Convention Sketches

For me, the highlight of last month's Big Apple Comic Con was that on Saturday I was seated next to the table of a lovely model named Marissa Jade. On Sunday, I had to content myself sketching the crowd.

Mot's Comics and Cartooning Students are Rocking the Indie Comics World

These artists were already brilliant, but I'm pretty sure I taught them each something.
Follow the links to see Brooklyn stories, dysfunctional crime fighters, comics as poetry, sexy suicide girls (& other cool drawings), cocktail bar reviews, stupid inventions, drinkers and inkers, Tapir Tooth, ... and that's just the tip of the iceberg!



There's still time to enroll in my summer courses, Cartooning Basics and Figure Drawing for Graphic Novelists. Tell your friends!

Convention Appearance This Weekend.

If you're in Manhattan this weekend, May 21-22, 2011, come see me at the Big Apple Comic Con, lest I feel lonely.

I'm out teaching on Saturday morning, but plan to be at my convention table by 2 pm Saturday and staying 'til they close at seven, and all day Sunday (10 to 5).

I'll have some misc, comics and artwork for sale. Mostly I plan on sitting and making sketches of goofy monsters and/or sexy girls until somebody decides to talk to me. Do swing by and say hello.

Penn Plaza Pavilion, 401 7 Ave @ 33rd St. Table #1008.

Dr. Sketchy's Sketches

I've been uploading my drawings from Dr. Sketchy's Anti Art School along with other life drawings to my Deviant Art site, then submitting them to Dr. Sketchy's Tumblr blog and reblogging them to my own Tumblr site. Confused? No less than me. Next, I guess I'll announce this post on Facebook. Oy!

Figure Drawing for Graphic Novelists

This summer, in addition to my long running Thursday night Cartooning Basics course, I'm debuting a new continuing education course at the School of Visual Arts titled Figure Drawing for Graphic Novelists, Wednesdays, 6:00 t0 9:30, June 8 through August 10.

We'll alternate between life drawing from models and figure construction from imagination, to refine techniques for staging expressive figure drawings in the comic book context. Beyond the usual figure study issues like proportions and muscle groups, we'll be exploring some concepts that might sound esoteric but are actually important for comic artists to grasp: tactility, congruence of forces, shape integrity, joint breaks, feature wrapping, and more. We'll try out some different drawing styles and get characters moving through comic story situations.

I'll present a slide show about it tomorrow night (May 9, 2011, 6:30-8:30 pm) at SVA's Cartooning and Illustration Information Session.

This will be enlightening and fun. Come sign up. Tell your friends. Thanks a bunch!

Demons on the Subway

Okay, maybe I've been hallucinating, but this time I don't think so. Has anyone else been spotting these characters on the trains late at night? If you sight one, please send me a cell phone photo so I can feel vindicated.

Best American Comics "Notables"

I see that the Made Out of Mac comic was plugged on the Drawing Words and Writing Pictures blog. Please have a look.

Doodle Diary

What's with all the birds, doctor? How come none of them are flying?

Illustrations for an Online Zine

I just had a couple illustrations posted in an online zine called the Mad Hatter's Review. They're in the fiction section, illustrating stories by Edmond Caldwell. Have a look. You can click on the pictures to view them larger.
Here's one they didn't end up using, for whatever reason:

What Would Caniff Do?

One of the assignments I give in my Inking Comics class is to finish these unfinished Male Call strips by Milton Caniff. It's a fun exercise in the strategy of organizing black, white, and gray. Below are some solutions by students Daniel Pucca, Adam Markiewicz, and Earl Barrett-Holloway.

Class starts next week, January 25, 2011. Come get inky with us!

Sketches and Notes from the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

12/4/2010:


The Art of Editing-- Sammy Harkham, Bill Kartalopoulos, Francoise Mouly.



Taking Inventory: The Story of Things-- James McShane, Jungyeon Roh, Renee French, Leanne Shapton.



When Comic Books Were New-- Evan Dorkin, Paul Pope, Dan Nadel. Also Anders Nilsen, Q & A.



How Nancy Is-- Johnny Ryan, Bill Griffith, Mark Newgarden, Bill Kartalopoulos.



Chaos and Pattern-- Mark Alan Stamaty, Jordan Crane, Keith Jones, Brian Chippendale.

Classes, News

This Tuesday, I'll be presenting slide shows about my upcoming classes, Cartooning Basics and Inking Comics, at the SVA Cartooning and Illustration Information Session.

Come hear me rant about line sensitivity, composition-driven distortion, temporal cubism, and other crackpot ideas. 6:30-8:30 pm, Tues. Jan. 11, 209 East 23rd Street, room 311, 3rd floor. Free!

In other news, my dear friend Jason Little was kind enough to drop my name on the Comic Book Resources site (scroll way, way down). Asked about overlooked cartoonists, Jason sez, "T. Motley immigrated from Boulder to New York a few years ago, and brought his brilliant formal playground 'Tragic Strip' to The Brooklyn Rail. It’s worth subscribing to this paper for Tom’s comics alone. Read more at tmotley.com." Actually, I came from Denver, but Boulder's close enough. Thanks bro!

Classes Future and Students Past

This amazing "Noodling Worksheet" is by the amazing Daniel Pucca,
rendered over a line drawing by yours truly.

