Adhouse Books’ publisher, Chris Pitzer, joins us this week. AdHouse Books has been a boutique publishing juggernaut since 2002. Over the years, they have won and been nominated for awards within the comic profession (Ignatz, Harvey, Eisner) and the design world (AIGA, Communication Arts, Domtar Paper). Their library of publications is an eclectic mix of sequential and illustrative arts including works by James Jean, Paul Pope, Josh Cotter, Jamie Tanner, and Adam Hines.

Recent releases include Ethan Rilly’s Pope Hats #3, Thomas Herpich’s White Clay, and Lamar Abrams Remake 3xtra.

Follow Adhouse Books on Twitter @adhousebooks .

SHOW NOTES

Dean Motter, Mr. X
Herb Lubalin
Lester Beall
Charles Anderson
John Pham’s zine Scuzzi
Mike Mitchell
Art Chantry’s essay on Jacob Covey’s cover design for the Strange Case of Edward Gorey
Leanne Shapton, J&L Books

Dustin Harbin is a funny cartoonist and illustrator (I think he might be a master of kung fu too, but I’m not positive about that). He’s also a contributor to the Drawn Blog, your daily source of inspiration for illustration, animation, cartooning, and comic art. Koyama Press has published 4 volumes of his Diary Comics. He’s a prolific artist whose work can be found on dharbin.com, dharbin.tumblr.com, and Flickr. Follow him on twitter @dustinharbin. You can purchase books, prints, drawings, and more directly from Harbin at the Dharbmart.

IMAGES
Top: Diary Comics 4 cover; bottom - “Out of the Woods”, from the One Hour Drawings series

MATT BORS is a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist and editor based in Portland, OR. He was a 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his political cartoons, which appear regularly in The Sacramento Bee, Portland Mercury, Pittsburgh City Paper, and on Daily Kos.

In the summer of 2010, Bors traveled to Afghanistan to draw comics and serves as the comics journalism editor for Cartoon Movement where he is currently editing a project on reconstruction efforts in Haiti.

His work has been published by The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Village Voice, The Daily Beast,and dozens of other print and web publications.

In 2012, Bors was the reciepient of the Herblock Prize and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for his editorial cartooning.

His first graphic novel, War Is Boring, a collaboration with journalist David Axe, was published in 2010 by New American Library.

Bors recently launched a Kickstarter for his first book, a 225 page collection of cartoons and humor essays titled Life Begins At Incorporation.

IMAGES
Top: Red Bull’s Adstronaut; Middle: White Dudes Talkin’ Rape; Bottom: War Is Boring cover art.

Matt Furie is an artist, illustrator, cartoonist, zinester, and biker. His self proclaimed “children’s book illustrations for adults” combines traditional and modern mark-making for his ripe, cartoon-inspired characters. McSweeney’s recently released his first children’s book, The Night Riders - a wordless wonder about an unlikely group of characters on a road trip through nature. Four issues of his comic book series, Boys Club, have been published by Pigeon Press and Buenaventura Press.

SHOW NOTES

See more of Matt Furie’s artwork at mattfurie.com and bigactive.

In the course of this interview, we discuss Future Colors of America collaborators Aiyana Udeson and Albert Reyes, the children’s book Grandpa’s Ghost Stories by James Flora, film and creative collective Encyclopedia Pictura, Andy Rementer’s webcomic Techno Tuesday, and Kyle Platt’s Megaskull.

IMAGES

Top: drawing from Furie’s website; middle: excerpt from comic book series, Boys Club; bottom: cover of The Night Riders

Librarian/cartoonist/zinester Caitlin McGurk is the Visiting Curator at The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. Before that, she was the librarian at the Schulz Library at the Center for Cartoon Studies. You can read about the amazing stuff she sees at the Billy Ireland on their blog.

Recently on behalf of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, McGurk announced the establishment of The Dylan Williams Collection of small press and self-published works.

Top: McGurk with Wu-Tang cards (from Jen Vaughn’s Flickr); bottom: rendering of the New Sullivant Hall, opening November 2013 (from Ohio State University website)

Mark Zingarelli is an illustrator, cartoonist, and writer. His influences include EC Comics and Robert Crumb. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Weirdo, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, and Blab. You can see more at the House of Zing or in his comic book, Real Life (Fantagraphics).

