This coming Saturday, November 1, I’ll be talking at the annual Alternative Press Expo (aka APE) in San Francisco with comics artists Matt Madden and Jessica Abel (pictured at left, in their dual self-portrait) on panels dedicated to their work.
The Madden panel is from 12:30 to 1:15 and the Abel one is from 2:15 to 3:00. Both artists contributed to the decade-long series of comics inspired by music that I edited in Pulse! magazine. (I did a similar one-on-one panel at Comic-Con in San Diego this past summer with Adrian Tomine, another Pulse! contributor.) Also appearing, by coincidence, at APE this year are several other cartoonists whose comics I edited in Pulse!, including Megan Kelso and Chris Ware. More info on APE 2008, to be held at the Concourse (620 7th Street, San Francisco), at comic-con.org/ape.
Among the earliest entries on Disquiet.com is an essay (“Home Decorating in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) that I wrote for Jeff LeVine’s magazine Destroy All Comics about a Madden comic, titled “House Music,” that appeared in Pulse! in 1995. The essay includes the full image of the comic, as well as the full image of an early draft of the comic. At right is the first panel of the six-panel comic, which has heavy echoes of John Cage’s theories on the silence-ness of silence, and of Erik Satie’s interest in “Musique d’ameublement,” or of sounds emitted by common, everyday household objects.