Video Preview of Not Guilty?

On Donewaiting, Wes Flexner posted a video preview of last Friday's Not Guilty? exhibition by Martin Hugo. The video is above.

Dylan Taylor-Lehman wrote a UWeekly article on the same show.

Other News:

* Tatyana Kagamas on Gallery Girls.
* Dang Olsen made a Kickstarter to fund the printing of his comic Healers.
* New Left Media has a new video out covering the GOP's war on women's rights.
* Blessure Grave plays at Skylab Gallery tomorrow (9/4) night.

Aidan Koch's Artist Talk

Books I Read in the First Half of 2011

After the jump is a list of books I read in the first six months of 2011.

Edward Gorey at Harvard

September 1950 Registration Issue of the Harvard Advocate. It contains, among other things, two poems and one story by "Francis" Frank O'Hara. The cover illustration is by Edward Gorey. 

As part of my internship for the Department of  Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, I compiled a report of sorts on Edward Gorey's milieu during his studies at Harvard. The impetus for collecting this information was a bequest to the museum of a group of envelopes hand-drawn by Gorey and sent to his childhood friend Sylvia Sights, who was in Chicago while he was in Cambridge. A story by Julia Vodrey Hendrickson featuring the envelopes and an interview with AIC's Curator of Prints and Drawings Mark Pascale can be found here. A Flickr set of a few of the envelopes can be found here. After the jump is the piece I wrote about Gorey's time at Harvard.

Graphic Ladies Tumble

Women's Comics Anthology, a zine I edited with Anne Elizabeth Moore, was tumbled on Graphic Ladies, a site maintained by Erin Polgreen.

And it was retumbled on Comics Girl.

She's Got the Right Stuff

In the current issue of Bitch Magazine (#49, The Confidential Issue), Anne Elizabeth Moore, Esther Pearl Watson and I have an article entitled "Gender and Comics Potluck: A graphic survey of where women and trans people are - and aren't - in the comics industry." Said article has been included in the current show at Medialia Gallery in New York, NY.

The Medialia Gallery show is called She's Got the Right Stuff: Favorites from the Comics Medium, and is curated by Tara Nakashima Donahue. It's actually closing this coming Saturday, February 26th, so I encourage you to go peruse it in all haste, if geographically possible. 

Find photos of the exhibit after 'the jump.'

Bitch: Winter 2010 Issue

The Winter 2010 issue of Bitch Magazine is out and about. It has an article I assisted Anne Elizabeth Moore and Esther Pearl Watson with called, "Gender and Comics Potluck: A graphic survey of where women and trans people are - and aren't - in the comics industry." 

It's something of a companion piece to Women's Comics Anthology, a zine I co-edited with Moore earlier this year. Both pieces are part of a larger project interrogating the gender inequality in comics that Moore has been exploring with her Lady Drawers class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

You can find Bitch Magazine, like, anywhere. It's even in real life places like Barnes and Noble, but, really, you should just subscribe. 

Lynda Barry at SAIC

Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry, of Ernie Pook's Comeek and One! Hundred! Demons!, graced the stage of SAIC's Columbus building in Chicago, Illinois, on November 15th. She spoke and joked about her working process, her desire to reclaim art-making for everyone and her new book, Picture This. It was the one artist lecture I've attended that could properly be described as 'rollicking.'

Or download: MP3

Bitch Magazine Reviews Arty Party

Bitch Magazine.

Poem In September's Short North Gazette

The Short North Gazette recently published an excerpt of my poem, Recollections Of How I Smelled On I-90, which is really quite a long poem as I tend to smell like many things. It has some local interest as its content.

I'm fond of the Short North Gazette for reasons outside of their publishing my poem. I like the James Thurber coverage, I like the odd gag cartoons, the poetry, the magazine-length articles on Columbus history, and, most of all, I like the semi-recent addition of Jared Gardner to their stable of columnists. Gardner is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State and heads the pop-culture minor there. (He also writes for The Comics Journal.) He was not only my Personalized Study Program advisor but also the advisor for the independent study project that "Punk Zine" came out of. So I'm doubly happy to see my poem published across from his moving eulogy of Harvey Pekar, who I first saw IRL at The Mershon Auditorium during a discussion that Gardner moderated.

The Gazette is free and available seemingly anywhere in The Short North.

First Half of 2010 Reading List

Books I have read in the first six months of 2010 presented chronologically.

Comic of my Future.

