Chris Ware Talk and Workshop this Fri & Sat

I'm very excited to be participating in a talk and workshop with Chris Ware, a cartoonist who's coming to SNC as part of the "Writers in the Woods" series hosted by the Humanities department. Ware has been a real inspiration for me as an artist – I think he's one of a handful of graphic novelists who have not only produced interesting work, but actually moved the medium of comics forward – pushing the boundaries of what seems possible. I'll be talking with him in an interview format on Friday evening, and running the workshop with him on Saturday morning. The talk is free and open to the public; the workshop is free for faculty and students, $50 for everyone else.

Here's the "Writers in the Woods" blurb:

Please join us for the last Writers in the Woods events of the semester. Graphic novelist Chris Ware will give a talk Friday, November 4 at 7PM in TCES 139. Hot and cold appetizers and wine will be served. The event is free and open to the community.

Saturday, November 5, Ware will lead a workshop from 9AM-Noon in TCES 139. The workshop is free to students and faculty. $50 for community members. Students may take the workshop for credit. These events will be of special interest to students studying art, literature, creative writing, media studies, journalism, and popular culture.

CHRIS WARE is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and the annual progenitor of the amateur periodical the ACME Novelty Library. An irregular contributor to The New Yorker and The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ware was the first cartoonist chosen to regularly serialize an ongoing story in The New York Times Magazine, in 2005-2006. He edited the thirteenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern in 2004 as well as Houghton Mifflin's Best American Comics for 2007, and his work was the focus of an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2006.

Workshop: Storytelling through Diagrams

A workshop with graphic novelist Chris Ware and and Sierra Nevada College Professor of Digital Art Chris Lanier

Chris Ware has often used diagrams as a storytelling device in his graphic novels – showing events taking place in a cutaway view of an apartment building, for instance, or using a medical diagram of a character as a jumping-off point to narrate her personal history. In this workshop, we'll look into Ware's techniques of "diagrammatic storytelling," and collaborate on a large scale narrative diagram, creating something that's partway story and partway map.

Since it's Halloween today, I thought it'd be appropriate to link a story Ware did for the New Yorker a couple years ago, which takes place on Halloween – click for larger versions of the pages:



Ware has also worked in other media – collaborating with animator John Kuramoto on some shorts for the "This American Life" TV show:



He's also created an interactive comics story for the McSweeney's app, called "Touch Sensitive" – more info on that here:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665117/chris-wares-ipad-only-comic-touch-sensitive-perfects-the-form

And if you still haven't gotten enough, here are links to a couple articles I've written about his work, for the Comics Journal and, many many moons ago, the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review:

http://classic.tcj.com/tcj-300/tcj-300-acme-novelty-library-19-reviewed-by-chris-lanier/

http://articles.sfgate.com/2000-11-26/books/17667810_1_panels-new-graphic-novel-jimmy-corrigan

Posterization

I've been meaning to do a blog post showing the posters for the films I'm screening in my independent film class, and some recent poster news is giving me a good impetus to close the deal. Chris Ware, one of the most interesting cartoonists around, has created a very distinctive poster for Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the latest film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the most interesting directors around. It's an unexpected intersection of two of my favorite artists. Click the image below to see a larger version of the poster:


I also might as well post a few more links pertinent to the art of movie posters, since I've been collecting that sort of thing in my bookmarks for a while (and it'll provide a helpful jumping-off point for my "Art & Advertising" class, which is starting a poster design project this week). First off, a link to posters commissioned by the Alamo Drafthouse, a famous venue for screening offbeat films; the Alamo is probably the most prominent source for limited-edition artist-designed posters for repertory films. I think of them as film-poster versions of a good cover tune. Below is an Alamo poster for The Shining:


An artist who's done several posters for the Alamo is Olly Moss, who has made several in the vein of the great designer Saul Bass -- here's a Bass-inflected design by Moss:


And to pick up again for a moment on The Shining kick (for some reason, that flick has inspired a lot of great repertory posters), below is a treatment done by Moxy Creative, for a series of redesigned posters inspired by Men's Style (thought in this particular case, it's more like ectoplasmic adolescent style):


Those Moxy posters trade on knowledge of the film -- they make more sense if you've already seen the movie. There seems to be a whole set of designers who make retroactive poster designs based on this sort of inside-baseball visual punning (like the Back to the Future 2 riff below, which I swiped from a blog post on "Minimalist Movie Poster Designs"):


