Tag: Chester Brown

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Episode 172 – Glynnis Fawkes

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Virtual Memories Show #172:
Glynnis Fawkes

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“A lot of how I draw comes from Greek vases. They’re like ancient comics.”

AlleEgoCover_400wGlynnis Fawkes joins the show to talk about archeology, comics, dig romances, Homer and more! We celebrate her award-winning new comic, Alle Ego, figure out how to make art while raising a family (hint: mine your family to make the art), explore the correlation of Greek vases to comics, lament the savage history of Troy and Gallipoli, while embracing the comics-centric world of Angouleme, and more! Give it a listen! And buy Alle Ego, the new installment of her book, from her store.

“We’re here now, but human experience goes so far back. Relationships, love, death: this has all gone on so long.”

We also get into her journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Middle East, her senior thesis on satyrs & maenads, the demands of drawing urns based on fragments, the best way to learn drawing comics, her move away from fine art, her life-changing experience at the Maison des Auteurs, and bumping into Alison Bechdel at the supermarket. Give it a listen!

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About our Guest

27026892976_7bb45c8368_mGlynnis Fawkes is a cartoonist, painter, and archaeological illustrator. Her current project is a memoir about working as illustrator on digs in Greece and the Middle East. She drew many of the pages for this book at a residency at La Maison des Auteurs in Angouleme, France in the summer of 2015. She recently completed 50 illustrations and cover for John Franklin’s Kinyras: The Divine Lyre (Center for Hellenic Studies Press, 2016). Glynnis’ background is in art and art history: a BA from University of Oregon, a BFA from the Pacific NW College of Art, and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University. During a Fulbright fellowship to Cyprus, she published a book of paintings, Archaeology Lives in Cyprus, and a book of cartoons, Cartoons of Cyprus. She spent almost 10 years working as an illustrator on archaeological projects and excavations in Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Lebanon, and continues to work in Greece. She began a doctorate at the University of Wollongong in Australia, but instead of finishing, married the famous archeo-musicologist John Franklin and had some children (now in school). She has exhibited paintings in Boston, London, Nicosia, Wollongong, at the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, OR, and in Burlington, VT, where she now lives. She teaches a course in Comics at the University of Vermont and drawing at Champlain College. Glynnis is a member of the NY-based web comic collective Activatecomix.com and publishes on Muthamagazine.com.

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Toronto Marriott Bloor Yorkville Hotel on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue enCORE 200 Microphone feeding into a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. B/w photo of Glynnis by me. Not sure who to credit with the color pic at the top.

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Podcast – 35 Cents & a Stamp

Virtual Memories Show: John Porcellino –
35 Cents & A Stamp

“I managed to go 43 issues before I hit the paralyzing grip of self-doubt and self-consciousness [from realizing that I had an audience]. I feel lucky that I had all those years to write comics in essentially a vacuum. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be 20 years old and trying to write comics in this world with the internet’s immediate response.”

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John Porcellino on The Virtual Memories Show

John Porcellino has been publishing his King-Cat Comics & Stories mini-comics for 25 years, but I managed not to check them out until last month. BIG mistake on my part! Turns out the critics were right; John P.’s one of the best autobio cartoonists out there, as well as “a master at miniature poignance” (Entertainment Weekly). We sat down at SPX 2014 to talk about publishing his new work, The Hospital Suite, as a standalone book and developing the skill and courage to tackle longer stories, his disdain for “the culture of like”, overcoming the shame and stigma of his OCD, the process of discovering an audience for his work, the pitfalls of autobiographical comics, discovering the power of negative space, turning his life into a narrative, how comics enabled him to communicate with people, and, most importantly, being an NFL bigamist. Give it a listen!

“If things didn’t get better, I was going to be the guy wandering down an alley in my underwear with tinfoil wrapped around my arms.”

Bonus: Roger Langridge gives us a few minutes at SPX to talk about his new book, Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow!

“To me, the best cartooning is the kind that has in place what needs to be there: nothing more and nothing less.”

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

John Porcellino was born in Chicago in 1968, and began drawing and writing at an early age, compiling his work into handmade booklets. His acclaimed self-published zine, King-Cat Comics and Stories, begun in 1989, has found a devoted worldwide audience and is one of the most influential comics of the past 25 years. His newest book is The Hospital Suite, and he is the subject of a new documentary, Root Hog or Die. His work has been collected in several editions, including King-Cat Classix, Map of My Heart, Perfect Example, and Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man. He is also the author of Thoreau at Walden and The Next Day: A Graphic Novella.

Credits: This episode’s music is Theater is the Life of You by The Minutement (John’s a fan). The conversation was recorded at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Mr. Porcellino by me.

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Podcast – Time’s Bomb

Virtual Memories Show: Nina Bunjevac –
Time’s Bomb

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“Fatherland is really about who my father was, getting to understand him, and also an attempt to explain how politics can tear a family apart, just like they tore apart the people of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.”

Nina B!

fatherlandNina Bunjevac‘s new book, Fatherland, explores her family’s fractured history against the backdrop of 20th century Yugoslavia. We talk about how she left her country in 1990 only to find that it wasn’t there when she went back. We also explore the risks and challenges of researching a terrorist organization, the comics tradition in Yugoslavia and her own comics history, Serbia’s culture of friendship, why the Toronto Comic Arts Festival is the best comics event in North America, how I discovered her first book, Heartless, the perils of too much stippling, why it was controversial to publish Fatherland in Serbian dialect in Croatia, and more.

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“When I got to Canada when I was 16, I saw an issue of Raw, and that pretty much did it.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

ninab-3DavidHaweNina Bunjevac started her art training in Yugoslavia, at the Djordje Krstic School for Applied Arts; in 1990 she moved to Toronto, Canada, where she continued her studies in art at the Art Centre of Central Technical School; in 1997 she graduated from OCAD in the Drawing and Painting department. Formerly a painter, a sculptor and an art teacher, Nina found her calling in sequential arts, a form that seemed to naturally evolve out of the narrative component in her sculpture installation work. Pen and ink became her medium of choice.

Nina’s comics have appeared in a number of local and international publications: Komikaze (Croatia), Black (Italy), GIUDA (Italy), Stripburger (Slovenia), Zone 5300 (Netherlands), Stripolis (Serbia), ArtReview (UK), Asiatroma/Le Dernier Cri (France), Broken Pencil, Exile, Taddle Creek (Canada) and Mineshaft (USA). Her debut collection of comics, Heartless, came out in September 2012 with the Nova Scotia-based publisher Conundrum Press, and was translated and published in France in 2013 by Ici-même Editions. In 2011 Nina received The Golden Pen of Belgrade at the 11th International Biennale of Illustration in Belgrade for the cover image of Balkan Women in Comics (Fibra/Croatia); in 2013 she received The Doug Wright Award in the Spotlight category, also known as The Nipper, for Heartless.

Fatherland: A Family History comes out this month in Canada from Cape Graphic/Random House and will be released in the U.S. in January 2015.

Photo of Nina Bunjevac by David Hawe.

Credits: This episode’s music is Bomba by King Africa (I make no apologies). The conversation was recorded at the Marriott Bloor in Toronto on a Zoom H2n digital recorder (because there was a power supply problem that caused a weird reverb on my main recorder). The intro and outro were recorded on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Ms. Bunjevac and me by Amy Roth.

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Podcast: Haste Ye Back

Seth on The Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories: Seth – Haste Ye Back

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The great cartoonist (and designer and illustrator) Seth joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about memory and time, his love of digression, being “Mr. Old-Timey”, what it means to be a Canadian cartoonist, and learning to let go of the finish and polish that used to characterize his work.

“When I was young, I thought there were an infinite possibility of stories you could do. As you get older, you realize you’re following a thread, and that you don’t have as much choice about what you’re writing about as you thought.”

“Style’s a funny thing. I think it’s important, but I think it’s a matter of the choices the artist makes that lead to the finished product. It is chosen, bit by bit over time, with each decision you make.”

rhythm-sprott“People only have a limited patience for listening to you go on and on about your own ideas, your own mind, your own memories. Art allows you to have that perfect experience of putting that down on paper without anyone growing tired and making you stop.”

“You add things onto yourself bit by bit through life to create the kind of person you want to be. Eventually, to some degree, it IS you. You picked these things deliberately.”

Seth: The Virtual Memories Conversation. Go listen!

“There’s some little thing that makes it hard to let it go of trying to create that fetish object you always wanted, that comic strip that looks like the best you can make it.”

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

Seth is the pen name of Gregory Gallant, a Canadian comic book artist and writer. He is best known for comics such as his ongoing anthology Palookaville, George Sprott: (1894-1975), Wimbledon Green, The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, and It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, all published by Drawn and Quarterly. His illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Details, Spin, The New York Times, and Saturday Night, and he has designed books and DVDs for a variety of publishers, including Fantagraphics (The Complete Peanuts), Random House (The Portable Dorothy Parker), and Criterion (Make Way for Tomorrow). Here are his favorite Criterion releases.

Credits: This episode’s music is Time Stand Still by Rush (because Seth’s Canadian, see, and his work revolves around memory and — oh, never mind). The conversation was recorded in Seth’s hotel room during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Seth by me.