Bezango WA Interview with Ron Austin

The TESC blog, The Evergreen Mind recently posted a nice interview with filmmaker Ron Austin about the Bezango WA documentary.

Also included in the post is the entire panel discussion (apparently) starring Matt Groening, Craig Bartlett, Drew Christie, Tommy Thompson, Megan Kelso, Ruth Hayes and yours truly from last May!

Thanks to Louise Amandes for directing me to this great blog.

CPJ Photos of the TESC Cartoonists Seminar

 Seated left to right: Matt Groening, Craig Bartlett, Drew Christie, Tommy Thompson, Megan Kelso, Steve Willis, Ruth Hayes

See this and other photos by Kelli Tokos at:
http://cooperpointjournal.tumblr.com/post/23322690497/animation-seminar

40th Anniversary Reunion at Evergreen

I took part in the program Animation, Comics and Graphic Novels: A Great Evergreen Tradition as part of the 40th anniversary of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. On my way there I was saddened to see the Handy Pantry, or the "H.P.," a place we used to go to on frequent beer runs back in the 1970s, apparently in a state of stasis.

 The TESC Steam Plant. Sometimes we would sneak past the guy in the glass office and gain entry into the maze of steam tunnels that honeycomb the campus.

 Dorm A. In 1974 Matt Groening lived in the room with the window on the 2nd floor far left. The next window was my room. He was the first person I met on my first day at Evergreen.

 This is the spot where an incident I relate in Evergroove Trivia Pt. 15 took place.

 One time Lynda Barry and I were walking together and at this point she grabbed me and made me hide with her around a corner while a conceptual artist walked by. "That man hates art!" she trembled. The actual corner has since been obliterated by building expansion.

 A lecture hall where one of our classmates in Shakespeare and the Age of Elizabeth vaulted over several rows of seats to beat up someone he didn't like in 1979.

 Ron Austin of Cartoonists Northwest and son Liam.

 Setting up

 

 With Tommy Thompson

 Tommy Thompson, Craig Bartlett, Matt Groening, Megan Kelso, Drew Christie

 Evergreen faculty Ruth Hayes, who will moderate, joins the group

 Showtime begins

The geoduck, Evergreen's mascot

Upcoming events

April 17: A lecture on The Evergreen State College, Baby Boomers, Photocopy, and Newave Comix at Evergroove for "The Women's West" program at Evergreen.

May 18: A "Fishbowl Seminar" celebrating Evergroove's 40th anniversary with: Craig Bartlett, Drew Christie, Matt Groening, Megan Kelso, Tommy Thompson, and yours truly. The bad news, they are selling tickets for the whole multi-day event at $150 bucks a pop and it does not appear as of today you can just come to this event alone at a discount.

May 26: Mini-Comics Day is a national event, and I'll be hosting the McCleary venue. Apparently, I have gone crazy.

June 2: The Olympia Comics Festival. Don't know yet what I'll be doing at this shindig, but I do plan on being there and if nothing else reporting on the artists.

Can o' Worms issue # 2

1st edition. Olympia, Washington : The Evergreen State College, January 1992. Enlarged digest size. I'm just scanning the front and inside covers here.

A look at the contents page (by Ed Martin) is most interesting. Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and your faithful pixel correspondent were already considered old guys almost 20 years ago!!! Jeez. A milepost worth noting for this blog.

By now the three of us must be in the fossil category.

Of this second generation of Evergroove cartoonists, I've met Edward Martin III, Cat Kenney, and Megan Kelso.

Ed was a student worker in the Evergreen library when I was employed there as Head of Cataloging 1986-1988. I liked his creativity and he was a fun conversationalist. It seems today he is a film director.

Cat Kenney, who I always liked both as an artist and person, worked in a local comic shop for awhile. She was the one who first alerted me that my work was woven into Understanding Comics.

This book has a very early example of Megan's work. I had the pleasure of meeting her this year at the Olympia Comics Fest.

I like the nice visual directory of the artists on the back cover. The previous Evergreen cartoonists anthology, Tales From the Steam Tunnels (1981), couldn't do that since most of us had already graduated when that title was published.

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 4

Megan Kelso (in green sweater) as she prepares for her afternoon "long" interview. As it turned out, her "brief" morning discussion with Jon-Mikel Gates was actually longer since most of the later session was taken up with a great visual presentation/narration overview of her cartooning career. Since I had agreed to be her interviewer, this made my task much easier!

I must admit although I was very aware of Megan's stature as a cartoonist, I had not really been exposed to much of her work until last week, when I was conscripted into the Fest as an emergency measure. This is no reflection on her, since I confess in addition to not being a comic collector, I'm also not much of a comic reader! Go figure. Actually I'm not much of a reader in general, either. So why am I a cartoonist and librarian? But this isn't about my existential mind taffy, so let's move on.

Anyway, I took a self-imposed crash course on her work and career and found an intriguing artist I'll enjoy watching for the next few decades. She graciously signed a copy of Artichoke Tales for me (which will go to the WSU collection) and treated all my questions with serious consideration.

I felt a real kinship with some aspects of her development as a cartoonist. Both of us were born and raised in Washington State, we both attended The Evergreen State College, we both lived on the East Coast for awhile and found ourselves missing the special kind of rain and mystery our corner of the world possesses.

But in many other ways her work was very foreign to me, as I mentioned in the interview. Most comix create a lot of noise in the head of the reader, but her show-not-tell style is very quiet and nuanced. The Japanese film director Ozu was one her stated artistic influences, whereas I was emotionally touched by Jim Varney's Ernest movies. But we did have Lynda Barry in common. And like Lynda, Megan came to the world of cartooning during her time at TESC.