Jeffrey Inscho is the writer/designer/thinker behind Static Made and the cohost of ZenGeek, a weekly audio program that focuses on technology and mindfulness. He also manages web and digital media initiatives at the Carnegie Museum of Art and before that he was the Director of Media + Public Relations at the Mattress Factory. In the course of our discussion, he mentioned David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Ben Brooks’ site The Brooks Review, and Patrick Rhone’s essay Saying No Is Really Saying Yes to Other Things. Static Made logo designed by Justin Visnesky.

After a career in film-making and advertising, Anne Koyama founded Koyama Press in 2007 in Toronto. Koyama Press’s mandate is to promote and support a wide range of emerging and established artists. Projects include comics, art books and zines. Koyama Press titles are distributed by Last Gasp, Tony Shenton, and Spit and a Half. They are available for purchase online through Secret Acres.

A selection of new and recent Koyama Press titles

The Kickass Annie Project features different artist interpretations of the Koyama Press Kickass Annie logo. The original Kickass Annie logo (seen at the top of this post) was created for Koyama Press by artist Aaron Leighton; the animated GIF was designed by David Huyck. You can check out the whole set on Flickr.

Kickass Annie by Jim Rugg

The portfolio of artist Stephanie Armbruster is a densely layered exploration of structure and symbolism.

Working primarily as an encaustic painter, Stephanie creates luminous, translucent surfaces by suspending drawings, pigment and ephemera between layers of molten wax.

These multi-layered emotive images suggest an evolving visual narrative, hinting at the process of their creation. Certain elements become obscured, while others are exposed, rising to the surface as if paused between actions.

See more of Stephanie’s work at stephaniearmbruster.com.

Hungry Ghosts VIII 2012 Encaustic on panel Triptych - 30″ x 60″ overall

Benjamin Marra is the creator, writer and artist of the comics NIGHT BUSINESS, GANGSTA RAP POSSE, THE INCREDIBLY FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF MAUREEN DOWD (A WORK OF SATIRE AND FICTION) and LINCOLN WASHINGTON: FREE MAN! and is the publisher of TRADITIONAL COMICS. His art is influenced by important artists who are in museums, like those guys, Picasso and Michaelangelo. His personal interests include deep stuff, cultural things, plays, art shows, the mall, sciences, fashion trends, different books and different kinds of music. He is disinterested in lots of stuff though, like, being insensitive.

Marra has been recognized as a serious artist by quality institutions like The Society of Illustrators, The Society of Publication Designers and American Illustration. In 2006, the Art Directors Club, in their eternal wisdom, named Marra as one of their Young Guns. He has also been hired to make art for serious publications and companies like Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vice, Marvel Comics, Paper, Nylon, Radar, Widen+Kennedy and McCann-Erickson. But he also is street. He has done album covers for the underground rapper Lil B.

See more of his comics work at www.traditionalcomics.com. Check out his illustration strangeness over at www.benjaminmarra.com.

Jasdeep Khaira is the Director of Artist and Member Services at Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Administrative Director of Flight School, and the co-founder of Encyclopedia Destructica - a community-based artist book publisher based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Encyclopedia Destructica publishes hand-bound artist books and zines. Their current project is a collaboration with The Institute of Extraterrestrial Sexuality called Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities.

Matt Doughty is an illustrator, scupltor, and toy designer. For the past five years his company Onell Design has produced the highly successful toy line, Glyos - a series of action figures and accessories “disguised as building kits” that are completely interchangeable by the interlocking form-fit function that Doughty has developed. He also allows other designers to incorporate the functionality into their work. He has also helped several artists create their own figures that work within the Glyos System, allowing for several different compatible toy lines. Celebrating their fifth year in production, Glyos continues to grow and develop as Matt continues to create new products in both PVC plastic and vinyl. Glyos will be celebrating with a 5th Anniversary release on Sunday, July 29th at 8:30 PM EST. www.Glyos.com

NOTE: This episode was recorded in Matt’s studio in Acton, Massachusetts.

