Jump On It!

My awesome sister, LIL' C, sent me this insanely great clip. I hope it makes you as happy as it's made me!

We've had an exhausting week here at Office 54 with Comic Con, Comic Con friends, and Comic Con parties. Not to mention our regular adventures -- we had lunch at the incredible Hearst Building yesterday and toured the Cosmopolitan Magazine office! I'll have a full report of our afternoon of fashion browsing and vah-jay-jay talking...

Anyway, it's Dance Party Friday, go put on your fave dance tracks today and feel the love!

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Now playing: The Sugarhill Gang - Jump On It
via FoxyTunes

I Love You, Australia

From Maiabee to Baz Luhrmann, there's never been an Australian that I haven't met and adored...

Most NBA players complain when their teammates ignore them, Andrew Bogut just creates new teammates.

EVENT: Earth Fair

EARTH CELEBRATIONS FOR EARTH DAY
Interactive Environmental Art Project at the NYU EARTH DAY STREET FAIR

Earth Celebrations: Reduce your Carbon Footprint Parade Scroll
Participants invited to make paint from fruits and vegetables
& add their footprint to 100 foot-long Reduce Your Carbon Footprint Parade Scroll

Earth Celebrations: Reduce your Carbon Footprint Parade Scroll will be created as participants are invited to add their footprint to a giant scroll of flags and then paint their footprint with homemade paint participants can help create from fruits and vegetables. Included will be messages of what participants aim to do to reduce reduce co2 emissions, as well as inspirations from their experiences of the natural world. It will be put together throughout the New York University's Earth Day Street Fair and will culminate in a parade of the scroll through the event.

The NYU Earth Day Street Fair will be held on Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22nd , in Greenwich Village, at Washington Place between Greene St. and Washington Square East. Volunteers can participate creating their footprint flags and making paint form fruits and vegetables for the Reduce Your Carbon Footprint Parade Scroll from 10:30am-2:30pm. Parade of the scroll is at 2pm. Volunteers for parade needed by 1:30pm at our table.

TO VOLUNTEER CONTACT: EARTH CELEBRATIONS
(212) 777-7969/ mail@earthcelebrations.com
Volunteers are needed from 9:30am-2:30/3pm.
Meet at the Earth Celebrations table/booth at the fair

http://www.earthcelebrations.com

Earth Celebrations is a not-for-profit organization in New York City, dedicated to fostering ecological awareness and reviving the arts at the center of community life. Earth Celebrations innovative environmental and arts programs include: theatrical pageants, exhibitions, performances, art & ecology/puppet & costume workshops, partnerships with schools, community centers, gardens, and numerous organizations. For 15 years Earth Celebrations produced the popular Rites of Spring:Garden Pageant and Winter Pageant on the Lower East Side, which engaged over 5,000 participants annually, and led to the preservation of many of the community gardens on the Lower East Side and throughout New York City.

EVENT: New York Comic Con

For the few of you actually on the internet today, who are attending NYCC tomorrow, I've two panels for KIDS DAY on Sunday:

A Parents' Guide to Buying Comics for Kids
12 - 1 pm --- Room 2D06-07

This panel will explain to parents how to select and support their children in their hobby of comics reading. Join Chris Duffy (Nickelodeon Magazine), Michele Gorman (Getting Graphic! Comics for Kids, Getting Graphic! Using Graphic Novels to Promote Literacy with Preteens and Teens), Alexander Danner (Character Designs for Graphic Novels), and Jann Jones (Senior Coordinating Editor for the DC Universe).

Comics for Girls
2 - 3pm --- Room 1E03

This panel will answer all the questions you've ever had about finding the perfect comics for girls. Join Barbara Slate (Angel Love, Archie, Barbie), Mike Pellerito (Archie), Allison Barrows (Pre-Teena, Goofyfoot Gurl), Jimmy Gownley (Amelia Rules), Buzz Dixon & Marlon Schulman from RealBuzz Studios (Serenity, Goofyfoot Gurl), Raina Telgemeier (The Babysitters Club).

EVENT: Publishing Graphic Narratives

WNBA Joins Friends of Lulu for Panel on Publishing Graphic Narratives:

As graphic novels continue to increase the comics industry’s success, the New York chapters of both the Women’s National Book Association and Friends of Lulu present a multifaceted panel called Speaking Graphically: Graphic Narratives in the Publishing Marketplace.

This event, taking place on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Center for Independent Publishing, 20 West 44th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues) in Manhattan, features five panelists who will share insights on the creative process and the editorial work involved in publishing graphic narratives. They will also discuss the variety of genres in the graphic narratives field, describe the marketplace for graphic works, and offer advice to prospective authors. The panel includes:

Jessica Abel: A cartoonist and writer whose work includes the award-winning graphic novel La Perdida and the comic book series Artbabe, Abel won both the Harvey and Lulu Awards for Best New Talent in 1997. She is the series co-editor of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics 2008.

Judith Hansen: Hansen is a literary agent who heads the Judith Hansen Literary Agency. Her clients include Scott McCloud, R. Crumb, Alice Kominsky Crumb, Eddie Campbell, Kazu Kibuishi, Hope Larson and Svetlana Chmakova, among many others.