As Sara says:

"A collaborative pair depicting a potential future joy ride with beastie sexual undertones. (James and I are destined to have our genitals rub up on a cute tiger in the not so distant future.) Hastily scripted by Jeremy Tinder and Lucy Knisley of Trubble Club as a fortune telling celebration for Free Comic Book day at Quimby's."

Knisley's is on the left and Tinder's is on the right. I look like a 35 year-old Daniel Clowes character in Tinder's.

BTW: Tinder is part of a show called "What's the Big Idea" with Columbus's John Malta in San Francisco at the Double Punch gallery in June. I would go to that if that is available to you geographically. The flyer for it is after "The Jump."

ARTY PARTY

Arty Party is out!

Arty Party is a collection of cartoon ha-has about contemporary artists like Lynda Benglis, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Jenny Holzer and Gordon Matta-Clark. Cornballs like William Wegman and Dale Chihuly are in the mix as well. Arty Party is 8.5 x 5.5 inches with a card stock cover and is completely hand drawn by the talented, farcical, slapstick Sara Drake. It also contains an essay I wrote on the art world, seriousness and class dispositions that ends with the line, "I'd rather a Jacques Tati than a Jacques David."

Arty Party started when Sara was having trouble writing one panel gags for her comics class. The easiest answer to this was, of course, to make fun of artists. I posted the initial three we made together here. We were tonally and visually inspired by The New Yorker cartoons but also by the over-the-top stupidity of Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix and Ivan Brunetti's Haw!. The material came directly from the History of Art 541 course taught by Kris Paulsen that I took last fall. The class was based on David Joselit's book American Art Since 1945.

This is a blogger who wrote about Sara and Arty Party.

This is Bad at Sports which blurbed Arty Party.

Order Arty Party online here.

Arty Party is available at the following stores:

Quimby's (Chicago, IL)
Boxcar Books (Bloomington, IN)
The Curiodrome (Bloomington, IN)
Mahan Gallery (Columbus, OH)
Used Kids Records (Columbus, OH)
Wexner Center for the Arts Store (Columbus, OH)
Wholly Craft (Columbus, OH)

Arty Party is also available in person from Sara and I for $3.00.

Women's Comics Anthology

                      Front and back cover wraparound by Sara Drake.

Women's Comics Anthology, a zine I co-edited as part of the Ladydrawers project I am helping Anne Elizabeth Moore with, is now available to download for free on 'the Internet.'

Women's Comics Anthology is a gendered content analysis of a random sample of comics anthologies. Some of the statistics derived from our study are deeply troubling and call for soul-searching introspection of behalf of comics editors, publishers and artists. For instance, women comics makers only accounted for 16% of total contributors to the anthologies we reviewed. Indeed, more women appeared as naked characters in the anthologies than as clothed creators contributing to them.  These facty-facts, propped up by anecdotal accounts in extensive interviews collected under the Ladydrawers project, paint the comics industry as systematically inequitable and largely divided among gender lines.

Women's Comics Anthology is also a comics anthology, largely drawn by women. Each statistic collected was illustrated by a different artist. Contributors include Ramsey Beyer, Candace Corbin, Chelsea Dirck, Sara Drake, Emil Emanta, Karla Hewitt-Blackie, Ingrid Olson, Leslie Perrine, Alma Vescovi and most of Moore's Ladydrawers class at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Download Women's Comics Anthology at Pressing Concern Books: here.

CSBYS MONTHLY APRIL 2010

This is a weird one. Pictures of semi-nude women in Japanese horror films, stories about beer and - nonsensically yet predictably - coverage of Toyota's cultural marketing, "Scion Rock Fest." I don't mean coverage as in critical dissection of spectacle or treatises on resisting commodification of our lifestyles, nope, just ambivalent "I get it and don't care" coverage. Somehow the "we're still not buying one of those stupid-looking cars" refrain doesn't content me. Why is the DIY monthly printing advertising for Toyota? You know, the company which deliberately hid known safety issues from government regulators? How "Punk 101" is it to get that corporate subsumption of our cultural interests is, like, maybe not a good idea?

Ray LaHood, US Secretary of Transportation, on Toyota:
"We now have proof that Toyota failed to live up to its legal obligations," LaHood said in a statement. "Worse yet, they knowingly hid a dangerous defect for months from U.S. officials and did not take action to protect millions of drivers and their families."

