Closing Down the Blog

It's with much consideration and no small feeling of regret that I'm typing out the last post I'll publish on this blog. This thing started out as an idea to write a travel blog back in 2012 as I was preparing for a trip that never transpired, a year abroad studying illustration in Edinburgh. It leapt to life with the calamity of the Aurora Theatre shooting, and built some traction as a place for my thoughts on comics and cultural matters, as well as periodic art school updates. And it's fallen into disuse and disrepair in the past few years as other projects and undertaking have absorbed my time and energy. It's time to retire this writing space.

I thank all of you who have been regular or irregular readers over the years. Your visits to this site have registered as numbers in my analytics feed and have encouraged me in my writing with the knowledge that a few people out there care enough to check and see what I think about...stuff. It's been a great platform for a few serious rants. It's been an excellent place to pen replies to other posts I read and to engage friends of mine in discourse in a sort of internet-age analog to the Letters to the Editor pages that are disappearing with the newspaper industry. It's challenged me to research and build arguments and not fly off the cuff about things I could easily be reactionary about. I've had people let me know that things I've written here have challenged them, gotten them and people around them thinking and talking in directions they might not otherwise have taken. I think it's made me a better writer, but so far I'm the only one who's told me that.

By no means am I going to stop writing; I'm merely pulling the plug on this particular platform. Any new blog posts and artwork I produce will be published first and foremost on my professional site at www.ajkomics.ca. Selections of what's written there will make their way over to my Medium profile at www.medium.com/@ajkomics; I haven't done anything with that platform in years, and it's worth trying out again. This website will remain here, dormant, as a lingering archive of what I've written. I'll dust off a few pieces from this archive and re-post them to both the AJKomics.ca blog and to Medium as a way of introducing a ready body of content to these new platforms and hopefully sparking some interest in what I have, and have had, to say.

And that's that. I'm turning out the lights here. I bid you all a very fond farewell; I'll see ya out in the Grid.

Cheers!

Asher

"Symbols and Censors" - Comics, Semiotics, and Islam

I have spent most of my day talking about comics and religion. It's been brilliant, and I am utterly exhausted.

I was invited last term by one of my professors to help him deliver a lecture on Islam and media, a lecture we both knew would need to touch on Islam and cartoons but the weight of which we couldn't fully anticipate prior to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. The video I'm posting is the audio and slides from the lecture I delivered earlier today in the Theology & Religion Department of Durham University, and I have to say I'm rather proud of it. My ideas for this talk came together in all the right ways, and I was able to tie my portion of the lecture seamlessly into what Prof. Davies was talking about prior to me taking the podium. It went off without a hitch (except for some projector issues near the beginning, so I apologize for the slow start; it picks up around 1:20, I promise).

In this lecture I tackle first and foremost the matter of censorship, both in the lecture hall and as it pertains to depictions of Muhammad in modern media. I look at the prophet in animation and then in comics, before moving on to discuss some of the visual functions of the comics medium and connecting visual abstraction as presented by McCloud to identity as defined by religious symbols. After a brief comparison of the idea of bodily representation in Christianity and Islam I close with some thoughts on the human drive as meaning-making, cultural animals and the role of censorship as we create our history. I hope you enjoy it, hope the sound quality's alright, and I hope to hear your thoughts and questions about what I'm saying.


A couple of notes. First, I inadvertently flipped McCloud's "perceived" and "received" taxonomy. McCloud presents them as precisely the opposite of what I've presented. Something to keep in mind. Second, The 99 has nothing whatsoever to do with Marco Polo. My brain made that up and inserted it into my notes; my apologies to Dr. Naif. In the stories, the Noor Stones do indeed travel to the Far East by the Silk Road, but not by the person I have suggested.

