This week I’m in the air again – first up off to Madison, Wisconsin Thursday, October 20, to do a workshop-talk connected with Lynda Barry‘s Image Lab/Applied Comics Kitchen at UW! Excited for the opportunity to share with them and work alongside Barry and her students. I’ve been sharing a lot from her recent books on drawing, writing, and comics make in my classes – so it’s particularly exciting (and perhaps a tad nerve-wracking, to do this work with her there! Details and registration (if you happen to be in Madison) here and on Barry’s Tumblr here.

Unflattening: A Comics Workshop with Nick Sousanis
Humanities Building, Mosse, George L, 455 North Park Street R. 6131, Madison, WI

And right from there – I head straight to the University of Wisconsin on Friday, October 21, where I’m the guest of professor Judith Pascoe for the Next Gen PhD series they are hosting this fall. We’ll talk Unflattening and alt-scholarship. Details here.

I’m back from an amazing trip to Penn State, where I got to speak in honor of receiving the Lynd Ward Prize for graphic novel of the year! Blown away to be among the company of such past winners as Chris Ware, the Tamakis, and Jim Woodring, and such a lovely and enthusiastic response to the work, my talk. This will stay with me a long time. Grateful for everyone at the Pennsylvania Center for the Book at PSU that made it such a special event. Oh, and they have stickers for all the Lynd Ward Prize books! The PSU paper did a short writeup of the talk here.

Lovely new review of Unflattening by Dan Barnett in the Chico Enterprise-Record (California). He closes the review with a smart reference to Flatland: “In comics, when the eye travels from panel to panel as a conversation unfolds, time turns into space (the physical space of each drawing). If time is the fourth dimension, then comics can help us grasp a reality that A. Square could never even dream.” See it in full here. Oh, I was at The Battery in SF last week – cool place, and really lovely event. Did a talk and then grids and gestures with everyone. Some really cool responses, I hope to gather up soon… Jessica Carew Kraft did an interview with me in advance of it – online here. And cartoonist Tyler Cohen attended, and made a cool drawing from the opening to the talk… I’m working on a new piece that opens with this distinction between smart and talented – and the problem with drawing this artificial line between the two. You can see the whole thing of what I said about it in the opening to this talk at the National Gallery in DC, recorded this summer. Oh, and I finally got my hands on a copy of the French edition “Le Déploiement” from Actes Sud! More to come soon… – N