Shag (Josh Agle) is a painter who combines the aesthetics of Mid-Century Modern—solid fields of color, stylized animals, elongated human figures, cocktail décor—with his own gentle Surrealism. I especially like the riled-up bears in the blue Shag image that opens this week’s Club, and the idealized version of Andy Warhol’s 1960s Factory below, starring Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and John Cale. (Appropriately, Warhol is in the background, detached but observant.) Visit Shag’s website, and note how retro-cool the Palm Spring Shag Shop is!

 

Like last year, the 2021 San Diego Comic-Con is all online because of the pandemic. It began Wednesday night, but most of the programming—lots of panels on comics and pop culture—will be available this weekend for you to watch for free. Browse the program schedule here. I’ll be joining several, including the panels titled “Ducks All the Way Down: Metafiction in Comics” (Friday, 1-2pm), “Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda” (Saturday, 5-6pm), and the Comics Arts Conference’s “Eisner’s A Contract with God in Depth” (Sunday, 1-2pm), and the choices are so numerous that everyone will find an event that fits their interests. Join in the fun!

 

The first Wonder Woman story was published in All Star Comics #8 (which appeared on American newsstands in late October 1941), and various celebrations are already underway for the Amazon’s 80th birthday. San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum is featuring an exhibit called “The Legend of Wonder Woman,” and you can see several pictures of the show in this tweet from cartoonist Shaenon Garrity. DC Comics is also preparing to release twelve comic books and graphic novels for the anniversary, including a highly-anticipated origin story for the Amazons written by Kelly Sue DeConnick and drawn by Phil Jimenez.

 

Between 2014 and 2016, Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou posted film analysis videos on YouTube under the umbrella title Every Frame a Painting, and if you haven’t yet watched these videos, do it! They’re deep but entertaining essays about how editing, music, movement, and other formal elements function in a movie, and they focus on such accomplished directors as Chuck Jones, Bong Joon-ho, Lynne Ramsey, and Akira Kurosawa. Not all are appropriate for kids—such as the dissection of the shifting power dynamics in a scene from The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—but I can recommend for everyone Zhou’s celebration of Jackie Chan’s action comedy (and Zhou’s problems with Hollywood action staging).

 

From 2013 to 2016, Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020), writer Andrew Aydin, and cartoonist Nate Powell collaborated on March, a National Book Award-winning graphic novel in three volumes that chronicles Lewis’ involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Now the first volume of the sequel to March, titled Run, will be published in August, as illustrator Lauren Fury joins the creative team. In a recent interview with The Comics Journal, Powell describes the contents of Run as spanning “from just two days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 to the fallout from the contentious ousting of John Lewis as SNCC’s chairman in Spring 1966.” This week, The New Yorker site features a preview of pages from Run. Also, The Washington D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose is sponsoring a virtual talk with Aydin, Powell, and Fury on Tuesday, August 3 at 7pm: details here. And please check out the entirety of Powell’s TCJ interview; it’s a thoughtful, comprehensive discussion of his politically-engaged career.

 

Austin Kleon describes himself as “a writer who draws. I make art with words and books with pictures,” a practice which is at least comics-adjacent. Kleon’s website offers us ways to cultivate our own creativity, while finding deeper connections with the books we read (see above), the movies we watch, and the other media we consume. Check out, for instance, his yearly list of favorite books (in reverse order from 2020 to 2011) and the archives of his weekly newsletter—the newsletter goes back to 2013, and every week Kleon includes “new art, writing, and interesting links.” He also frequently updates his blog. This is the place to go if you’re looking for inspiration for that new project you’re working on.

 

 

This weekly blog post is written and compiled by Craig Fischer. To send along recommendations, ideas, and comments, contact Craig at [email protected] [.]

Playhouse Comics Club, Issue #64 (July 16, 2021)Playhouse Comics Club, Issue #66 (July 30, 2021)
PHP Code Snippets Powered By : XYZScripts.com