On Sunday, I went to the Alternative Press Expo, held in the Concourse in San Francisco. APE is the independent comics convention for the Bay Area, featuring a lot of small print publishers and local comic shops, as well as the independent self-publishing artist types. I'm always inspired by the local artists, who man their booths and share their art with the world.
The Flight people were there (Kazu Kibuishi,Amy Kim Ganter Erika Moen, Michel Gagne, Chris Appelhans, Neil Babra, Clio Chiang), as were Derek Kirk Kim and Raina Telgemeier.
I attended the Flight panel, and Raina's presentation. Notes on those two sessions are in the extended. I took the notes with my Nokia 6820. My fingers have since recovered from the trauma.
Flight 3 will be out on June 27th, and the contents are much more fairy tale fantasy.
Kazu talked a little about the history of Flight, and how it started two years ago at APE, and how it was originally going to be a black and white volume that was going to be self-published, and how he sought out artists whose work he admired to create the stories that went into Flight. His original thought was that it would be a way for indie comic creators without a publisher to have a place to publish. An editor who had recently been hired at Image was visiting APE, saw the work, and made an offer to publish Flight 1.
After that, Kazu started showing off some samples of what will be in Flight 3, and talking abit about the artists themselves.
Kazu has a forum set up for Flight where they critique each others' comics and point to other artists' work. Reagan Lodge was one of the artists that was discovered this way, and while Reagan does post to the forum, it's mostly about his own fears as an artist. Reagan's work is entirely done in Photoshop.
Rad Sechrist posts a lot about getting pointers on his work. Rad comes from a family of engineers, and it was a shock to his family when he went into the arts instead.
Neil Babra is telling pieces of a whole in his stories in Flight. Much of it is semi-autobiographical, and in a way, it's like every story of his in Flight is a chapter in a graphic novel.
Israel Sanchez's work is all painted. While it couldn't be seen on the projector, in Flight 3, people will be able to see the texture from the brushes and the canvas.
Rodolphe Gueno... is a little shy about asking for help on his comics -- he asked for help by asking someone to ask someone to ask Kazu if he could get some help on his coloring. Rodolphe is currently working for Dreamworks Animation on a feature called Kung Fu Panda.
Ben Hatke: They saw his webcomic and approached him for a story.
Kazu takes time out now to answer a question from the audience about the artists they choose for Flight. Kazu says that he doesn't look at any submissions from outside artists, and that he doesn't give a rejection to the artists, because he feels that allthough their work may not be right for Flight, it's probably something that someone somewhere would enjoy. One of the first questions they ask themselve when choosing an artist is 'can they tell a story'? He encourages artists to do their own thing, and it'll eventually work it's way through the community.
Bannister: From France.
Johanne Matte, works on the Drawing Board, as well as Disney TV animation in Canada.
Kean Soo was one of the artists that Scott McCloud noticed and sent to Kazu.
Matthew Forsythe's work was shown.
Question: What goes into a Flight comic?
Chris: When you can be honest. Comics are just another medium to use.
Kazu talked a little bit more about putting together Flight. He was going to school, and was working on a animation for his thesis project. Spending lots of time doing it, figured that this was going to be his way to get into an animation studio and become an animator. Didn't really like anime or animated films until he saw Hayao Miyazaki's work, but that was because it seemed like it was produced story first, and animation second. He's always wanted to do more intimate stories. So he was working on it, and someone broke into his apartment and stole his computer. He didn't have any backups or anything, and he was in a rut when he decided to give Flight a shot.
Michel Gagne:
On the Flight internal message board.
Gagne says that he reads the message board whenever he's feeling depressed, because the artists there are so encouraging. Flight became an outlet for Rex, and he's another artist telling a larger story within Flight.
Chris says that having the board makes them work harder, because they see other artists' work and think "F*ck. This has to be way better.".
Kazu: Art is a good lie test. He doesn't want bull in his stories, so he looks for people who can tell honest stories.
Erika: My comics are about my own insecurities in not having a faith. It's semi autobiographical. She also talks about learning to make little origami stars from strips of paper, and how the act of doing that creates something of value.
Clio: My first story in Flight was done at a time when I was taking a history class at UBC on First Nations people, and the sadness about it. I didn't do my research on childbirth though, the images in the story are completely unrealistic. Her second story was because she had a crush on a guy, and then the guy went and got married.
Kazu: In a way, looking at his past work is a lot like seeing what he was like at different ages. One of his first comics that he wrote when he was cynical and hating everything was called "James and the Giant A-hole", in which they rode around in a giant butt, which was basically him in the back corner saying everything sucks.
Originally, they wanted to put a page from someone's yearbook in the back of Flight, but decided instead to use old photos of the Flight artists and their friends.
Kazu still feels that comics are strongest in the short form.
Raina Telgemeier's presentation.
She's the new artist for the Babysitter's Club graphic novel from Scholastic. She's also one of the artists of Flight. She's a fulltime cartoonist , and her comic Smile is based on something that happened to her in childhood, which resulted in 5 years of orthodontics. Her directive for the Babysitter's Club is to modernize and update the look of the books, and adapt the words of Ann M. Martin into pictures.
She talked about Bizarro World from DC where her story was basically the JLA take their kids to work day. At first it was going to be them as kids playing in the backyard.
Because a lot of things in her stories are autobiographical, her parents sometimes say things like "That's not the way it happened!" but to her, that's how she remembers it.
