Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they do.
Nicole Georges is a cartoonist, writer, zinemaker, teacher, aerobics instructor (?), and pet portraitist. When she was a child, Georges’ mother and family told her that her father died when she was a baby. When she was 21, a palm reader told her that her biological dad was still alive. She called conservative talk show host Dr. Laura for some advice. She chronicles what happened next in her graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura.
Based in Portland, Georges has been making comics and zines including “Invincible Summer” for over a decade. She also teaches at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, which provides access to tools and resources for creating independently published media and artwork. Georges tells us about teaching Riot Grrl history and zinemaking to teenagers, and finding value and self-empowerment through self-expression. When we talked to Georges, she was in the middle of a 9-month fellowship at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT.
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Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they do.
Two years ago, we recorded a conversation with a 16 year-old high school student. Not someone famous, but someone who is, to you, a random teenager. So that he could feel free to speak candidly about friends, school, and culture, we gave him the pseudonym Teenager X. He told us about being more tech-savvy than his teachers, he described his hectic schedule, he vented frustrations about learning to drive, and shared a funny anecdote about being kicked out of an online Metal Gear game.
Two years later, we revisit Teenager X. He's 18 now and mere months away from high school graduation. He talks about high school "busy work", modern jazz, and nerd culture. He tells us about a brief stint reviewing rom-coms for his high school newspaper and ponders his plans for life after high school, work, college, and girls.
Also: We've got a T-shirt bearing TMSIDK's smart aleck logo! Challenge people with your shirt to tell you something you don't know. Everyone loves a know-it-all.
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Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they do.
Stephanie Buscema is a painter, illustrator, cover artist, and comic book artist. She studied cartooning and illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In our conversation, she tells us what it was like to grow up with artist role models in her family. We discuss the influence and importance of illustration greats Mary Blair and Marie Severin. Stephanie walks us through her process for creating killer Red Sonja comics covers, and talks about the benefits of working on a variety of projects in different formats, and the sacrifices necessary to be a working artist.
Also: We've got a T-shirt bearing TMSIDK's smart aleck logo! Challenge people with your shirt to tell you something you don't know. Everyone loves a know-it-all.
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Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they do.
Bill Boichel is the owner and proprietor of Copacetic Comics, one of the greatest comic book stores ever. They are located in Pittsburgh, PA, and specialize in independent comics, music, film and literature. Bill has worked in comics retail for over 35 years, and has seen comic books go from disposable entertainment found on newsstands to an art form that is now accepted in galleries, museums and universities.
In this episode, Bill discusses the significance of Carl Barks and his impact on the American comics community. We talk about Barks' challenges with creator's rights, and similar struggles faced by artists like Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Jack Kirby. Bill ponders today's comics landscape and history. We survey Copacetic Comics' extensive inventory of small press comics and find out how Bill manages to keep up with such a dynamic and diverse art form. You can experience an online version of his store at copaceticcomics.com, where Boichel posts extensive reviews and promotes the books he carries. But the best way to experience it, and it's worth the trip wherever you are, is to find your way to Pittsburgh and visit in person.
Also: We've got a T-shirt bearing TMSIDK's smart aleck logo! Challenge people with your shirt to tell you something you don't know. Everyone loves a know-it-all.
This episode of TMSIDK is sponsored by Warby Parker. Read the rest
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they do.
“Make what you want to make. Don’t wait for people to ask you to do it. There are no barriers to it now.” — Elana Schlenker
Elana Schlenker is an independent graphic designer and art director based in Brooklyn. Print magazine honored her on their 2013 New Visual Artist list - a prestigious annual distinction that recognizes the industry’s top 20 creative talents under the age of 30. Schlenker is the publisher and creator of Gratuitous Type, a pamphlet of typographic smut.
This episode, we ponder the phrase “unspecialized practice” and try to decide if it’s a positive description for one’s work. We consider the differences between zines and magazines, the contemporary state of magazine publishing, Helvetica vs. Comic Sans, and the virtues of collaboration compared to DIY. Elana Schlenker tells us about studying marketing and studio art, rather than graphic design and walks us through the process of designing It’s Time to Move – writer/cartoonist Peter Wieben’s and photographer Dominic Nahr’s harrowing first-hand account of the Egyptian revolution through their text, drawings, and photos.
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Andy Warhol Museum, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from focusc's photostream
This episode is brought to you by Audible, the leading provider of audiobooks. Download a free ebook, on us, and get an extended free trial of the service by using this link.
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they do. In episode 22, we speak to Eric Shiner, Director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA.
"To Give Voice to Those That Don't Have It" and "Making the Anomalies of Society Into the Paradigms of Society" are among his responsibilities as the museum's director. Over the past twenty years, Andy Warhol's popularity has soared. Shiner talks with us about Warhol's legacy, about exhibiting the museum's collection in the Middle East, China, and Japan, and about engaging fans of the legendary pop artist through social media and interactive technology (on-site at the museum, and online).
In 2013, Shiner curated the Armory Focus portion of the Armory Show. He spoke with us about the commercial side of the art world. He explains, "Warhol himself saw absolutely no separation between art and business."
Finally, Shiner discusses the impact of the internet on the art world and how he finds new and exciting artists.
(The opening music in this episode is by Artificial Human.)