Mike Mignola is the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning creator of Hellboy, the Amazing Screw-On Head, and BPRD. His comics career began in the early 1980s as an inker at Marvel. His work has been adapted in movies, animation, and video games. In 2007, he co-created Baltimore, an illustrated novel, with Christopher Golden. This December, he returns to drawing comics full-time, with Hellboy in Hell (Dark Horse Comics)!

NOTE: This episode was recorded live at HeroesCon and engineered by Adam Daughhetee from Dollar Bin Productions.

Top image: B.P.R.D. HELL ON EARTH: THE RETURN OF THE MASTER #1 variant cover by Mike Mignola; Bottom image: Dave Cooper’s Weasel #4 interior page

Julie Sokolow is a musician, writer, and filmmaker raised in suburban New Jersey and currently residing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At nineteen, she released an introspective, lo-fi album, Something About Violins, through Western Vinyl that achieved acclaim from Pitchfork, Wire, and The Washington Post. As a Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, Sokolow focused on writing and film and was awarded two Brackenridge Fellowships and an honorary BPhil degree towards the development of her screenplay, The Subvertebrates, a dark comedy set in suburbia. Recently, she’s embarked on filmmaking and from 2010 to 2011, she was a finalist in Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day contest, won best director at the Sprocket Guild’s Film Festival, won a Creative Capital Flight School Fellowship, and received a Pittsburgh Filmmakers First Works Grant and Heinz Endowment for various film work. Sokolow is the founder and director of Healthy Artists, an organization that produces an original documentary series in which artists discuss their lives, their work, how they’ve struggled with the current, broken health care system. Currently, she is shooting a psychological feature-length documentary entitled Aspie Seeks Love, made possible by a Creative Development Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation. Sokolow’s work often addresses consumerism and escapism in American society and explores the friction between the individual and societal norms.

Keenan Marshall Keller is the creator of Galactic Breakdown, a.k.a. Space Battleground 666 - the comic book saga of Roids, a Largo, FL. drug dealer whom is inexplicably beamed into the far off reaches of the galaxy and becomes an Intergalactic space warrior!! He is also 1/3 of the DIY underground art and zine publishing collective, Drippy Bone Books. As part of Drippy Bone Books, he has published fellow cartoonists Derek M. Ballard’s You Will All Die in Pain and Pat Aulisio’s F’Real Real. He is also the curator of Freak Scene, an art show of contemporary underground comix, featuring the work of Johnny Ryan, Benjamin Marra, Tom Neely, Victor “Bald Eagles” Cayro, Jason Karns, and others, opening July 6th at Synchronicity in LA. Learn more and damage your retinas at drippybonebooks.com.

Ed Piskor is a cartoonist. He began his comics career drawing American Splendor, Macedonia, and the Beats with writer Harvey Pekar. His first graphic novel, Wizzywig, about the history of phone phreaking and computer hacking, debuts this summer from Top Shelf. You can read his newest comic, Hip Hop Family Tree, weekly on boingboing.net’s Brain Rot. Follow Ed on Twitter: @EdPiskor.

WARNING: What you are about to hear is a very frank and urgent discussion with a 16-year-old suburban, American teenager. In order to protect all those involved during the course of this interview, the subject shall be referred to only as teenager x.

Nina Barbuto makes things - lots of things. She is an architect, installation artist, Executive Director/Founder of Assemble, the Children’s Studio Educator/Teaching Artist at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Weekend Program Manager at the Carnegie Science Center, and a co-founder of I Made It! Market. Currently her work can be seen at the Mattress Factory as part of their Gestures exhibit. You can learn more about Assemble at assemblepgh.org and follow Nina on Twitter @nbarbuto and her blog http://ninamariebarbuto.blogspot.com/.

Paul Nosa sews imaginations! Give him five words and he’ll sew you a drawing (our words were “Hot Air Balloon Cat Pilot”). Since 2004, artist/musician Paul Nosa has been making drawings with a souped-up, custom-built solar and/or bicycle powered sewing machine called the Solar Sewing Rover! Learn more about Paul’s art on pnosa.com and follow his tour across the country. Check out the video clips below to see examples of Paul Nosa in action!

This video focuses on Paul’s Solar Sewing Rover and how he generates his own energy:

Keep up with Cecil Castellucci at www.misscecil.com and follow her on Twitter @misscecil and crushlibrary on Tumblr.