Today on the site, RJ Casey talks to the cartoonist Sophie Yanow about memoir, comics journalism, and translation, among many other things.
I am interested in architecture and economics and how those things affect livability. It seems to me that the obvious short term is that more and more people will be priced out of living in “major” cities. Seattle suffers from the same tech industry influx that San Francisco does, which for residents means so much energy spent on keeping your housing or just needing to move. The crazy capitalist endgame might be what we see in London, where entire neighborhoods are empty of people because the international super-rich have bought massive apartment buildings as places to park their capital rather than to house humans. While there are many great architects and urban planners out there, they can’t solve this stuff alone. Short term, people need to band together to strengthen things like rent control and renter protections. Long term... replace capitalism?
Also, Rob Kirby reviews the new book by Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do.
In her early twenties, Bui traveled back to Vietnam to meet her extended family. It was shortly afterward that she began to record the family’s history, hoping that “if I bridged the gap between past and present… I could fill the void between my parents and me.” Her narrative flashes back and forth in time, illustrating how larger events (war, dictatorship, immigration) shaped the family’s lives. She records her father's traumatic, uprooted childhood in the 1950s (she calls him “Bố,” or “daddy”) and how he endured periods of living as a refugee with his abusive, philandering father in a country wracked with sociopolitical turmoil and poverty. Meanwhile, Bui's mother (“Má”) grew up in privilege as a child of a civil engineer, shielded for many years from the dire conditions of much of the country. After marrying Bố, Má gives birth to multiple children, usually under extremely difficult conditions, including her daughter, Bích, right before the Tet Offensive in 1968; a stillborn child, Thảo, in Saigon in 1974; and her son Tâm in a UN refugee camp in Malaysia in 1978.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. The New York Times talks to outgoing New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff about some of his own favorite cartoons. I haven't seen much extensive commentary on this upcoming change yet, but Mankoff was a somewhat polarizing figure in some cartooning circles, for various reasons including the setup of the Cartoon Bank, the magazine's cartoon caption contest, and the fairly laborious submission process he oversaw.
While Mr. Mankoff, 72, may be leaving the magazine, he’s hardly retiring. He will be teaching a course about humor and communication at Fordham University. He’ll continue to consult on the Cartoon Bank, a licensing platform he founded in 1992. He’ll also be working on Botnik Studios, a company he’s creating with the comedy writer Jamie Brew that explores using artificial intelligence to augment creativity. (Mr. Mankoff, a former graduate student in experimental psychology, has already collaborated with a Microsoft researcher on an algorithm that can sort through the flood of entries to the magazine’s weekly cartoon caption contest.)
Newsarama talks to Ben Passmore.
I was reading some Frantz Fanon with a homie of mine, another black guy existing in the New Orleans punk scene, and comparing our experiences navigating various exchanges with our white friends and acquaintances. We were reading Black Skin, White Masks, which is largely about the psychological effects of colonization on black people. It wasn't the first time we'd had that type of conversation, it's the kind of thing black people that interact with some amount of white people on a regular basis have within five minutes of meeting each other. The only difference was that the context of the conversation was our sense of dysphoria, or how our social relationships with white people effected how we saw ourselves. Something about this particular conversation with my friend made me realize the extent we, black punks, live if a different world than our white friends.
The Beat talks to Maggie Umber.
I’m a cartoonist and the associate publisher at 2dcloud. This past year I had a 24 page comic in the anthology The Shirley Jackson Project edited by Rob Clough and published by Ninth Art Press. My first graphic novel, Time Capsule, was published by 2dcloud in 2015. My upcoming graphic novel, Sound of Snow Falling, is being kickstarted as a part of 2dcloud’s Spring 2017 collection.
—Misc. The New York Times gets R. Sikoryak to explain some of the thinking behind his pastiche-target choices in his comics adaptation of the iTunes users agreement.
Joe Cool, the Snoopy persona, is not that far from Steve Jobs. I had to use “Peanuts,” that’s why it’s in the first 10 pages or so, because that was one of the first things I knew I wanted to do. I’ve always been interested in pulling people into comics who might not even be that into comics, but are aware of them: “Oh yeah, I saw that Christmas special with the dog, right?” People might recognize the characters or the general notion of a strip and that sort of pulls them in.
Linda Medley, the creator of Castle Waiting, is in need of financial assistance.
Several years ago I was diagnosed with severe cervical spondylosis as well as carpal tunnel syndrome, and took some time off from creating artwork to rest, and adapt to new modes of working. Although my convalescence took longer than anticipated, I'm currently hard at work on Castle Waiting Volume 3 and hope to have the first 150-page installment ready for publication next year...but I'll need your financial help to be able to continue working on it.
