vAnthology

an anthology of Vanth's stuff: cartographic antics, comics and signs. see 2manypets for my pet comics!

[vanthology-blog]

Sam and Dean Winchester, being told everything that’s going to happen to them through Supernatural seasons  1-10.

For those of you unfamiliar, Supernatural is a TV show infamous for its physical / emotional torture of its main characters.

Sam is... sitting right now. That’s totally why he’s shorter than Dean in this image.

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Dean Winchester from Supernatural.

Jensen Ackles why u so hard to draw >:0

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UW Cartography Lab

UW Cartography Lab, Day and Night. I drew this from photographs in the spring of 2014 and finally got the full size drawing (18″x24″) scanned.

The last panel is a self portrait. There’s a stack of maps on the table and a sign that says “To Grade.”

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Made a few new panels for the paranormal chapter in the Madison Atlas. The last panel is the 42nd panel. This was unintentional, spooky, and awesome.

As with everything else in the comic, the places and events are real. This is really a door in Science Hall, and if the door is opened, this is what yo uwill see on the other side.

I realize that these pictures look blurry (and I’m not sure why), but if you click to view them they’ll become much crisper.

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A gift for a friend I made today, of her character El.

[thenearsightedmonkey]

Dear Students,

Here are some comics we made last week based the epic poetry found in Old Mother Hubbard. Your assignment was to write a verse to add to the poem and turn it into a finished comic strip in a single class period.

Read more of them here.

Thank you to Captain Haddock for scanning and posting them and also forcreating this kick ass tutorial for how to clean up your comic strip in photoshop (Only after you’ve drawn it all by hand, of course)

Thank you to Dan Chaon for pointing out the madness of Mother Hubbard’s dog and their co-dependent relationship.

Sincerely,

Professor Hanky Panky Hebdo

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the last set of panels is mine!

[thenearsightedmonkey]

Dear Students,

Here are some photos from today’s Making Comics 2 class.  Sometimes Huck Finn buys the class flowers and when he does, we wear them. There is something strange and beautiful about working on comics with flowers behind our ears. It feels quite normal when the flowers come from Huck.

This is a class I will miss with all of my heart,

Love,

Professor Hi Hat Hebdo

[thenearsightedmonkey]

Dear Students,

As the semester comes to a close, I find myself looking over images from your composition note books.  In our class, we use the composition note book as a place rather than as a thing.  I love looking at what went on in this ‘place’ during our time together.

Sincerely

Professor Hebdo

University of Wisconsin-Madison

[thenearsightedmonkey]

Dear Students,

Here are some of our composition notebook images from this past academic year. I could look at them all day long, I love them so.

Sincerely,

Professor Hebdo

University of Wisconsin-Maidson

[thenearsightedmonkey]

Dear Students,

Below are some words from Art Spiegelman about several recent cartoonist related events.

A very good MSNBC interview on with Speigelman and Francoise Mouly speaking on the same subject can be seen here.

Though Spring Semester has ended and I’m no longer Professor Hebdo, I will always be interested in talking openly about these issues.

Love to you,

Professor Squirrel Head 

On Tuesday night, Art Spiegelman hosted a table at the PEN gala, after other authors dropped out in protest of an award being given to French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Here, he speaks to TIME about the award and why cartoons are so misunderstood by many Americans.

SOURCE: Time

TIME: After six writers withdrew from hosting last night’s PEN gala honoring Charlie Hebdo, why did you decide to step up and co-host the event?

Spiegelman: It seemed necessary as a corrective to what I saw as boneheaded reasons for the pullout. I decided to accept an invitation to host a table that I’d passed on before, because black tie galas aren’t my thing, and I had something else I was supposed to do that night. But after those six authors, who I’ve come to think of as a kind of super hero team called the Sanctimonious Six, pulled out, I just felt that it was necessary to be a corrective and invite other sympathetic people to be there to shout, “Cartoonist lives matter.”

Why was it important to honor Charlie Hebdo with the James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award?

One point that was made over and over again was that this is an award for courage. And it’s hard to be more courageous than going back to work after your office has been bombed and your comrades have been slaughtered. On those grounds alone, one would think, “It’s a no brainer. They get the award.”

Beyond that, the magazine was getting a really bum rap. It’s actually anything but a racist magazine. One of the most touching things for me during the award ceremony last night was having the head of SOS Racisme, a French organization that combats racist activity, very movingly talk about Charlie Hebdo being a great force against racism in France.

They received the award for using their particular vocabulary and medium to stir debate on issues, not to create mischief, and they did it estimably, even when people didn’t agree with them. As one of the editors pointed out yesterday, the Charlie Hebdo editors don’t even agree with each other. The point of these cartoons is to start conversations about these issues. And these issues are not trivial.

This week, we also saw a shooting in Texas outside of a “Draw Muhammad” contest sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative. What’s the difference between Charlie Hebdo and Pamela Geller’s organization?

I think that’s when my brain short-circuited. Because superficially, it seems like, well, the same thing is happening in Texas. But it’s not. It’s the anti-matter, Bizarro World, flipside, mirror-logic version of what Charlie Hebdo is about.

The American Freedom Defense Initiative is racist organization. It’s exactly the nightmare version that the writers who were protesting the PEN award thought Charlie was. But Charlie is an anti-racist, political magazine that does not have an agenda that consists of wanting to bait or trouble Muslims.