And if you want to go really minimalist, you should check out filmtheblanks.com, a site where you can see movie posters reduced to their most iconic design elements -- The Deer Hunter gets the abstracting treatment here:


Another transformative tack on movie iconography comes from Andrey Kuznetsov, who has drawn images of blockbusters as if they were being advertised via Medieval woodblock print:


Any look at outre movie posters would be remiss to leave out the Polish poster designers who have both managed to create some perfectly poetic images for great films, and even some perfectly poetic images for terrible films (check out the Crocodile Dundee 2 poster at the link):


If you want on ongoing supply of great eye-candy and commentary on movie posters, Adrian Curry writes a Movie Poster of the Week feature for mubi.com. Curry is smart about the power of single images, like this one for Black Swan:


And he's equally adept at noticing trends in poster design -- for instance pinpointing the recent vogue of using title text to obscure the faces of the actors:


And here, finally, is the run of posters for the films in the indy film class. I tried to find original posters (not subsequent redesigns). One thing that becomes apparent is that the 80s were as ugly in movie poster design as they were in everything else; the posters for Before Sunrise and Do the Right Thing are easily the worst of the batch, in my eyes. It's funny how few of the posters actually conjure a flavor of the movie they're promoting -- the one for Persona does it, and that's about it (though several of the other posters are still attractive on their own terms).

There's an interesting story behind the poster for Nothing But a Man, an emotionally intense neo-realist look at a black railway worker in the American South. In listening to an interview with the filmmakers, Michael Roemer and Robert Young, I found out they were angry about the poster. Nothing But a Man was a pioneering film with a largely black cast; the filmmakers intended the film to play in black neighborhoods, but the distributors confined it to the art-house circuit of the time (1964). By making the image a drawing against a white background, you could almost not know the movie stars black people -- the poster actually unwittingly recapitulates a monologue delivered by a preacher's wife, played by Abbey Lincoln, late in the film. She mentions to her husband that she has more latitude than he does, in the white-dominated South, because she's not seen as a physical threat to white men. And there her face stands on the poster, whitewashed and also obscuring the masculine (and unmistakably African) features of the actual protagonist of the film, Ivan Dixon.

Wolverton's Apocalypse & Ware's Futurity

I've just had a couple pieces of writing published -- reviews of some interesting comics/books, by artists I admire. One is on a book of eccentric Bible Illustrations by Basil Wolverton, who made his name working on Mad Magazine and pulpy sci-fi and horror comics in the 40s and 50s.


It's up at The Comics Journal's new online site, here; The Comics Journal is moving into a much stronger online presence this month. They haven't had an "official launch" of the online version of their magazine yet, but there's already a good chunk of content up.

Here's a quote from the Wolverton article, describing his apocalyptic drawings, derived from the Book of Revelations:

Giant, luminous hailstones rain down to crush bloodied heads. Walking corpses with gaunt, ravaged faces stagger through rubbled wastelands. Mouths are reduced to organs fit only for yelling or screaming (oftentimes no teeth are shown, so the mouths are more like gaping wounds — some horrible hole driven into the face). The elements are in upheaval: flames leap higher than skyscrapers, the sea rises up in torsioned waterspouts, the sky ejects airplanes as though spitting watermelon seeds. There was always something toylike in Wolverton’s depiction of architecture, and in these vistas of destruction, the flimsiness of the skyline reads as a rebuke to man’s vanity. The listing skyscrapers look like shoeboxes, with equidistant little window-holes cut into them, being kicked over.

The other piece is appearing in issue #300 of the print version of The Comics Journal. It's a great issue: the bulk of it is taken up with interviews between younger and older generations of cartoonists. There's also some really sharp writing by R. Fiore and a great diagnosis of the ascendency of "Geek Culture" by Tom Crippen. I'm glad they were able to squeak in my review of Chris Ware's last book, Acme Novelty Library #19. Here's the first paragraph:

Part of the fun of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19 is seeing him apply his style to a new mode. The first half is a science fiction adventure story, involving a desperate struggle for survival, a failed escape across inhospitable terrain, the murder of several dogs, and even a brief bout of auto-cannibalism. All this transpires on a faltering colony on Mars, and the arid setting allows Ware to maintain his usual formal distance without shortchanging the urgency of the plot. At its core, the story is one of abandonment – both intimate and infinite.

Issue #300 is currently only available in print, so to read the rest, you'll have to hit your local newsstand.