We also had an excellent gathering of students at Josephine Butler College this evening for a "Global Voices" forum, at which I was asked to kickstart discussion around Charlie Hebdo and the matter of free speech. That conversation went in all kinds of interesting directions and I'm sorry to have not recorded it, but know that it happened, that young minds are actively, that we're trying to make sense of what it means to speak freely in a modern, global context. This event was particularly encouraging for me after chatting earlier with a friend about The Free Speech University Rankings in the UK, in which Durham received an amber traffic light (middling grade) for a diversity and equality in which the "Definition of racial harassment includes the ‘display of offensive material’." We have a tendency, it seems, to be vague about what materials we consider offensive, while our Students' Union places no restrictions on speech. Thanks, guys. For more of my thoughts on encountering (almost) censorship of cartoons in my work at Durham, take a read of this post from January on the other blog.

Reblogged: Sacred & Sequential Statement on Charlie Hebdo News

As many of you know, I work with Sacred & Sequential on matters of comics and religion. Yesterday I took part as our group crafted an official response to the horrific acts of violence against the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, an event that has whipped the internet into a fervour in defense of art, satire, and free speech. We at Sacred & Sequential sought to make it clear that, as important as that conversation is to both the field of journalism and the comics/cartoon medium, just as vital is recognizing the impact that this tragedy is having on religion and the religious.

The following is a public statement by the Sacred and Sequential group:

Nothing can justify the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. Some of the cartoons published by the magazine were offensive and at times deemed Islamophobic, but that in no way legitimates violence. Charlie Hebdo had the right to publish what it did under the protection of free speech. Just as freedom of speech did not guarantee the victims of the attack immunity to criticism, the right to dissent does not include murder.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s killings, the response has been varied. New Yorkers took to Union Square to offer their support in an impromptu vigil. Cartoonists such as Sarah McIntyre and Carlos Latuff, politicians such as Barack Obama and David Cameron, and pundits across the planet have offered their support and condolences to the victims’ loved ones. Among those who have voiced their sadness and outrage are Muslim individuals and organizations from all over the world, such as the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA.

Others’ responses have been of a more combative tenor. Internationally, and on a far too familiar pattern, an imaginary “Islam,” simplistically conceived as a monolithic, murderous, West-hating, and terrorist ideology, has been blamed for the attacks. In some places, the response has not been limited to words but has spilled over into violent acts perpetrated against a number of sacred spaces and places of worship. Several French mosques and Muslim prayer halls have been subject to attacks, placing many innocent worshipers in the line of retaliatory fire for the actions of a select few.

“Islam” did not do this; adherents to a particular, marginal, and extreme interpretation of what Islam is and what it means to be a Muslim did. They do not represent the planet’s more than one billion self-identifying Muslims. Neither the Qur’an nor the traditions attributed to the Prophet of Islam uniformly oppose illustrations nor modern comics and cartooning. Moreover, wherever and however they are published, comics as a medium has no innate aversion to religion but, instead, is a fertile site of opportunity and engagement with all faiths and beliefs. We must conclude that these events cannot be attributed to Islam as a religion nor to comics as a medium. Protecting this art and its artists is just as necessary as protecting Islam and Muslims from reduction to ideological extremism.

Art by Sarah McIntyre
(http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/)

Gnosticism in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier", and Other Stuff (like zombies!)

It's always a bit of an adventure tackling a topic you really know next to nothing about. When Canadian lit critic Jeet Heer fired up his Twitter essay machine yesterday and starting writing about Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a Gnostic fable, I knew I should respond. I also knew that I knew squat about Gnosticism, so basically there was a lot of of knowing about knowing about knowing going on and I figured I should write something on it. The brief essay I produced is published on Sacred & Sequential's website, along with all of Jeet's original thoughts on the matter. He makes some excellent points about the way the film fundamentally altered Hydra's role in the Captain America narrative, potentially even changing the nature of the narrative itself. I'm not entirely in agreement with Jeet there, but they're ideas worth discussing. Read it, give it a like, come back here and we'll talk.

In the realm of "other stuff", I've finally justified the name of this blog. If you pop on over to www.ajkomics.ca, there is empirical proof that I am now in England and painting watercolour horizons. Or at least, a watercolour horizon.

