Futures of Comics Futures of Comics

Country

Un Faulduo (Argentina)

Un Faulduo is an Argentine art collective exploring and experimenting around comics. Born in 2005, the group is formed by Nicolás Daniluk, Ezequiel García, Nicolás Moguilevsky and Nicolás Zukerfeld. Alongside an interdisciplinary path that includes visual arts, film, music, comics, performance and literature, the group carried out exhibitions and performances in art spaces of Argentina and Europe. Un Faulduo is, also, the name of a magazine published by the group, which has released eleven numbers. Each issue is led by a different member of the staff, forcing changes in format, content and technique. Un Faulduo published the book La historieta en el (Faulduo) mundo moderno (Tren en Movimiento, Argentina, 2015; Ed. Marmotilla, Spain, 2018), inspired by Oscar Masotta’s essay La historieta en el mundo moderno (1970). Nowadays, the group is developing the project “From now on: El Eternauta”, which re-writes and intervenes the mythical #201 of “Gente” magazine, where El Eternauta (written by Héctor G. Oesterheld and drawn by Alberto Breccia) was published for the first time in 1969.

Morvandiau (France)

Born in 1974, Morvandiau is a comics artist and a press cartoonist. He started developing his art next to his older brother, the author Tanitoc, and gets into business early in the 90s, publishing his work in fanzines, in the cultural and political press in France (The Inrockuptibles, Rock & Folk, Bakchich, Marianne…) as well as in artistic reviews (The electric eye, Scrap, Jade, Ego Comme X, Rabbit, Le Tigre, MLQ…). Morvandiau is the co-founder, in Rennes, of the Festivals Périscopages (2001-2011) and Spéléographies, biennale des ecritures (since 2014) and he is also active as a journalist, an editorial adviser (Le Monde Diplomatique en bande dessinée, 2010) and a teacher at the l’Université Rennes 2. In 2016, he began researching his arts thesis entitled The Art of Smuggling? A cartography of the francophone alternative comics (1990-2015).

Powerpaola (Colombia / Equador)

Powerpaola is a Colombian-Ecuadorian visual artist and comic author. She is the author of graphic memoirs Virus Tropical (2011), Por Dentro (2012), Diario (2013), qp (2014), Todo Va a Estar Bien (2015), Nos vamos (2016), Vacío (2017), ¿Si me muero todo seguirá igual? (2019) and Espero porque dibujo (2019). Her work deals with themes of sexuality, feminism, family, and personal identity. She is a member of the international comics collective Chicks on Comics and No Tan Parecidos. She lived at the artistic residency La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2003- 2005) and won the residency program at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney (2007). Winner of the project ‘En Vitrina’ (performance and drawing) at Lugar a Dudas, Cali, 2010. She make a Drawing Club at the Amazons for two months with the indigenous comunity Huitoto with a scholarship of Gilberto Alzate Avendaño. Her artist books are part of the collection of the Luis Angel Arango Library, Bogota. She was the art director of the animated movie Virus Tropical. She works at Arcadia (Cultural Magazine) making a monthly comic. Work and live between Bogota and Buenos Aires.

Cartoonists Against Amazon (USA)

Cartoonists Against Amazon is a group organizing in opposition to Amazon’s inhumane labour practices, and the company’s ongoing involvement in supplying tech to ICE (U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.) ComiXology, a digital distribution platform for comics, was purchased by Amazon in 2014, and the two sponsor numerous comics, literary and small press festivals across the world. In September 2019, Cartoonists Against Amazon penned an open letter to comics festivals calling on them to cease all partnerships with the the companies. The letter additionally demands complete transparency regarding sponsorships and money allocation in the future. The letter was signed by over 190 artists, writers, publishers, critics, organizations and industry professionals.

Alexandra Zsigmond (USA)

Alexandra Zsigmond is an award-winning art director and visual thinker working at the intersection of fine art, illustration and editorial design. From 2010-17, she was an art director for the New York Times Opinion section, commissioning original illustrations for articles, curating art-driven features, and designing for both print and digital. She has directed over 4000 editorial illustrations and collaborated with over 1000 artists worldwide. As an art director, she strives to push artists toward the creation of their best, most original work, and toward visual solutions that are at once striking, incisive and experimental.

Dušan Barok (Slovakia)

Dušan Barok is an artist and founding editor of the artist-run research platform Monoskop. He graduated from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. His practice revolves around participative constructions of archives and libraries, conducted by repurposing established media forms and formats, often in the form of experimental publishing. His work includes commissions from Seoul Mediacity Biennale, SKOR Foundation Art and Public Space, European Culture Capital Mons and ZHDK’s project Creating Commons.

Benoît Crucifix (Belgium)

Benoît Crucifix is a researcher in comics studies. He was a FNRS doctoral fellow at the Universities of Liège and Louvain. His dissertation focused on the transmission of comics memory in the contemporary North-American graphic novel. His current project focuses on children’s drawing and creative tactics of child readers in European comics. Overall, he is interested in the heterogeneous uses that are made of comics, the cultural practices that move and reframe existing comics in a variety of contexts and settings. He has co-edited with Maaheen Ahmed the essay collection Comics Memory: Archives and Styles (Palgrave, 2018) and with ACME the two-volume Abstraction and Comics | Bande dessinée et Abstraction (PULg | 5c, 2019). He is active in the network La Brèche and he intermittently writes for zines in print and online.

Josh O’Neill (USA)

Josh O’Neill is an American comics-worker who has won Eisner and Harvey Awards for editing, writing and publishing art books and graphic novels. As the co-founder of the Philadelphia-based small presses Locust Moon and Beehive Books, he explores the unique capacities of comics, graphic art and sequential storytelling through art history, creative collaboration and experimental publishing.

Guillaume Dumora (France)

Guillaume Dumora is a bookshop keeper and his glorious shop, Le Monte-en-l’air is a literary hybrid, a triple-purpose space with a ‘curiosity shop’ for atypical and disturbing novels, a gallery where different painting and photos are hung every three weeks, and the main ‘librairie’ where you’ll find everything from graphic novels to classic literature and contemporary poetry.

Aarthi Parthasarathy (India)

Aarthi Parthasarathy is an Indian filmmaker, writer and comic researcher, and has worked on many short films and animations, as well as written a number of comics, short graphic stories, articles. She founded Falana Films, a Bangalore-based creative film and animation studio along with Chaitanya Krishnan. She created the webcomic Royal Existentials and is part of Kadak Collective, a group of South Asian women graphic artists and writers, who discuss issues of gender and sexuality through their work.