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Event :: Friday Night Comics Workshops at SAW

The Sequential Artists Workshop logo image

The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) offers free weekly online comics workshops on Fridays, each hosted by a professional cartoonist who leads participants through a structured drawing and/or storytelling exercise. The series was originally started by The Believer (‘We Believe in Comics’).

SAW is an online and in-person grassroots, non-profit comics school located in Gainesville, Florida, founded in 2011 by indie cartoonist Tom Hart. “At SAW we help budding cartoonists discover their own path in visual storytelling. Students learn core comics techniques like storytelling, character creation, panel design, storyboarding, inking and lettering.”

Numerous working groups meet via their online SAW Mighty Network Community, and the SAW Certificate Program enrolls every fall for a nine-month intensive instruction in drawing for comics, comic storytelling, comics history, and more. Many SAW graduates from the past ten years have gone on to publish full-length works.

Driftwood Press – Issue 9.1

Driftwood Press‘s latest short stories “Wing Breaker” by Rachel Phillippo and “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother” by Dailihana Alfonseca take you from brutal arctic traditions to the cultural traumas of migrants in America. This issue also collects some of the most insightful and harrowing poetry being written today; these poems delve into illness, motherhood, religious pressure, and much more. Wrapping up the issue are visual arts and comics by Io Weurich, Kelsey M. Evans, SAMO Collective, Jim Still-Pepper, Andrew White, Kimball Anderson, & Casey Jo Stohrer. Now at the Driftwood Press website.

Driftwood Press – June 2021

Short stories “Work” by Chad Szalkowski-Ference and “Haze” by Mike Nees take you across the white plains of the Tularosa Basin and into a hazy apartment complex. From joyous lyricism to stark realism, the poems this issue are a bricolage of loss, grief, solitude, and joy. Wrapping up the issue are visual arts and comics by Kelsey M. Evans, Rachel Singel, Dustin Jacobus, Lia Barsotti Hiltz, Coco Picard, and Laila Milevski. Read more at the Driftwood Press website.

Anomaly – No 32

Our new issue, ANMLY #32, features a special folio Neighbor Species and Shared Futures curated by Kristine Ong Muslim. Featuring work in various genres from Tilde Acuña, Richard Calayeg Cornelio, Reil Benedict Obinque, Regine Cabato, Pedantic Pedestrians, Melvin Clemente Magsanoc, and more. See what else you can expect to find in this issue at the Anomaly website.

Anomaly – No 31

In the new issue of Anomaly: comics by Tamara Jong, Jennifer Murvin, Chloe Martinez, Andie Frein, Amelia L. Williams, and Alina Viknyanskiy; poetry by Tian-Ai, Stephanie Jean, Shay Alexi, Saddiq Dzukogi, Noor Ibn Najam, Noʻu Revilla, Michal Jones, KL Lyons, Irteqa Khan, Ima Odong, Heather Simon, Eunice Kim, Chavonn Williams Shen, Bailey Cohen-Vera, Asmaa Jama, and Amanda Holiday, fiction by Laurence Klavan, LaToya Jordan, and Carson Faust; and nonfiction by Tasha Raella, Jody Chan, and Anjoli Roy.

Driftwood Press – Issue 7.2

Featured in our latest issue is the 2020 In-House Contest winning story “Trash Man” by Jessica Holbert alongside another story, “The Taxidermist,” by Seth Tucker. The poetry in this issue explores the emotional and physical connections to different geographies and technologies, from abandoned lighthouses and frost-covered pastures to half-truth news coverage and Harry Potter. Wrapping up the issue are visual arts and comics by Coz Frimpong, Geoffrey Detrani, Yi-hui Huang, Aimee Cozza, and Jason Hart. Read more at the Driftwood Press website.

Anomaly – No 30

Anomaly - April 2020

The latest issue of Anomaly is out. In this issue: comics by Mita Mahato, Kimball Anderson, Jason Hart, and more; fiction by Monica Macansantos, Feliz Moreno, and more; poetry by Turandot Shayegan, Rodney A. Brown, María Lysandra Hernández, Jacq Greyja, Hussain Ahmed, Hari Alluri, Gabrielle Spear, Fargo Tbakhi, Derek Berry, Ashely Adams, and more; and translated work by Zsuka Nagy, Yan An, João Luís Barreto Guimarães, and others.

Runestone Interview with John Ostrander

John Ostrander
Photo Credit: Hieu Minh Nguyen

Runestone Volume 6 was released at the end of February and features an interview with John Ostrander, prolific writer of comics in the the DC, Marvel, and Star Wars universes.

Ostrander answers questions about comics he loved as a child (he had to hide super hero comics from his mother), the challenges of joining an already well-established comics universe, and how involved in the process he was for his comics being adapted into films.

In terms of working minorities and more diverse characterization in, I’m very proud of that.  One of the characters I created was Amanda Waller for The Suicide Squad.  There was no one like her at the time, and really not many like her since then.  When I was first working on it, I knew that as the head of it I wanted someone who was not super-powered, I wanted someone who was African American, I wanted a female, I wanted someone slightly older, and I wanted them to be tough as nails.

Read part one of the interview with Ostrander here.

Lynda Barry: Making Comics

Lynda Barry Marking ComicsLynda Barry’s Making Comics is a how-to graphic novel guide for people who gave up on drawing. Lynda Barry says that everybody has an innate ability to draw, which most people abandon in their youth; comics are gestures of the human hand, and the act of writing is likened to the art of drawing. Making Comics explores the process of expanding the life of drawings, and fusing symbols for character building. A term is introduced for reimagining the happenings of one’s life: autobifictiontionalography.

Great interview with Lynda Barry by Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm KCRW.

More here: Lynda Barry’s New Book Offers a Master Class in Making Comics