Dear you,
If you’re in Ann Arbor, please join us at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 2nd in Angell Hall, Room 3154, for the michigan comix collective’s inaugural event (!) Robert Bell, a graduate student in American Cultures, and Josh Lambert, a graduate student in English Language and Literature, will be sharing some work in progress:
“New Dawn Fades”: Detroit, Disaster, and the Emerging Global Consciousness 1967-1992
Robert Bell
A phantasmogoric setting of Detroit provided a fundament to several stories of ruin and redemption in the decades after the 12th Street Riots of 1967. Looking closely at James O’Barr’s comic ‘The Crow’ and at the stories within the Robocop universe, this talk will cover my in-progress exploration of the meaning and form of the fictional, post-millennial Detroit. The motif of the burning future city, rather than a sufficient comment on the coming future, was an urgent reaction to the spatio-temporal and political concerns of the present. What, then, is the form of urban disaster today?
“Dirty Pictures, Graphic Novels: Obscene
Images and the Genesis of a Genre.”
Josh Lambert
How do you convince people that comics are for serious adult readers? This talk explores the surprising answer to this question presented in pioneering works by Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Briefly glossing a history of anti-comics activism, the talk argues that Eisner and Feiffer used explicit images of sexual failure
and disappointment to distinguish their work from traditional comic strips and comic books on the one hand, and from Tijuana Bibles and underground comix on the other, thus opening a space for mature literary narratives in the medium. (Fair warning: If the images shown during this talk appeared in a movie, it would almost certainly be rated NC-17.)
We hope you find the above both informational and enticing (!)
Until Wednesday–
the michigan comix collective
