Tag Archives: jen sorensen

Small Press Expo’s 20th Anniversary Guests Include Charles Burns, Jen Sorensen, Tom Tomorrow and Ben Katchor

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Small Press ExpoThis year is the 20th Anniversary of SPX, which will be held September 13 and 14, 2014 at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. For our 20th birthday, we are pleased to announce Charles Burns, Jen Sorensen, Tom Tomorrow and Ben Katchor to join in the celebration of the comic creators of the alt-weekly newspapers.

They are in addition to the previously announced alt-weekly guests Jules Feiffer, Lynda Barry and James Sturm, as well as SPX first timers Brandon Graham, Emily Carroll, Drew Friedman and Mimi Pond.

Charles Burns completes the final installment of his trilogy that began with The Hive and X’ed Out with the release this September of Sugar Skull. Mr. Burns is renown for his epic graphic novel Black Hole, as well as his work for such periodicals as Raw, The Believer and The New Yorker. Courtesy of Pantheon Books there will be advance copies of Sugar Skull at the show, as well as a special book plate designed just for SPX 2014.

Jen Sorensen is the recipient of the this years prestigious Herblock Award, which is given every year for excellence in political cartooning. She also won the 2013 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in Cartoons as well as the 2013 National Cartoonist Society Award for Best Editorial Cartoons. Her political cartoons can be seen in various alt-weekly newspapers around the United States as well as at The Nib and her own web site. In addition to her weekly cartoon, she also does illustration work for such clients as the Kaiser Health News, The Dallas Observer, Ms. Magazine, Politico and her current home paper, The Austin Chronicle.

Tom Tomorrow aka Dan Perkins is the creator behind This Modern World, his weekly political cartoon strip that has been running since 1990. He is a two time winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in Cartoons, as well as the winner of the James Madison Freedom of Information Award and the 2012 Herblock Award. He is the author of 10 compilations of his cartoon work, as well as a children’s book and he created the cover to the Pearl Jam album Backspacer.

Ben Katchor started in the alt-weekly’s in 1986 and six compilations out of his award winning work, the latest is the 2013 Hand Drying in America and Other Stories from Pantheon Books. He is an associate professor at Parsons The New School for Design and has taught cartooning all over the world. Mr. Katchor is also works in the theater as a librettist, having won an Obie award for his work on The Carbon Copy Building.

SPX Announces Original Art Donations for the Small Press Expo Collection at the Library of Congress

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Falling the recent donation of numerous small press and indie comic books, today the Small Press Expo announced the acquisition and subsequent donation to the Library of Congress of original art by various Small Press Expo alumni and exhibitors. Sara Duke, curator of Applied and Graphic Material in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress had this to say about the donation:

We are excited that our partnership with SPX is leading to a greater understanding of the  patrimony of comics; the wealth of original cartoon art here at the Library of Congress now includes independent and small press cartoonists. We are looking forward to the Expo in September, and hope that more talented artists will join the ranks of Raina Telgemeier, Jim Rugg, Jen Sorensen, Matthew Thurber, Keith Knight, Jim Woodring, and Matt Bors in the SPX Collection at the Library of Congress.

The originals include examples of Kurtzman and Glyph Award winner Keith Knight’s daily comic strip, The Knight Life as well as examples from his other strips K Chronicles and (Th)ink. 2012 Herblock Award winner Matt Bors donated a number of originals, as did Jen Sorensen, whose Slowpoke syndicated strip  won the 2012 AltWeekly Award for Cartoons.  Creators such as Jim Woodring, Matthew Thurber and Jim Rugg donated originals to be alongside their already donated printed versions.

Plans are for this to become a yearly donation.

The Small Press Expo Collection at the Library of Congress is a first of its kind partnership to preserve the legacy of the indie comics community by focusing on original art by SPX exhibitors, as well as limited edition mini-comics and other publications that are created by the SPX community.

Graphic Journos Launches

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Journalists using graphic story telling is nothing new (think political cartoons), but it does seem like it’s becoming a hotter way of doing it.  With that being said Graphic Journos has launched bringing together a site to showcase some of the hottest journalists doing this sort of story telling.  According to Dan Archer (one of those involved) the site is a:

…a showcase/forum/sounding board for drawn journalistic pieces featuring a handful of up and coming journalists…

From the about on the website

We believe that this type of storytelling is an incredibly powerful and woefully untapped kind of communication worthy of broader recognition. As journalism struggles to find its way with new technology and economic constraints, we are adamant that things don’t need to be as they always have been. If there were ever a time for new narrative forms, now is it.

Readers are bombarded with more information than ever before, but art has a unique power to make those readers stop instead of flipping the page or clicking away. This kind of work is consistently popular, and yet it is all too rare. In the transition from print to the web, original art has been all but lost.

So, listen: that “Joe Sacco thing” isn’t a novel gimmick. Graphic reportage is a fast-growing medium that is being drawn to its full potential by an expanding range of talents with unique approaches and skill sets. We are just some of them.

We plan to use this space to promote not only our own work but also that of other talented visual communicators, as well as spread the good word of fact-based graphic narrative and help interested editors and creative directors to do this stuff right (and often!).

Taking part in the website are:

Dan Archer. Knight Fellow 2010-2011 at Stanford University. Published at Alternet, the Huffington Post and others.

Susie Cagle. Columbia Journalism School graduate and former words-only reporter. Published at the Awl, Campus Progress, the Rumpus, the Bay Citizen and others.

Sarah Glidden. Recently published the travelogue How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, Vertigo. Published at Cartoon Movement.

Wendy MacNaughton. Recent winner of an Awesome Grant! (Yes, that’s really the name.) Published at Pop-Up Magazine, GOOD, The Rumpus, Longshot Magazine and others.

Jen Sorensen. Cartoonist of the beloved, long-running editorial strip Slowpoke. Published at the Oregonian, Bitch and others.

Congrats and I can’t wait to see what’s in store!

graphic journos