And if you catch this in the next hour-and-a-half, head over to Kickstarter and give AH Comics a last-ditch boost in their crowdfunding for the wicked cool zombie-head t-shirt that Adam Gorham designed for them. It's a rad shirt. You should buy one.

Crossing the Pond: A Cartoonist Abroad

This blog is about to become, heaven forbid, exactly what it was created to be...

A travel blog.

As has been mentioned before, I started this blog anticipating a year-long trip to Scotland that never happened. During the summer of 2012, with my travel plans in limbo, the Aurora theatre shooting in Colorado happened, leading me to write my first post, and after that this blog became...something else. A comics, arts, and culture blog, I suppose. It did, however, retained the sappy, romanticized title given it by an art student fantasizing about watercolour sketching on the highlands. So, there's that.

Now I've come full-circle, and the year abroad is actually happening! I landed in Manchester on Sunday morning, and I've settled into the little northern town of Durham for a year studying medieval English literature and theology at Durham University. It's the perfect place to study, really. Not only is Durham home to a world-class literature program, but the town exudes an oldness, a tangible air of history I have never encountered before. The town is overlooked by two monolithic structures left behind by Norman builders of the 11th century: the famed Durham cathedral and castle, stone towers of rugged and imperious beauty. It's like nowhere I've ever lived before, and it's all kinds of inspiring.

Durham from the train station viewpoint

While I may be writing more on here about my travels than I normally would, by no means does that mean comics will be left out of the equation. For starters, I'll still be drawing. Durham University's student newspaper (or at least, one of them), The Palatinate, has hired me on as editorial cartoonist for the year, so as those pieces are finished and published you'll see them appearing on my other blog (the one with all the art) at www.ajkomics.ca. I finished my first cartoon for them Wednesday morning; you should be seeing updates shortly, and I'm pretty damn excited to see what the year holds in store, particularly for the political side of my work.

Life of a mobile cartoonist; given enough time, every hotel room becomes a studio

Also on the calendar are visits to the British Cartoon Archive housed at Canterbury's University of Kent, where I'll be interviewing head librarian Dr. Nicholas Hiley about his role in the archive's digitisation project, and to the Thought Bubble comic art festival in Leeds in November. So, there will be comic news, and reviews, and likely a bit of fangirling over people I meet and things I find. Stay tuned; more from Durham coming your way shortly.

Cheers!

Asher

My humble lodgings at Josephine Butler College. How I love it.

New Websites and Research Plans

It was never my plan to abandon this blog and all you wonderful readers entirely, but unfortunately, that seems to have happened. I just don't have the time to maintain an online presence in five places at once, and this blog has been pushed to a back burner as I've focused on posting daily visual content to Off the Sketchpad. I don't know how many of you are following that blog. I bought a new domain and everything for the site, and now it's starting to feel like my internet home, at least more than it did. You can now visit the site, and keep tabs on my various projects, new pieces, and whatever beer I'm drinking as I read new additions to my bookshelf, at www.ajkomics.ca.

That's not the only new domain announcement I have! Clearly, I've been away far too long... Sacred & Sequential has launched our new website at www.sacredandsequential.org! We're all very excited about this. I had a draft blog post from way back when sitting, unfulfilled, that read,"even if the site doesn't look like much yet, we are developing more content" and now Voila! the site is full of content. A. David Lewis, the mastermind behind Sacred & Sequential, has done a superb job of gathering religion-and-comics-focused articles together into a formidable archive on the site. You can find all our stuff in one place: information on the ISIS death fatwa issued against The 99 creator Dr. Naif Al Mutawa; an interview with Dr. Christine Hoff Kraemer concerning Alan Moore's spiritual philosophy, her interactions with the famed comics writer and Magus, and the "gap in Moore scholarship"; and news on courses in the areas of religion and comics (preferably overlapping), such this one being offered by Dr. Jeffrey Brackett at Ball State University. All this and much, much more. Suffice it to say I have a lot of reading to do to get myself caught up.

