Classroomjammer Kids

Teaching Comics
with Corinne Mucha, Nicole J. Georges, Walker Mettling, and Josh Bayer
moderated by Aaron Renier
Everyone knows kids make the best drawings and have the best stories – now it’s time to talk about harnessing those skills and helping kids make great comics. What’s the role of an artist/teacher? How do you set out to “teach” making comics – and what are the results?
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Real Life

A Round Table on Women and Graphic Autobiography
with Rina Ayuyang, Julia Wertz, Leslie Stein, Marian Runk, Keiler Roberts and Lucy Knisley

Autobiography has pushed the boundaries of what comics can be and how memoir can be embodied. Real life recounted in comics form is often capable of finding places that are the most funny, relatable and true. This roundtable conversation examines the challenges and rewards of working (and playing) with your own life as subject matter.
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Double Vision

Comics and Animation
with a Q&A featuring Jo Dery, Jim Trainor, Amy Lockhart, Nate Beaty and Marc Bell
Curated by the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation

The unique kinship of Comics to Cartoons is undeniable, and yet, hard to put your finger on. Chicago’s Eyeworks Animation Festival has handpicked a screening of work focusing on this not-so-secret love affair. Several filmmakers will be in attendance to discuss their work.

Violent Line

Mark Making and Meaning
with Grant Reynolds, Anya Davidson, Conor Stetschulte,
Mickey Zacchilli, Charles Forsman, Lale Westvind and Patrick Kyle
moderated by Noel Freibert

We are quite possibly living in comics’ Grindhouse Era: outrageous violence, magic, sex and drama abound and the resulting graphics are delivered with both a self-assured sensationalism and a self-aware sophistication. The resulting bloodbath can transcend the tropes of the genre or wallow in the rot of it all… or both. The Violent Line will be looking at how horror and gore can be sed as drawing tools and how artists arrange a smorgasbord of influences to go in for the kill.

Free Smells

A Comic Mixtape
with Ryan Sands

West-Coast-smart-attack Ryan Sands has never failed to surprise and delight with every editorial endeavor and internetscape project he’s embarked upon. Like a live-action- mega-mix-totally-tumbl’d-love-letter-to-the-world he’s put together a slide show cheat sheet for the rest of us to try to keep up.

Wacky Wall Walkers

Comics and Fine Art
with Paul Nudd, and Karl Wirsum
moderated by Joe Tallarico
sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago

What’s the difference between the pages of a comic and the walls of a gallery and how can we describe the ever shifting divide between highbrow and lowbrow art? Would we even want to? WWW probes into the history of cross-pollination between these the two arenas and the value of putting comics in your art and art in your comics.

Low Brow, High Mesh

Silk Screened Comics
with Sanya Glisic, Keith Herzik, Jen Tong, and Tom Toye
moderated by Carrie Vinarsky

Silkscreened comics often double as artists’ books, offering doorways into texture and craft and far-out experiments in layered imagery and color. With screenprinted comics becoming more and more popular (while still remaining just as labor intensive!), this conversation looks at how the medium effects the language of comics, and vice versa

Comics in Chicago

The Past 10 Years
with Jeremy Tinder, Paul Hornschmeier, Lyra Hill, Robin Hustle and Ezra Claytan Daniels
moderated by Edie Fake
sponsored by the Chicago Independent Radio Project

Besides having a consistently vibrant population of cartoonists, Chicago has been the home base for a vast variety of comics collectives, participatory drawing events and experimental endeavors. Glancing back across the past decade, points of cohesion develop where group efforts can shape community, and strange new presentations can impact an entire scene.

Jeffrey Brown

Draws a Minicomic

By our calculations, Jeffrey Brown’s maximum operating capacity is 5,840 minicomics a year.

Crude and Rude

The Importance of Vulgarity
with Ivan Brunetti, Lisa Hanawalt, Hellen Jo, and Onsmith
Moderated by Josh Reinwald and Justin Rosenberg
Sponsored by Quimby’s Bookstore

The first rule just might be that there are no rules. Comics have gained notoreity as a medium where any taboo or transgression can be splayed across the page and the result can warp the psyches of an entire generation. Some of our meanest, grossest, most-favorite-est cartoonists working today take the stand to talk about the power – and limitations – of being as bad as you wanna be.
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Start a Micropress

with Annie Koyama, Jesjit Gill, Caroline Paquita,
Sarah Becan, Austin English, and Greg Means,
moderated by Zak Sally

Some of the most exciting, ambitious, focused and challenging work in comics today is being put out by micropresses – visionary small operations with artist-focused philosophies and commitment to excellent production values. This conversation looks at both the technical side of how things get started and the internal goals and ideas behind running a publishing operation.

Queer Communities, Queer Anthologies

with Annie Murphy, Justin Hall, and Robert Kirby
moderated by Noah Berlatsky
sponsored by Little Heart, a Comic Anthology for Marriage Equality

Anders Nilsen, John Porcellino, and Kevin Huizenga

in Conversation
moderated by Caitlin McGurk

With versatile bodies of work that span from self-published minis to long-running serials to graphic novels, Huizenga, Nilsen and Porcellino have all carved their own visual eloquence through their explorations of the human condition. The three come together here for a comics discussion moderated by Caitlin McGurk, librarian at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

Just the Facts

LadyDrawers at Work
with MariNaomi, Sara Drake, Nicole Boyette and the LadyDrawers
moderated by Anne Elizabeth Moore

The LadyDrawers project crunches some hard numbers on the comics industry while also documenting the lived experience of women and people of color working in comics. Sur facing last year with a sweeping postcard project and a column on TruthOut , LadyDrawers ignited (and weathered) some irate outrage while continuing its confrontational presentation of what the statistics are and what they mean, its eyes on the prize of media equity.