New York Symposium Publishes Fall Line-up
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The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium has posted their fall line-up of speakers and topics. Each symposium is free to the public and online though you need to register. To register, visit their newsletter on Substack for the email address one week prior to the event.
Sept. 1 – Roman Muradov: My Idea of Funny
A playful examination of the mechanics of humor through various mediums, from comics and novels to music and abstract art. Looking closely at the use of repetition and omissions, variations in syntax and style, and many other aspects of visual, written and spoken language, this talk is a celebration of comedy in its many shapes and forms.
Sept 7 – The Comfort with In(n) Sean Christensen
This talk will be an iteration of a performance/talk, on finding the heart in the art you make and how it communicates with you. Being born the same year as a hotel chain called the Comfort Inn and finding yourself always looking for the comfort within. This will be explored over a few works of mine made in the last 10 years.
Sept 15 – Paul C. Tumey: Is Diss a System? The Lost Judge Comics That Shaped Milt Gross
This talk will be an iteration of a performance/talk, on finding the heart in the art you make and how it communicates with you. Being born the same year as a hotel chain called the Comfort Inn and finding yourself always looking for the comfort within. This will be explored over a few works of mine made in the last 10 years.
Sept. 22 – Ben Mendelewicz’s Electric Fence
Ben Mendelewicz will discuss his comic Electric Fence, which is “the story of a libertarian proxy war fought in the creator-space between Vloggers and Podcasters.” Mendelewicz currently serializes Electric Fence on Patreon and self-publishes limited edition transparent plastic and standard print versions of his graphic novel in progress.
Sept. 29 – Jason Shaffer on “The American Cruikshank(?): David Claypoole Johnston’s Cartooning”
This talk takes its title from the first major study of Johnston’s work, an essay by Clarence S. Brigham in The Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, which houses Johnston’s family papers and some unique paintings and sketches along with a nearly complete collection of his prints and illustrations. Brigham plays something of a double-game with the sobriquet bestowed on Johnston, denying that Cruikshank influenced Johnston’s style or portraiture even while establishing that the two men corresponded and that Johnston’s comic annual, Scraps, seem to have taken its title from a similar collection by Cruikshank.
Oct. 6 – Bronwyn Carlton: My Career in Comics
Best-known as a WFMU radio host, Bronwyn Carlton will share the inside story of her years working in comics. Carlton worked as both a writer and (under the name Bronwyn Taggart) an editor at Marvel and at DC. Her wide-ranging projects included Paradox Press’s Big Book Of… graphic anthologies, Stuck Rubber Baby, Catwoman, and Cartoon Network children’s comics. She won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor in 1996.
Oct. 13 – Jeff Ravel on Playing Cards and Political Ideology During the French Revolution.
Before 1789, the French crown regulated the appearance of commercial playing cards as a method to collect taxes from consumers. With the onset of the Revolution, however, the government temporarily halted the excise tax on cards, leaving designers and manufacturers free to experiment with politically inspired iconography on the decks of cards they made. This talk will explore the radical twists that playing card design took during the 1790s in France.
Oct. 20 – Oskar Cox Jensen on Ballads, Woodcuts, and the Georgian Imagination
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the most ubiquitous cultural medium in the western world was the simple song. For many, their point of access to this was the printed ballad – meaning that music was most often accompanied by graphic image, in the form of an illustration heading the ballad sheet. In this talk, I consider the imaginative potential afforded to the consumer and recreator of ballad prints, in three tiers of sophistication: plain woodcut, coloured etching, and full-scale realisation. Across these escalating forms of graphic encounter, I explore how image and song interacted to create a multimedia imaginative space, in which singers and listeners could subsume themselves as heroes, villains, victims and more. And inevitably, William Hogarth will feature along the way (that guy gets everywhere).
Oct. 27 – Georg Barber (ATAK) on his new book — Sleepy Hollow.
ATAK will discuss his latest work (Sleepy Hollow) and his techniques of hand color-separation.
Nov. 3 – Emmy Waldman on Filial Lines
Emmy Waldman will discuss her first book, Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form (Cambridge University Press). Her book places the autobiographical projects of these canonical comics authors alongside each other, focusing on new and neglected works (and with an epilogue on the Pulitzer Prize-winning tour-de-force debut of Tessa Hulls). The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes — boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs — through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes.
Nov. 9 – Sarina Nihei: Designing Despair, Drawing the Absurd
This talk explores the literary and artistic influences behind my animations. Focusing on recurring themes of despair and absurdity in contemporary society, I will discuss how writers, such as Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Harold Pinter have shaped my approach to storytelling. I will also examine how artists and directors including Tomi Ungerer, Priit Pärn and Yasujiro Ozu have influenced my visual language and hand-drawn animation. Through these influences, I will reflect on how Japanese and European traditions have come together in the development of my own practice.
Nov. 17 – The comics of Drew Lerman
This talk will look back on my comic strip Snake Creek, which appeared on Instagram from 2018 – 2025 and has been collected in three volumes.
Nov. 24 – Mark Iosifescu on Saga de Xam
In the long history of alternative comics, few works are as venerated, or as underseen, as Saga de Xam, the legendary French graphic novel by Nicolas Devil and Jean Rollin. Originally published in 1967 in limited quantities, the book earned a devoted cult following for its innovative psychedelic visuals and avant-garde sensibilities, even as it spent decades out of print. Editor Mark Iosifescu will discuss the book and the process of developing its first-ever English translation, which he edited for Anthology Editions in 2025.
Dec. 1 – Pete Maresca on George McManus
A comprehensive look at the life and work of George McManus from 1902 to 1954, from his early days in St. Louis to his ground-breaking work for Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in New York. McManus is one of the “Founders of the Funnies.” With his strip, The Newlyweds, he pioneered the genre of the family-humor comic strip which led to the sitcoms of radio and television. This form reached a peak with battling (yet loving) spouses, Jiggs and Maggie, in Bringing Up Father. Once the most popular comic artist in the world, McManus had a wide influence on the form—not only in America, but also in Europe (Hergé’s Tintin) and Asia (Tesuka’s manga). Enjoy incisive commentary by the two editors of an upcoming large-sized collection from Sunday Press, as they present examples of all of McManus’s work along with a collection of photographs, illustrations and memorabilia. Lovers of classic comics have seen too little of McManus, but, by George, that is about to change!
Dec. 7 – Lily Thu Fierro and Generoso Fierro
A discussion about science as an entry point and mediating force for creating signs and establishing perspectives in the comics of Lily Thu Fierro and Generoso Fierro. They will focus on their latest comic, The Interpretant, as a case study for the experimentation involved in their process, and they will talk about how their research into causality, perception, and Christian mysticism has manifested in their work.
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