Ladies Making Comics

Indiegogo Project O’ The Week!

Lucy Knisley’s “In Oscar’s Footsteps”

A while back, at MoCCA fest 2011, after I had her sign French Milk, and bought her minicomic Here at Hogwarts, about her trip to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, I asked her if she had any other travelogues planned.

“I’d really like to do one about Oscar Wilde,” she told me, visiting his birthplace in Dublin, his haunts around London, his prison in Reading, and his final resting place in Paris.  I knew exactly what she meant because I had gone on much the same pilgrimage when I studied abroad in London.  It was all the more appropriate, since some of Lucy’s earliest work I encountered was when she posted it to the old wildecentury community on LiveJournal, way back when she was an undergrad! And I currently have this portrait hanging in my cubicle at work:

So the deal with her new Indiegogo campaign is to raise funds to go on this pilgrimage— the plane tickets to get across the pond are already dealt with, but she’ll need hostels to stay in, intercontinental flights and trains, and sundry other travel expenses.

Oscar Wilde is a real writer’s writer, and artist’s artist.  For someone whose personal life has been publicized and picked over for over a century, he is still such an enigma, and every generation judges him in their own way.  Whether you see him as the first modern celebrity, a queer martyr, an affected hipster, a genius ahead of his time, a pithy quote dispenser, or all of the above, any further exploration of this man—and the modern day artists who admire him—is well worth any money you can spare to help.  If you’re not convinced, watch Lucy’s video: her passion for Wilde is palpable and runs deep, and we are all in for a real treat the more funds she raises.

wwnorton:

On the left, Alison Bechdel’s re-creation of a vintage paperback edition of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt. On the right, the Norton edition released in 2004 (and made available as an e-book last month). The novel was originally published under the pseudonym ‘Claire Morgan’. Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska are scheduled to star in the upcoming film based on the book.

Alison Bechdel—a serious Highsmith fan—was kind enough to mention our Highsmith recommendation engine on her blog(!):

Check out [Norton’s] great website. You can “choose your Highsmith” by answering a branching list of funny questions about what exactly you’re in the mood to read. And you can see a 3 minute promotional video with people like Joanne Schenkar and Terry Castle and me (Alas,no! I did not get to meet the infamous Castle or the mysterious Schenkar…we were all interviewed separately.) talking about Highsmith’s work.

You may remember us talking up Highsmith a ton last month.

And you may remember me mentioning that Highsmith used to write comics before her first novel was published!

Also, they are making a movie with Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska??? Must see *_____*

PS: W.W. Norton, I would buy an edition with the Bechdel cover, jsyk.

(Belated) #PrideMonth ProFile Friday

Katherine Shannon Collins (born Arnold Alexander Saba, Jr., July 6, 1947, in Vancouver, British Columbia), formerly Arn Saba, is a Canadian cartoonist, writer, media personality, stage performer, and composer.

Born of a Lebanese-Canadian father and a Scottish-Canadian mother (Miriam Allison McBain), Collins grew up in the affluent Kerrisdale district of Vancouver. Her maternal great-grandmother was Mary Adda “Dolly” Collins (née Rombaugh), a painter, writer and illustrator in the Winnipeg area in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was in her honour that Katherine Collins took her surname. Saba’s (Collins’s) mother was also a writer and cartoonist, who gave her child her first lessons. Saba attended Kerrisdale Elementary School, Point Grey Secondary School, and Magee Secondary School, with slightly-better than average grades.

In 1965, Collins, then known as Arn Saba, began the University of British Columbia on a creative writing scholarship, but devoted almost all her time while at UBC to the campus twice-weekly paper, The Ubyssey, where she created her first comic strip, Moralman (1965–1968), and also wrote and illustrated articles.

In 1977, she moved to Toronto, to try for success in a larger arena. She immediately began appearing on, and eventually producing, segments of the popular national CBC Radio program Morningside, where she usually paired with host Don Harron for free-wheeling discussions of favourite old comic strips and other pop culture. She also wrote, produced and acted in scores of comedy skits. Saba made similar appearances on CBC Television, on the Don McLean show. In her appearances Saba demonstrated, with humor, her enthusiasm and knowledge of cartooning, comics history, theatre and music.

In 1979, she wrote and produced a five-part radio documentary on CBC, The Continuous Art, exploring the cultural position of comics. It featured interviews with some of cartooning’s greatest names, including Milton Caniff, Hal Foster (his last interview), Floyd Gottfredson, Hugo Pratt, Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Russ Manning. Saba spent several years in late 1970s and early 1980s travelling throughout North America, interviewing famous cartoonists, many of them at that point quite old. (Many of these lengthy interviews were later published in The Comics Journal in the 1980s and 1990s.)

In 1982, Saba moved to California, ceasing all other media activity in favour of cartooning.

Saba/Collins’ most famous creation is Neil the Horse. The series ran in Canadian newspapers from 1975-1982 via the Great Lakes Publishing syndicate located in Toronto. It subsequently appeared in fifteen comic book issues from 1983–1988, published by Aardvark-Vanaheim/Renegade Press.

With a drawing style based in Disney comics, as well as in early-20th Century Sunday pages, Saba added something new to comics: music. The motto for the series was “Making the World Safe for Musical Comedy,” and many issues of the comic book feature the characters singing and dancing. When the characters are shown hoofing it, it is to original choreography.

Saba had a vaudevillian approach, changing the format of the comics several times within each issue. This variety act included the comic strip, comic book stories, illustrated stories, originally composed sheet music, crossword puzzles, joke pages and more. In the letters columns, the characters themselves “answered” the mail. To top it off, there were paper dolls and fashion pages, in the tradition of Katy Keene. Neil the Horsewas like a modern version of early twentieth-century hardbound children’s annuals (especially in Britain) using an endless variety of formats, something rarely seen in comics.

