Photography credit: Aaron Reiss

Come get a balloon and meet your favorite authors at Table #144 for book signings:
10 AM-12 PM: Liniers
1-2 PM: Françoise Mouly
1:30-2 PM: Art Spiegelman
2-3 PM: Dean Haspiel
3-4 PM: Rutu Modan
5:30-6 PM: Jeff Smith

What a line up!  Come help us celebrate the release of The Big Wet Balloon by Liniers.  Also joining us (WOW!): ART SPIEGELMAN, FRANK VIVA, JEFF SMITH, RUTU MODAN, DEAN HASPIEL, TRADE LOEFFLER, GARY PANTER + MUSIC WITH BARRY BLITT AND THE HALF TONES. Live painting on stage..don't miss it!

For more information contact: 
Kimberly Guise:  [email protected]    917.545.9724 
Brian Byrnes:     [email protected]         305.433.0190

We are headed to SPX with signings and events scheduled for every hour of this jam-packed weekend. Join us in Bethesda, MD on Saturday and Sunday to catch these incredible TOON authors and artists:

11 AM - 12 PM: Frank Cammuso signing at TOON Table (#K13)

12 - 1 PM: Jeff Smith Q+A in the White Oak Room

Jeff Smith’s career as a cartoonist has enjoyed one of the broadest trajectories in the field. His self-published, black and white comic book series Bone was an all-ages bastion of the independent comics scene before becoming an enormously successful series of full-color graphic novels for younger readers from Scholastic. Since then, he has completed the science fiction series RASL and has authored a comic for early readers from TOON Books. Smith returns to his roots at SPX, and appears in conversation with Isaac Cates.

1 - 1:30 PM: Jay Lynch signing at TOON Table (#K13)

1:30 - 2:30 PM: Liniers Q+A in the White Flint Auditorium

Liniers is among the most globally recognizable cartoonists from Argentina, a nation with a strong cartooning tradition still largely unrecognized in the US. His diverse body of work includes formally experimental comics, painting, and work for younger readers. For more than ten years, Liniers has drawn a hugely popular daily strip, Macanudo, for the Argentine newspaper La Nación. The Big Wet Balloon (TOON Books) is his first book to be published in the United States. Moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos.

2:30 - 3:30 PM: Liniers signing at TOON Table (#K13)

3:30 - 4:30 PM: Rutu Modan Q+A in the White Flint Auditorium

Rutu Modan has had a diverse and influential career, both in her native Israel and around the world. She was a co-founder of the pioneering Actus Tragicus collective, has been a children’s book author, an illustrator, and a teacher, and is the author of books including the acclaimed graphic novels Exit Wounds and The Property, both of which address historical and contemporary realities of Israeli life through the lens of fiction. She will discuss her work with comics scholar Marc Sobel.

4:30 - 5:30 PM: Jeff Smith signing at TOON Table (#K13)

6 - 7 PM: Rutu Modan signing at TOON Table (#K13)

12 - 1 PM: Frank Cammuso signing at TOON Table (#K13)

1 - 2 PM: What Makes Drawings Funny? with Jay Lynch in the White Oak Room

Humor in comics can be found in the writing and in the drawing, and most often is a product of the two. But some drawings are inherently funny in and of themselves, for reasons including style, structure, concept, and composition. Cartoonist Dustin Harbin will investigate the basis for humorous picture-making and ask Peter Bagge, Scott Campbell, Lisa Hanawalt, and Jay Lynch about their individual approaches to making drawings funny.

2 - 3 PM: Jay Lynch signing at TOON Table (#K13)

3 - 4 PM: For Kids/Not for Kids with Rutu Modan, Liniers, and Jeff Smith in the White Oak Room

Children’s comics have opened up new areas of publishing to comics and have developed new generations of comics readers. But not every artist who produces comics in this field works exclusively for younger audiences. Roger Langridge, Liniers, Rutu Modan, Brian Ralph and Jeff Smith will discuss the practical and aesthetic similarities and differences between producing work for younger and older readers in a panel discussion with comics journalist Heidi MacDonald.

4 - 5 PM: Liniers signing at TOON Table (#K13)

5 - 6 PM: Rutu Modan signing at TOON Table (#K13)

For more information Contact: 
Kimberly Guise:  [email protected]    917.545.9724 
Brian Byrnes:     [email protected]         305.433.0190

September 2013 U.S. Appearances by Liniers:

9/14 at 1:30pm – Q&A at Small Press Expo (SPX), Bethesda, MD
 
9/15 at 3:00pm – Panelist on “For Kids/Not for Kids” at Small Press Expo (SPX), Bethesda, MD
 
9/16 at 10:30am – Bilingual Presentation to bilingual students at Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC
 
9/16 at 2:00pm – Open Book Children’s Literacy Foundation-sponsored book reading to bilingual students at H.D. Cooke Elementary School, 2525 17th St. NW, Washington, DC
 
9/18 - In collaboration with NYSABE and the City College of New York, presentation to bilingual students at New York Public School.  Details to be announced. 
 
9/19 at 7:00pm – TOON Books All-Ages Comics Extravaganza at BookCourt Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY (with very special guests Art Spiegelman, Jeff Smith, Gary Panter, R. Kikuo Johnson, Rutu Modan, Dean Haspiel, Frank Viva, Trade Loeffler, plus musical accompaniment by Barry Blitt and the Half-Tones)
 
9/22 at 2:00pm – Target Children’s Area Plaza at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Brooklyn, NY
 

For review copies, or to schedule interviews with Liniers (in English or Español), please contact:
Kimberly Guise:  [email protected]    917.545.9724 
Brian Byrnes:     [email protected]         305.433.0190

Within the graphic arts world, Mouly is venerated. “Françoise has been one of the most influential people in comics for 30 years,” says Peggy Burns, associate publisher at Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, a publishing house inspired by Raw. Mouly is a role model, Burns says: “She’s very generous, very committed to her artists.” Toronto illustrator and author Frank Viva, who is currently finishing his ninthNew Yorker cover, praises Mouly as singularly articulate and knowledgeable: “She knows more about comics, illustration and art than anyone I know.”

Yet beyond that orbit, Mouly is largely unknown, an imbalance soon to be remedied by Jeet Heer’s In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman. Heer, a cultural critic and comic aficionado who describes himself as “intra-coastal,” commuting between Toronto and Regina, set out to write about the couple’s creative union before realizing Mouly was the untold story. He believes she’s been overlooked for two reasons: sexism in a traditionally male-dominated field and “wife of” syndrome, with Mouly’s career overshadowed by that of her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, the author of the famed graphic novel Maus.

[...]

Mouly is delighted to finally be a subject, she tells Maclean’s: “I was very well-hidden in plain sight.” Being a woman in the “testosterone-driven” world of cartoons was a mixed blessing, she says: “It was quite lonely, but it also worked for me, because I was an outsider—to the culture, to the language.” Being an “enforced observer of the American political system” has informed her work, she says, noting an early draft of the famed “fist-bump” cover showed Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity peering in a window. Mouly asked they be removed. “It focused blame on them,” she says, “but we were all at that window.” She speaks eloquently about the need for print books and magazines as cultural artifacts—they “fossilize the moment” in a way the web can’t. “They have permanence and authority,” she says; they “hold your fingerprints.” And now, finally, there’s a book that holds hers.

Read the entire article at Maclean's website