Also in the issue is a drawing by Ana Humanleather, comics by Sara Drake and Reda Ashour, and a Mexico/Cuba memoir/travelogue through politics by "Jim Ride." I contributed a version of my interview with Cat and Girl's Dorothy Gambrell. I was unpleasantly surprised by the cover's lead-in headline, "James Payne Interviews Another Crush." Five words that instantly discredit Gambrell's work and my interest in it before even getting to the interview. I understand the editorial mandate is "take piss out equally," however, I don't think female comics creators need yet another layer of sexism applied to discussion of their work. (AND HELLO, I JUST MADE A ZINE ON THIS VERY TOPIC). I don't have a crush on Dorothy Gambrell - I like her work. If I interviewed a man about his work would this "joke" even be considered? Uncouth, uncalled for, not funny/interesting, actually boring, stupid and unfortunate.

Xerox Candy Bar: "Beware The Ides Of March!" Issue

Xerox Candy Bar is a comics-centric contributor based magazine run by School of the Art Institute students and edited by Ingrid Olson and Sara Drake. This issue is themed on and published for "THE IDES OF MARCH." An Arty Party comic about Joseph Beuys that Sara and I collaborated on is included in the mix. Xerox Candy Bar also features Ingrid Olson, who made the Greco-Roman delight that is the cover, Orion Martin, Bill Cleveland, Beth Hetland, Ian McDuffie, Jeni Crone, Vanessa Hoff, Ryan Ingebritson, Mario Martinez, Sarah Smith, Lyra Hill, Anna Gorman, Ben Bertin, and many more.
Unfortunately, I did not scan in the mini-comics which also come with Xerox Candy Bar.

Check out Xerox Candy Bar's site here.

Xerox Candy Bar is named after a poem by Richard Brautigan:

Xerox Candy Bar

Richard Brautigan

Ah,
you're just a copy
of all the candy bars
I've ever eaten.

Dorothy Gambrell Interview

Dorothy Gambrell is the creator of the long running and overly educated webcomic titled "Cat and Girl" that successfully straddles the line between knock-knock joke and philosophical dialogue. Gambrell also produces humorous/sad infographics at Very Small Array, keeps an ongoing document of how she spends other people's money at Donation Derby, and made another strip (now dead) called "The New Adventures of Death." One of her bands, The Basement Apartments, has a song about Jacques Cousteau. The other is called Jenny and the Holzers. What follows below is a Gmail Chat/interview from February 23rd, 2010.

(A version of this interview is at LADYDRAWERS, the Anne Elizabeth Moore-helmed blog of everything not-a-dude in comics.)

Chicago Zine Fest & Comic Symposium of Chicago

My friends in Chicago are throwing two, count 'em, two, big time events celebrating print culture - The Comic Symposium of Chicago and The Chicago Zine Fest. The two events overlap as the symposium is on March 11th and 12th and the zine fest is on March 12th and 13th. The Comic Symposium of Chicago was organized by Sara Drake and Ingrid Olson and is happening at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Speakers include Sarah Becan, Jeffrey Brown, Christa Donner, Surabhi Ghosh, Beth Hetland, Nicole Hollander, Paul Hornschemeier, Joey Jacks, Lucy Knisley, Ian McDuffie, Bernie McGovern, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Anders Nilsen, Laura Park, John Porcellino, and Jeremy Tinder. The symposium is organized into four topic discussions - Professionalization, Identity, Comics & Art, and Independent Distribution and Publishing in Chicago. It happens from 4:30 to 7:00 on both days.

This Is A Comic Book Catalog

This is the catalog for a show I curated last year with Colleen Grennan for the Mahan Gallery.
Inside are examples of each artist's work, essays by Anne Elizabeth Moore, Dave Filipi, J.Caleb Mozzocco, and interviews with Phonzie Davis and Jane Lee.

Here is a review of the show at Every Day is Like Wednesday.
Here is an article about the show by Melissa Starker.
Here is a blurb about it on the Wexner Center Blog.
Here is a blurb about it on Bust.

Candy & Cigarettes / Snakepit Essay

This uploaded zine from Austin, Texas, "Candy and Cigarettes" was edited by Reynard Seifert and contains an essay I wrote a couple of years ago about Ben Snakepit's comics called "Snake Sense: Time in Snakepit." This essay was also published in a slightly different form in "Punk Zine" but for completionists' sake I wanted to link/blog it. Candy and Cigarettes also contains two comics/illustrations from John Malta as well as other comics and literature.

Here is an internet blurb/review from the zine's release party in 2008.