painting | sculpture | comics
One of the many art tools I have of my dad’s this Boston Model 18 electric pencil sharpener. It quit working at the start of the summer, so I dissected to see what the problem was. The plastic gear seemed to have lost some of its teeth, and as I looked for schematics so that I could draw the gear in Illustrator then cut it with a laser cutter- I found someone who was already tooling gears for just this purpose. It was pretty easy to install, and now it’s up and running again.
At this year’s CAKE (Chicago’s Alternative Comix Expo) I picked up lots of books, but the one that stayed with me the most was Joshua Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest. The black and white graphic novel follows the lives of a pair of brother cats growing up in the midwest and delicately plays out the transition from childhood to adulthood with seamless shifts between fantasy and reality that are at once touching and disturbing. There’s a loving nostalgia for the past evoked with each obsessively hatched and cross-hatched line, but also a dark current running beneath the shifting dreamscapes. I’m definitely looking forward to picking up his other books. Here’s his website: jwcotter.tumblr.com and an interview of his on the Comics Journal .
Crystal Dragon. Color your own at: http://www.dragonandgoat.com/?page_id=414
Dragon and Goat’s new, all-ages book The Sparktacular S’Particles is now at Chicago Comics and Graham Cracker comics. If you can’t make it to Chicago pick up a copy online at: https://www.createspace.com/4324392 @dragonpendragon
Page 15 from upcoming comic on perceptions of an Imaginary Japan and my experiences last summer in Kyoto. Beyond Paper Walls will hopefully be launching next April if I can keep my Rapidographs clean.
Page 15 from upcoming comic on perceptions of an Imaginary Japan and my experiences last summer in Kyoto. Beyond Paper Walls will hopefully be launching next April if I can keep my Rapidographs clean.
Here’s an issue of the comic The Funnies, featuring conanobrien as Phantasmo. Thanks, Library of Congress!
Remembering a once militant Japan. KIYOCHIKA Kobayashi created this ukiyo e in 1895 commemorating a victory in the Sino-Japanese War as Japan modernized rapidly and built up its military might- which led to WW2 involvement and the endgame at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today Japan and its people have often been the voice of peace but with PM Abe’s reinterpretation of Article 9- we’ll have to wait to see how that voice is changing. See more of Kiyochika’s war prints at: http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/throwing_off_asia_02/toa_essay02.htm
The Giving Tree.
Yesterday Japan’s Prime Minister ABE Shinzo announced a dramatic shift to Japan’s Article 9 of the constitution (read here) that allows Japan’s Self Defense Force to take up arms with an ally in war. Since WWII, Japan has largely embraced pacifism, but this move by the government has stirred protests throughout the country. In Tokyo a man set himself on fire at Shinjuku Station (video here- not to be watched with kids).
When I was in China in 2004 a change in Japanese textbooks set off protests there, so it will be interesting to see what the Chinese reaction will be now that the SDF is not so “toothless.”
“American Elf: the Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka”
In today’s Cartooning class at the College of DuPage, we looked at James kochalka‘s web comic diary American Elf. I assigned students a daily diary comic that, for a grade, they will have to maintain every day- for fifteen years.