Ron Regé, March 28, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 357th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 28, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Ron Regé on Gnostic Sophia, Hermeticism, Wonder Woman & The Muse

Ron will discuss the classical concept of The Poet and The Muse, as well as aspects of The Goddess in Gnostic & Hermetic thought, drawing a line through history to the original Wonder Woman of William Moulton Marston – and how interest in such topics has shaped his work over the last decade.

Ron Regé, Jr. is an artist and musician (Lavender Diamond) living in Echo Park, CA.

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Jesse McManus, March 21, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 356th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 21, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Jesse McManus on Drawing from the Void, or, A Cartoonist’s Conundrum. 

Presenting an archive going back to the early ‘90s into the future. I’ll be charting my personal comics-specific evolution, inspirations and trials up to the present day projects in progress.

Jesse McManus, b.1986, grew up in Minneapolis, went to school in Chicago, was unspooled by the Cartoon House in Brooklyn, and now lives and works as a designer/animator in Portland, OR.

Banned Comics: Old Problems, New Forms [A Will Eisner Week event], March 7, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 355th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Banned Comics: Old Problems, New Forms. A Will Eisner Week event with Jeff Smith, Jerry Craft, Denis Kitchen, Jeff Trexler, Michael Dooley and Danny Fingeroth.

Will Eisner believed that artistic freedom —in his own work and that of other cartoonists—was of utmost importance. He was an early ally of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Eisner lived through the controversies over comics of the ’40s, ‘50s, and until his 2005 death, and made use of new freedoms for his own graphic novel work. With the current controversies over graphic novels in schools just the latest in the decades-long battle over free speech vs. community standards, comics historians and creators including Jeff Smith (Bone), Jerry Craft (New Kid), Denis Kitchen (Kitchen Sink Press),Jeff Trexler (acting director, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) and Michael Dooley (The Education of a Comics Artist) discuss comics censorship over the decades, and what we can learn from Eisner’s career and work to help deal with these latest challenges. Danny Fingeroth (Will Eisner Studios) moderates.

The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium is sponsored, in part, by the Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation.

Deadcrow Comix Collective, Feb. 28, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 354th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held live and in-person on Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 7pm ET at Parsons The New School in the Bark Room, lobby of 2 West 13th Street, NYC – and also streamed ONLINE VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for the online event. Free and open to the public.

Deadcrow Comix

A Faction of the Deadcrow Comix Corporation that includes Jade Mar, Sam Seigel, Chaia Startz, Floyd Tangeman and Virgil Warren will elaborate, expand and expound upon the history and future of Deadcrow publications -simultaneously imbibing individual cartooning exploits and philosophies.

The Deadcrow Comix (DC Comix) Corporation is a shadowy network of American underground cartoonists and dreamwalkers, originating in San Francisco, California circa 2008. 

CF, Feb. 21, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 353rd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

CF on Clean Sweep – Self-Destructive Scroll Continuum

“Scrolling” has become a dominant mode of interacting with media. When something is posted to the internet it is hard to remove. It has the implication of ephemera but in fact is “carved in silicon”. 

When comic strips are printed on a strip of receipt paper, the images are degraded by the printer, and the paper slowly self destructs and falls apart over a decade. Scrolls are one of the first portable document formats, with a kind of built-in privacy feature. The images are hidden inside until you get to them, no flipping through in the bookstore. 

Comics are typically printed on a page wherein we may see a bit of what’s coming, and flipping pages with eye movement from the bottom to the top creates an implicit rhythm of its own. In the scroll, the rhythm becomes a continuum determined only by panel shapes and the spaces between them. 

CF is based in NY. He has exhibited internationally and published with Picturebox, Anthology Editions, Mania Press, and Landfill Editions among others. Forthcoming books include a collection of early work from NYRB and a book for Breakdown press. “Clean Sweep” is a series of scrolls by different artists printed on receipt paper. He self publishes a monthly one-sheet “Causeway” available through Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/333cf). In addition to drawing, he makes lamps from metal, acrylic, and folded paper, as well as electronic instruments from scratch that are used in solo sound project “Universal Cell Unlock”

Vanessa Conte, February 14, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 352nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Vanessa Conte: Naked Eyes

Vanessa Conte will show work by artists whose glorious and grotesque visions of the body have inspired her visual storytelling practice. Artists who explore sexuality through autobiographical narrative and horror will be featured to contextualize the themes of her most recent comics.

Vanessa Conte is a graphic artist and painter from Yonkers, NY, who has been exhibiting her work in galleries and museums internationally since 2004. Her first publication was a book of humorous and extreme erotic short stories in 2016, and she soon after fell in love with the form and genres of comics. Conte still exhibits paintings but is most passionate about making drawings for the intimate book format. Her zines have been published by Random Man Editions, NY, innen, Zürich, and Halle für Kunst, Luneberg.

Brian Maidment, Feb. 7, 2023 at 5pm ET

The 351st meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 5pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public. Please note 5pm starting time.

Brian Maidment: ‘Beyond Pickwick – Robert Seymour and late Regency caricature in Britain’.

‘If known at all, Robert Seymour is remembered as the first illustrator of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836). He was, nonetheless, a well-established and prolific comic draughtsman in his own right by the 1830s. His varied career is visible enough to give some sense of what it meant to be a struggling jobbing comic artist at a moment when the market for illustrated cheap print was expanding rapidly. Seymour produced single plate etched and engraved caricatures, lithographs and a mass of small wood engraved illustrations. By the time of his disastrous collaboration with Dickens, he was beginning to publish series of plates under his own name which satirized contemporary manners. These series brought the traditions of exaggeration and the grotesque from caricature into alignment with newer ideas of social observation. This paper will give over an illustrated overview of his often striking and accomplished work’

Brian Maidment is Emeritus Professor of the History of Print at Liverpool John Moores University. His recent research has centred on down market comic prints and cheap illustrated publications between 1820 and 1850. His book Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820-1850 (2013) offered an overview of down-market comic illustration in this period. His most recent book is Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture, which forms the first full length study of Seymour.   

Margot Ferrick, Jan. 31, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 350th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

Margot Ferrick: Sweet Emergence

Trying to tie together the narratives which have been the most important to me over the past year, mainly Takashi Ishii’s Sweet Whip, Shindo L’s Emergence, Fromsoft games, and some fragments of Catholicism.

Margot Ferrick was born in 1988 on Long Island and now lives in Illinois. Their published work includes Yours (2dcloud) and Dognurse (Perfectly Acceptable Press), both of which were included in Best American Comics. They have also done comics and illustrations for Vice, Lagon Revue and Gucci.

Victor Cayro, January 24, 2023 at 7pm ET

The 349th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, January 24, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

The Outlaw God Victor Cayro

Drawing, tools-methods-application. Secrets, tips, Learning techniques, habits, diet, etcetera, inspiration. Art Life.  Perhaps some dos and don’ts. 

Victor Cayro had been drawing since 4 years old. He loves artwork and laughing with his audience. Wants to sell out but their soul won’t let them. Victor Cayro met Joe Rogan irl , Rogan scolded security as Cayro walked away for allowing him to get so close.

Life long Artist in comics, illustration, apparel, 3D

Known for Kramers Ergot and Bittersweet Romance.

Spring 2023 schedule of events

All events are online. Please register by email, one week before event, to comicssymposium@gmail.com. Talks start at 7pm ET, except for Feb. 7th and May 9th that begin at 5pm ET.