We couldn’t make it to HeroesCon this weekend, but it sounds like everyone else did — our reporters on the floor say the show is packed and word on the streets is that tickets presale was up significantly. Guests include everyone from Stan Lee to Babs Tarr and the show blog has all the updates and exclusive goodies.
Follow our @comicsbeatlive in Twitter for buzz from the floor and hot scoops, and @comicsbeat on Instagram for pictures. Our Davey Nieves has been slaying it with the E3 visuals but there’s more to come as always. Kyle, Hannah and Harper are all at HeroesCon so if you see them say hi and give them some news!
FINALLY if you are at HeroesCon tomorrow, we urge you to go to this CCS megapanel, organized by Craig Fisher and Ben Towle on the 10th anniversary of the Center for Cartoon Studies, surely one of the most influential institutions in comics right now. I call it the Navy Seals training of comics: cartoonists come out whipped into storytelling shape and the proof is on the page.
At the Junction of Words and Pictures: the Tenth Anniversary of the Center for Cartoon Studies
For this year’s mega-panel, cartoonist Ben Towle and critic Craig Fischer celebrate the first decade of the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS), the influential school for comics artists located in White River Junction, Vermont. Ben will begin with a slide show/talk about the history of “how-to” cartooning guides, including How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, Understanding Comics, and the CCS-sponsored Adventures in Cartooning books by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost. Ben’s presentation will be followed by a screening of Cartoon College (Josh Melrod and Tara Wray, 2012, 75 minutes), a lively documentary that chronicles CCS’s history while focusing on a group of students furiously working on long-form comics for their graduation projects. One added attraction of Cartoon College: interviews with such luminaries as Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly, and Steve Bissette.
To explore the issues and situations brought up in Cartoon College, we’ll then move into a panel featuring CCS alumni and students. Our guests will be Chuck Forsman, Oily Comics publisher and creator of such recent graphic novels and comics as TEOTFW, Celebrated Summer, and Revenger; Sophie Goldstein, writer/artist of the Ignatz-winning House of Women and AdHouse’s graphic novel The Oven; and current CCS student Andy Shuping. Come get the inside story on CCS from those in the know! The panel will end with a display of original art to be included in a major CCS art exhibit at Appalachian State University in fall 2015.
Be there!
Today is a day to send shout-outs to the Center for Cartoon Studies, located in White River Junction, VT and recognize it’s many good deeds. While my shout out should be a loving essay on how teaching comics has had a strong effect on storytelling and how the bucolic yet isolated campus in rural Vermont allows students to focus in on making comics, or the print room or the other great things about the faculty which includes James Sturm and Steve Bissette, I don’t have time for that.
Instead I will just direct you to Rob Clough’s series looking at the WORK of CCS grads (which he didn’t tag with CCS, shame shame shame), and spotlight a few of them:
• Chuck Forsman, now putting out an exciting new action focused comics series, THE REVENGER:
• Melissa Mendes, who is serializing a great comic called The Weight.
• Colleen Frakes, creator of Island Brat and much more, including StevenUniverse fan art.
• Melanie Gilman creator of the Eisner nominated webcomic As The Crow Flies
• Sean Ford creator of Only Skin and Shadow Hills.
• Eleri Mai Harris whose non fiction comics grace The Nib on numerous occasions.
• Alexis Frederick-Frost artist on the Adventures in Cartooning series.
• Sophie Goldstein, whose The Oven is coming out later this month and is amazing.
……and dozens more. I have to leave the office now or I would spend hours more looking at the great great yards from this school. Someone smarter than me needs to look at how the precepts taught at CCS have changed cartooning, and how Sturms ideas about applied cartooning are changing the business. But for today…just a shout out.
• I regret to inform the dozens of people who were looking forward to my being there, that I won’t be at WonderCon after all. Some travel stuff and other factors made it unfeasible. I’m sad I won’t be seeing everyone, but not as sad that I won’t be complaining about the line at Starbucks every morning.
For those who are going, please take notes!
• I will be at the Center for Cartoon Studies for THE FIRST TIME EVER this Thursday for Industry Day, if all goes well.
• Beside CCS, I am going to the dentist today, because I have a “situation” which is teetering on the edge of something…bad. So of course I read this.
The exciting news in all this is that Gabrielle Bell has a Tumblr now!
AMC, History Channel, Spike — every TV network that ever wanted to do a “Comic Book Idol” TV show — here is the comic book life captured in its most primal and dramatic: people arguing about cover design in front of over stuffed bookcases and furnishing mingled from antiques and plastic storage boxes from Target. Yes, this is the life.
Or more accurately a documentary about the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, the already near-legendary academy where scribblers enter and come out comickers two years later. The film is directed by documantarians Josh Melrod and Tara Wray who previously made Manhattan, Kansas and was funded on Kickstarter.
The clip features an array of comics superstars including Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, Scott McCloud, Jason Lutes, and James Sturm but we’re putting money on our own Jen Vaughn as the breakout star. We’re also intrigued by the big fellow in the suspenders who appears in all the CCS videos — he is legend.
Word on the street is that the documentary will debut at SXSW — and then find a place in our hearts for all time.
More info at the website and Facebook.
Comedy writer Tom Gammill (Seinfeld, The Simpsons) has a comic strip called The Doozies, and has made a bunch of videos in which he teaches the ancient secrets of cartooning. In his 26th episode, he visits the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont and discovered things about the climate and the students. The humor is a bit, er, broad, but this video is quite charming.
That’s a bummer, Ace. I’ll have to buy you a beer at the next one!
:(
I, for one am happy that they’re moving this back to San Francisco next year. Don’t get me wrong – it’s convenient having the convention ALMOST in my backyard – but I don’t like robbing a city of it’s landmark comic book convention. Last year, I bitched and whined about the traffic- this year I found out that LA Metro has a bus that goes directly to Disneyland and the last one leaves past midnight- so I’m taking advantage of that itinerary.
The CCI committee should occasionally hold something at Anaheim every year or so – just don’t call it Wonder Con.
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Coat
Seems many are! They lost 4 guests out of a very small guest list already!
When/where has CCI said that WonderCon is moving back to SF next year? They’ve been very vocal about wanting to keep the show in SF but they’ve also been just as vocal that the Moscone doesn’t allow them the leisure of locking in dates early enough.
When I was calling someone at CCI last week to change the name of my guest pass – relayed to me that to tell my cancelled guest (who’s from San Francisco) that next year she won’t have to travel too far to come to the next one.
So I kinda took that as a hint.
~
Coat
Just small FYI, but 3 day and Saturday passes are sold out as of 3/26/13 @ 08:20pm PST.