Whew so many events going on it is hard to keep track. Last weekend’s Asbury Park Comicon seems to have been a cracking good time, based on all the blog and FB posts we’ve seen about it. We’ve been hoping to go to the show every year, but this time two cons in a row left The Beat conned out. I believe Torsten is working on his own report, but co-show runner Cliff Galbraith was kind enough to send along some photos and talk about the show’s move to a new venue AND two days. Would it hold up? What do you think? Take it away, Cliff.
It was a really incredible weekend. We had the the first nice weekend at the beach — the comic gods were smiling on us once again. In fact, it kind of blew my mind and it’s got us really pumped up about our show 6/14 (the New York Comic Fest in Westchester). At times we had ticket lines around the block and had to add people to help keep things moving. The fans were really great and it was cool how they were able to talk to a lot of the creators we had, like J.H. Williams and Steranko. Chris Claremont was holding court and being really terrific with the people there to see him. Were we nervous about going to two days? Of course — there’s a lot more moving parts. But we’re glad we did it because it really worked out all the way around and it really sets us up for June when we have the show with Steranko, Sienkiewiecz, Denny O’Neil, Scott Snyder and Mark Waid.

One thing that caught me off guard, in a good way, was that Claremont originally was just supposed to be there on Saturday. But that night we had a dinner that was secretly in honor of Denis Kitchen, who we wanted to thank for everything he’s done for the creative community and comics in general. We had a whole bunch of people there and I guess Chris had a good time because he decided to stay a second day! So there he was Sunday, with more fans out the door. Also, J.H. Williams III blogged last week that Asbury Park might be his only show of the year.
And that dinner was a hit. Jon B. Cooke presented Denis with the award and he was completely taken by surprise. It was really lively with Steranko, Mark Schultz, Annie Nocenti, Don McGregor, Peter Bagge, my partners Robert Bruce and Dan Greenfield, Ming Chen, Michael Zapcic. All there. I don’t want to leave anyone out but Dean Haspiel, Gregory Benton and Christa Cassano were there from Hang Dai Studio in Brooklyn. Bob Camp, David Spurlock, Robert Sikoryak. John Holmstrom showed up. Jim Salicrup, Ellen Abramowitz, Tim Truman, Todd Klein, John Workman, Carl and Nancy Gropper, too.
At the same time, we had Kathleen Hannah’s The Julie Ruin and Screaming Females show over at the Asbury Lanes, so guys like JH Williams and Box Brown were over there at our after-party. We had a lot going on and I think we’re moving towards being a much larger festival with bands and other activities — maybe like a mini SXSW of comics. We leased the park across from the hotel and filled it with food trucks and cars like the Batmobile and Ghost Busters Ecto 1, but next year I see the addition of a ferris wheel and a stage for bands. I want to involve the whole City of Asbury Park.
And the best part was the mood was fantastic over the two days — everyone was stoked. We had packed panels with Claremont and Steranko, Williams was a hit, plus Robert Sikoryak’s Carousel got a lot of people talking. The Comic Book Men panel was standing room only. The dealers said they did really well and the artists and writers were getting a lot of shmoozing and commissions in. The cosplay contest was way bigger than last year. And we were pleasantly surprised when Dan DiDio showed up quietly on Sunday afternoon!
Even though we’re called a comicon, I really see this as Rob and I are throwing a party. We choose to invite the people we want to spend the weekend with. That’s how this started a few years ago and it’s how we’re going to keep it. It’s for people we enjoy being around and those we’d like to get to know. I remember when cons were a lot more fun and a lot less crowded — Asbury Park is a reset to a more sane time in con history. I was really starting to feel bad for kids who never got to experience the cons we got to go to. I’m not trying to change the con business, I’m just offering an alternative. The big cons are like Hollywood blockbusters, we’re more like the quirky little indie film that’ll touch your heart.
Next up for the Crucial folks is the New York Comic Fest June 14th in White Plains, and in 2015, the East Coast Comicon at the Meadowlands(!).
Next year for sure.
Photocomix are strange creatures. They look like a hybrid of a photography medium and a comics format, and when you spot them in the wild you’re never sure whether they arose as some part of a natural evolutionary process in art or if they were the result of some kind of misguided experiment, maybe even one gone wrong. That reaction’s been shaped by encountering low-quality work with vague pretensions at humor, or perhaps offering some behind the scenes reveals about the comics making process. Frozen, melodramatic poses and cheesy dialogue are par for the course. And so, if a reader spots photocomix roaming free online or in a shop, they approach with caution and refuse to get their hopes up regarding quality.
Then there’s FORCEFIELD FOTOCOMIX, which makes you feel guilty for all of that instinctual caution and pre-emptive wariness. It gives you what no one really dares expect or demand from photocomix, a team of seriously talented individuals on a mission to exploit the full potential of the medium. To do this, they decide to spin this collection of comics into a number of genres, covering all the bases and it’s as if they are illustrating future directions for photocomix.
