Interview: Ryan Alexander-Tanner

Set for a May 1st release, To Teach: The Journey, In Comics marks Bill Ayers’s first foray into the world of sequential art. The book is an adaptation of the writer’s seminal 1993 text, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. Ayers, for better or worse, requires little introduction, particularly in the wake of the last presidential election, in which the Weather Underground co-founder became a well-tread talking point in Sarah Palin’s anti-Obama stump speeches.

The name of Ayers’s collaborator on the graphic novel, however, will no doubt prove unfamiliar to most. The 27-year-old artist first collaborated with Ayers as part of a high school history assignment, transforming an interview with the educator into a short strip.

Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner largely fell out of touch after the project. In the meantime, the artist got a bachelor’s degree and moved to Portland. In 2009, he won a Xeric for his book, Television #1. And when the time came to recruit an artist for To Teach, Alexander-Tanner’s name found its way to the top of Ayers’s list.

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Interview: Graham Annable Pt. 2 [of 4]

Comics have never exactly been a primary focus for Graham Annable. The cartoonist began his professional life as a 2D animator, eventually transitioning into the world of video games. Annable’s career has since swung back around to animation, with the artist joining the staff at Laika Entertainment to storyboard 2009’s stunning Coraline.

Annable’s comics work arose, in a sense, out of his dayjob. Once hand animation became antiquated, he began to draw his own strips in his downtime, work that would eventually evolve into his best known series, Grickle. In 2003, Annable and fellow LucasArts employees released the first issue of the humor anthology, Hickee on Alternative Comics.

In wake of Alternative Comics’ indefinite publishing hiatus, much of Annable’s comics work has gone out of print. Thankfully, Dark Horse has seen fit to collect some of his best strips in the terrifically compiled The Book of Grickle.

[Part One]

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Interview: Bill Ayers Pt. 1 [of 4]

Bill Ayers has led a number of lives in his time on earth. The 65-year-old Illinois native is likely best known as a co-founder of the late-60s revolutionary activist group, The Weather Underground, an aspect of his life that once again thrust him into the spotlight when Sarah Palin and John McCain began bandying about his name in their run against Obama. When Palin tossed out the phrase “paling around with terrorists,” she was almost invariably talking of the then senator’s fellow Chicagoan, Bill Ayers.

For the past 35 years, however, Bill Ayers has been deeply entrenched in education, currently working as a professor at The University of Illinois at Chicago, and penning a number of books on the subject, most famously 1993’s To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. When approached to write an updated edition of that title, Ayers initially balked, and ultimately tossed his publishers a curve ball—he would do an update To Teach, so long as he was allowed to re-imagine the text as a graphic novel.

His publishers conceded, and Ayers nominated Ryan Alexander-Tanner for the project, a young Xeric-winning artist whose name—and work—is likely unfamiliar to even the most studious alternative comics fans. Alexander-Tanner ultimately moved into a recently vacated room in Ayers’s Chicago home, and two began work on what would become To Teach: The Journey, in Comics.

In April both artist and writer will attend the MoCCA Fest to promote the book (due out May 1st). Ayers will appear on the Sequential Activism panel, alongside Peter Kuper, Josh Neufeld, Tom Hart, and Ward Sutton. I will be moderating. Ayers, happily, agreed to discuss the project ahead of the event, calling from his car on the way back home from a political rally in Detroit.

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The Cross Hatch Dispatch 3.15.10

The Cross Hatch Dispatch 3.13.10

[Above a child learns how to read through comic books, below the illiterate Dispatch.]

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Kick It New School: a quick look at kickstarter for cartoonists

Once my darling ex-cartoonist friend Anders made a Kickstarter page to fund his first album I had to take a second look at this Kickstarter thing.  As I write this, his request has been up for one day and already he’s half-way to his goal.  That’s $400 just out of the blue, which completely blows my mind.  Could it be that Anders is very popular and has many rich friends?  Well, not exactly.

Kickstarter is an internet infant, having only been around since April 2009.  If its existence is news to you, I suggest that you read this excellent Publisher’s Weekly article from Terri Heard that illuminates some of the service’s history.  Most interesting to me was that its origins lay in the effort to keep Arrested Development on the air.  Oh, how I wish it had succeeded!

This month’s Wired Magazine also featured Kickstarter in its award-winning Start section.  It reminded me of specific Kickstarter success stories like the Calvin & Hobbes documentary Dear Mr. Watterson which is still openly accepting donations and generating mad cash.  In fact, it’s almost doubled its goal amount through Kickstarter donations.

I’ve lived a number of impulse purchase success stories, including the time I bought an orange coat I totally didn’t need but always receive compliments for wearing.  Basically, I’ve been a big fan of this model even before it existed.  The fact that it’s here now is so remarkable and unbelievable, I hardly appreciated it was real until someone I know well got involved.

