Making Comics: Telling Your Stories Through Art
A1010 (1:30-2:45PM)
Comics have a longstanding history of being the type of literature you love but don’t want anyone to know that you read. Thankfully, popular reception towards comics is changing, and in part because artists keep proving that just because a story is told through pictures doesn’t mean it can’t be as immersive, complex, and thought-provoking as your battered Nabokov volumes. Comics are a place for us to bring out and celebrate our multitudes, whether it be literary critic (think Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home), documentarian (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), romantic (Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim), fashion buff (Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss series), or appreciator of fairy tale femme fatales (Emily Carroll’s When I Arrived at the Castle).
In this workshop, you’ll get to hear from professional comics artists Janice Liu and Zoe Si about their creative processes and what inspires them to make comics. We’ll chat about our favourite comics, the importance of comics as a means of self-expression, and what it means to make great art and to have fun as a woman of colour. We’ll also take some time to focus on our own artistic journeys, designing a small comic strip to share with others or keep closely to ourselves. Whether you’re a beginner or pro, this workshop is for you to find your fellow comic nerds and recall that most important part of making comics is that the process gives you joy and speaks accurately to your truth.
ORGANIZERS
Kathy Nguyen
Kathy Nguyen is an enthusiastic reader of comics. Some of her recent favourites include Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, and Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine. She lives on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people.
GUESTS
Zoe Si
Zoe Si is a cartoonist, illustrator, and lawyer from Vancouver, British Columbia. She believes in the power of words, but also that wherever words fail, a mildly disparaging cartoon can usually succeed. Zoe has a life-long passion for laughing at her own jokes and is always looking for new ways to tell stories with art. Zoe’s cartoons appear in children’s books, online, and in print magazines including Geist and the New Yorker.
Janice liu
Janice Liu is a children's comic creator and instructor, and a Future 2016 workshop alumnus. Since 2016, she has been teaching and running art classes for kids at Young Artists' Place in Burnaby, BC. Janice is the artist of the bilingual graphic novel Chicken Soup & Goji Berries 中药鸡汤 (Chicken Soup & Goji Berries). She is also one of the contributors to Shuster Award-winning Wayward Sisters: An Anthology of Monstrous Women.
Don’t miss the 2020 Future Forum for creative BIWOC in Vancouver.