Monday 25 January 2010

How Naked Was He?











(To make the cartoon really bigger, click on the Whippoorwill's wattle.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Citizens Against Public Nudity.

This was a fun cartoon to draw with all its little bird people. I like to draw birds and some of my favorites are featured in the header panel for this cartoon, shown below. Some papers use these panels, some use thinner ones like this or this, some use none, depends on how comics section is laid out.

Some of the birds at left are tattooed on my right forearm, as a matter of fact. Looky here.

I got a few emails last week from people who didn't understand this cartoon. The joke hinges on the expression, "naked as a Jaybird." I'm not sure if people who didn't get the joke just didn't make the connection or had simply never heard the expression. Where I come from, people say this sort of thing all the time.

That's all for today, go forth this week and conquer your kingdom with sparkles.

Graphic Narrative Discussion Group

Our Graphic Narrative Discussion Group met last week and selected our readings for 2010. They are:

February 18, 2010: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
An award-winning and highly-praised graphic novel that intertwines three separate narratives to explore the Chinese-American experience and issues of myth and race.

April 15, 2010: Clover by CLAMP (omnibus edition)
A shoujo (‘girls comics’) futurist cyber-fantasy by the preeminent Japanese mangaka collective.

June 17, 2010: Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
This artistic & narrative tour de force about an architect who re-examines his life was one of the best reviewed graphic novels of 2009.

August 19, 2010: Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
Parallel stories set in the 19th century and the modern day examine Bertrand Russell’s foundational quest in mathematics.

October 21, 2010: Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke & The Hunter: A Parker Novel by Richard Stark
Cooke’s highly-praised adaptation of Stark’s seminal noir novel gives us the opportunity to discuss the challenges and opportunities involved in adapting a work from one medium to another. (We will read and discuss both the original prose novel and the graphic adaptation.)

December 16, 2010: Masterpiece Comics by R. Sikoryak
Adaptations of literary classics produced by mashing-up comic styles and characters with the source material, e.g. The Little Lulu characters in a retelling of The Scarlet Letter.

Our Website at http://webservices.itcs.umich.edu/mediawiki/gndiscuss/ has been updated with the 2010 schedule.