In other news, I've pulled out of the 3rd global conference on The Graphic Novel at Oxford. Which is something I never thought I'd hear myself say, that I was letting go of the opportunity to present research at Oxford, yet here I am. It's the downside of being both a student and an independent scholar; when an $1100 conference opportunity comes your way, you either get a grant or you don't go. So that's a shame. BUT...the research planned for that project will continue, and will pick up speed when I return from my year abroad and can settle in again with proper resources and all of my Digital Humanities comrades here in Kelowna. For those of you in the dark, the plans to which I'm referring involve encoding Canadian "Golden Age" comics, the black & white classics known fondly as the "Canadian Whites", using John Walsh's Comic Book Markup Language. Initially, those plans involved only one title, cartoonist Adrian Dingle's Nelvana of the Northern Lights, recently collected and reprinted in a gorgeous hardcover volume by Canadian comics historians Rachel Richey and Hope Nicholson. Hope and Rachel were wonderfully supportive when I pitched them my idea back in March. Now, with Rachel working on a reprint of Johnny Canuck and Hope tackling the classic Brok Windsor, my idea is...evolving. I'm stepping away from it for about a year while I study in England, and you'll see a new and more fully developed iteration of it sometime down the road. So many ideas, so many grant applications to write...

I think that brings us at least somewhat up to date. I'll try not to be AFK for so long this time. I'm sure I can think of something else to write about. There's always something.

Cheers!
Asher

Sacred & Sequential at the Kelowna Art Gallery!

As a few of you are aware, I'm a part of a scholarly group called Sacred & Sequential, intent on exploring the intersection of religion and the comics art form. A. David Lewis brought me onto this project back in the winter with the group of gathering a scholarly community around the medium and its confluence with religious scholarship. At this point I'm pirating words from my LinkedIn profile (there are only so many ways to describe our mission), but our aim is to provide informed analysis and nuanced commentary on the topic of religion as it appears in or in relation to these graphic narratives. As both a cartoonist and academic I've got a unique toolset in this field of study; I can use the comics form as a pedagogical tool to present ideas visually. I see great value in creating a common ground in form between the subject and the critical discourse. Not to harp on a perhaps overused piece of comics theory, but Scott McCloud has used educational comics to great effect in the past. There's a lot of teaching potential in creating a visual accompaniment to textual material, and that's exactly what A. Dave and I are up to right now. He's dsitilled a portion of his dissertation into eight pages of tightly scripted goodness, and I get to put my pens to it and turn into panels and stuff. And now, for...

...some great news! I submitted this project a month back to the Kelowna Art Gallery's Superheroes and Supervillains show, and it's been accepted! So not only will the comic go up on Emory University's culture and religion blog Sacred Matters by summer's end, but come January 2015 you can go see the original page on display in Kelowna, BC among numerous other works of both superheroic and villainous disposition. It's going to be one heck of a show. Bring your capes.

If you'd like to see more of what Sacred & Sequential has done thus far, I suggest you check out Beth Davies-Stofka's article on comics and the Bible, which was recently picked up by the Huffington Post. We've got a variety of different projects in the works; you can follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sacredandsequential, and I shall do my utmost to keep you appraised here as those works come to fruition.

Sacred & Sequential on Twitter:
A. David Lewis
David McConeghy
Jeff Brackett
Elizabeth Coody
Michael J. Altman (Sacred Matters)
Jason Tondro
Christine Kraemer
James F. McGrath
Kori Pacyniak
Dan Clanton
Jeff Jackson
Andrew Tripp

...and others, but it's hard to keep track of all of us.

Cheers!

It's a Beautiful, Crazy Life

Well hey there. I missed you guys, whoever you are. Ladies. Gentlemen. Everyone else.

It's been a crazy...month? Couple of months? It's been a while, any way you slice it. A lot has happened; let me fill you in.

