KATMAN preview

KATMAN releases September 1st

From Henry Holt for Young Readers

Here's the back text:

Expelled into the hot, empty streets, fifteen-year-old Kit takes to feeding the stray cats that haunt the forgotten and unseen spaces of his town. There he also meets Jess, a manga-loving punk stuck with heavy-metal headbangers. But the pack can only hold for so long once she creates Katman, a ferocious shape-shifting stand-in for Kit’s quiet version of heroism. Not that he thinks of himself as a hero. After all, heroes don’t typically lie, steal, and hang out with crazy people.

Exploring themes of abandonment, reluctant responsibility, and the transformative power of art, KATMAN tells the story of two people forced to make a choice: Is it cooler to care about something, someone, or nothing at all?

WORKSHOPS

EDUCATIONAL WORKSHOPS-

Comix Journalism
Built on an investigative project-based education model, this workshop teaches basic journalism techniques of research, interviews and reportorial narrative and applies them to producing non-fiction comics on a specific subject of academic interest. Students learn basics of sequential story-telling and comic construction. Examples of successful non-fiction comics are presented and analyzed for visual strategies.
(see Prison City Comix)

Visual Storytelling
Basic tools of comics such as word balloons, panel composition, sequential transitions are presented. Examples from published works are presented and followed by exercises. Subject matter of exercises can be curriculum specific or purely fictional.

Minicomics
Production basics for creating stapled, self-published mini-comic including layout, pagination and assemblage. Photoshop and InDesign can be employed if available.

Place as Character
Using examples from author’s work as well as other established artists, this workshop illuminates the unique storytelling possibilities of landscape in graphic novels and how to achieve them.



Past Workshops

Feb 09
Truth and Fiction, Center for Cartoon Studies, White River Junction, VT
Participants: College age students enrolled in 2 year program.
Consisted of power point presentation of career survey of illustration, "docu-comic" and graphic novel work followed by illumination of visual story-telling tools employed in sequential art. Discussed role of research in non-fiction work and issues unique to that genre. Provided editorial input on current class project and conducted portfolio reviews.

Dec 08
Art Talks to Power, Puffin Cultural Forum, Teaneck, NJ
Participants: Students from Teaneck Middle School
Conducted three hour workshop focused on creating "opinion editorial" illustration on the subject of global warming. Consisted of power point presentation illuminating the use of visual tools like symbols, transformation and scale followed by discussion of specific issue and strategies for representation. Students then each produced an illustration and discussed each other's work in terms of clarity, effectiveness, artistic value and emotional impact.

March 07-May 07
Prison City Comix, The Center for Urban Pedagogy, Heritage High School, NY, NY
Participants: Senior English class.
Conducted a six-week investigative workshop focused on creating a 32 page non-fiction comic about the impact of the criminal justice system on the local community. Presented tools for non-fiction investigation including research, first person interviews and surveys that students then employed to gather content. Presented strategies for visual representation of complex issues and basics of sequential story telling. Arranged for guest speaker and class trip to Harlem Justice Center. Provided drawing instruction, editorial input and digital expertise for production of comic. Facilitated editorial session
for creation of comic cover.

May 05
Interrupted Life, Capacity Youth Art, Columbus, OH
Participants: High school students in community art program.
Conducted all day workshop designed to facilitate production of art installation addressing the incarceration of mothers. Presented working process for researching and creating non-fiction work engaged with social issues. Introduced visual strategies for presenting complex information and discussed the role of materials in installation art. Facilitated discussion of final concept for eventual installation included in traveling art show.

BOOKS

BLINDSPOT
Included in “Best American Comics 2008,” edited by Lynda Barry
starred review from “Publisher’s Weekly, "A very smart and humane graphic novel."

Dean and his friends enjoy a paradise of freedom in the woods behind their suburban housing development. But the fantasy can’t last. Their paradise is not entirely their own, and soon, through a series of surprising discoveries and dangerous encounters, the adult world intrudes. As the boys adapt to this new more perilous version of the world, fractures widen and alliances shift until Dean is left to struggle with the dark reality of his army fantasy alone.

Set in the childhood worlds of nature and fantasy Blindspot explores the role of forbidden knowledge and imagery during the transition to adulthood.

MORE INFO: http://www.blindspotbook.com/



PRISON TOWN
Paying the Price

Published in 2006
by The Real Cost of
Prisons Project

This comic book tells the story of the ways in which the financing and siting of prisons and jails affects the people of rural communities in which prisons are built. It also tells the story of how mass incarceration affects members of the urban communities that the majority of people who are incarcerated come from. Included in the comic book are alternatives to the current system. Intended as an activist tool, over eighty-five thousand copies have been distributed across the country.



LAB U.S.A.
illuminated documents

Published in 2001 by Autonomedia
Winner of the Silver Medal for Sequential Art from the Society of Illustrators
A docucomic that reveals bad svcience in the language of great art," - Sue Coe
This heavily researched, thoroughly footnoted docu-comic chronicles the history of clandestine racist and ideologically- inspired science and research in America.