Cartoon College

Hey, so remember that documentary that I'm in, and that I did some illustration work for a little over a year ago? Well that documentary has now been released! It's available for streaming/VOD through iTunes, or you can pre-order the DVD through the website. It's a documentary full of awesome people, some of whom are pretty dear to my heart, and serves as a snapshot of a fairly important time in a bunch of our lives. It also features, like, 80 straight minutes of people talking about comics. WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE?

 

Also, in honour of this sucker coming out, I'm going to spend the next couple weeks posting the chapter illustrations I did for the film on my tumblr. The first one's already up, so go check it out!

First the Drought, Then the Rain

Hey all! Sorry for the lack of updates this past month or so. I'm gonna level with you, I've been starting to delve a lot deeper into my work as of late. This might mean a slight decrease in the regularity of some of my posting for a little while (though hopefully not quite to the recent extent). Please don't take this as a sign of neglect! I still love you, Internet! I just need to ride this wave of recent creativity to its natural end before I can return in full force. In the meanwhile, here are a couple of quick things I've been up to this past month!

The above is a photo from a few weeks back, when I had a chance to speak to a couple of classes of grade 7 and 8 students at King Edward Public School. They recently completed a unit on comics, and had invited me in to talk about the craft, and what it's like to work on comics all day everyday (in brief: it's pretty awesome). It doesn't take much in general to get me excited about talking about comics with any age group, but these students came off as particularly bright and eager and were a real pleasure to talk to. Big thank you to Miss Venn for inviting me, and creating this opportunity.

Then secondly, because I have trouble bringing myself to put up a blog post without some actual drawing in it, here's an excerpt of some recent work I've been doing for the upcoming documentary Cartoon College. It's a documentary about the comics school I went to, as well as about cartooning in general, and is full of some exceptionally awesome people (including Chris Ware, Lynda Barry and Art Spiegelman, to name drop a few).

I'm in it as well - likely acting like a generally silly dude, as is my wont. I'm fairly proud of some of the drawing I recently completed for it though, which is perhaps a thing of note. Anyway, more on all that as the film approaches completion and release, but keep checking here for updates as time goes on.

Cardboard Sketches

I've been busy with many things lately, and have had less time to blog than I'd like. And I've realized that there's a lot of drawing that I do that I often don't get around to putting online, and maybe should? So in place of anything of actual substance to report, here are some random doodles done on comic backing boards while at my "day job."

One more on my flickr. The sketches on the latter page here are mostly inspired by a book of paintings by artist Lucian Freud. His portraits are such an amazing mix of the beautiful and the grotesque, it really gets my juices flowing in interesting ways.

I wanted to point out as well a recent series of interviews that the Comics Journal podcast did with some Center for Cartoon Studies alumn. I've been mentioning CCS a lot over the past few blog posts, mainly because I've been putting up comics from that period, but also because going there was a fairly significant experience for me. And I feel like these interviews - particularly the parts with Melissa Mendes, who was in my class, and Joe Lambert, who was part of the community while I was around - paint a fairly accurate picture of what being there was like. So, you know, consider giving it a listen. And consider checking out Joe and Melissa's blogs as well, because both of them just happen to be ridiculously talented people.

Ophestios, 1890

And after a brief break, we're back again with another addition to the still-growing comics section (which I'm already starting to consider trimming down a little bit. We'll see, we'll see). I realize that all of the comics I've added so far have been on the slightly lengthier side. Well let me tell ya, this one is the worst of the bunch. Good thing it's also probably the one I'm most proud of.

"Ophestios" is the comic I produced at the end of my first year at the Center for Cartoon Studies. I had a lot on my mind at the time, principally some ambitious thoughts on "comics as literature" coupled with a mild obsession with the works and philosophy of Bertolt Brecht. Suddenly, I wanted to do a "period piece." And I wanted it to have substance to it, and I wanted it to feel like all that great, depressing Russian and German literature that I'd learned to love in undergrad, oh so long ago. This was the result.

This story was originally intended as the start of a much larger piece, which I eventually set aside, but I think it still functions fairly well on its own. The Comics Journal's Rob Clough had some very nice things to say about it upon its initial release, as did Rich Kreiner more recently. Reading the reviews now makes me almost regret having decided to put this project on hold. But oh well. I'm convinced that the project I'm working on right now, in place of this, is pretty swank too. And there's still quite a few ideas behind the world of "Ophestios" that I still like, so maybe I'll return to it someday.

In the meanwhile, there are hard copies of the book still available for purchase through I Know Joe Kimpel, or through me when I appear at conventions. I wasn't sure if I had much of a desire to pump out another print run once this current batch runs out though, so I thought maybe a second life online might be the best way to keep the piece alive. At the end of the day, it's a story that I still like quite a bit. And hey, maybe you will too. (Be warned though, the comic contains both adult language and situations. Potentially NSFW)

Old Comics, New Comics

I just made two new additions to the comics section of this here blog, both of which are comics slightly on the older side. To be honest, I actually came pretty close to deciding not to put them up at all. It's hard for me to not look at these particular pieces now and not have part of myself go, "Gawd! But it's so... so... UNREFINED!" (I mean honestly, the lettering alone! Egads!) However, in both these cases there was at least something to the stories that made me want to put them up rather than leave them to die a slow, slow death in the obscurity of my computer's hard-drive.

The first of them was a comic produced as part of an anthology assignment during my first year at CCS. Our anthology theme was "chance," and my initial idea for the comic was mostly born as an excuse to make a really bad pun. You can actually read a fairly flattering review of this comic on the 365 Zines a Year blog over here. Although maybe you'll want to read the actual comic first. I dunno, man. It's up to you.

The second is actually even older, and is the comic I was required to produce as part of my initial application to CCS. The comic needed to be a minimum of four pages, and needed to involve yourself, a robot, a snowman, and a piece of fruit. I remember a good friend of mine, not long after finishing this, telling me it was in her estimation the best comic I'd done up to that point. And another good friend, having read this comic before actually meeting me, later telling me that the comic had led her to assume that I was some kind of giant jerk. Heh, so you know. You guys be the judge!

CCS Awareness Week

Hey all, just wanted to make a quick shout out to the fact that this past week was CCS Awareness Week.

For those of you who maybe just recently stumbled onto this blog and aren't, perhaps, in the know, the Center for Cartoon Studies is a school focused entirely on the study and production of comics, and it's where I did my graduate studies for the past two years. I was, of course, making comics before going to CCS, and had I not gone there, there's still a chance that I might have continued to make them today. CCS is the place that got me militant about making comics though, the place that put my face to the wall and said, "Look! This is what comics are! This is what they're about, and this is what they demand of you!" And faced with said metaphorical wall, a young(ish) Josh, full of hopes and dreams, was forced to either embrace it or turn away. And so he embraced it. He embraced it, and he ingrained his ink-stained fingers into the coarse brick of it as hard as he could.

CCS also taught me about not being alone in this insane pursuit of this oddly specific artistic medium. There are others, just as dedicated, all pretty much universally amazing in their own unique ways, many of whom I can't now imagine not having in my life to some degree. CCS also gave me the tools to sustain all this, and to approach this art form with a far greater competency than what I'd possessed before. Essentially I'm trying to say that CCS was a pretty great place for me. And I've since graduated, and have started to move on towards that next big question mark on the horizon. And lord knows how that's gonna go. But I also know that I wouldn't be able to approach that horizon without nearly the same confidence I have now had it not been for CCS. So you know. Be aware.