The man behind the camera, someone whose work has defined “serious” photography of the cultural zeitgeist in the past decade and then some, is Seth Kushner, the co-creator of the celebration of comics tradition LEAPING TALL BUILDINGS with Christopher Irving. Kushner’s photo portraits of comics creators in LEAPING TALL BUILDINGS have garnered so much attention that they’ve been scavenged by internet sites repeatedly and Neil Gaiman even chose to use Kushner’s portrait of him as his new dust-jacket image. He’s been working on photocomix for some time now, creating a CulturePOP series for the digital arts salon TRIP CITY, profiling real lives in comics format from author Jonathan Ames to adult film star Stoya, but FORCEFIELD is a departure into the realm of total composition in fictional realities.
During an informal conversation at Hang Dai Studios, where Kushner keeps a tidy computer work station flanked by a few vinyl and action figures, he revealed some of the process behind his striking cover to FORCE FIELD. He staged a full-on photo-shoot to capture the images in his mind by engaging actress Zoe Sloan, as well as a costume designer and a makeup artist, to create a Barbarella homage fused with a direct design reference to a Jim Steranko cover of BLADE RUNNER from Marvel Comics. The Steranko cover, which uses multiple color reduplications of the hero pointing a gun, inspired Kushner to pose Sloan holding, instead, a Super 8 camera in retro style. The metaphor’s impressive: Kushner’s camera is a loaded weapon at the center of the strange narratives contained in FORCEFIELD, capable of directing the reader’s experience, and by using a Super 8 video camera rather than simply a camera, he’s suggesting the role of storytelling.
Kushner’s increasingly open these days to revealing the process behind his work to generate enthusiasm for the forms themselves and encourage others to experiment, as evinced by his recent contribution to TRIP CITY, a blow-by-blow narrative of the steps by which the first comic in the collection, “The Hall of Just Us”, called “Anatomy of a Photocomic”. The story, co-scripted by Emmy Award winning artist Dean Haspiel, led to its own formal photoshoot at the recently hurricane decimated by increasingly resilient Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook. Kushner and Haspiel set about “casting the roles, as we would for a film”, says Kushner, and the co-creators drafted full layouts for the comic before shooting, giving them a “map to follow”.
They created the comic shot for shot, a tale of three “miscreants”, superheroes in a bar chasing a super-powered lady’s attentions, “The Tarot”. After the shoot, time-consuming photo-shopping and comics construction added text, word balloons, and special effects. But all of this description only hints at the visual impact of “The Hall of Just Us”. It’s all about mood, created from strongly color-themed lighting (the pink, blue, and yellow of the cover’s design), and about the off-beat simple hero costumes straight off of Mego action figures or the BATMAN television show of the ‘60’s.
While the heroes posture and ratchet up the bombast, The Tarot figure, portrayed by model and artist Katelan Foisy, brings an eerie presence and substance to the narrative. She can see the future “sometimes” and sees the other heroes as Tarot figures, commenting “There’s the path you can take or the road you can make”, but she’s really calmly waiting for her “date” known as Señor Amore, portrayed by Haspiel. This is certainly the “romance” genre promised by the cover as one narrative alternative, but it leaves room for reader-interpretation. Superheroes with super powers are still hanging out in a bar, looking for love, for one thing.
“Spiders Everywhere” provides the “horror” also promised by the cover, and again homage to genre comics and films is evident. The narrative and premises are simple- horrific waves of spiders taking over the world, but Kushner plays to the strengths of the photocomix medium by conveying frantic movements and moments of psychological realization in cinematic style.
“Understanding Photocomix”, a visual walk through Kushner’s history with photography and photocomix, which first appeared in American Photo Magazine, supplies the metadata on the very form in which its composed. It also forms a clever narrative bridge between the first chapters of FORCEFIELD and its follow up chapter COMPLEX, by explaining Kushner’s increasing drive to push the boundaries of photocomix in a “full fictionalized graphic novel” that he’d “direct like a movie using actors and locations”. In many ways, FORCEFIELD is the herald of that process, and it’s Volume number “.01” suggests that it’s a forerunner of bigger things to come.
The story COMPLEX: “Luv_Underscores_U”, kicking off Kushner’s work on his dream project of the COMPLEX graphic novel, first appeared in Jimmy Palmiotti’s CREATOR OWNED HEROES #7 alongside Kushner and Irving’s ongoing profiles of indie comics creators (a follow-up project to LEAPING TALL BUILDINGS). It’s a lavishly shot and designed comic which plunges into science-fiction BLADE RUNNER style, another link to FORCEFIELD’s cover image. It constructs multiple virtual realities visually with ethereal attention to detail and emphasizes a governing psychological perspective, a central character keeping all these virtual worlds in motion for the reader. This isn’t far from the role of the camera itself seeming to direct the reader, perhaps FORCEFIELD’s hypothetical Super 8 on the cover itself.