NEWS!! It appears that I will be finishing my English minor at Durham University in the UK next year. I'm still waiting for the affirmative from the last stage of the application process, but at this point things are looking good. It's a daunting prospect; Durham's English department is currently the highest rated in the UK, surpassing both Cambridge and Oxford. I'll keep you posted on how that goes, and with luck I'll be writing to you from England in the Fall.

The first Sacred & Sequential post is up on Sacred Matters! I haven't written much here about the work I'm doing with S&S; I'll try and elaborate on it in the near future. We are, as you can read in brief at the bottom of Beth Davies-Stofka's article, a consortium of scholars working together to build a conversation around the intersection of religion and comics. I was honoured to have Dr. A. David Lewis ask me to join the project last year, and Beth's essay on Genesis in comics is the first published material to come directly out of this enterprise. I can't give too much away, but there will be more material appearing on Sacred Matters in the next couple months. Keep a weather eye on it. Also, thanks to Michael J. Altman for giving us a space online to publish the beginnings of this project; it's pleasure to be working with you.

Some of you may be following me on Twitter, and if that is the case then you are aware that I'll be traveling to Chicago in mid-April to present my paper Out of a Diasporic Metropolis at the PCA/ACA national conference. This prospect still terrifies me. I have a ton of editing left to do (but sshhh...don't tell anyone at the PCA), a hatchet job of about 5000 words to bring the paper down to a journal-appropriate length. I'm playing the optimist here and hoping to get published. We'll see if that goes anywhere. As it turns out, applying for a travel grant is actually a hell of a process. It's quite the Catch-22, in fact: in order to apply, one must submit a confirmed flight itinerary, which you only get once you buy your tickets, which you can't afford to be buying at all unless you get the grant. Quite an experience. I'm still waiting to hear about the grant; until then, I'll keep pecking away at this paper in hopes that I won't actually have to sell my soul to get to Chicago.

What I have had to sell is my art. After the credit card bill for those tickets went through I had about $200 to my name, which is half a month's rent for a shoebox on Leon Avenue. I'm lucky enough to have a steady illustration gig for The Phoenix News, though. As soon as I discovered just how broke I really was I emailed my editor to let him know that I would, in fact, be drawing the piece I'd turned down yesterday, and that if he had anything else I'd take that too. I found myself in the studio, drawing like mad because, for the first time in my life, my skill with a pen was actually my livelihood. It felt like this challenge was the thing that had missing from my art, like it was the missing piece of my passion: "Here; make this mean something. Make it more than just a hobby. Make it your life."

Shameless Plug: I recently put my self-published comic Inspired By Art up online at bit.ly/AJKzine, where you can order it and get a FREE ZINE!

Any money I can put together from sales of said comic book will also go towards helping me reach Toronto in early May, to attend another conference. I've been selected to present this lovely piece to The Canadian Society for the Study of Comics, which happens to be holding their conference in conjunction with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I may have freaked out a little when I discovered that Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Dakota MacFadzean, and Jeff Smith are all going to be there. But only a little. I swear.

I have a lot of other things on my mind, but I'm saving them for other posts. You can look forward to reading about what I learned about monsters when I went to a Durer/Picasso show in Kamloops, my thoughts on Stephen Harper's speech in the Knesset, a comics review or two, and likely a sneak peek at my BFA grad exhibition as it comes together over the next month. Until then, I'll leave you with a tweet:

It's mad #DH world out there. These things happen @KaleGreenfield @googleanalytics #Illustration #Robots #DigitalAge pic.twitter.com/MtI5ydJUy9
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) March 11, 2014

Cheers!

Welcome to 2014. Now Get to Work.

Well. Here we are. It's a brand-new year, a bracing new semester, a brave new world. And, frankly, the size of that open horizon of opportunity is daunting.

Probably because mine isn't nearly as open as I like to think it is.

I have a bad habit of piling my plate high with every project that catches my attention. My eyes are far larger than my calendar, and it tends to get me into trouble. I would do exactly the same thing with my course schedule, if time-slot conflicts weren't standing in my way; I would sign up for six or seven classes per term in an endeavour to learn, do, and write all the things, and go well and truly insane/broke in the process. Thank goodness for institutional restrictions. So, I have to make do with extra curricular activities to make my life a tightly scheduled and overbearing hell. It's good times.