Then I remembered an old friend from far away, Box Brown, had already made the Kickstarter system work for him.  Boxy makes the webcomic Bellen! and self-published minis until he won the Xeric to print his graphic novel Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing.  He recently ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that earned him $3,279 to print issues one and two of a new comic series Everything Dies.  We talked over email regarding his experience as a Kickstarter success story.

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Newave: The Underground Comix of the 1980s

Newave: The Underground Comix of the 1980s
Edited by Michael Dowers
Fantagraphics

The near universality of the Internet in the modern age has granted a strange sense of immortality to contemporary art. There’s a feeling that, no matter how minute or trivial a work is, it will be stored for posterity for far beyond the life of its creator, in some form or another. That’s not to say, of course, that work created in this contemporary context is somehow more worthy of preservation than its predecessors—or even that newly created works are built with staying power in mind (heck, many contemporary artists have happily embraced the concept of the ethereal meme), it’s just that it’s hard to imagine creating a work today that one won’t be able to revisit at some point down the road, should it be deemed worth of re-examination.

It is, in many ways, the polar opposite of the approach that drove much of ‘zine and early mini-comix culture. And while the argument can perhaps be made that nearly every artist is—on some level—seeking greater exposure, there’s something romantic in the sense of hyper-specific culture to which such documents cater.  “It makes little difference if fifty or fifty thousand people read them,” Comix World publisher Clay Geerdes writes in 1983’s “The NeWave Manifesto,” reprinted in full in the introduction of this new collection. “Ideas and their expression are the issue, not quantity or quality…Newave is about art, not money.”

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Little Nothings: Uneasy Happiness by Lewis Trondheim

Little Nothings: Uneasy Happiness
By Lewis Trondheim
NBM

At some point, for those lucky enough to realize their dreams, passions morph into careers. A blessing, to be sure, but certainly not entirely devoid of its own built-in curses. The line between love and obligation is often simply a matter of obligatory repetition. It is with that in mind that Lewis Trondheim declared his retirement from the form in 2004. And while deeming his venture dubious would be a touch generous, it speaks to a greater truth in art: transforming a passion into a job oft has the tendency to extinguish that initial spark.

No better is this double-edged sword demonstrated than in the world of the diary strip. Plenty of noble intentions give rise to such things. They can serve as a fantastic tool with which to hone one’s line or pacing or simply help an artist keep track of otherwise fleeting memories. Somewhere along the line, however, such intentions fairly often give way to obligations. Whether for public consumption or private reference, a diary strip holds little value if it’s not maintained.

As with all passions-turned-obligations, the question inevitably arises—has the value of such a pursuit been eclipsed by a sense of responsibility? What value, after all, is there for a reader in a work born of habit? Here, often, is where things get weird, with flights of artificial fancy, or, as is more often the case, simply peter out.

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The Cross Hatch Dispatch 3.8.10

Interview: Graham Annable Pt. 1 [of 4]

I jumped at the opportunity to interview Graham Annable, upon being asked by his new publisher, Dark Horse. We haven’t heard much from Annable on the printed front since the publishing schedule at Alternative Comics slowed to what might be generously referred to as a crawl. In fact, the latest issue of the Annable-helmed Hickee anthology, published in 2008, is the most recent book listed on the publisher’s site, still carrying a big, red “NEW” graphic, atop the homepage.

After a moment, however, something occurred to me—thing is, we’ve never really heard all that much from Graham Annable in this area. He is that rare beast in the world of cartooning—an artist with a really good day job. In fact, he’s had a string of them, having worked in the animation and gaming fields for more than a decade and a half, working for Chuck Jones, LucasArts, and TellTale Games at various points in his career.

Annable is currently employed by Laika Animation—the former Will Vinton Studios, now funded by Nike founder Phil Knight. The cartoonist storyboarded the studio’s first feature—the nearly universally beloved Coraline. Nice work if you can get it, certainly, but its easy to also lament what such successes have meant for us comics readers: fewer Grickle books.

Of course Annable has been doing plenty of peripherally related work in his free time, from his YouTube Grickle Channel to his weekly TellTale strip, Dunk/Dank. Still, it’s hard not to find oneself hoping that any success that might arise from the coming release of Dark Horse’s The Book of Grickle will inspire a whole new spate of Grickle material.

As the author of the book’s introduction, Jeff Smith, will happily attest, there’s something magical in these strips—perfect little snapshots of tragicomedy, drawn deceptively simply by an artist who could clearly craft something more grandiose, given a little more time. But to do so would strip them of some of their immense charm.

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