Tag: comics

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Art Art Feature

With Great Art Comes POW! Great Responsibility

Chris Claremont will be at the Memphis Comic Expo.

The Memphis Comic Expo explodes on the scene with cosmic force this weekend with more than a hundred comic writers and artists in attendance. Special guests are Chris Claremont, who has done some of the best known tales in the X-Men canon, and Scott Snyder, who has earned praise and numerous awards for his Batman work.

Other comic creator celebrities include:
– David Finch, who has worked for Marvel and DC, and his wife Meredith Finch, known for her work on Xena: Warrior Princess and her own fantasy title, Rose
– Peter David, who has worked on Marvel’s Incredible Hulk
– Gene Ha, who collaborated with Alan Moore on Top 10 as well as his creator-owned book, Mae
– Robbi Rodriguez, co-creator of Spider-Gwen
– Mike McKone, who has done pencil work on the Punisher and the Justice League

– Scott Kolins, an artist known for the Flash and numerous other characters

Look for Scott Snyder at the Memphis Comic Expo.

Dozens of other creators at the national and local levels will be at the expo, which is in its sixth year. It was created by Donald Juengling, manager of Comics and Collectibles in Memphis, who says, “Our motto is ‘Creators Come First.’ Whereas many so-called ‘comic conventions’ are gravitating toward media guests and ignore the actual comic creators. We are the exact opposite.”

Spider-Gwen co-creator Robbi Rodriguez is coming to the Memphis Comic Expo.

The Expo will have a cosplay contest with cash prizes as well as video game tournaments with cash prizes for Smash Bros and Tekken.

The Expo will run at the Agricenter from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, October 19th, and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 20th. Tickets are $25 for one day and $35 for both days. VIP passes are available for $85. Children 12 and under are free. Go to memphiscomicexpo.com for details.

Categories
Book Features Books

Deep Cuts: Local Comic Crowdfunding Campaign

For the past three years, a group of Memphis-based artists and illustrators have been working away in semi-secret, hunched over sketch pads and digital illustration tablets, emailing each other ideas, and hogging the big table at Memphis Pizza Cafe when they met up to discuss their project in person.

Now, after three years of script-writing, character designs, and story-boarding, the creators of the Paper Cuts comics anthology have announced the project along with a crowdfunding campaign that runs until Thursday, July 4th.

Joni Miller

Paper Cuts is a full-color, 170-page independent comics anthology inspired, in part, by the popular Flight comics anthology. The project, presided over by editor Shane McDermott and art director Elliot Boyette, was announced to the world via its Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday and is available exclusively via Kickstarter pledge. The goal is set at $12,800, and as of this writing, the campaign has garnered $1,816 in pledges.

“It wasn’t super organised at first because I’m not super organised,” says McDermott, a freelance graphic designer and former editorial illustrator for The Commercial Appeal and professor at Memphis College of Art (MCA). After making the move to freelancing, McDermott found himself thinking about a comics project he had kept on the back burner for what seemed like too long. So he started making calls, seeing who might be interested in contributing to an independent comics anthology. As both a former professor and student at MCA, it was only natural for McDermott to look to his former classmates and students to fill out the ranks of the anthology. “A lot of us met for pizza one night and started talking about it and formed our core group.

Shane McDermott

“Most of us are alums of the Memphis College of Art,” McDermott says before taking pains to stress that, while he might have taught some of the anthology’s contributors, when it came to Paper Cuts, they were peers and equals. “Since the school is closing, it’s really important to us that this book does succeed, because it’s a tribute to the school and to the program,” he adds.

“We debated on whether or not to have a theme early on, but we decided to just let everybody do what they want,” McDermott says of the eclectic collection. “If there’s any commonality between us, it’s that we’re all indie artists making our own thing,” adds Boyette, the anthology’s art director and a graphic designer for the city of Memphis.

That freedom allowed the artists to follow their passions — and has made for some seriously strange and exciting subject matter. Included in the anthology are stories about a nurturing velociraptor mom, space adventures, love stories, and a guy with T-rex heads for hands. McDermott’s entry is a side story from a larger work of his called Sea Horse. “It’s about this guy who gets stuck in the imaginative worlds he created as a child, but it’s sort of run down because he hasn’t been there in a while because he’s an adult,” McDermott says before describing his submission for Paper Cuts, a story that somehow manages to cleverly wrangle all my favorite genres into one comic. “[It’s] called ‘The Ghouls, the Bat, and the Ugly.’ It’s a haunted Western. It has zombies and a vampire and a wicked witch of the wild west getting into a shoot-out at the Black Lagoon Saloon.”

