Dinner with Cartoonists

So here I am at TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, utterly overwhelmed by this evening's experience. To be fair, I have myself to blame. I opened my big mouth on Twitter to promote the living heck out of the Doug Wright Awards kickstarter, which thankfully succeeded and will be holding it's 10th annual ceremony tomorrow evening. I went and picked the backer reward of dinner with Drawn & Quarterly and their cohort of cartoonist guests, because hell, you're only in this position once in maybe a lifetime; why not? Good food, good company, the chance to talk shop with industry greats...

...so it's my own damn fault that I ended up having dinner tonight with Seth, Kate Beaton, and Chester Brown, all wonderful, down-to-earth, easy people to talk to, and that I have to dump my starstruckedness all over this screen before I explode. Seth revealed that he has never used a microwave, and Chester (rightfully) chided me for having not yet read Chris Ware. It was quite a conversation (also, exquisite beer).

I was also introduced to Tom Spurgeon, of www.comicsreporter.com as well, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for linking to my blog from his, on occasion. Again, thanks Tom. And a big thank you to Brad Mackay for being an excellent host, a good conversationalist, and an all-around gentleman. Cheers, Brad :)

It's been a helluva night. More news from TCAF to come, later.

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!

My First Encounter with the Popular Culture Association - PCA/ACA 2014, Chicago

April was a whirlwind. It's the only suitable way to describe it. The winds began on the 8th, in fact, my last post and the international Day of DH. That was the first day of setup for my BFA grad exhibition. The following week was a week of 18 hour work days as I emptied, cleaned, painted, and constructed my exhibition space. Most nights I slept at school, crashed on a couch in the studio or a corner of the floor or wherever I could find that security would let me get some shut-eye. T'was a long week.

Cranking out @gorillazband and @julytalk all night in the lab while processing the #anaglyph #3D prints I'll be hanging tomorrow.
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 14, 2014

Tuesday, April 15th: the day I was destined to fly to Chicago for the Popular Culture Association conference. Monday night at around 10pm my good friend TP walked into the studio and made me realize just how much I wasn't going to be finished hanging my show by the time the last bus left campus. So I packed up and headed home, showered, packed, and caught the 11:30 bus back to campus. By 7am the show was up and ready to go, and I had a flight to catch. I took the bus from campus to the airport, hopped on a plane, and 10 hours later touched down in The Windy City.

Sitting in Pearson International wondering big things. Like what I'm going to eat when I get to #Chicago. #pcaaca14
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 15, 2014

This is good, yeah? I'm in Chicago, at my hotel, settled in by 11pm-ish...and supposed to present at 9:45 the next morning. At which point it hit me just how ill-prepared I was for this whole endeavour. I sat down on the hotel sofa and started editing, and suddenly it was six. In the morning. How did that happen? Well, I thought, I'll just take an hour-long nap. And this is part that I haven't talked much about until now.

Because I woke up at two in the afternoon.

I might kill the next hotel alarm clock that lets me down.
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 17, 2014

Needless to say, I was devastated. As far as I was concerned I'd just blown it at my first big academic conference, my academic debut if you will. I dragged myself out of the hotel and down the street to the conference centre to beg forgiveness from our area chair. Dr. Wandtke was incredibly gracious about the whole thing, understanding of the negative effects that a string of all-nighters and a cross-continental flight will have on punctuality. He had, he told me, a Friday afternoon panel with only two presenters on it that he could fit me into. Long story short, I moved some flights around and made that happen; a little pricey, sure, but damned if I was going to leave Chicago without giving that presentation.

This was all followed up immediately by a moment that made me realize just how important community is in the world of comics scholarship. I walked out of the conference room with what felt distinctly like a new lease on life, and nearly bumped into John Lent, EIC of the International Journal of Comic Art. Twitter fiend that I am, I knew that IJOCA was up for an Eisner; the nominations had been announced the day before, and I'd seen Dr. Lent's name on the list during my layover at Pearson. Without missing a beat I introduced myself and congratulated him on the nomination, which was enough to get him to stop and talk. We were promptly joined by Chris Couch (University of Massachusetts), and I suddenly found myself in conversation with two men who were referring to Scott McCloud and Denis Kitchen by first names as old friends and colleagues. Mind. Blown. I cleared the awe from my head in time to answer a series of questions from Lent about my topic, which prompted Couch to ask if I had a background in Judaic Studies. "No, art history", I said, all the while thinking, "I'm an undergrad surrounded by giants. I don't have a background in anything; I'm stilling working on finishing the thing that will get me into what will be my background...". And then John Lent asked me to send him my paper, and I don't remember the rest of what happened.

