Saturday, October 3, 2015

SPX Report - Sami Alwani

The first panel I went to see at SPX was a discussion and interview between Kate Beaton and Noella Stevenson. Kate Beaton had just released her new book “Step Aside Pops” and Noella Stevenson gained popularity with her graphic novel “Nimona” and more recently “Lumberjanes”. They both talked about how they started working in the medium of comics and what it meant to them. Kate Beaton said that she originally started out as a humor writer at her college at which she was studying History, and she didn’t find her writing was very successful but immediately was able to make much better work when she started executing the same ideas in comics. Noelle was actually a student at MICA before she became a popular cartoonist and she was studying illustration here only a few years ago. She said that for her comics were a way to explain to people things that were upsetting her or to communicate with people directly telling them the way she felt in a way that she wasn’t able to before.
They also discussed the implications of their both being female cartoonists and described some aspects of what the medium is like for women working in the indie comics industry as well as what it’s like being a girl growing up reading comics. The last topic of conversation was about how the internet has changed the medium of comics because both of these creators gained most of their popularity first through an internet following.

The second panel I attended was called “Humour and Absurdity in European Comics” which featured three cartoonists: Brecht Vanderbrouke, Joan Cornella and Bendik Kaltenborn. I was already familiar with and a fan of the work of Brecht and Joan. These three comic creators shared some stylistic qualities among which were that many of their works were painted, in a style diverging from traditional comics drawings. Each guest went through a brief biography of their trajectory in their comics career and covered different important events.

One aspect of the panel which I found very interesting was that both Joan and Brecht revealed that much of their work was referencing or inspired by the cartoonist Her Seele, whose work I was already familiar with and loved but I had never made this connection. The cartoonists were all working in a satirical mode and produced confrontational work that sometimes was politically charged or motivated by institutional critique. They briefly described the publics varying response to their work in different situations and also went over some future projects that they were in the middle of developing.

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