TCAF Guest List Includes Brunetti, Feuchtenberger, Guibert, Tatsumi

The biennial Toronto Comic Arts Festival has announced its first round of Honored Guests for the 2009 show, including Ivan Brunetti, Anke Feuchtenberger, Emmanuel Guibert, Seth, Adrian Tomine, and Yoshiharo Tatsumi. Tatsumi’s autobiographical graphic novel A Drifting Life will debut at the Festival. Other guest and exhibiting artists will include Shary Boyle, Chester Brown, Jordan Crane, Tom Kaczynski, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, Jillian Tamaki, and Mariko Tamaki. The event will take place May 9 and 10 at the Toronto Reference Library.

Satrapi and Ware in Conversation with Mouly

Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware will appear in a live conversation moderated by Françoise Mouly as part of the Festival of New French Writing taking place in New York City this February, Publishers Weekly reports. The event, taking place February 26 through 28, will feature “eleven major French writers, all translated into English… with leading American writers, in dialogues hosted by well known American cultural critics.” The conversation between Satrapi and Ware will take place on Friday, February 27 at 8:15 pm at the Skirball Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Richard McGuire On His Guggenheim Talk

Richard McGuire spoke to Steven Heller about his recent appearance at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the Museum’s “24-Hour Program on the Concept of Time” event, which took place January 6 through 7, 2009. “I talked about ‘time’ in different aspects of my work,” McGuire told Heller. “I started by talking about the Liquid Liquid song ‘Cavern’ and how it’s been sampled and changed and been used over time… A clip from my film Fear(s) of the Dark, of the scene with the guy looking at the photo album, so you see the woman’s life compressed into one minute. Then some New Yorker stuff, like the ‘New Year’s Eve’ cover that rotates and reads both ways, night transforming into day.”

Heller previously interviewed McGuire specifically about the artist’s segment in the Fear(s) of the Dark animated anthology film. An excerpt from McGuire’s short can be seen along with more samples of McGuire’s work at the Prima Linea website.

McGuire is  best known in comics circles for his groundbreaking short story “Here,” which was originally published in RAW vol. 2 no. 1, and was recently republished both in Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories from Yale University Press and in the eighth issue of Comic Art. That issue cover-featured McGuire and also included an interview with the artist and an appreciation by Françoise Mouly.

McGuire is also well-known as the bassist for the musical group Liquid Liquid. The band’s work has recently been re-issued on CD by Domino Records, and the group recently reunited to play several shows. Via Alvin Buenavantura comes the following video clip of the group performing their signature song “Cavern” at Santos Party House in New York, NY, on November 19, 2008.

Yuichi Yokoyama Draws in Public

The Comics Comics blog points to this Flickr photo-set by Tokyo-based cartoonist Jon Chandler, which documents public appearances by Yuichi Yokoyama in which the artist draws live for his audience. Two of Yokoyama’s books, New Engineering and Travel, are currently in print in the United States.

In the Shadow of No Towers in Performance

On September 11, 2008 the Issue Project Room will host a live performative reading from Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Eric Bogosian will read from Spiegelman’s book with live musical accompaniment “featuring Marco Capelli and Elliott Sharp and several other surprise guests.”

Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn carries more information about the production: “An animated film and graphic menagerie based on Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In The Shadow of No Towers, in which [he] relates his personal experiences during the September 11th attacks, this multifaceted piece will be accompanied by a live experimental soundtrack interwoven with spoken word.”

The event takes place at 8pm; admission costs $15.

Krazy Kat Plays Again

The Richard B. Fisher for the Performing Arts at Bard College will host a performance of music from John Alden Carpenter’s Krazy Kat, a “jazz pantomime” based upon George Herriman’s comic strip and composed to accompany an original ballet in 1921. The performance, taking place on August 10, is part of the Bard Music Festival’s Sergey Prokofiev and His World, a series of events featuring music by Prokofiev and his “teachers, contemporaries, and successors.” The Krazy Kat performance is specifically part of a selection of music titled “The Cult of the Child.”

According to PBS.org, Carpenter’s Krazy Kat, “with its dazzling orchestration that influenced Gershwin, enjoyed a great success and resulted in a commission from Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev for an American ballet.” The published musical score is also notable for featuring several original drawings by Herriman, which are reproduced in the book The Kat Who Walked in Beauty.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

NEMLA’s Comics-Related CFPs

NEMLA, the Northeast Modern Language Associate, has issued a full call for papers for the organization’s 2009 convention in Boston, Massachussetts. The CFP includes the following specifically comics-related panels:

History, Memoir, and Comics “History, Memoir, and Comics” invites papers on recent graphic narratives. The panel seeks papers that investigate (1) why the comics form lends itself to the representation of tragic events; (2) the strategies by which graphic narratives simultaneously invoke personal and public history; and/or (3) why studying the interaction of verbal and visual narratives matters, especially today. Please send abstracts to dpines@bu.edu.

Reclaiming the Comic Book Canon Comic books were once the near-exclusive domain of dedicated outsiders and fringe enthusiasts. Now, they are everywhere — and being judged by almost everyone. Who holds the power now for anointing the greats? Has the medium gone irreversible corporate? Or does the Ivory Tower of Academia have more say than the local comic shop? Works largely identified as avant garde, such as Maus, Persepolis, Blankets, etc., are of particular interest here, as well as those serving as the basis for multimedia spectaculars (e.g. Iron Man, Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men). A. David Lewis: adl@bu.edu

Neil Gaiman: Intertextuality and Influences Fantasy fiction writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman blurs the border of reality through imaginative tales that transport us to strange and alluring lands. Yet embedded in the extraordinary are hints of the familiar. In what ways does Gaiman modernize old myths and narratives and to what end? How does internet culture influence his work? What other cultural texts, traditions, and conventions – both new and old – inform Gaiman’s short stories, novels, comics, graphic novels, and films? What does this generic heterogeneity signify and how can – and should – we classify these texts? Grace Wetzel: wetzelg@mailbox.sc.edu

Other panels also invite comics-specific takes on the subject at hand. Unless otherwise noted, abstracts are due to panel chairs by September 15, 2008. NEMLA’s 2009 convention takes place from February 26 through March 9, 2009 at Boston University.