Tom Spurgeon visits The Center for Cartoon Studies

Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon visits The Center for Cartoon Studies as a guest of their Industry Day. He reports his observations of the school and visit in White River Junction, Vermont.

* the senior studios were fun. Every second-year student gets one, in an older building with cryptic notes about not setting foot into any room on the first floor. I imagined the students working quietly like assassins and then posting their finished pages in a kind of ongoing, nerd-macho throwdown. The Denys Wortman archives across the hall would have been stunning and remarkable just for the supplementary material on-hand — any time you get to hold a vintage Annie original is a good time — but for the amount of material on-hand from Wortman the room was a bit mind-blowing. Sturm reiterated a point I’ve heard him make in public, that one of the big lessons about reissuing a book on Wortman and doing a show in support of that books is how quickly and completely the once very prominent illustrator and comics-maker disappeared from public view.

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