dan clowes Archives - Graphic Policy

Small Press Expo has to announced Françoise Mouly and Adrian Tomine as honored guests of SPX 2012. Both Mouly and Tomine will be making their first SPX appearances this year and are in addition to the previously announced guests Chris Ware, Dan Clowes and Jamie & Gilbert Hernandez.

Mouly, art editor for The New Yorker since 1993, is the author of several books including collections of cover art from The New Yorker, and has edited the forthcoming 2012 edition of the prestigious The Best American Comics series. Mouly got her start in comics as the co-creator (with husband Art Spiegelman) of the groundbreaking and highly influential RAW series in 1980. Consciously designed as an art object, RAW was, throughout the eighties, the premier showcase of cutting-edge comic art and storytelling techniques. Many of the celebrated contributors to RAW, including Charles Burns, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman have since gone on to grace the cover of The New Yorker with their artwork during Mouly’s tenure as art director. Her successful Toon Book imprint takes her cartoon and illustration aesthetic into the world of children’s books.

Writer/artist Adrian Tomine burst onto the comics scene in the mid-‘90s with Optic Nerve, and his closely observed characterization and thoughtful storytelling quickly earned comparisons to the likes of Raymond Carver and nominations for the Eisner Award. In addition to volumes collecting his sketches and otherwise uncollected work, Tomine’s critically acclaimed Optic Nerve stories have been collected into several handsome volumes. Though he is a generation removed from the “RAW generation,” Tomine’s distinctive artwork is of a piece with their sensibility, and has also gone on to grace the cover of The New Yorker on numerous occasions.

SPX 2012 will be held Saturday, September 15 and Sunday, September 16. For more information on the Small Press Expo, please visit http://www.spxpo.com.

Small Press Expo Announces Dan Clowes and Chris Ware as Special Guests for SPX 2012

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Brett

Official Press Release

Small Press Expo Announces Dan Clowes and Chris Ware as special guests for SPX 2012

Bethesda, Maryland; February 6, 2012 – The Small Press Expo (SPX), the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comics, graphic novels, and alternative political cartoons, kicks off 2012 with our official announcement that cartoonists Dan Clowes and Chris Ware will be attending this year’s festival as special guests.

Superstar cartoonist Dan Clowes was awarded the 2011 PEN Center Literary Award for his “Outstanding body of work in graphic literature.” He received the Independent Spirit Award and an Academy Award nomination as writer for the movie Ghost World, based on his graphic novel, and he has published in the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and GQ. He was the first cartoonist selected for inclusion in Esquire’s prestigious fiction issue, and he drew the backgrounds for The Ramones’ video “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.” But for cartooning cognoscenti, he is perhaps best loved for Eightball, the ambitious and groundbreaking serialized anthology in which he premiered most of the stories eventually collected in his graphic novels. The most recent issue of Eightball contained the entire story “The Death Ray”, published in 2011 as a standalone graphic novel and selected by The Onion’s AV Club as one of “The Best 25 Comics of the ‘00s.”

Graphic novelist, gallery cartoonist, strip cartoonist — Chris Ware is one of the best known and most respected independent American cartoonists. He has guest edited McSweeney’s Quarterly and The Best American Comics and published cartoons in the New Yorker as well as the Virginia Quarterly Review. He was the first cartoonist to serialize a story in The New York Times Magazine, and has had his work included in the Whitney Biennial. His graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan – the Smartest Kid on Earth received the Guardian First Book Award, the American Book Award and the prestigious French comics award “L’Alph Art.” Fans are eagerly anticipating Volume 21 of his Acme Novelty Library comic strip series and his new compendium, Building Stories, will be released this Fall from Pantheon.

Details of events featuring Ware and Clowes will be released as planning is finalized.

About SPX

SPX is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit that brings together more than 300 artists and publishers to meet their readers, booksellers and distributors each year. Graphic novels, mini comics, and alternative comics will all be on display and for sale by their authors and illustrators, as well as a series of panel discussions and interviews with this year’s guests.

SPX also preserves the works of the creators in the indie comics community through the Small Press Expo Collection at the Library of Congress, a first of its kind relationship with a major institution in the United States.

As in previous years, profits from the SPX will go to support the the SPX Graphic Novel Gift Program, which gifts graphic novels to public and academic libraries, as well as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), which protects the First Amendment rights of comic book readers and professionals. For more information on the CBLDF, go to their website at http://www.cbldf.org.

SPX 2012 will be held Saturday, September 15 and Sunday, September 16, with the Ignatz Awards festival prize ceremonies occurring Saturday September 15 at 9PM. For more information on the Small Press Expo, please visit http://www.spxpo.com.