The East Bay Alternative Press Book Fair was a fine time, and I came back with a foot thick stack of zines which I am making my way through. Kate Saturday, our way awesome neighbor at APE, was there in her final California appearance before moving to Minneapolis. I drew her a ghetto Richard Wagner by way of a parting present, and she drew me a hairy eyeball house on legs in return, and in general it was great.
My favorite part of these events is finding new strips, writers and artists to follow. APE gave me Prophecy Failed, Carpe Chaos, and Knights of Nine to Five. EBAPBF has given me Elle Skinner. I picked up her It’s a Very Scribble Christmas, about her experience adopting a cat over the holidays and it is CHARMING. I mean every capital there. Her webcomic, The Littlest Elle, is equally wonderful.
Her boothmate, Jeanne Beacom, was putting out Hey Derby Girl, a fun comic about roller derby that has cleared up some of my larger misconceptions about roller derby which come primarily from 1980s movies about The Dystopic Future in which roller derby was combined with lasers… somehow.
Agent Agnes of Acrobats fame was also there. I was hoping for a fine Acrobats collection, but was equally happy to pick up Picnic on the Moon, a journal comic of her experience attending the MoCCA festival in New York. Social anxiety, drinking, horror movies, Buffy, sexual identity, and sweet, sweet comics talk – all of our favorite things!
Much more to tell, but Geoff needs me to draw like eight episodes in the next forty eight hours, so back to the ink mines with me!
– Count Dolby von Luckner
First – on December 11, a mere two days from now, I’ll be at the Berkeley Alternative Press Book Fair! Come – get free sketches – talk to me!!
Cubism’s a funny thing. The first properly cubist work was created by Georges Braque, not Picasso, and it was Braque who, for the half decade or so following, was consistently the first to expand the frontiers of the genre’s possibilities. His stand alone constructions, his use of papier colle, his abstraction of figures – all ideas that paved the way for Picasso’s work.
Plus, his approach is just so much more fundamentally likable – take the subject of the guitar. Both Braque and Picasso painted a LOT of damn guitars. Braque did so because he dearly loved music and wanted to render instruments with such hyper reality, such totally faceted representation, that you could feel the guitar by just looking at it. Picasso, on the other hand, saw that it was curvy and had a hole in it, and used it more often than not as a Woman and her Vagina pun. Granted, this is pretty much true of any object that has a hole in it that you find in a Picasso work – he found that, I guess, endlessly clever of him. It’s really kind of sad.
As to cubism’s potential as a weapon, well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we?
– Count Dolby von Luckner