I will be attending the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland tomorrow. If you’re there, please say hello to me, as neither my wife nor baby nor friends ended up being able to come with me and I will be utterly alone. I’ll be wearing a red t-shirt featuring Tonantzin and Vicente from Love and Rockets, most likely pestering Marc Bell and Chester Brown for David Bowie sketches. I will talk to you about A Song of Ice and Fire for minutes on end at your request.
I’ll also be hosting a couple of spiffy panels that I hope you’ll attend.
Excruciating Detail: Drawing the Grotesque
1:00 pm | White Flint Amphitheater
Historical comics ranging from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy to the horror comics of the 1950s have specialized in images of the grotesque. Sean T. Collins will speak with cartoonists Lisa Hanawalt (I Want You), Benjamin Marra (Night Business), Tom Neely (The Wolf), and Johnny Ryan (Prison Pit) about the act of drawing horrific, visceral, visual detail in contemporary comics that speak to horrors that are both timeless and contemporary.
Craig Thompson Q+A
3:00 pm | White Flint Amphitheater
Following on the heels of his sensitive tale of departure Good-bye Chunky Rice, Craig Thompson came to national attention in 2003 with his massive, autobiographically-based graphic novel Blankets. Eight years later, Thompson has completed his next graphic novel, Habibi, a love story set in the Middle East and patterned after the visual cadences of Arabic calligraphy and Islamic art. Thompson will discuss his work in a conversation with Sean T. Collins.
Tags: comics