I'll be selling my comic wares at the Vancouver Comics and Arts Festival this weekend. Like you need an excuse to go to Vancouver, but this should be pretty rad.
Anyhow, I'll be at table M2 in the gym. Pacific Northwesterners, swing on by!
VanCAF2017
Saturday, May 20 and Sunday, May 21
10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Roundhouse Community Center
181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver BC
I'm pleased to announce that my cartoon, "Beyond the Safety Pin" will be included in the print version of Resist! magazine. This is a cartoon anthology edited by Gabe Fowler, Françoise Mouly and Nadja Spiegelman featuring work from women and LGBTQ artists in response to Trump’s election, and will be distributed free in DC on Innaguaration Day. You can learn more about it and see more cartoons by the other artists here, and read an interesting NY Mag article about the project here. Apparently I am not the only woman who feels a sick aversion to drawing Trump.
Beyond the Safety Pin
I'm still figuring out how to address our new political horrorshow in my cartoons, and figuring out how but more on that later. In the meantime, I figured I'd use my limited talent for portraiture to draw people who are genuinely inspiring:
Some more of my political cartoons (or more accurately, "politically inspired" cartoons?) are below. And if any readers would like some I'll Miss This Guy stickers [see above], please contact me and I'm happy to send some your way.
The Troubled Mind: Post 2016 Election Edition
Journaling IS a dumb word.
As an artist, I’ve been fascinated by the amount of material that has suddenly blossomed about the “creative process.” Not only is it impossible to open my email without a barrage of “7 tips for boosting your creativity”-esque clickbait, there are now journals to help you along, Tarot cards to spark ideas, collections of inspirational quotes, coloring books up the wazoo, and all sorts of stuff I’m probably forgetting.
And what always fascinates me is how little any of it helps when I sit down to actually work. The most they can offer me is solidarity; a “hey, it’s hard for all of us, isn’t it?” reassurance that’s handy to have in the back of your mind, but completely useless when trying to figure out what to draw and how to draw it. Perhaps for that reason I’ve always been more consoled by works like Isn’t It Romantic?–the brilliant 2011 David Rakoff essay where he describes in beautiful, agonizing detail the process of how a day devoted to writing will so easily go from “Pregnant with Potential” to “Freighted with Failure,”–than I am by encouraging posters.
This is not to say I think less of the people who find books or journals about creativity helpful. It’s easy to roll your eyes at titles like “Unleashing Your Inner Something-or-Other” (and I may gently mock them in my cartoons now and then) but if someone feels as though they finally have “permission” to draw or paint thanks to a book, or a think piece, or even a wine and paint class, only a churl would begrudge them for it. (Besides, the fact that adult coloring books are a thing now can only lead to more jobs for artists and illustrators, so I’m sure as hell not complaining.)
My Creative Process series adds to the pile of these guides, but without offering any useful advice whatsoever. The goal is just to show what it’s like for me, and, because I’m not particularly unique, what it might be like for other people. I finished it last spring but never got around to posting it, so Parts 1 - 6 are below:
Today my cartoon, The Worried Well* starts running on Go Comics (home of many of my other favorites Tom the Dancing Bug, B. Kliban and the two Richard Thompson classics, Cul de Sac and Richard’s Poor Almanac).
Astute readers may notice that the idea for my first cartoon, Oh Shut Up, originated from my You Can’t Put Art on a Pedestal show at the DC Art Center a few years back.
*The Worried Well is also the name of the bar I would like to open, if I were to ever receive some sort of windfall. (Mental health professionals use the term 'worried well' for patients who aren't mentally ill per se, but go see shrinks to feel less anxious about their lives.) The entire bar would be therapy themed. There would be portraits of famous shrinks on the wall, the bathroom would be wallpapered with New Yorker couch-gag cartoons, the drink menu would be divided into sections titled, Love and Work, the two main reasons people go see therapists). Coasters would have illustrations of various mental ailments. I’m even thinking there would even be a parapsychology room with Tarot cards and a palm reader, in case patrons decide to nix the whole clinical psychology thing and just give the fake science a go. Anyhow, you can see I’ve really thought this through. If any angel investors out there are interested, please drop me a line.
SPX is now over, but you can still buy some of the work I was hawking. Phew! It was overwhelming, humbling, and exhausting, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I also learned it's much easier to sell work from behind a table than it is to browse the work of other people in a comic-convention setting. Who knew?
Coming to the Small Press Expo this weekend? Swing by and say hello! My table is H7A:
Below, a small preview of the stuff I will be hawking. Books are all $5, the Museum Guide is $1 (and the postcards are free).
Who doesn't love to complain about the creative process? Definitely not creative people, I can tell you that much!
I may decide to do a cleaned up, non-sketchy version, but I like the spontaneity of this one for now.
Another semi-fatalist cartoon: