Solstice We Responses

It’s the winter solstice – shortest day of the year, longest night. From here on out we see increasingly longer days as the light returns. My family has always observed the solstice with particular significance – and perhaps it offers a reminder of hope and brighter days to come in dark times. To that end, I wanted…

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Comics Studies Penn

This Friday, December 9, I’ll be at at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication to talk on Unflattening and new forms of scholarship. For details see Annenberg site here.This trip signals the close to a full travel schedule of speaking on the book for the fall. Most recently, I was at Davidson College, and prior to that…

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WE

My full-on return to comics was for an art show in Detroit around the 2004 US Presidential Election. I’ve made a habit of doing a piece around each election since. For various reasons, this year has been a little tougher than the others – but this is what I’ve come up with. A piece about “We.”…

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Lynd Ward Prize

This week, I’m off to Penn State University to receive the Lynd Ward Prize for Graphic Novel of the Year! The award (which was announced this past spring) is run by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress – and past years include Chris Ware’s Building Stories,…

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Jaipur Boulder LitFest Korean Edition

This Friday, I’m off to Colorado to participate in the Jaipur Literary Festival-Boulder at the Boulder Public Library. On Saturday the 24th, I’m on 3 panels: First up, “Graphic Novels: The Image and the Word” alongside Ms. Marvel’s G. Willow Wilson from 12-1pm. The program reads:  “As the language of digital image challenges letters and text, a…

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SFAI talk

As of July, I’ve been a resident of San Francisco where my family and I moved for me to take an assistant professorship at San Francisco State University. I will have more to say on plans for what we plan to do around the study of comics and making comics at SFSU in the coming months. But in the…

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Comic-Con! NGA Video

So the end of July came along and my wife, daughter, and I packed up and said goodbye to Calgary after a great year and a half in that sunny city. From the tremendous support of comics scholar extraordinaire Bart Beaty who brought me there to all the friends we made over that time, it was a difficult goodbye.…

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Grids and Gestures

With this post, I want to try kicking off a collective comics-making activity – details below. But first, a few bits of news… New interview with me by Pedro Moura on the origins of Unflattening, my process, challenges, and more in The Comics Alternative. I was also interviewed recently for Colombia’s El Espectador by Pablo Guerra that…

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Unflattening Lexicon March Talks

I’m excited to see “Unflattening” picked up in other fields and entering the lexicon a bit… First up, Dr. Diane Jette, the Associate Chair of Physical Therapy at Massachusetts General Hospital referred to it as part of her keynote lecture at the American Physical Therapy Association conference. This was brought to my attention by Mike Pascoe assistant…

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PROSE Award Detroit Duke

I am thrilled to share the news that Unflattening has won the 2016 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in Humanities!  (The work also won the sub-category, Media & Cultural Studies.) I’m excited for what it means for me, but perhaps more for what it means for greater acceptance for comics and alternative scholarship. This…

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Choice, Kenyon Reviews, Student Work

This time out, I share some work from my comics as a way of thinking course, which just wrapped. But first, some news on Unflattening. The October issue of the American Library Association’s “Choice: Reviews” kindly called Unflattening “potentially revolutionary.” The full text reads: “For more than two decades, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) has…

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Nature Moscow Best List

Unflattening made The Independent’s (UK) list of top graphic novels of 2015! It’s great company to be in, as the roundup includes Adrian Tomine and others, as selected by Neel Mukherjee who recently reviewed Unflattening for the New Statesman here. I’m pleased to have created a comic for the journal Nature on climate change in conjunction with the Paris climate conference beginning…

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