The sixty-eighth meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Monday, November 25, 2013 at 7:00 PM at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.
Presentations by Brendan Leach and Nick Sousanis.
Brendan Leach’s new graphic novel, Iron Bound, features a flex disc of music written and recorded by Lucas Gutkowski. Brendan will be discussing the writing of the book and the process of collaborating with the songwriter. Lucas Gutkowski and Alex Obercian will preform the songs accompanied by artwork from Iron Bound.
Brendan Leach is an Ignatz and Xeric Award winning Graphic Novelist and Illustrator. His comics have been published by Top Shelf Comics, Secret Acres, Retrofit Comics, Ca et La (France), and 001 Edizioni (Italy and Spain). Brendan’s illustration work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators and 3×3 Magazine, and his comics have been included in collections and anthologies, including Best American Comics 2011 and 2013, Stephen Heller’s Comics Sketchbooks, Strapazin (Germany), and Smoke Signals. He is currently a faculty member at the Fashion Institute of Technology, teaching drawing and writing for sequential art. Brendan received his MFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts.
Nick Sousanis will discuss and share images from his doctoral dissertation, written and drawn entirely in comic book form. Some background: While words have long been held up as the sole means of serious thinking, images have been typically relegated to aesthetics and spectacle. This bias runs deep. Plato dismissed images as “shadows of shadows,” Descartes sowed doubt of sensory perception, and Western thought and the academy have followed these lines of thinking since. Through an argument embodied in its visual form, Sousanis’s comics dissertation poses a challenge to verbal-linguistic dominance and seeks to broaden the forms academic inquiry can take. In their capacity for both text-like sequential reading and image-like simultaneous viewing, comics offer a unique thought-space to facilitate discovery and present a powerful tool for serious inquiry. Titled Unflattening, the dissertation employs the mechanisms by which we see as metaphors for considering new approaches to how we think and how we learn. For a brief overview of this work, see here.
Nick Sousanis is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s school of education writing and drawing his dissertation entirely in comic book form. Previously, he was immersed in Detroit’s arts community where he co-founded www.thedetroiter.com and directed UM’s Detroit exhibition space. His comics have been infiltrating academic realms through numerous presentation, publications, and his comics courses at Teachers College and Parsons. Dissertation excerpts and more at www.spinweaveandcut.com.
images by Brendan Leach (top) and Nick Sousanis (bottom).
New York Comics &Picture-story Symposium 
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