Belles Etrangères wrap-up

As you may know I recently went to France for two weeks as a visiting author for the Centre National du Livre's annual Belles Etrangères festival.


I would love to do a detailed travelogue about the whole experience but I don't see having the time in the near future. In short, it was a great trip where I met a lot of French readers, made some new friends and contacts, and ate some amazing food. And it was a lot more exhausting than I was expecting. So what I do have to offer are a few links. Of most interest might be my photo album--which I'm still editing but take a look--chronicling most of my voyages within France (Paris, Nancy, L'Aude, Corsica).

One of my fellow Beautiful Strangers, the novelist Andrew Sean Greer, put together a list where you can follow the tweets of a handful of the authors (me, Andy, Hannah Tinti, Colson Whitehead, and occasionally John Haskell). That said, one problem with Twitter's lists is that I don't know that you can make them time sensitive so you'll need to scroll through a few screens of post-BE tweets from me and Colson before you reach the tour reports, but they are fun.

Sometime soon the CNL will be posting the hour-long documentary they made featuring brief interviews with all 12 authors. I'll let you know when it's live but you will be able to find it here.

Otherwise, here's a radio show on Culture France where I talk briefly here about being a cartoonist invited to a literary festival (at about 6 minutes).

And here's a video of me talking about Oulipo, Oubapo, and Jack Kirby in French:

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Maybe later on I can post about some details of my evening as guest of honor at one of the Oulipo's monthly dinners (almost 50 years' worth and going strong) but for now I'll have to leave you with this photo from the end of the evening:

Oulipo dinner, November 17 2009. L-R: Jacques Roubaud, Paul Fournel, Daniel Levin Becker, Michelle Grangaud, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Jouet, moi, our host Mireille Cardot, Frédéric Forte.

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Matt in Belgium: Strip Turnhout Dec 11-13

Jessica and I will be in Turnhout, Belgium, this December for the bi-annual comics festival, Strip Turnhout.

I was originally invited to this festival two years ago but the dates fell quite literally on the birthday of my daughter, Aldara. They have graciously invited me again and this time all three of us will be attending the festival.

Back in 2007, as followers of this blog may remember, the festival published a lovely hardcover edition (the only one) of my "must-have boek" (Stripelmagazine), Stijloefeningen:

In the intervening years, an educational group called Kunst in Zicht has put together an educators' pack devoted to my book and its applications in secondary school classrooms. (I'm hoping to get it translated into English soon--details to follow here of course.) The day before the festival, Thursday December 11, Jessica and I will be talking at an educational symposium the group has organized in conjunction with Strip Turnhout.

Jessica and I will then be having a chat with the amazing Paul Gravett on Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon we'll be looking at art by young, aspiring cartoonists.

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Very brief update from France

This is just to say I will not be posting anything until after I get back. I'm too busy and anyway I can't seem to d/l photos from my camera. In the meantime follow me (better yet, the whole group) on Twitter or periodically check the feed to the right. Read more...

Nov. 8-21: touring France with Belles Etrangères

For the next two weeks, I'll be touring France with 11 other American authors as part of the Centre National du Livre's annual Belles Etrangères festival.

A film crew came to my house over the summer and shot a bunch of footage for an hour-long documentary which will be screened in Paris on Monday night. It will be posted on line later and I'll post the link here. We're based in Paris and do various short trips with one other artist where we'll be doing readings and talking to the public at libraries and schools. I'll be in Nancy on my own, in the Pyrenées with novelist John Haskell and finally in Corsica with would-be U.S. Secretary of Postracial Affairs, Colson Whitehead. You can see the full itinerary here.

And I guess you could call this burying the lead: I've been invited to be a guest of honor at one of Oulipo's legendary monthly dinners. I'm a bit more excited than I am intimidated!
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Digital Inking

Today I dashed off a few attempts at digital inking.

I'm doing research for DWWP vol. 2 and tried out two ways of doing digital inking in Photoshop, using a Wacom tablet, for a small section about it I am writing.

For the first drawing, I scanned a panel I had already penciled for "Drawn OnwarD", reduced the layer opacity to about 30%, then made a new layer where I "inked" the pencils with the Pencil tool and one of the brush presets that gave a slightly charcoal-y (though too uniform, I think) line.



For this second drawing I did a very quick, simplified copy of the method Brian Bolland describes in some detail here: I "penciled" directly in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet. Then reduced the opacity to 20% and made a second pencil layer where I refined the drawing a bit. I faded that one too (reducing the first layers opacity to 10%--I should probably have just turned it off) and made an "ink" layer. I inked following Bolland's specs, using the Pencil tool with a brush size of 5 or 9. I did a background sketch but didn't finish it. I may go back and do that later in order to play with using the Pen tool to make perspective lines and so on.

In both cases I have deleted the pencil layers to make these finished jpegs.

I have to say I am pleased with how these turned out and also with how relatively easy it was to get a hang of the method(s). More to come...?
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Best American Comics 2009 event in Brooklyn, Thursday October 22

Come to powerHouse Arena in DUMBO this Thursday, October 22, at 7PM for a reading and signing event for Best American Comics 2009.

A bunch of contributors are going to be there as well as Jessica and me. There will be a slideshow reading featuring Michael Kupperman, Ben Katchor and other TBA. Then there will be mingling, drinking, and signing. Guest editor Charles Burns can't make it due to prior commitments but you can count on a lot of cartoonists being there, including, possibly, some big surprises. Read more...

A few Matt-related links

A new interview, a magazine debuts comics, and my first iPhone comic, all after the jump.

Many of you are already know about the Graphic NYC cartoonist portrait project.(I posted about the photo shoot here.) Writer Chris Irving has been following up with interviews and they have been posting all of it on their blog. We met for coffee and then a beer a few weeks ago and the piece went up earlier this week.




My comic "Je vais encore sortir ce soir" (I still don't have an English title for it) appears in English on the back page ofthe current issue BOMB. It's an honor since it's a cool magazine based on artists interviewing other artists; plus I believe this is the first comic they have printed.



Finally, I know have a comic you can download on iTunes. It's my story "The Others" and you can download it for $.99 and read it in Panelfly. There are still a few zoom issues in the horizontal view as of this posting but they are working on it. Not all of my comics make sense read on an iPhone or similar small screen but I think "The Others" works pretty well. I have a few others that might work--"Prisoner of Zembla" or "Six Treasures of the Spiral" for example. I'm thinking about offering those too, through Panelfly or another app. Read more...