On June 8th, I’ll be a guest of Toronto’s Luminato Festival of Arts + Creativity, taking part in a panel called “The Political Graphic Novel” hosted by The Beguiling’s own Peter Birkemoe.
And hey Torontoans, I’ll be sticking around through the 11th, so hit me up in the comments for a good time.
An auspicious prelude to the NY Comic-Con, I’m quoted in this Friday’s New York Times Metro section piece on “the downtown comics scene” along with a handful of my NY cartoonist friends.
In conjunction with next week’s NYCC, I’m speaking in a Young Adults seminar on Tuesday, April 15. I’m putting together a discussion on how to create write/design memorable characteres; all details/map contained below:
The New York Comic-Con is coming to the Javitz Center next weekend (April 18-20) where I’ll be signing shiny hardcovers over at Grand Central as well as moderating the following two panels:
Friday, April 18 / 4:00-5:00 pm
Saturday, April 19 / 2:00-3:00 pm
SHOOTING WAR Book Signing, Grand Central Publishing
You can also find me kicking back at Artists Alley Table E-11; I’ll have all manner of things with my artwork on them there, including a malnourished young child whose entire body I’ve tattooed from head to toe with the only existing copy of Act Three of “KELLY.”
Yesterday I did a podcast interview with writer/director Lance Weiler for his excellent online resource The Workbook Project, an open-source informational hub for creators looking to use the internet in new ways to spread their storytelling regardless of medium. Lance and I met at SXSWi and talked about how his last film HEAD TRAUMA incorporated a cross-media ARG (alternate-reality game) that creates a supplemental story using phone calls, websites, live performances and even a Jack Chick-sized comic that fans can follow clues to additional pieces of the film’s story. A longtime comics fan, Lance was very interested in SHOOTING WAR’s path from web to print to motion picture… so we had a little chat about it:
One result of this conversation is a word I’m going to overuse: micropatron. It’s the model of organizing your fans’ donations to meet your production budget that allows them to go from passive fans to active producers, showing their enthusiasm for your work by helping bring it to life. This bon mot and more are contained within the podcast.
A few months ago, I’d quietly decided to license “KELLY” under a Creative Commons CC-by-NC license after reading a particularly brain-popping article on doujinshi culture in Japan. Applying open-source ideas to comics has always excited me… and my freakadelic “KELLY” has served as my current laboratory for pushing boundaries in all directions, so it felt natural for me to take this step with this particular project.
Imagine the smiles exchanged when I met the folks behind Creative Commons at SWSWi recently and the lovely chats we had… and imagine my smile when they graciously posted “KELLY” to their main page last week:
For those unfamiliar with CC, publishing “KELLY” online under this license effectively allows you to spread and remix “KELLY” however you like… as long as you credit my original work and you’re not making any money off it. I enthusiastically encourage all sorts of “KELLY” sharing/remixing… and I hope to hear from you about what you’re doing with it.
My heartfelt apologies for the delay; I’ve got comics in the oven you don’t even know about yet.
SHOOTING WAR gets some nice love from The Brooklyn Rail; here’s a snip:
Smart, topical, and entertaining, Shooting War exemplifies an exciting direction in comic books. It’s understood but not wholly accepted that comic books have reached an adult level of sophistication in the last thirty years… They’re also deeper and more fun than the Hollywood war movies that keep combusting instead of blockbusting.
I’ll be traveling to Austin TX for SXSW Interactive, a gathering of all things shiny, wired and AJAX-powered. As part of their Book Readings series, I’ll be discussing SHOOTING WAR’s genesis and execution as well as casting a fiery eye to the gorgeous future.
On Tuesday evening (February 12th), I’ll be giving a talk with my SHOOTING WAR co-author Anthony Lappé at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library; the talk will an expansion of the multimedia presentation we gave on tour this past fall, chock full of behind-the-scenes information on the evolution of the book from webcomic to hardcover; 6:30pm:
His critically-acclaimed graphic novel SHOOTING WAR was listed among 2007's top graphic novels in the Village Voice and Publisher's Weekly. He is also a founding member of online comics anthology ACT-I-VATE, where he serializes the psychedelic psychodrama "KELLY".
Dan is currently working with The New Republic's Michael Crowley on 08: A GRAPHIC DIARY OF THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, a nonfiction comics memoir of the presidential primaries to be published by Crown Books in January 2009.