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Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they do. In episode 21, we speak to multi-disciplinary artist John Peña. Each day for the last five years, he has made a drawing about some aspect of his day. He calls this project Daily Geology, and presents it online in a form that resembles a webcomic. We talk with John about how he makes a living as an artist, comic artist Julia Wertz’s artist statement, faking happiness until you are actually happy, teaching, and the business of art education.
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In this episode of Boing Boing's Tell Me Something I Don't Know podcast, we speak with Joseph Lupo, a printmaker and professor at West Virginia University. His work focuses on how writers and artists communicate through comics. For more than a decade, he has deconstructed and examined a single volume of The Invincible Iron Man comic book: Volume 01, Issue 178, published in 1984.
"It is a different kind of superhero issue for a few reasons," says Lupo. "For one, never in this story does the superhero Iron Man ever directly appear. Also, this issue is split into two different story lines."
Using that single issue as source material, he invited 23 nationally-recognized artists to create new work inspired by that original comic. The result: a curated group exhibition, "Shame of the City: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Comic Book Narratives," which opens at Future Tenant in Pittsburgh on December 13, 2013.
We speak with Lupo about the show, and what we can learn about communication from studying comics.
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Cartoonist Ed Piskor's latest book, The Hip Hop Family Tree (Fantagraphic Books) collects his non-fiction comic strip history of Hip Hop, serialized weekly here on Boing Boing. The Hip Hop Family Tree follows the success of his debut graphic novel last year, Wizzywig (Top Shelf Comics), the tale of a computer hacker. Piskor has a special knack for creating comics that appeal to audiences beyond those of us who frequent comic book shops and bookmark webcomics for daily reading. We caught up with him after a busy month of promotional activity for the new book, including stops at Miami Book Fair, Chicago Ideas Week, Brooklyn Book Fair, and the Small Press Expo.
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Jacq Cohen is the publicist of Fantagraphics Books. Before that, she was an assistant publicist at Dark Horse Comics and interned at Top Shelf Comix. Fantagraphics Books has been a proponent of comics as a legitimate form of art and literature since they started publishing the Comics Journal in 1976. Since then, they’ve published some of the greatest cartoonists in history including George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Carl Barks, the Hernandez Brothers, Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, and many, MANY more (including TMSIDK's own Ed Piskor).
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Cartoonist Farel Dalrymple is our guest in this episode of "Tell Me Something I Don't Know." His comics career began as part of the Meathaus gang, a loose collective of artists from the School of Visual Arts around the end of the 20th century--Brandon Graham and James Jean know the secret handshake. His work includes Pop Gun War, illustrating Jonathan Letham's Omega the Unknown, the webcomic It Will All Hurt on SG12, and the newly released Delusional from Adhouse Books. He has been nominated for Eisner Awards, received a Xeric Grant, and earned a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.
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Bill Shannon is a multidisciplinary artist based in Pittsburgh. In 1992, Shannon attended the The Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BFA in 1995. In 1996 Shannon moved to NYC and immersed himself in the art, dance and skate cultures of Brooklyn and Manhattan
Over the past two decades, Shannon's installations, performances, choreography and video work have been presented nationally and internationally at numerous venues, festivals and events including the Sydney Opera House, Tate Liverpool Museum, NYC Town Hall, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Holland Festival, Amsterdam, Temple Bar Dublin, Kiasma Museum Finland, the Hirshhorn Museum, and many more. Shannon also completed a project with Cirque du Soleil: he choreographed an aerial duet and a solo on crutches for their 2002 production "Varekai," which continues to tour.
Shannon has been honored with a Newhouse Foundation Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Award, among others. He has also received support for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and others.
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Peter Bagge and Evan Dorkin began making alternative comics in the 1980s.
Peter Bagge began his career on R. Crumb’s Weirdo magazine as a cartoonist and then editor. He created Neat Stuff and Hate for Fantagraphics Books along with works for DC Comics, Marvel, and Dark Horse including the titles Yeah! (with Gilbert Hernandez), Apocalypse Nerd, and Other Lives. His latest work is the biography, Rebel Woman: The Margaret Sanger Story.
Evan Dorkin is best known for Milk & Cheese, Dork, and Superman and Batman: World’s Funnest (he also wrote and drew Bill & Ted’s Excellent Comic Book). He has written for a number of TV shows including Space Ghost Coast To Coast, Superman, and Welcome To Eltingville. He is the co-creator of Beasts Of Burden (with Jill Thompson).
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Frank Santoro is a Pittsburgh-based cartoonist. He self-published his first major work, Storeyville in 1995 while living in San Francisco. Upon its republication twelve years later, Tom Spurgeon wrote, "Frank Santoro's Storeyville may be the book of 2007, which is doubly amazing when you realize that it may have been the book of 1995 as well." After spending time in the New York art scene, where he painted and assisted painter, Francesco Clemente, he returned to making comics in the early 2000s with Cold Heat - an unfinished collaboration with Ben Jones. He cofounded the influential comics criticism blog and publication, Comics Comics, with Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler. In 2011, he founded the Santoro Correspondence Course. He writes a weekly comic for tcj.com and runs comicworksbook (currently in the midst of the comicsworkbook Composition Competition 2013). This fall, Picturebox, Inc. will release Santoro's new graphic novel, Pompeii -- a historical romance set in the days before the eruption. Read the rest
