara, Palmyra, Masada, Qumran, Megiddo, Pompeii, Rome) and some I haven’t (Tikal, Machu Picchu, Mesa Verde)–it feels like I’ve been revisiting them all in pen and ink. Eric’s book is a lively and engaging overview of the archaeology of these places, enhanced by his depth of experience in excavating and teaching. I cannot wait to see this book!
This drawing is based on Van Gogh’s Church at Auvers, L’Arlesienne, and Portrait of Camile Roulin and will be part of the exhibit Comics vs. Art! at Wildgoose Creative in Columbus, Ohio starting October 8th as part of the CXC Festival. I’m sorry to miss CXC in October and this show of over 60 artists’ comics based on a particular work of art. If you are anywhere near it, please go see it!
Among the many excellent comics nominated for the Ignatz Award at the annual Small Press Expo is one of mine, on the great MuthaMagazine.com.
I am very pleased to co-edit the next issue of the Strumpet with my friend and Strumpet founder Ellen Lindner.
The theme for this issue is Origin Stories. Where did you come from? How did the stuff you love or hate begin? Answer the question – how did we get here (particularly relevant in this year of massive political change)? Renaissances and re-inventions of all kind are also welcome, and we encourage you to look all around the globe, as well deep into your own history, for your fictional and non-fictional tales. Surprise us!
We have instituted a suggested page count of 1-3 pages for newbies, 1-6 pages for folks we’ve published in the past. Want more? Please shoot The Strumpet an email at strumpetcomic at gmail dot com and pitch us your idea. We are also happy to look at scripts or roughs and give editorial tips.
Deadline:
March 1st, 2017. No exceptions! (Seriously, anyone who’s been in The Strumpet before can tell you – we are reasonable, though strict, about enforcing the deadline.)
For more information and details, head over to Strumpet HQ.
It’s the time of year (June) when my heart turns to thought of drawing pottery on the Kenchreai Excavations in Greece. I’ll be there for two weeks of illustration work on the project and then two and a half weeks of travel to Islands with my family.
Καλή διασκέδαση!
Read all about the game John Franklin and I are developing on Eidolon.
I am honored to be among five winners of the Society of Illustrators/MoCCA festival award. My submission was my book in progress Alle Ego. Summer Pierre (cartoonist, friend, and table mate) captured the moment with members of the Jury. Read more about the festival and award on the Comics Beat. I’ll have work in a show in May at the Society of Illustrators in NY.
Here’s the medal in its new home on my studio shelf.
Two up coming events Burlington in March:
New City Gallerie on March 19 A night of comics reading at New City Galerie, featuring a diverse and wonderful roster of Burlington women comic artists:
Rachel Lindsay
Glynnis Fawkes
Iona Fox
Stephanie Zuppo
Anna McGlynn
Julianna Brazill
Susan Norton
Phoenix Books on March 24th a panel discussion on graphic memoir with Jennifer Hayden and James Kochalka.
New on the website MARSAM (founded by residents at La Maison des auteurs) is my comic The Three Apples, a tale from the Arabian Nights. It looks even better in French, with many thanks to Mosk Mimo for both the font and the translation. I drew this comic for the Graphic Canon, forthcoming in the Spring of 2017. See full 8 pages on Marsam, both in French and English. Sorry no Arabic (yet)!
My husband John Franklin’s book, Kinyras the Divine Lyre for which I drew about 50 illustrations, 2 maps, and designed the cover, was published in 2016 by the Center for Helenic Studies Press. This book was 10 years in the making and is as thick as a brick.
Congrats to John!
The wonderful and patient cartoonists at CCS listened to my life story for several hours in November.
Photo by Alain Francois in my studio at La Maison des Auteurs in Angouleme. I am working on a book about relationships in art school and my first trips to Greece and Israel. I love this place.
I have a short comic in the anthology about Helen of Vermont.
Dirty Diamonds, an all-girl comic anthology, features the “semi-autobiographical” work of female comic creators from around the world, focusing on a single theme for each issue. For this, our sixth issue, we, the editors, released an open call, seeking comics related to the theme of BEAUTY.
The final product will be a perfect-bound, 8.5″ x 11″, 200 page book featuring a brilliant, gorgeous special guest cover by Carolyn Nowak.
Read at Seven Days Online: http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/local-artists-depict-their-lives-through-comic-art/Content?oid=2641974
Somewhere at the intersection of memoir, fine art and illustration sits “Graphic Lives,” a four-artist installation that opens this week at Burlington’s New City Galerie. In using the medium of illustration to represent events and ideas from the artists’ lives, the show calls into question the standard definitions of “memoir” and “comics.”
Vermont artists Glynnis Fawkes and Alex Costantino are joined in the show by New York illustrator Summer Pierre and New Jersey cartoonist Jennifer Hayden. Even though — or perhaps because — all the artists’ styles are distinctive, the artworks in “Graphic Lives” combine to suggest possibilities not traditionally associated with comic art, or with the memoir genre.
Fawkes’ willowy illustrations draw on her experiences in art school, as well as on the classical myths she has studied and taught. Pierre specializes in single-page comics about complex subjects and people, including herself. Hayden uses pointy-nosed characters (which evoke those of Vermont Cartoonist Laureate Ed Koren) to tell the story of her battle with breast cancer. Costantino’s is the most unconventional work, combining not only comics and memoir but also ceramics. He makes jars and pots etched with scenes that unfold in frames akin to the panels of a comic.
“These are lives, expressed using these unique forms,” says Joseph Pensak, the show’s cocurator and director of New City Galerie. “They’re stories, and each life is a collection of stories. Sometimes those stories are scattered and not fully formed; some are so clear that they can be depicted in six panels.”
The combination of comics and autobiography is a more and more common — and savvy — union. Recent graphic memoirs such as Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? and David Small’s Stitches: A Memoirhave appeared regularly on best-seller and end-of-year lists, as Alison Bechdel‘s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic did before them. A January Publishers Weekly article on genre sales trends from 2013 to 2014 lists the second-biggest climber in nonfiction as biography/autobiography/memoir (up 12 percent); meanwhile, graphic novels made the biggest sales jump in the fiction category, with an increase of 15 percent.
For Fawkes, it was natural to use cartoons to depict events from her own life. “My memories are as visual as they are verbal,” she says. “I could just write the story — Once upon a time, I did this — but I can’t help but think of events that happened as very brightly visual, so that’s the way I want to capture them.”
Fawkes and Colchester artist Elise Whittemore came up with the idea for the show; both are, with Pensak, its cocurators. Fawkes knows Hayden and Pierre from comics expos; Whittemore, a friend of Fawkes and an admirer of her work, brought Costantino’s work into the show. “Seeing how comic artists create stories with text, visuals and design really intrigues me,” says Whittemore. “I admire this form that pulls all these things together.”
Pensak’s approach to the show’s subject matter is to treat it as a kind of folk art that is both accessible and profound. “Graphic Lives,” he says, offers “points of entry for anyone to discover the artists, and to dive in deeper.”
The artworks in the exhibit have no shortage of either of these qualities, which may be their appeal. Hayden’s panels, for instance, bring to mind familiar newspaper comics of previous decades but address the subject of life-threatening illness. Fawkes’ work is lissome and instantly engaging, yet its pictorial grace is countered and enriched by its multifaceted story about an artist finding her creative identity.
Pensak returns to the idea embodied by the show’s title. Though no artist can depict every single event or thought in his or her life, he says, “through a very specific story, [they] capture a life. It’s not a whole life, but it’s nothing less than a life.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “What’s So Funny? Artists Depict Their Lives Through Comic Art”
‘Graphic Lives’ @ New City Galerie
Sketches, paintings, books and sculptures that examine the act of writing and drawing a life by comic memoirists Glynnis Fawkes, Alex Costantino, Summer Pierre and…
Through July 28
This July and August I will be in residence at La Maison des Auteurs at
in Angoulême, France. Here is what it is all about:
La maison des auteurs opened its doors in July 2002 in order to provide positive support to cartoonists and animators working in Angoulême or who wish to spend time here as creators in residence.
La maison des auteurs has been established with the following purposes in mind:
> we offer a working environment that encourages creativity, host authors with a view to completing a professional project,
> we act as a showcase for creative achievements in the fields of comics, animated films and multimedia, through exhibitions and events,
> we provide a center for technical and documentary resources,
> we host professional development workshops and exchanges,
> we help to protect the author’s status and to defend intellectual property rights in the field of artistic creation.
Since its inauguration, la maison des auteurs has hosted more than 200 creators, whether new talent or seasoned authors, coming from France and abroad: Nicolas de Crécy, Aude Samama, Jimmy Beaulieu from Quebec, the Americans Jessica Abel, Matt Madden, Richard McGuire, Ted Stearn and the Russian Nikolaï Maslov.
