Guest Strip: Derik A. Badman

Derik A. Badman is a librarian in Philadelphia, PA. He has been blogging at madinkbeard.com since 2004, primarily about comics. His webcomic “Things Change” has been running at the same site since 2006, and pdfs of it are available for free download.

Badman’s comics recently appeared in Abstract Comics (Fantagraphics, 2009). Today on the Cross Hatch, he shares with you all a brief autobiographical vignette. Enjoy!

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Diario de Oaxaca by Peter Kuper

Diario de Oaxaca
By Peter Kuper
PM Press

A sketchbook is a secret thing, a collection of unfinished and often times abandoned ideas never intended for public consumption—at least not in their current state. It’s a private space for honing one’s craft and workshopping, separating good ideas from those best left unexplored

Over the years, these parameters have loosened, particularly in the comics community, where the sketchbooks of artists like Robert Crumb and Chris Ware have been collected and bound and put on store shelves next to their most meticulously crafted works. While subject to a good deal of cherry picking and editorial oversight, these collected sketchbooks still hold a similar appeal as their predecessors, offering a still relatively candid glimpse into their creators’ thought process.

The whole space is complicated a bit further with the introduction of the “sketchbook diary,” a book, which, while lacking some of the polish of a more deliberately produced title, often feels as though it were conceived of as being a marketable title from its inception.

It’s hard to say precisely what Peter Kuper’s motives were in the creation of Diario de Oaxaca, but given the amount of work clearly invested in nearly ever page, it seems rather likely that, fairly early on in the process, it became clear that, given the right publisher, the work would eventually be released for public consumption.

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The Cross Hatch Dispatch 11.11.09

[Above, Isabel Rucker unfurls. Below, rollin' up the Dispatch.]

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King Con 2009: The Cross Hatch Rehash

Expectations, I think, were largely low in the lead up to the first ever King Con. I had told a number of people that I would be spending the better part of the weekend in Brooklyn, observing the event between the three rather spread out panels I had signed up to moderate. Reactions were generally guarded, with questions along the lines of, “does New York really need another comic convention?”

Fair enough. After all, this was the debut show, and as such, the maiden King Con seemed to have been plagued by a number of the trappings that tend to befall first-time events, not the least of which was the seemingly haphazard publicity push that didn’t really seem to hit critical mass until the final days leading up to the convention.

[More Photos]

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The Cross Hatch Dispatch 11.9.09

[Above, Daryl Cagle takes a shot at the middle east. Below, foaming at the Dispatch.]

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Interview: Jerry Moriarty Pt. 1 [of 4]

In a sense, Art Spiegelman and Jerry Moriarty were a perfect fit. One strode to create sequential art on-par with the era’s finest literature. The other toiled quietly, bridging the once-seemingly infinite chasm between contemporary fine art and comics.

What Spiegelman has accomplished in his post-Raw life is one of the best known stories in contemporaty indie comics. Moriarty, on the other hand, has lived a fairly quite life, content to teach students at SVA, where he’s been a professor since 1973, while producing work largely for his own satisfaction. Over the past two decades, the mention of his name to even the staunchest of indie comics fans was likely to elicit little more than a well-timed head scratch.

Now 71, Moriarty has become the unlikely subject of renewed interest, thanks primarily to Buenaventura’s gorgeous hardcover reprint of Jack Survives, a hand-painted comic originally serialized in Raw, back in the early 80s.

Alternative comics hero Chris Ware penned a forward for the book, and conducted a subsequent interview with the artist for Believer Magazine, which he open by referring to Moriarty as, “one of the great geniuses of the comic strip.” To state that the Jack Survives author is an artist’s artist is something of a wild understatement.

While he doesn’t appear to harbor any ill will toward the industry in which he has maintained a relative level of obscurity, speaking with the artist at SPX, Moriarty does seem to take some pleasure in the new-found buzz surround his decades-old work. He smiles a lot, ready to expound at length on nearly any subject that might arise, insisting all the while, from beneath his bright white, shoulder-length hair that he feels far younger than his 71 years.

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Guest Strip: Paul K. Tunis

Paul K. Tunis died at sea in the late 1800s. When making comics he tries to find unconventional things to draw on e.g. people, manila envelopes, transparencies. He recently completed his MFA in fiction at Sarah Lawrence and currently is working on an illustrated novel entitled Bumblebee Physics. He finds three-legged dogs funny even though he knows people think that’s mean. His comics, writing and disgruntlings can be found on “Death by Orphans: A Blog for Velociraptor Enthusiasts” [www.deathbyorphans.com]. Also, he sneezes when he eats carrots.