Well, alright. That's not entirely true. With a light heart and a head full of dreams (as one ought to have when encountering success in The Windy City), I made my way to Lou Malnati's, the city's top-rated deep-dish pizza joint. It was there I discovered that Chicago deep-dish is a beast to be reckoned with; that you cannot be a foodie in that town and avoid sausage; and that the locally brewed Pale Ales there are to die for. Seriously. Amazing local beer scene. Even the hotel lobby had a dozen or so local brews on tap, each deliciously different from the next. My culinary experience there was wonderful, but frankly I blame the people. Food is always better with fellowship, and I had that a-plenty. I met up with my Twitter acquaintance Heather Urbanski, also a presenter at PCA/ACA, and found a whole new group of people to hang out with. We went out for sushi one evening, and I realized that I am, in fact, a terrible British Columbian. My province is up to its eyeballs in sushimania, and I can barely tell sashimi from a California roll (okay, that's a lie; I can very easily tell sashimi from a California roll, but I have to make my point somehow). To sum up my experience with Chicago's food scene:

• Discovered Chicago's famous deep-dish pie (the sausage, man...)
• Reveled in the local beer scene
• Had an awkward sushi experience (made better by excellent conversation)
• Ate a cheeseburger at a literal hole-in-the-wall (Billy Goat Tavern; seriously, it's in a wall under a bridge)
• Consumed a lot of...no, we'll say "too much", Dunkin' Donuts

I feel that this sums up my time at #pcaaca14 flawlessly. pic.twitter.com/sir9om6B4U
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 18, 2014

Did I mention comics?

Yeah, there were also comics. I made a point of walking down to Graham Cracker Comics, which is an excellent shop if you're ever in Chicago, and picking up...well, a bunch of stuff. I was able to track down Astonishing X-Men #2, the second-to-last Joss Whedon issue I need before I own the complete run. I snagged the new Serenity title (because it's shiny, why else?), the much lauded Sex Criminals by Hickman, and Lumberjanes, a title I've been longing to get my hands on since Noelle Stevenson first mentioned it on Twitter. It's all proved to be excellent reading. And Gotham Central...that series, never ceases to amaze me, never will. Read it, you crime comics people reading this post, if you haven't already. It will rock your world.

Anyway, that's about it. I did successfully present my paper, in a panel on Comics and Education. You don't get a lot of questions in question period when you're the only guy talking about Jewish narrative tradition in a room full of people interested in pedagogy, but them's the breaks when you've slept through your alarm and had to reschedule. I flew back Saturday instead of Friday, having shuffled my flights to make the panel a possibility. I landed at 7:30pm, and went straight back to school to attend the opening of my BFA grad show. I was a bit out of it; I wandered around the gallery for some time, going "I've been in three different international airports today, where am I now?". This, ladies and gentlemen, is my life.

Day of DH 2014 - Notes from the Gutter

Well it's April 8th here on this fine planet of ours, and that means that it's the Day of Digital Humanities (or "DH" for short). I'm going to keep this short: you can follow my research progress on the other blog I'm running today, "Notes from the Gutter", as I use the Comic Book Markup Language, written by Indiana University's John Walsh, to encode a page of Nelvana Comics. I hope you'll take a minute to check out the work I'm doing, it's pretty cool stuff.

Cheers!
Asher

Cover for Adrian Dingle's Nelvana of the Northern Lights

Captain America: The Winter Soldier - The Game is Changing

Those of you who read my last blog post may have caught this update from me just after I got myself caught up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:

UPDATE: Marvel wins

Just got caught up on #AgentsofSHIELD after seeing #CaptainAmericaTheWinterSoldier; holy mother of continuity am I a happy fanboy right now.
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 6, 2014

I was over the moon when Agents actively tied its events into the opening events of the Winter Soldier movie, but those of you who have seen the film know that it's a gamechanger for S.H.I.E.L.D.. And it should be, as the first fully S.H.I.E.L.D.-focused movie in the Marvel repertoire. I suppose it could be argued that The Avengers fits that criteria, but that film had a very different agenda. Joss Whedon's writing for The Avengers was an exercise in team-building, creating meeting point for an ensemble of headlining characters that had to feature them all equally. And it was beautiful. But The Winter Soldier is a movie very much about one guy dealing with a new life, a new worldview, loyalties, secrets, and red tape; it's a conspiracy movie, not a slugfest. The writers get that, and they nailed it. Not to mention that Kevin Feige straight-up told us it was going to be a "political thriller".

According to the clip below, we only have to wait til Tuesday to see the blowback from the film hit Coulson's team of operatives. I'll be waiting with bated breath.