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The Layer Method
Our top Secret time-saving technique for creating and merging balloons and tails in Illustrator.
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Thursday, September 9, 2010
Back in Berlin
or How I spent my summer
We have had one of our busiest years of this 21 year long Cartoonists Across America & The World tour in 06 with a whirlwind of mural and graphic novel workshops in the United States following our May visit to Germany.
I started off the summer of 2006 with a week of work in the schools and libraries of Sarasota, Florida and then on the 16th through the 18th of June, I was one of the special guests at a wonderful art festival called Our Cultural Connections put on by Judy Dean of Our Finer Places. Her vision was to bring together entertainment from various parts of the world and also to have our mural painting event for the children attending the festival. On the 16th of June, we were treated to a special performance of the Congo Choir who were kicking off their U.S. tour with this special event. Mayor Fredd Atkins presented myself and Mary Jean Eisenhower with the key to the city of Sarasota and in response to hearing that I have been using comics to promote education on our world tour, both the Mayor and Mary Jean proceeded to tell moving stories of their own love of comics.
Mary Jean is continuing the work that her grandfather, the President who understood better than most of the recent presidents the full horror of war, had started in the 1950s with his organization People to People which is based in Kansas City, Missouri. People to People also gave birth to the sister city movement and President Eisenhower's vision was to try and bring more people on this planet together in a variety of peaceful ways so that we might avoid wars in the future. I promised to stay in touch with Mary Jean on our 2007 US tour through the midwest and hope to do bigger events for peace in the future.
I very much have seen how comics truly cross all generations and all cultures as I continue on this tour. Sadly, the apathy continues from the 'comic book fans and comic book industry' in the United States. The shame of this new generation of so-called comic book fans is that very few of them actuallY READ comics. In fact, judging from the vast amounts of mindless morons that trek by our booth in San Diego, I wonder if they even read at all.
After Sarasota, I flew to our mural event at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History which was part of my five month Theo the Dinosaur exhibition. The museum did an excellent job with the show of my original oil paintings and we had a very nice crowd for the weekend of the mural event. My youngest son Gabe, the film student at Cal State University Long Beach, actually drove out from sunny California to rainy Ohio and documented the event for our long in the process documentary we have been shooting. Our European VP Klaus Leven came in as well for a series of the graphic novel workshops I was doing in the Midwest and for our big event in San Bernardino a week before the San Diego Comic Con in July. Brenda and Keith Murphy also attended the Cleveland mural event and Brenda brought a wonderful new chocolate sculpture of the dinosaurs playing rock and roll. She put in figures of herself as the Candy Queen and her husband Keith who is inductee #200 in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. The Cleveland Plain Dealer did an excellent piece on the event and we were also featured in American Profiles, an insert with a circulation of seven million copies throughout the country in small town papers. One of the families who read about us in American Profiles drove all the way from the Pittsburgh area to the show! We also debuted the eighth printing of our classic Dinosaurs Across America comic (now with 180,000 copies sold) at the museum with a special brand new Cleveland cover and also a new story. Cleveland is the birthplace of Superman and I was thrilled to be back in that city having helped Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster with their rights battle many years ago. And one wonders why I never worked for DC comics.
After Cleveland, we met up with Cartoonists Across America's Chicago VP Geoff Bevington who is also the creator of Steve the Dog. He met us at the famous Taste of Chicago food festival in Grant Park and we also visited the new Millenium Park for the first time with their incredible Frank Gehry architecture. I am drawing the park into the new issue of Dinosaurs Across America - The Route 66 edition since the Mother Road actually starts off in Chicago and continues all the way west to the Pacific. The special edition of Dinosaurs Across America - Route 66 will debut in the fall at the Edward James Olmos Latino Book and Family Festival in both Los Angeles and Chicago.
Our events following Chicago took us to both Muscatine and Cedar Rapids, Iowa and were great successes. The paper in Muscatine did a great story about our graphic novel tour and how we use cartoons and the creative process to reach a wider audience. The Cedar Rapids Public Library has one of the best collections of original children's book illustrations in the world and I was honored to be asked to contribute to their collection which includes original art by Maurice Sendek and Bill Peet.
The next event on this summer tour was in the 100 degree heat in San Bernardino, California which is right on old route 66. We had agreed to come back to the city after meeting these wonderful librarians in December when we did our first graphic novel workshops there. On July 15 and 16, we were joined by Simpsons artist Phil Ortiz, Tony Hawk artist Matt Lorrentz, Sabrina the Teenage Witch co-creator and writer of thousands of Archie stories George Gladir and musicians and authors for a huge weekend of painting and celebrating the arts. We actually painted the San Bernardino library truck and van and Mayor Pat Morris joined us in the hot sun and helped paint the red corvette that I drew on the hood of the van. The media coverage for this one event was beyond anything that we have had in the last 21 years in the United States with major stories in all the local papers and radio and tv coverage.