Pam Geller’s organization is intentionally trying to start war of culture with Islam by saying that all Muslims are terrorists under the surface, and we’re going to prove it. Do the group members deserve free speech protection? Of course. But they’re hiding behind that banner with things that have very little to do with free speech and a lot to do with race hate.

What is the role of images and cartoons in this debate?

It’s interesting to me that cartoons have been so central to it. Cartoons are so much more immediate than prose. They have a visceral power that doesn’t require you to slow down, but it does require you to slow down if you want to understand them.

They have a deceptive directness that writers can only envy. They deploy the same tools that writers often use: symbolism, irony, metaphor. Cartoons enter your eye in a blink, and can’t be unseen after they’re seen. But to understand some of these cartoons requires a lot of culture immersion and symbol reading and a lot of analysis.

There was a New Yorker cover back in the beginning of my time at the magazine that helped change the magazine’s DNA enough to embrace controversial images. It was in the wake of the Crown Heights race riots in which the West Indian black community and the Hasidic Jew community came to bloody blows. As I was doodling I wondered, “What would the guy with the monocle look like if he were Hasidic?” And then I had a black woman kiss him.

When the cover came out, it created a riot of its own—as much indignation on both sides as possible in the world before the Internet. Among the letters that came in to the magazine was a letter from a young woman saying that she thought it was really sweet that on Abe Lincoln’s birthday there was a picture of Lincoln kissing a slave. What’s so amazing about that is that it gets right to the heart of the problem that some of the protesting PEN writers have: learning to read images. They’re very easy to misread without enough information, and some of my writing brethren are great mis-readers.

What would you like to see moving forward?

We should be teaching visual literacy in all schools. We’re bombarded with images more and more, and we have less and less time to understand them. What’s amazing about these simple drawings is that they stand still long enough for you to circle them and get around them in ways you often can’t with videos.

It’s not easy for Americans, because for one thing there are hardly any political cartoonists in America at this point. Political cartoonists are a dying breed. Here there are fewer newspapers, fewer newspapers with a cartoonist on staff, and political cartoons have been reduced to being a variant of a gag cartoon because the last thing a newspaper would want to do is lose a single reader.

I’m stuck having to agree with my bête noir friend Pam Geller that it would be better going forward for newspapers and magazines to take on the responsibility for showing these images. When the Danish Muhammad cartoons appeared in 2006, and when the Mohammad cartoons from Charlie Hebdo appeared, newspapers should have shown these images and talked about them. Many dismissed them as banal and treated them as, “Nothing to see here, move along.”

If it were taken as a matter of course for newspapers and magazines to show these images, they could be normalized, so the many Muslims not offended to the point of grabbing a machine gun could understand that this is how our culture functions with images and issues. It would create a better-informed population dealing with whatever comes next. It would also be useful to have other voices on newspaper and magazine staffs.

What’s the mistake in not publishing images that could be deemed offensive?

There’s no stopping it. What would it be based on? Would it be based on when someone takes up arms against the image? Would it be based on when someone thinks it’s offensive? God knows where the line would be drawn. It can’t be drawn that way. There is an incredible efficiency cartoons have, once you learn to read them, in clarifying the issues at hand, making them memorable.

There’s something basic about cartoons. They work they way the brain works. We think in small, iconic images. An infant can recognize a smiley face before it can recognize its mother’s smile. We think in little bursts of language. This is how cartoons are structured. They’re structured to talk to something deep inside our brains. A cartoon becomes a new kind of word that didn’t exist before.

It’s interesting how little respect they get. “Oh, anyone could draw that crude, vulgar scrawl,” said a number of critics of Charlie Hedbo. That’s not quite true. They’re not totally dismissible. If a writer had made some of the points that Charlie Hebdo had made, I don’t think the writers protesting PEN would have been so condescending and dismissive.

(Below, more of Art Speigelman’s New Yorker Covers)

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Paranormal Madison!

I’ll be making this available via Zazzle (along with my Monster Map) sometime in the coming weeks. There’s an accompanying comic that goes with it -- look out for the link in the coming weeks!

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I’m at the 2015 American Association of Geographers meeting in Chicago, staying at Hosteling International - Chicago. Currently I’m working on my presentation for Thursday (on signs), beneath the neon glow of another amazing sign.

This is a little cartographic fortune cookie I’m choosing to interpret as ‘forget the (precise academic/archaeological/formal) maps... follow your instincts (to make the map you want.)

It’s just the advice I needed, just when I needed it. And now I’m back to work. :)

[templeofapelles]

Herbert James Draper, Clyties of the Mist, 1912

[hazelfluffypants]

A little something I painted today! 

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This is so adorable

Is this Nugget??

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This is a little teaser for my haunted Madison project!! You’ll notice that some of the dialogue isn’t finished and the panels aren’t in color, but you’ll be able to get a sense of where I’m going from these. There’s about 40 more panels that are in various states of completion. When the first haunted site is 100% complete, I’ll give you another update.

I’ve been up to a lot of other stuff, too! Some of it will be posted here in the nearish future when I get time to make some scans.

[iris-trottingmare-deactivated20]

Wow! Look at these! I would like to thank vanthology for giving me the tutorial to make these and the very talented Daniel Huffman for making these tutorials in the first place. The first map was directly from the tutorial Vath showed me here. The second one was my first solo map, turned out pretty good! :D

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These look pretty damn good! You’re getting some serious skills!

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this is Caspian, the character of a friend