Today on the site Karen Peltier profiles Lale Westvind, whose comics I admire more a lot.
Westvind primarily focuses on the potential madness of futuristic and alien worlds. Often depicting simultaneous perspective and motion, her characters bounce and blast their way through desolate deserts and impenetrable tangles of organic and mechanic matter. Departing from exploration of material worlds, Now and Here explores the liminal space of her protagonist’s psyche, simultaneously stretching infinitely while locked within the confines of thought.
Now and Here is a creation born out of the act of creating. Admiring her prep drawings for an upcoming animation called Cunt Eyes, Westvind wanted a vehicle for those images to be appreciated as static, allowing the viewer to soak them up to the fullest. “It was like making a comic backwards,” she recalls. “I picked the ones I liked and rearranged them, tried to put them in an order that might make narrative sense and wrote something describing each image. I had a vague idea of how I wanted it to work, but I definitely didn’t know what it was going to be about or what was going to happen until I was finished. In that way, my subconscious wrote it.” Now and Here captures the subjective nature of thought in a material way; it confronts the reader with the process of taking in visual information and assigning meaning through thought and the new visualizations those thoughts take on.
Hey, you'd think my being best friends with Santoro would entitle me to know there's a new Comics Workbook mag out in the world. But, like the rest of you poor slobs I found out via the internet.
Tom Spurgeon reports back on TCAF. Boy I don't miss going to festivals (yet). I don't know how Spurgeon does it. I mean, how does he talk to all those people? I would never be able to write up that kind of report without casting judgment against at least half of those people. Good lord. Spurgeon! What are you made of? Festivals. Oh boy. All except Lucerne. That I'll always miss.
Nice Barry Windsor Smith process post here. His revival of Pre-Raphaelite image-making is of a piece with other 1970s revivals (deco, for example), as well as the general '70s glittery excess. Sometimes it has an almost disco sheen, like it's one step removed from fashion illustration of the time. Hot kitsch.
Good to see some TCJ pieces featured in this Slate list of long form writing about comics.