I really enjoyed Kelso's Watergate Sue series and hope she expands the concept of exploring that era through the eyes of the little girl that she was during the first half of the 1970s. Such a great way of storytelling on many different levels. Megan's insight here is nothing less than astounding considering she was working from the memory of child. I'm speaking as one who was a McGovern volunteer at the time.

Generally Megan takes more risks in her writing than she does with her graphics, which creates the effect of a cautious visual lid on the cauldron of emotion in the story, of which there is plenty. And since she doesn't use captions, this creates a sophisticated tension. She makes comix for grownups. And does it well.

She seems at a crossroads, which is where any good artist should frequently find themselves. Hope I get a chance to have the long interview with you in a few more years, Megan, to catch up on your interesting journey.


For some reason, and this has never happened before with my phone photos, my shot of the photogenic Katy Ellis O'Brien got eaten by the pixel monster. So I'm substituting the promo sheet she handed out.

G. Fling and Eight and a Half by Eleven Comics

The Comix Jam Workshop hosted by Chelsea Baker with me as her co-pilot. I was gratified to see almost half of the people in the room were left-handed. At the table in the foreground, 3 out of 4 were lefties! Hopefully, Chelsea will be scanning and the posting the results of this effort on the Fest blog. In the space of an hour several coherent and very funny jams were produced.


The right-handed gentleman is Mr. Rex N. Munger. He is my oldest friend. We have known each other since Eisenhower was president. Rex and I were avid comrades in comic book collecting during the 1960s and early 1970s. He also has many of my earliest publishing efforts when I drew superhero and funny animal comic books. So if friendship includes mutual blackmail, Rex has the goods on me! But don't mess with him, he's an attorney.

Rex is also an astute student of sequential narrative and any comic art scholar would benefit from hearing his observations.

The left-handed gentleman is Steve Blakeslee, who came up with great laugh out loud zingers to conclude a few comix jams.


Chelsea Baker was the 4th member of our comix jam table. Perhaps there is no other cartoonist in Olympia history who has done as much to create a community of comrades in our art form. Given our natural contrary nature, this is an objective with many inherit obstacles.

The Olympia Comics Collective!

OK, I'll only say this once. I'm not much of a joiner, but if I was, I'd join these guys. This trio really projected a true love of our genre. It is great to see their kind of creative energy in Olympia. Having gone from Kindergarten through college in Oly, I never would've dreamt this sort of interest would ever happen here, especially in the days before Evergreen landed.


Jon Mikel-Gates apparently said something that made the poor guy at the table cover his face. Meanwhile, Angelica Blevins, the artist who created the poster for this year's Fest, looks on with the kind of detached amusement we cartoonists are noted for.


So, there is a young woman who slid out of the middle chair and under the table rather than appear in this phone photo. I was tempted to lift the tablecloth and snap a shot of her crouching underneath. Charlie Daugherty handed me a microcomic in the meantime.


Rick Perry gave an excellent presentation at the morning stage show on the different social interpretations of Superman during the last 70+ years.

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 1

This year the Oly Comics Fest filled 40 tables. I'd say the majority of attendees were from Portland, reflecting how our neighbor has become the cartoonists magnet of the Pacific Northwest while the Seattle scene fades into the background. Either way, Olympia is lucky to be situated between these two great cities.

I took a whole bunch of phone photos and apologize for the poor quality. Think of it as an impressionist impression of the event. Yeah, that's the ticket. I also didn't get quite all the tables or catch everyone's names, but sometimes it's more fun to visit than to document.

Spritual Succesor(us)

Larry Gonick, Megan Kelso, Paul Chadwick, the special guests. At the stage show all three had to endure a short interview, and then survive a longer interrogation in the afternoon. I had the pleasure of talking with Larry in preparation for this, and then later on stage in front of an audience of maybe 100 people.

Since I didn't have a lot of time, my questions were pretty off the wall, just serving as a preliminary for his later interview. Larry never considered himself fully a member of the small circle of underground cartoonists when he produced work for Corporate Crime Comics, Tales From the Ozone, etc., but rather on the periphery. But he still regards that association as a very positive thing.

Larry does have one Newave comix title he contributed to: Unfunny Animals in 1981, published by Clay Geerdes. When I asked him about this before the show, he couldn't really recall it.

I was also fascinated by the fact he is the only cartoonist I've met who had Jackie Onassis as an editor. According to Larry, she was something of an advanced doodler/cartoonist herself!

A true Renaissance Man cartoonist covering a wide variety of topics, it was a pleasure to meet him.

Kelsey Smith is a librarian with Timberland Regional Library and is an energetic activist for promoting comix and zines for library use. She is one of those people who makes me feel good about being a librarian. It's impressive and forward thinking for Timberland to have a presence at this event.

Chelsea Baker, cartoonist, Evergreen alum, and one of the Fest organizers, announcing the agenda of workshops and presentations.

The Exiled

I love the accidental symmetry these Portland cartoonists provided here


Julia Gfrörer

I wish this photo had turned about better. A quiet gentleman came up, introduced himself and made me about fall over when he told me his name. This is none other than Wade Busby from the Comics F/X years of the late 80s/early 90s! It was so nice to see someone else from the old days. Fewer and fewer of them are showing up each year.

Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Website

Looks like the folks at the Danger Room in Olympia, Washington have retooled the Olympia Comics Festival website.

Also they have named a date: May 21st, 2011, and already have a special guest lined up: Megan Kelso.

Check it out at: http://olympiacomicsfestival.org/

2/19 Update: Looks like it was Chelsea who has updated the site! Nice work!