Saba also completed a graphic-novel-length Neil the Horse adventure, and an illustrated Neil children’s book that have yet to be published. The final issue of the comic book series demonstrate her prolonged and elaborate efforts to pitch Neil as an animated series. From 1998-93, the “property” (Neil and characters) was optioned three times by Hollywood studios and networks, but was never produced. Saba’s business partner for these attempts was John Gertz, president of Zorro Productions of Berkeley, California.

In 1982, Saba wrote a two-and-a-half hour radio musical called Neil and the Big Banana that was twice broadcast in five episodes, in Canada on CBC Radio. Saba wrote the book, music and lyrics, and played the part of Neil. The play was unanimously reviewed with raves across the country, but subsequent efforts to mount later musical-comedy projects were unsuccessful— Collins later learned that the most promising producer rejected the stage musical because he had been informed of her transition (which was in the early stages at that point).

She gave up cartooning in the mid-1990s after her Neil the Horse graphic novel could not be published, and her commercial cartooning work was not lucrative. She has shied from any publishing or public presence since then, except for two issues as Art Director of TNT (Transsexual News Telegraph) magazine, 1999-2000.

Since 1993, Collins has officially been living as a woman. In January 1995, a few months after her reassignment surgery, the Collins met Dr. Bobbie Bentley (Barbara Ellen Bentley), who quickly became her domestic partner and great love. Bentley, a physician who had been forced to retire by a brain injury in a car accident, was a “bulldyke” (her term) or butch lesbian, who dressed in snappy, well-pressed men’s clothes. Until Bentley’s death from cancer in July 1999, Collins happily termed herself Bentley’s wife, and they collaborated together on a number of projects within San Francisco’s transgender community, including Bobbie’s election in 1997 as “Mr. ETVC”. Collins and Bentley were planning to be married in Canada at the time of Bentley’s death, and Collins later began calling herself “the widow Bentley”.

In 2005, after fifteen years in San Francisco, Collins was deported under the USA PATRIOT Act for “crimes of moral turpitude,” an old conviction for possession of psilocybin mushrooms. Back in her hometown of Vancouver, Collins fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with leukemia. In 2008, she declared herself on the way to a full recovery.

A collection of Neil the Horse is forthcoming from Hermes Press.

#PrideMonth ProFile Friday

Paige Braddock is a cartoonist best known for her comic strip Jane’s World, the first queer-themed work to get distribution from a national mainstream media syndicate.

In high school, Braddock was mentored by Alley Oop cartoonist Dave Graue. She earned a degree in Fine Art from the University of Tennessee, then worked as a visual journalist for twelve years for such newspapers as the Chicago Tribune and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She left journalism in 2000 to accept the postion of Creative Director at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates. There she oversees art direction and editoral control of all licensed Peanuts material, including the 2012 comic book limited series published by Boom! Studios.

She devised Jane’s World in 1991 and first started the strip as a webcomic in 1996. In 2001, United Feature Syndicates’s Comics.com picked up the strip. Soon after, she founded Girl Twirl Comics to publish and distribute Jane’s World to comic book stores. In 2007, Braddock started producing new strips, now carried by Universal Press Syndicate.

In 2008, she collaborated with writer Jason McNamera on The Martian Confederacy, a graphic novel about outlaws living on Mars in 3535, where breathable air is a top commodity. A second volume was published in 2011, and a third is in the works.

Jane’s World was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2006, and 10 volumes of the strip are currently in print.

Braddock lives in California with her wife, Evelyn.

#PrideMonth ProFile Friday

Joan Hilty (born December 27, 1966) is a cartoonist and editor best known for the comic strip Bitter Girl and her tenure as a senior editor at DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint.

Hilty grew up in Northern California after some time in Kentucky and West Africa. She attended Brown University as part of the class of 1989 where she earned a BA in visual arts, which included coursework at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Her first comics were published soon after graduating college in publications such as Wimmen’s Comix, Girljock Magazine, Gay Comix, and The Advocate. Her illustrations have appeared in such publications as Ms. Magazine and The Village Voice.

She joined DC Comics as an editor in 1995, starting in the trading cards department. She was soon moved to Vertigo as well as given responsibility over licensed titles such as Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, and The Powerpuff Girls, as well as DCAU titles such as Batman Adventures and Gotham Girls. In the main DC Universe, she edited such titles as Birds of Prey (with writer Gail Simone), Manhunter, Black Lightning: Year One (with writer Jen Van Meter), Vixen: Return of the Lion (with writer G. Willow Wilson), Blue Beetle (starring Jaime Reyes), and Huntress: Year One (written by Ivory Madison), as well as runs on Checkmate, The Outsiders, and The Flash. She later developed some of Vertigo’s first original graphic novels, such as the G. Willow Wilson-written Cairo, the Inverna Lockpez-written Cuba: My Revolution, and the Colleen Doran-pencilled Gone to Amerikay.

Her weekly alternative comic strip Bitter Girl was first published in 1998, inspired by an ill-fated relationship. Since 2001, it has ben distributed by Q Syndicate to LGBT newspapers across North America. She also posts strips to her blog a few weeks after they are released in print.

In 2010, she left DC Comics in the midst of the company’s restructuring. She is now the editor-in-chief of PageTurner, a book packager that specializes in graphic novels, as well as the owner of Studio Kabito, an independent editor specializing in genre fiction, nonfiction & graphic novels. She currently lives in New York City with her wife and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art.