Here's a glimpse of the coming year.

First and foremost, I have my BFA exhibition to worry about. The key word in that last sentence was worry. Hence, this is the the single most high-pressure and important semester of my entire degree. In theory, what I accomplish this term is what I will be showing to grad schools in the future. I have set myself goals that seemed good in the planning stages and seem insane, now, as I jump into the creation process itself. Long story short: I am writing a comic book, drawing it, and then turning it into a three-dimensional, walk-through, reader-activated media installation. Yes, that is as complicated as it sounds, but I believe it's an important formal exploration. How do you effectively take a traditionally 2D narrative form and translate it into 3D space? I aim to find out. If you're interested, and unafraid of reading, you can check out the rough-up of my research thesis on the matter here, on my portfolio site (bit.ly/AJKart).

I have a list of conferences that I want to attend this coming year. They made up 3/4 of my New Year's resolution list on Twitter last week:

Goals for 2014: 1. Get published 2. Get published 3. Get published 4. Go to Scotland #writing #ComicsScholar #Wanderlust
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) January 1, 2014

I have high hopes for this year; can you tell? In April I'll be traveling to Chicago, where I am presenting at the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association of America. My paper is titled Out of a Diasporic Metropolis: An Exploration of Jewish Comics Creators in the Urban Landscapes of the Early 20th Century. Yes, the rest of the paper is just as long-winded as the title, and I have a lot of editing to do yet. But it'll come together. The other project on the drawing board right now is one I cannot speak too much about, simply because everyone involved is still hashing out the shape of whatever it is we're trying to build. Suffice it to say that myself and a number of other comics scholars under the leadership of A. David Lewis are working together to start a conversation at the junction of Religion and Comics. Stay tuned; this could get exciting.

So, PCA/ACA '14 is on the list. Small Press Expo out East is on the list, and Toronto's Comics Arts Festival is on the list. And, as always, the Emerald City Comic Con is on the list, though I doubt that I will have the time or the money come March to make the trip to Seattle. There are a lot of excellent creators slated to be there this year: among them, Jeff Smith (Bone), Brian Clevinger, and Scott Wegener (Atomic Robo), Greg Rucka (Gotham Central), and David Petersen (Mouse Guard), all men whose work I deeply admire, and Kelly Sue DeConnick, a woman whose writing on the Image series Pretty Deadly has set my imagination afire and prompted me to buy a t-shirt, which I have been wearing far too often lately. If there is one person at ECCC this year whose brain I would love to pick, it would be hers.

PCA, SPX, TCA, ECCC, SDCC...in 2014, I want to attend all the acronyms. It sounds like fun.

The other part of the aforementioned tweet, of course, is number 4 on the list, "Go to Scotland". I'm mid-way through applying to UBC's exchange program in hopes of being able to study English Lit in the fall Edinburgh, home to the world's oldest English Lit department. I nearly went to Scotland a year and a half ago, for the third year of my degree...but, there was a girl, and a long-standing tradition of men making silly choices for women which I yearned to be a part of. So, I'm in good company. Any hope of that relationship is well and truly behind me, and nothing (paperwork excluded) is going to stand twixt me and the highlands this time.

This post has shifted insidiously from a declaration of my over-commitment and poor time-management to me daydreaming verbally through my keyboard about white shores and far green country. I may be overtired (despite having done nothing of note today except not get hired for a part-time job), so I'll wrap it up. I have a heavy few months ahead of me. I have rather a lot of reading, writing, and research to undertake and I have a daunting piece of media-installation-comic-art to tackle. I have classes to attend in the Digital Humanities and in Posthumanist Theory, areas I have no experience with. The work will be thrilling, and it will be gut-wrenching. The work will be broken up by gaming, by traveling, and by late nights at the pub griping about it all with friends. I am, I believe, going to love every bit of it.

I'll keep you posted.