Elliot Boyette

Boyette, a fan of both silly comic humor and post-apocalyptic scenarios, decided to marry the two seemingly disparate styles for his offering. “It’s about what happens when a calamity happens in the world and people band together in a run-down Hardee’s and make up a whole new cult religion,” he says. “It was true, pure fun making this comic.” Boyette didn’t actually set the story in a Hardee’s, though; he made up his own fast foot setting for his comic-book showdown: Nova Burger.

McDermott’s and Boyette’s graphic short stories will be in good company in Paper Cuts, alongside works by Rachel Stovall Davis, Nick Hewlett, Joni Miller, April Rodriguez, and a packed lineup of creative others. Fans of weird comics and out-there stories have until Independence Day 2019 to support this collection from independent artists.

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Dammit Gannett: Fabulous Prizes Edition

Picking on the Commercial Appeal used to be its own reward, back in the day when they were the big corporate Goliath and we were the little dude with a slingshot. As the paper has continued to decline, it’s become a weekly, though not entirely joyless, chore. Still, it’s good to feel appreciated. So thanks, Jim Palmer, for this cartoon inspired by Fly on the Wall’s regular “Dammit Gannett” feature.

Jim’s a first generation Memphis Flyer vet who contributed illustrations for columns by Lydel Sims. He’s the creator of Memphis’ own Li’l E and your Pesky Fly’s very favorite cartoon about the journalist’s life. 

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

The Howling Monkey Reads The Comics: 5/3/15

The Howling Monkey Reads The Comics is a public service to you, in which we explain why the Sunday funnies are, well, funny.  This thrilling edition of The Howling Monkey Reads The Comics includes bags of milk, jigsaw puzzles, mythology and a man who smells bad!  Enjoy it, won’t you?  (You won’t).

[audio-1]
Joey Hack is a regular contributor to Fly On The Wall, and is a member of The Wiseguys improv troupe.

Categories
News News Blog

Memphis Comic Expo Makes a Splash In its First Year

Artist Derrick Dent at the Memphis Comic Expo

  • Artist Derrick Dent at the Memphis Comic Expo

The first-ever Memphis Comic Expo debuted this year to throngs of comic fans looking to buy comic books, meet artists and authors, and revel with other fans. The inaugural year’s lineup included over 35 guests in the art and fiction world, hailing from all over the country. Even wrestler Jerry Lawler was a guest, displaying his Batmobile — a replica of the 1966 car Adam West and Burt Ward drove in the 1960s-era “Batman” TV show.

With the expo aligned in rows, comic book fans bobbed and weaved around cosplayers, large comic book collections, action figure displays, and huge art presentations. A podcast was even being recorded live on-site from the folks at Black Nerd Power, a podcast featuring thoughts on the science fiction and fantasy world from a black perspective.

Attendees could also commission a piece of art from an illustrator during the expo, get an autograph, or purchase completed pieces directly.

One Memphis artist, Derrick Dent, sold his illustrations as well as pieces that had been previously commissioned as part of the annual Bikesploitation event that had its fourth year last May. Dent has been illustrating since he was in college, and he was first commissioned his junior year. His style was originally influenced by “a lot of manga and a lot of video game art,” he said.

“I was a really big fan of traditional cartoonists, and I understood what they were doing was a form of drawing, but it was a magical kind of thing,” Dent said. “It was so clean and precise.”

The fast-talking artist brought his work to sell as well as promote, offering a table-length’s worth of art that attendees could view.

“A lot of my work is really kinetic,” Dent said. “There’s a confident line to my work that I think people are attracted to. There’s a sense of tradition because I do a lot of brush and ink drawings. That’s a timeless way of creating images — I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon. I handle black-and-white images very well, and I think that’s always been a strength of mine.”

During the interview, Dent was working on an Elvis illustration — one that he admitted later to its recipient that it might have been more Johnny Cash.

Comic books were not the only facet of nerd culture at the expo. Science fiction and fantasy author Cecilia King was promoting her novel, Take It to the City in the Sky. King is also from Memphis and said she’s been writing since she was little. Her novel features a teenager named Avi, a juvenile delinquent in the year 3047 who has been arrested for the third time — this one revolving around drugs.

Even if comics were the overarching theme, any self-proclaimed nerd could have found his or her fill at the expo. The Memphis Comic Expo now joins the growing number of nerdy and geeky conventions, exhibitions, and gatherings staking their claim in the Mid-South.

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