Séverine Bascouert, April 30, 2024 at 7pm ET

The 393rd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. 

Séverine Bascouert on Lagon Revue: From Comics to Exhibition / De la bande dessinée à l’exposition

The avant-garde French comics anthology LAGON celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2024. To mark the occasion, three exhibitions will be held in Europe: in Paris, France; Luzern, Switzerland; and Berlin, Germany. In conversation with Bill Kartalopoulos, LAGON editorial team member Séverine Bascouert will outline the aesthetic concerns that animate the publication and discuss solutions arrived at in the effort to translate Lagon’s ethos from the context of book publication to the gallery space. 

Séverine Bascouert is a printer, artist and editor. Fifteen years ago she founded L’institut Sérigraphique, a silkscreen printing studio located in Paris. Together with Sammy Stein, Jean-Philippe Bretin and Gaspard Laurent she edits and publishes the comics anthology LAGON, an ongoing project which constantly seeks new ways to edit and print comics narratives. In the latest issue of LAGON, titled PLAINE, she silkscreened gouache paintings by Jin Angdoo that appear on both the cover and in the center of the volume. Her work across projects and media engages a constant reflection on the making and the form of the book. 

Bob Levin, April 23, 2024 at 7pm ET

The 392nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 23, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. 

Bob Levin on How did a guy who hadn’t read a comic in 35 years end up talking to you about them.

Bob Levin lives in Berkeley with his wife Adele. He is a graduate of Brandeis University, Penn Law School and the masters program in creative writing at San Francisco State. He represented injured workers in workers’ compensation cases for for 40 years and has been a contributing writer to The Comics Journal for about that long. His books include The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture; Outlaws, Rebels, Free-thinkers, Pirates & Pornographers: Essays on Cartoons and Cartoonists; and Most Outrageous: The Trials and Trespasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chester the Molester. His new collection Messiahs, Meshugganahs, Misanthropes, Mysteries & More, will be out shortly from FU Press.

John Porcellino, April 16, 2024 at 7pm ET

The 391st meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 16, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. 

DING DONG SCHOOL: John Porcellino Answers 1,001 Questions About Comix

John Porcellino was born in Chicago in 1968. Since 1989, he’s self-published King-Cat Comix, a journal of his life, thoughts, and creativity.

Nina Rowe, April 9, 2024 at 7pm ET

The 390th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 9, 2024 at 7 pm ET. In-person presentation at The New School, University Center, 63 5th Ave, New York, NY, Room UL104 (lower level) with streaming via zoom. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for zoom link. Free and open to the public.

Nina Rowe: Word and Image in Medieval Manuscripts: The Story of Emperor Nero

In the period between circa 1330 and 1430, manuscript workshops in the cities of southern Germany specialized in the production of a new genre of book – the illuminated World Chronicle. These volumes offered expansive tellings of biblical and ancient history, written in the vernacular language of the street, augmented by expansive pictorial cycles. The narratives often are surprising to modern audiences, presenting in word and image legends that have fallen out of standard accounts, but which register interests and preoccupations of the late medieval urban arena. This lecture explores a story about unusual demands the ancient Roman emperor Nero made on a cluster of doctors, as presented in a pair of illuminated World Chronicles created in the city of Regensburg, circa 1400. The original audiences for the tale lived at a time of increased professionalization and regulation of medicine, when the well-being of individuals was understood to be a means toward achieving municipal peace more broadly. The Nero episodes in the World Chronicles invited reader-viewers to reflect on harmony in the public sphere by engaging with entertaining scenes of Nero’s corporeal eccentricity. 

Nina Rowe is a Professor of Medieval Art History at Fordham University. Her books include The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2011) and The Illuminated World Chronicle: Tales from the Late Medieval City (Yale UP, 2020), as well as co-edited volumes, most recently: Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past(Fordham UP, 2019). She has held fellowships from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she served as President of the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), 2020-2023.

Nero and the Doctors, in a World Chronicle manuscript, southern Germany, 1402. (Image: New York, New York Public Library, Spencer MS 38, fol. 341v.)

Clemens Krümmel, April 2, 2024 at 5pm ET

The 389th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, April 2, 2024 at 5 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. PLEASE NOTE THE 5 PM STARTING TIME.