This spring, I'll once again teach the Inking Comics course, alongside my regularly scheduled Cartooning Basics class at SVA, making this a good time to follow up on this earlier post. An impressive number of former students are making me proud and making their excellent work available online.

A group of inking students, notably Daniel Pucca (above), Van Hong, and Ken Frederick, continue their studies on the Drinking and Inking blog.

Ken Frederick is also active in Pronto comics, along with Earl Barrett-Holloway and Dominic Sparano.

Zachary Snyder's web comic Stupid Inventor, was a finalist in The Washington Post's America's Next Great Cartoonist contest. Zachary also has a YouTube channel, Stupid Inventions.

Meanwhile, Bill Roundy has a strip running in The Brooklyn Paper, Bar Scrawl, that combines cartooning with bar hopping. How fun is that?

Mark Weisner, aka Max West, has a blog and website of his Sunnyville Stories.

Adam Markiewicz' "The Insomniac" blog features must-see comics and sexy pin-up girls.

A personal favorite: Alexander Rothman makes poetic broadsheet comics on his Versequential blog and participates in Tapir Tooth along with Andrea Tsurumi.

Have I forgotten anybody? Send me a link!

Another Recent Strip

This one is a rare attempt at ink wash, which I think turned out okay.

Upcoming Appearance-- UVM

I'm slated to show work from my forthcoming book, The Golden Ass (being published by David R Godine), at the University of Vermont this Monday. If you know anyone around Burlington, tell them to come see!

And while I'm up there, I'll be speaking to a couple of graphic novel classes. I feel honored.

Made Out of "Mac"

I'm stoked to hear a reading of new poems by Harry Mathews at 192 Books tonight. In honor of that, here are my newest installments in the "Made Out of 'Mac' " series of Oulipo cartoons (I'm not sure whether they qualify as Oubapo).

I've already posted others in the series, including two Mathews's Algorithm examples here and here.

The first collection can still be purchased here. This collection, by the way, was listed among the "Notable Comics of 2009" in the latest edition of Best American Comics.

NYCC sketches

The bigger the New York Comic Con gets, the less it seems to offer a minicomic fan like me. I was grateful for the small amount of quality programming I found in the time I spent there:


J. J. Sedelmaier hosted this panel on political cartooning, featuring Mike Lester, Ann Telnaes, and Steve Brodner. The level of draftsmanship of these artists really blew me away.


This panel on indie comics, "Indie Cred," was moderated by Chris Radke and featured cartoonists Alex Robinson, Jason Little, Julia Wertz, and Mike Dawson.

Don Oriolo and Craig Yoe discussed new collections of Felix the Cat comics and Dick Briefer's Frankenstein.


And here's an academic author from Brazil, Fabio Luiz Carneiro Mourilhe Silva, discussing comic adaptations of the stories of Poe.

Panel Discussions

Comics and Form. Ben Katchor, Jillian Tamaki, Karen Green, and Robert Berry. Brooklyn Book Festival, 9/12/2010.

I've fallen way behind on posting my sketches from panel discussions. With the New York Comic Con coming up this weekend, I may get swamped with more. So here, newest to oldest, are my latest...

At the Brooklyn Book Festival last September, I was listening to a very fine panel on The International Graphic Novel with Jessica Abel, Matt Madden, Josh Neufeld, and Nick Abadzis, when it started to rain on my sketch paper. Then I got a text from my wife that my daughter, Molly, was helping Chris Raschka read a book at the kids' tent, so I dashed over there and ended up sketching Raschka. Later was the Comics and Form panel pictured above.


Jessica Abel, Matt Madden, Josh Neufeld, Nick Abadzis. Brooklyn Book Festival, 9/12/2010.


Chris Raschka, 9/12/2010



Last December, 12/5/09, the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in Williamsburg hosted this panel called Flatlands: Comics on the Picture Plane featuring Mark Newgarden, David Sandlin, Lisa Hanawalt, and Ron Rege Jr, and moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos, followed by a live comics drawing session with Robert Sikoryak, Frank Santoro, and Gabrielle Bell.





At King Con, Brooklyn, 11/7/09, I sat in on this panel, Europe to Brooklyn, moderated by Thomas Baehr, and featuring Vasilis Lolos, Simon Fraser, and Amir Moye.




Before that, there was the Robert Crumb interview conducted by Francoise Mouly at the Union Square Barnes and Noble on October 23, 2009. I showed up ten minutes early to get a good seat. Sheesh. I guess my head's stuck in the 1980s. I can't get it through my head that comics are respected now.



Back on September 28, 2009, I made it to the New York Anime Festival, and attended this interview and slide show with fashion designers from Baby, The Stars Shine Bright. Included in this picture are designers Miho Satoh and Masumi Kanoh, moderator Jessica Kam (in plaid), and Viz Media president Seichi Horoguchi. Special thanks to Andrea Tsurumi for helping me with these attributions.



And on September 12, 2009, Andrei Molotiu moderated a panel at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art on Abstract Comics. Left to right we see Alexey Sokolin, Henrik Rehr, Richard Hahn, Janusz Jaworski, Patrick McDonnell, Anders Pearson, Derik Badman, Andrei Molotiu, and MoCCA Director, Karl Erickson.



And way back on August 12, 2009, was this panel called Lines On Paper: Drawing for Comics at Union Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos and featuring Austin English, Lisa Hanawalt, and Dash Shaw.

Whew. Now I'm ready to go sketch some more.