Sadly, that next week, we had to come back to the reality of the San Diego Comic Con where of course, folks like us who promote comics to the mainstream and especially for kids are largely ignored by the ignorant masses of non-readers who now stream into the convention in search of free toys and a chance to see their favorite tv or film star. I had a chance to comment on this downward spiral of the Comic Con in the previous Sunday's San Diego Union Tribune article about my friend Shel Dorf, who founded the convention as a place where artists and writers could actually shine and meet their fans. I was one of the few people who attended that first convention and I am troubled that San Diego continues to get bigger and bigger with very few of the people even pretending to read comics let alone any type of book.
I truly believe that if our industry is going to survive in the United States, it is up to us who actually draw, write, and publish comics to do a little more hard work reaching the mainstream. Everywhere that I speak in the United States, I am amazed that almost no one can even name a single cartoonist let alone a painter or any other visual artist! This lack of basic art education is clearly the root of our basic ignorance and lack of understanding why the arts and literacy are even important.
After San Diego, I did more of my graphic novel workshops in Oregon, North Carolina, and Virginia. A special treat was having old friend Mike Royer show up in Medford, Oregon to see me. Mike used to be one of the inkers for Jack Kirby and I had a chance to be his assistant when I was all of 18 years old. Mike saw my work and told me to never ever work for someone else and I continued to follow that advice for all these decades. We had a wonderful breakfast on my last day in Medford and a nice visit in his home. He retired from Disney and is still active in Oregon. I promised to return in the summer of 07 on my Pacific Northwest tour.
I am writing this from Berlin at the moment. It's the 18th of September and Phil Ortiz, who is working on his own new series as well as drawing the Simpsons for Bongo Comics and Mark Bode (Cheech Wizard) and I have just painted a mural in Berlin. Klaus Leven just released the second issue of his Joey & Gonz comics with many special guests including Sergio Aragones and has organized this nice little German tour. Mark was in town for the debut of his new Cheech Wizard line of clothing for Puma and some other gallery shows for his new prints. Phil is here to promote his new tv series and also to do some work for the Simpsons publishers in Europe. They are bringing him to Switzerland and Austria as well as a nice tour of Germany including the Frankfurt Book Fair over the next two weeks. Our first mural in Berlin was a great event and we hope to return to this city again next year for a bigger event with musicians and more artists. Like our first mural for the Frankfurt Book Fair a few years ago with special guest Sergio Aragones, the public here appreciates the art form and people actually read books in the rest of this world which is always a great joy to us. I have been coming to Europe for many years and I must say that the difference between the United States and the rest of the world is night and day when it comes to our art form.
I leave Europe at the end of September and then start a tour of California in October (Mark and I are guests at Silicon in San Jose on Oct. 6-8), followed by a special series of workshops on November 24 at the Newark Museum in conjunction with the American Comic Masters show. As one of the few artists who has worked with the city of Newark and their literacy campaign for many years, I am grateful for the chance to speak about diversity in our field since this first show was basically all white men. But we have to start somewhere. It's just great to see the comic book and comic strip finally getting the attention and respect from the so-called important media after a century of neglect and scorn in the country I was born in. Sadly, many artists in this show like Jack Kirby and Harvey Kurtzman and Charles Schulz did not live long enough to see this wonderful exhibition of their work.
We will continue our own graphic novel workshop tour through the summer of 2007 and as I continue to speak to more journalists in our backwards nation about the power of our art form in combating the terrible illiteracy crisis here in the United States, I am thrilled that we now have the backing of more media due to the recent success of these museum shows. We still have a long way to go if we are going to turn the tide on the masses of ignorant apathetic nonreaders in this country but if we roll up our sleeves and start to understand that people simply do not know about our art form, perhaps it can change.
We are not banking on that change in the United States of course, I am already writing several new bilingual books in Spanish, Chinese and German for the next few years.
Contact us at wingedtiger.com if you care to book an event in a school, library, convention etc.
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Friday, February 8, 2008
• The End.
So long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Good night.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
• Closing time
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
• Oni resurrects letters columns
Resurrection series features letter-writing contest
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
• And... we're back
With Red 5 info
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
• Happy Thanksgiving!
From aka Comics and Comic World News
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Lettering powerhouse and CWN sponsor turns 15
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• Surrogates movie ready to start production
Bruce Willis to star
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February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain