Hark! A Vagrant:

I am making a brief appearance at New York Comic Con next Saturday! I’m on a panel called “Beyond the Webcomic” with Ryan North, Chris Hastings, and Seth Fishman (an agent of mine and Ryan’s!). It should be interesting! I understand it is difficult to find the info on the website, so here it is, a little screencap and link to the info page.

I’m not a regular attendee though, so I don’t have a table or signing hours for those who asked. But I will stick around to say hello after the panel.

-Kate

Shirt ideas for the store, 2013 -

duck feathers and loaves of bread

Shirt ideas for the store, 2013 -

Birth of Jug Band Venus

Shirt ideas for the store, 2013 -

ahhhhhh PUNS

watch out

Shirt ideas for the store, 2013 -

Peacocks, the Ryan Gosling of birds

Shirt ideas for the store, 2013 - To the last, I grapple with thee. From hell’s heart, I hug at thee

Look what else hits the shelves today!! (edit: Rats! not today, the 8th! I just received it today). I got it and it turned out beautifully! Can’t wait to read the whole thing.

Isabel Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is out, and a must have book! You will like it.

Here it is on Amazon, here are some page images and a lil write up.

Take a moment if you will, and read this comic by Dean Trippe, Something Terrible. It is about the difficult subject of growing up after experiencing childhood sexual abuse. It is personal and powerful.

whimsicalnobodycomics asked: What are your thoughts on why there is such a small number of African-American female "indie" cartoonists? Or are we just not hearing about them?

digital-femme:

darrylayo:
No, I think that the number is actually just really small. It bothers me so much. I’ve looked and looked but I’ve only found a handful of African American women cartoonists. I haven’t even been able to wager a solid guess as to why we see so few black women doing comics.
It is obviously a cultural problem of some kind. In our kind of comics, there isn’t anybody to overtly prevent anyone from participating. There are no cultural gatekeepers to exclude or dissuade black women from participating in indie comics. So the question of why black women are not nearly as represented in indie comics seems to be a question of access or exposure.

This ties into my yelling about public comics such as newspaper strips, poster-comics and the like. If comics as an art form are contained to a cyclical ecosystem, we need to intentionally break comics out of that ecosystem. Explore new venues to put this work into the grasp of all people, everywhere. If some groups of people don’t frequent places where comics are found, then find those people and bring comics TO them.
That’s how I feel about what should be done to cultivate a more widespread interest. But I’m still terribly hazy on the initial question of how it came to be this way in the first place.
@darrylayo
Black people go where we are wanted—or at the very least, tolerated. This is not due to laziness, or the lack of a desire to push beyond the boundaries of what is “suitably black.” This is done to protect our lives, our livelihoods, and our income.
The reason why black people do not have a larger presence in comics now is because we were actively pushed out then. White newsprint makers refused to sell newsprint to black comic publishers such as Orrin C. Evans. White creators used anti-black caricatures such as Ebony White (derived from antiquated slave imagery depicting black people as hideous beats) in their works. Finally, the demise of the black newspaper meant that the one place openly hospitable to black cartoonists had been lost. Of course, there were white organizations such as Esquire who would hire African American artists, but the race of the gentlemen (not women) hired remained an industry secret. To the mainstream public, the comics industry was simply not an option for black people—and was a place where they could be ridiculed for entertainment purposes. And for the rare black individuals who forged ahead anyway? It was undoubtedly rough.
But you’ve asked about black female indie cartoonists and you’ve asked about the present, not the past. But the answer is the same, we go where we believe we are wanted or tolerated. And we know it’s safe when we see positive reflections of ourselves. Those reflections are found mainly in mainstream superhero books. Of course, there are no black women working at the “big seven” in a creative or editorial capacity, but we are there within the panels. And those panels get a great deal of publicity. Storm and Vixen are brought to the mainstream via Marvel’s and DC’s PR behemoths. Black women see these characters and assume that there is a place for them (leading to disappointment upon the discovery of the true mainstream industry behind the four-color curtain). These women add to mainstream comic culture through fan art and fanfiction—and some move onto original superhero characters.
The indie/DIY scene is actually more hospitable to black women than the mainstream industry. Anyone is welcome to grab a pen, hang a shingle, and do their own thing. You can actually find a small number of black women creating and editing comics. But these women aren’t broadcast to the public. The image of the indie scene that is pushed to the public—the media focus—is one of the navel-gazing white guy. The black women hustling on the web? The ones trying to make things happen via Kickstarter? They are invisible.
I founded the Ormes Society in the hopes of making these amazing women visible to the mainstream. It is my hope that the followers the Ormes Society has attracted will sample the works of these women after perusing the latest scans of Storm or Vixen—that not only will they absorb positive images of fictional black women, but they will read the words of real ones as well. The more these women are seen, the more other women will follow.
(I plan to drag as many in as I possibly can.)

Darryl’s tumblr essays are always thoughtful. Also, do head to that Ormes Society link.

The Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor (1864) has many fine little humorous illustrations.

Nothing like a good pinterest of curios, hey?

From the collection of The Public Domain Review magazine.

Oh, please tell me that is a contemporary illustration. Gloves for boots and boots for gloves! The horse is driving the cart! Fish in the air! Upside town things!

It’s positively ZANY!

Full text, here

typeverything:

typeverything, vintage tin

beautiful

(Source: typeverything, via typeverything)

medievalpoc:

As an aside: In regard to Joos Van Cleve, The Guild of Saint Luke, and the use of live models for these paintings…these two Balthazars are almost certainly the same guy. Obviously one of these paintings a a bit more detailed, but the resemblance in hair, clothing style and pose is very noticeable.
The manner in which most of these paintings were produced is that the Master would do individual figure sketches from life, and then use those drawings to render outlined figures in a composition on the panel or canvas.
Then, the upper-level associates, journeymen and apprentices would fill in various planes of the painting as assigned and overseen by the Master. Often, the master would do the faces and hands himself, as well as any other especially detailed or important portions of the painting. For some paintings, the Master would appoint a chief to oversee the production and not participate at all. Those paintings are usually attributed to “the workshop of-“.
It wasn’t unusual practice at the time to use the same sketch in multiple paintings, or to use a previous painting as a model for another one. In fact, many artists even used other artist’s paintings as models.
For example, this painting is “After” Joos Van Cleve, which means it was not painted by him, and possibly not even painted by his workshop but a copy from another artist who had viewed the Van Cleve painting. In Medieval Europe, painting was considered more like a “craft” than the way we view art today, as a kind of personal form of self-expression.
As for who this particular Balthazar was, we’ll almost certainly never know. He most likely lived either in Antwerp, Sweden, where the workshop of Van Cleve was located, or was a member of the French Court where Van Cleve visited and painted Francis and Eleonore, the King and Queen.
His powerful carriage and overall glow of health (and age! being over 40 in the 1500s was kind of its own accomplishment) lends credence that he must have been a powerful man of the times…but it is also possible he was a relative of someone who worked at the shop or was just Bill, the Antwerp cobbler, inexplicably blessed with teeth, long life and being a total medieval DILF.

haha yes yesss “inexplicably blessed with teeth”