Charles Kochman: A senior editor at Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Kochman edited New York Times bestsellers Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, along with R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, and Kirby: King of Comics. He also edited Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross.

Dan Nadel: Nadel is the director of PictureBox, a Grammy award-winning publisher of art, music, photography and comics. PictureBox’s comic publications include the periodical anthology The Ganzfeld and the insider magazine Comics Comics, along with graphic novels.

Christine Norrie: The creator of Cheat and author of the Hopeless Savages collections, Norrie is a graphic novelist, and illustrator of the graphic novels Breaking Up and Grosse Pointe Girl: Tales from a Suburban Adolescence. Her work has been nominated for two Eisner Awards.

The WNBA’s Karen Rosenberg, who publishes fiction, short plays and essays in literary magazines and anthologies in the U.S. and Europe, and Lori O’Dea, the chief editor of secondary-education publisher Amsco School Publications, will be the event’s moderators. Following the panel, there will be an opportunity to socialize with the panelists, and refreshments. Admission is $10, and free to Friends of Lulu and WNBA members.

The Women’s National Book Association is a nonprofit professional association founded in 1917 for those who work with and value books. For more information, go to www.wnba-nyc.org or contact programs@wnba-nyc.org.

Friends of Lulu is a national not-for-profit organization geared toward bringing more women and girls into comic books as professionals and readers. The national site is www.friends-lulu.org and the site of its most active chapter, based in New York, is www.friends-lulu.org/ny.

Contact: Danielle O’Brien, FoL/NY president, DanielleOBr@gmail.com

Bodega boogie

Saw this little clip via SWISSMISS and it made me happy. I hope it makes you happy too! I think everywhere across the world, everyone should regard Friday as Dance Party Friday.

Even if, like me, you are a lump of exhaustion lazily posted at the coffeemaker watching the brew drip ever so slowly into the pot. And, you're thinking about your crazy deadlines, and still need to prepare for speaking engagements, NY Comic Con, and super-hero comic you're illustrating. Plus, you haven't been to the salon in ages so you look like a wreck, paperwork and voicemails and emails are stacking up, and the dishes can't seem to get done.

Forget all that, go put on your fave dance tracks today!

xo.

Billie Holiday

Ten years ago, in a semi-basement loft in Williamsburg, my roommate Jonathan and I listened to nearly twenty-four hours of Billie Holiday on KCRW. Many years later, and sometimes worlds apart, he still emails to let me know that it's Billie Holiday's birthday and we listen together to the Columbia University broadcast of her songs no matter where we are.

COURVOISIER sketch

Charles Burns

For the last fifteen minutes I have been trying to write an appropriate introduction to my feelings regarding Charles Burns and his incredible work. And, I'm just stupified. We've met a couple times before, in those fleeting "how do you do" moments, and it's always the same-- I fall into a mute silence.

Charles was working on pre-press and technical issues with our mate John Kuramoto, and I sat across the room thinking about how I am a certifiable nerd for his stuff: my FACETASM posters are over fifteen years old, I owned and wore his "Devil" t-shirt through my teen years, I stared in wonder at his Time Magazine covers, I videotaped Dog Boy episodes from Liquid Television!

Not mentioning any of these stalker-type things, the office got into a cheerful discussion about Tintin and Hergé's influences, Charles' current work-in-progress graphic novel, managing the mental ups and downs of freelance gigs, and having a family while being an artist.

His style of conversation reminds me of his art-- thoughtful, mysterious, and purposeful. I felt terrifically at ease and nearly forgot that I was sitting and chatting with a living legend/master inker! At one point, he remarked upon our joint, "You guys have a real comics vibe in your studio."

Thank you, Charles.

"There was a certain line quality that I was always really attracted to—this very thick-to-thin line that is a result of using a brush. There was just some kind of solidity to it, or a kind of richness…. I don’t know, just a feeling to it that I really liked.

So I started out trying to emulate the look of that kind of line, and took it to an extreme, I guess. Because if you compare the work that I do with the work that inspired it—more traditional comic-book stuff—mine looks much tighter and much more precise in a certain way. Not more mechanical, but more extreme. It’s also something that I arrived at slowly. In my earlier work I relied on shade patterns and cross-hatching to create a gray middle ground, but I gradually stripped it down to pure black and white.

I try to achieve something that’s almost like a visceral effect. The quality of the lines and the density of the black take on a character of their own—it’s something that has an effect on your subconscious. Those lines make you feel a certain way. That kind of surface makes you feel a certain way. That’s the best way I can describe it. If you’re looking at the texture of the woods in Black Hole, that starts to be a real element of the story, part of the character of the story. Or when Keith is in the kitchen, and he’s looking into a cup that has cigarette butts floating in it… Hopefully I’ve drawn it in a way that you’ll feel his disgust, or it reflects a sense of his despair. I don’t have to write “I looked down into the cup and saw…” or “The room was all trashed and it made me feel crummy.” I don’t need to tell the story that way—that’s what the artwork achieves if it’s successful. Hopefully it makes you have some kind of gut reaction."

-- Charles Burns
interviewed in The Believer