The final chapter of FORCEFIELD, a never before published noir tale, “The Perfect Woman” appears in uncharacteristic emphasis on black and white tones, with hints of color. Kushner’s photography is known for its psychedelic presentation of color through light effects, but also for his more sepulchral, moody hues in portraiture. Here he does with black what he often does with a solid color, making it a rich compositional basis into which he incises featured characters and settings. Like a compelling dime store novel rich with noir tropes, the story pursues an elusive lady in a cityscape from the visual perspective of a narrator. Kushner’s locations for this shoot were clearly exacting, capturing a city of the 1930’s complete with architectural detail. But the reader should have expected that this is a collection of stories with an expicit BLADE RUNNER homage and technology and perception may play as strong a role as the romance of pursuit.This is the “mystery” genre, completing the triad of color themes and pulp homage.
To add to the total design package that is FORCEFIELD FOTOCOMIX, it’s also presented in slick prestige magazine format with card covers, suggesting that photocomix can find their own effective dimensions for publication, in this case somewhere between a traditional comic and a traditional large-format photobook. But the format also speaks to Kushner’s consistent, passionate attention to detail throughout the collection which seems to constantly remind the reader of his fundamental belief in the art behind the form. The photocomix in FORCEFIELD are visually riveting, one might even say mind-altering, but the stories are also expansive, creating strange pocket universes with their own sets of rules and assumptions. Exploring them is part of the intrigue. Seeing FORCEFIELD in the wild is bound to make an impact on our assumptions about what photocomix have been, and more importantly, what they can be as a narrative medium in their own right. Kushner was inspired by comics, photography, and films to launch this project. In the future, creators might well be saying that they were inspired by FORCEFIELD to take photocomix in equally surprising and mesmerizing directions.
[Kushner answers, "What's the coolest item in your collection?" for Hanzarai.com]
FORCEFIELD FOTOCOMIX Vol.01 will be available for physical sale for the first time at the upcoming Asbury Park Comic Con March 30th, but the limited edition is already available for order through Kushner’s etsy shop.
Title: Seth Kushner’s FORCEFIELD FOTOCOMIX Vol.01/Publisher: Self-Published/Creative Team: Photographer, Seth Kushner/ Design, Seth Kushner and Dean Haspiel/ Writers, Seth Kushner, Dean Haspiel, Chris Miskiewicz/ Edits by Dean Haspiel
Hannah Means-Shannon writes and blogs about comics for TRIP CITY and Sequart.org and is currently working on books about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore for Sequart. She is @hannahmenzies on Twitter and hannahmenziesblog on WordPress.
As we’ve been noting of late, the local comics scene has been blowing up—pretty much around the globe, from Dubai to Denver. And tomorrow Asbury Park gets its first comic-con, courtesy of organizer Cliff Galbriath, (left) aka frequent Beat commenter Citizen Cliff. Cliff sent along a fact sheet on the Asbury Park Comic Con and some photos of the venue, which is a cool retro bowling alley/club a few blocks from the Asbury Park Boardwalk and a bunch of fine restaurants and bars. Admission is a mere $5, with $1 going to the Hero Initiative. You can read all the deets in the PR below, but everyone we’ve spoken with has been psyched about going to this show; if we weren’t so conned out, we might be tempted by a birthright journey back to Jersey. We’re always especially charmed by seaside conventions like San Diego, MeCaf, Long Beach and now….Asbury Park.
[Disclosure: The Asbury Park Comic Con is a Beat Advertiser, but their ad is so cool looking we're actually going to be sad when it goes.]
The first annual Asbury Park Comic Con will kick off on Saturday, May 12, 2012. The one day mini-convention will be held in the intimate setting of the Asbury Lanes, a small bowling alley / rock club at the Jersey Shore one block from the historic Asbury Park boardwalk.
Asbury Park Comic Con will feature a wide variety of comic book & pop culture purveyors as well as many comic book creators, artists and illustrators from the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas. Comic fans will have a rare opportunity to meet the artists, who will be available to sign books that will be sold at each artist’s table. Commissioned sketches are also available from many of the artists for a fee.
• Eisner Award winner Evan Dorkin (creator of Milk & Cheese, co-creator of Beasts of Burden, writer for Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Shin Chan,)
• Sarah Dyer (creator of Action Girl, writer for such television shows as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Shin Chan, Superman, and Batman Beyond)
• Michael Kupperman (creator of Tales Designed to Thrizzle and Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010)
• Jamal Igle (Super Girl, The Ray, Green Lantern Corps, and many other DC and Marvel books)
• Danny Hellman (cartoonist for New York Press, Time, Sports Illustrated, Screw, Village Voice, and many others)
• Steve Mannion (creator of Fearless Dawn published by Asylum Press)
• Fred Van Lente (co-creator of Cowboys and Aliens, writer for Marvel, Valiant, and Evil Twin’s
I’m bummed I couldn’t make it back this year. Just too close to the previous weekend’s show. Glad to hear everything went so well.
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