Clemens Krümmel on Feliks Topolski – Expressionism Home and Abroad

With the Polish-British painter and draughtsman Feliks Topolski (1907–1989), I want to present an  extremist of reportage drawing, illustration and press graphics who was very prolific in his lifetime and has been almost forgotten in the course of the last forty years. I’ll focus on his travel books and his independently published „Chronicles“ (1953–1979), a pictorial and political record of almost three decades of world history that was available as a very affordable artist’s edition.

Clemens Krümmel (*1964) is an art historian and translator, lives in Berlin and teaches at Kunsthochschule Kassel.

Image from Topolski’s Chronicles, vol, XIII, 1965.

Alex Beringer, March 26, 2024 at 7pm ET

The 388th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 26, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. 

Alex Beringer on Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth Century US Comic Strip.

Alex Beringer will discuss his new book Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth Century US Comic Strip, the first full-length study of US comic strips from the period prior to the rise of the Sunday newspaper comics. Where current histories assume that nineteenth-century US comics consisted solely of single-panel political cartoons or simple “proto-comics,” Lost Literacies introduces readers to an ambitious group of artists and editors who were intent on experimenting with the storytelling possibilities of the sequential strip.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, figures such as artist Frank Bellew and editor T. W. Strong introduced sequential comic strips into humor magazines and precursors to graphic novels known as “graphic albums.” These early works reached audiences in the tens of thousands. Their influences ranged from Walt Whitman’s poetry to Mark Twain’s travel writings to the bawdy stage comedies of the Bowery Theatre. Most importantly, they featured new approaches to graphic storytelling that went far beyond the speech bubbles and panel grids familiar to us today.

A gallery of selected images from Lost Literacies can be viewed at the site linked here.

Alex Beringer is Professor of English at the University of Montevallo. He has held fellowships with the University of Cambridge and the American Antiquarian Society. His research concerns nineteenth-century American visual culture, literature, and comics. Find him at www.alexjberinger.com.

David Claypool Johnston, “Trollopania,” in Scraps, Vol. 4. (Boston- D.C. Johnston, 1833)

Lee Marrs, March 19, 2024 at 7pm ET

The 387th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 19, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Lee Marrs: Career-Hopping for Survival

A survey of survival skills for future writer/artists will be presented based on Lee’s many careers as an illustrator, cartoonist, movie storyboard artist, animation director, games art director and college instructor.

Best known for The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (nominated for a 2017 Eisner Award), Lee Marrs was a frequent contributor to underground comics and one of the “founding mommies” of the Wimmen’s Comix collective, as well as Gay Comics. In 1982 she received the comics industry’s Inkpot Award. In 2022, CXC gave her the Transformative Work Award “For Changing the Course of Comics and Cartooning History”. 

Using a more illustrative style, she created short futuristic graphic tales for Heavy Metal magazine, and Epic Illustrated. After assisting on Prince Valiant, Lil’ Orphan Annie and other comic strips, she drew tales for DC’s Plop, Weird Mystery and House of Secrets. But most of her mainstream comics work was as a writer, for Unicorn Isle (1983), Wonder Woman : Annual (1989), Viking Glory: the Viking Prince (1991), Zatanna: Come Together (1993), Faultlines(1997) and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight: Stalking (1998).

For most of her career she ran Lee Marrs Artwork, a digital design & animation company. An Emmy Award-winning art director, she pioneered in 2D digital animation in the early 1980s. Her clients have included Disney/ABC, Apple Computer, IBM, Time Warner Inc., Children’s Television Workshop, Nickelodeon, Electronic Arts, and MTV. Beginning in 2000, Marrs taught at Berkeley City College. She served as Multimedia Chair there until she retired in 2014, glad to have spent time out of the cold.

Peter Blegvad, March 12, 2024 at 5pm EST

The 386th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 at 5 pm EST. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. Please note 5 pm starting time for this event.

Peter Blegvad on his book, ‘Milk: Through a Glass Darkly’

For over fifty years, since he was in his early twenties, Peter Blegvad has been collecting quotations about milk, the primary substance of nutrition and of wonder. All the while his belief in the numinousness of milk has been compounded, that in its opacity and fluid density it is a thing full of both meaning and mystery.
Blegvad will talk about his book, ‘Milk: Through a Glass Darkly’ which gathers these quotations into a mosaic, or literary collage, consisting of almost three hundred and fifty separate passages that consider light, smell, writing, mothers, fathers, colour, nothingness, regression, gender, race, food, cattle, ectoplasm, anti-matter, the moon, sex and insanity amongst other things. 