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Congratulations to the Winners!

Here are the winners of the indie comics costume contest:

Congratulations to you all!

FYI: The polls officially closed at Midnight. However, the quiz is probably still up this morning, since it needs to be closed manually by the polling site sodahead.com. All votes made after Midnight were not counted.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our first costume contest. You rock. To everyone else, start planning your own indie comics costume for next year’s contest!

- Sarah Morean

I’ll Be Moderating Three Panels at King Con This Weekend

This weekend marks the first-ever King Con, a mid-sized gathering of some of New York’s finest cartooning talents, based in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. I’d recommend everyone in the New York and surrounding areas check out the event occurring at the Brooklyn Lyceum, if only to help support a fledgling community comics event, but of course my interests run a bit deeper, this time out: I’ll be moderating three panels throughout the weekend.

The first, set for 1PM on Sunday, is an examining of Smith Magazine’s Pekar Project, featuring the four primary artists, and, of course, our man, Harvey Pekar. Here’s the official synopsis:

AN AMERICAN SPLENDOR ONLINE: MEET HARVEY & THE PEKAR PROJECT: SATURDAY 1PM-1:50PM
Harvey Pekar’s been mining the mundane for magic for more than 30 years in his autobiographical American Splendor comics. Now he has teamed with SMITH and four remarkable artists – Tara Seibel, Joseph Remnant, Rick Parker, and Sean Pryor – to create his first ongoing webcomic series. SMITH comics editor Jeff Newelt and The Daily Crosshatch’s Brian Heater talk with Harvey & the artists about what its like for a legendary Luddite to go digital and the artists will each share their favorite working-with-Harvey stories. We’ll also be discussing Pekar’s recent graphic novel adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working with Harvey and artist Joan Reilly.

On Sunday, I’ll be heading up a discussion about the state of comics for kids.

KIDS COMICS: SUNDAY 11AM-11:50AM
Remember that old cliche, “comics aren’t just for kids anymore?” In the era of grownup graphic novels and gritty anti-heroes, are comics for kids at all anymore? Join a new generation of cartoonist creating work with a youth-centric focus as they discuss the past, present, and future of comics for kids. Moderated by Brian Heater the panel will feature Matt Loux, Raina Telgemeier, Dave Roman Sara Varon, and more!

And last, but certainly not least, I’ll be chatting up the great Bob Fingerman on Sunday night.

SPOTLIGHT ON BOB FINGERMAN: SUNDAY 5PM-5:50PM
Alternative cartoonist Bob Fingerman has had a long and *ahem* colorful career. We’ll trace the artist’s career from his early days working for magazines like Screw and Penthouse, to his new illustrated novel, Connective Tissue and comic, From The Ashes. Along the way, we’ll visit Fingerman’s seminal book, Minimum Wage, his early sci-fi graphic novel, White Like She, and, if he let’s us, his stint as a writer for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. Moderated by Brian Heater.

So there you go, something for everyone, right? Come out and say “hi.” Or, if there’s nothing appealing above, you’ll likely find me hanging around that 8-bit Gaming Tournament for the remainder of the weekend.

–BH

Britten and Brülightly by Hannah Berry

Britten and Brülightly
by Hannah Berry
Metropolitan Books

Britten and Brülightly is so good it’s hard to believe it’s Hannah Berry’s first book. Suspenseful, engrossing, beautifully painted, and extremely sad, it seems a book that should at least be Berry’s sophomore effort. Then again, she’s only 25.

Although it got some press, Britten and Brülightly, which was published in April by Metropolitan Books, seems to have sort of slipped under the radar in the U.S. Probably because it is the debut work by a little-known, 25-year-old woman who lives across the ocean in Brighton, England. But it did garner much attention and praise in the U.K., and having read it, I can safely say it deserves all of that commendation. This is undoubtedly one of the best graphic novels I’ve read in a while.

The book tells a classic noir story, following private detective Fernández Britten (who prefers the term “researcher”) as he investigates a suicide case. He has been hired by the fiancé of the deceased man, who is convinced her husband-to-be didn’t kill himself. As Britten unravels the details of the case, the situation becomes increasingly dangerous, violent, and confusing. In the end, the true story involves all the juicy bits of a good noir: blackmail, illegitimate children, more deaths, and a sad, sad truth.

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