Tuesday, October 07, 2008

SPX 2008 - a few bits

At the Saturday panel on political cartoons, Frank Camusso said, "The internet really is a great place to suck." Ted Rall commented later in the same panel, "It gets really tiresome to do cartoons to remind people that torture is wrong."

On the Joost Swarte panel, he covered bits of his career. A few interesting points that I noted:

He designed stamps for a special December holiday mailing which have a reduced rate. He put the text of the stamps explanation of the rates in the center of the sheet so they couldn't be discarded. The stamp itself people delivering mail to each other until light shines at the end of the tunnel (ie the center of the stamp).

Swarte was majorly influenced by Willem's underground work, and then by the Americans in Zap Comix like Crumb, Shelton, Wilson, Moscosco and Spiegleman (with whom he worked on Raw).

The building he designed for Haarlem's arts center can be seen at http://www.toneelschuur.nl The photos he showed looked very cool.

He's illustrated three novels by a Dutch writer - Neskio perhaps? These looked interesting. He designed the illustrations to work as a flip book with the character's head centered throughout in one of them.

One thing he showed was his latest comic work - a short story Exercise of Style #100, based on Queneau's 99 Exercises in Style.

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