Born in New York, Peter Blegvad lives in London with his wife, the painter Chloë Fremantle. He has been making music since the mid-1970s with Slapp Happy, Faust, Henry Cow, John Greaves, the Golden Palominos, John Zorn, Andy Partridge and others. As a broadcaster, he created many dozens of ‘eartoons’ (audio cartoons) and several radio plays for BBC Radio 3. His comic strip, ‘The Book of Leviathan’, is published in the UK by Sort Of Books, in the US by Overlook Press, and is also available in Mandarin, Cantonese and French. In 2000 he was awarded the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille by the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Paris, and in 2011 was elected president of the London Institute of ’Pataphysics. 

Nicholas Meyer, March 5, 2024 at 6pm ET

The 386th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 5, 2024 at 6pm EST. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Star Trek’s  Nicholas Meyer talks Will Eisner’s “The Plot” and more. The director/author in conversation with Danny Fingeroth. A Will Eisner Week online event

Multitalented NICHOLAS MEYER is best known for his work on classic movies including Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan and best-selling novels like The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Among his many works is the 2019 Sherlock Holmes novel, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, which centers around the infamous, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which is, sadly, still influential. In Peculiar Protocols, Meyer notes that “I am indebted to ‘The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ a graphic novel by the late Will Eisner.” Discussing the influence Eisner’s final work had on the book and on his career, Meyer will tonight talk with Will Eisner Week Chair DANNY FINGEROTH (Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin) about the role Eisner’s and others’ comics have played in his personal and creative development, about the graphic adaptation of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and other fascinating recollections and observations from his amazing life and career.

NICHOLAS MEYER is the author of five Sherlock Holmes novels, including The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year. He’s a screenwriter and film director, responsible for The Day After and Time After Time, as well as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country among many others. A native of New York City, he lives in Santa Monica, California.

DANNY FINGEROTH, Chair of Will Eisner Week, is a popular culture critic and historian. Having spent many years as a writer and editor at Marvel Comics, he’s written books including 2019’s A Marvelous Life (from St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan), a biography of controversial Marvel Universe co-creator Stan Lee. Fingeroth’s newest book is 2023’s Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin (from Chicago Review Press), a look at this bizarre, history-shattering figure. For more: http://www.dannyfingeroth.com

Paul Kirchner, February 27, 2024 at 7pm ET

The 384th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 7 pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. 

Paul Kirchner: Fifty Years of Visual Storytelling

Paul Kirchner will talk about his 50-year career in visual storytelling. He will discuss the artists he has worked with, projects he has worked on, lessons he has learned, and the ways the comics landscape has changed during that period. He will discuss finding one’s style, creative blocks, Sturgeon’s Law, individual versus collaborative projects, the relationship of panel and page, and other topics. He will talk about his inclination toward surrealism and wordless storytelling and will share his speculations on the nature of the creative process.

Born in New Haven, CT in 1952, Paul Kirchner attended the Cooper Union School of Art with the ambition to eventually draw comic books. He dropped out during his junior year in 1973 when he began getting work in that field, penciling horror stories for DC and working as an assistant to Tex Blaisdell, Ralph Reese, and Wally Wood. He wrote and drew the Dope Rider comic for High Times magazine and created the regular feature “the bus” for Heavy Metal. He collaborated with the Dutch mystery writer Janwillem van de Wetering on the graphic novel Murder by Remote Control. In the 1980s he began doing more mainstream illustration, much of it comics related. He did design work for the toy industry, as well as writing and illustrating comics that were included with toys such as the Eagle Force and Dino-Riders. For Telepictures magazines, he produced comics about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ThunderCats, GoBots, and Power Rangers. He worked as a freelance storyboard artist, eventually accepting a position as an art director at a New York agency, a job he held for six years before going back to freelancing. After his freelance work dried up about ten years ago, he returned to comics, producing new Dope Rider strips for High Times and new bus strips for a second collection. The French publisher Editions Tanibis has put out six hardcover collections of Kirchner’s work: the bus, the bus 2, Awaiting the Collapse, A Fistful of Delirium, Hieronymus & Bosch, and Murder by Remote Control, in French and English language editions.