Comic-Con@Home: POC Culture Picks for Wednesday and Thursday!

Watch When Available!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/LrceWULlU-0

Sabaa Tahir (A Thief Among the Trees: An Ember in the Ashes Graphic Novel) is joined by James Otis Smith (Black Heroes of the Wild West), R. Sikoryak (Constitution Illustrated), and David Bowles (Rise of the Halfling King) in this discussion about graphic novel adaptations. Moderated by Adam Kullberg (Pop Culture Classroom) and sponsored by the CBC Graphic Novel Committee.

Participants
R. Sikoryak
Constitution Illustrated
Cartoonist R. Sikoryak is the author of Masterpiece Comics, Terms and Conditions, and The Unquotable Trump. He adapts the classics for various anthologies, including The Graphic Canon, Fable Comics, and more. His comics and illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Onion, MAD, and SpongeBob Comics, as well as on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He’s done storyboards and character designs for Augenblick Studios on various animated projects. Sikoryak teaches in the illustration department at Parsons The New School for Design and previously at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Since 1997, he’s presented his live cartoon slide show series, Carousel, around the United States and Canada. He lives in New York City with his wife, Kriota Willberg. Constitution Illustrated is in stores next week!

Sabaa Tahir
A Thief Among the Tress: An Ember in the Ashes Graphic Novel
Sabaa Tahir is the author of the An Ember in the Ashes series. She grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s eighteen-room motel. There, she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, raiding her brother’s comic book stash, and playing guitar badly. She began writing while working nights as a newspaper editor. She likes thunderous indie rock, garish socks and all things nerd. This is Sabaa’s first graphic novel collaboration.

David Bowles
Rise of the Halfling King
David Bowles is an award-winning Mexican-American author and translator, as well as an associate professor of literature and Nahuatl at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He has written over 20 books, among them Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico and Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Maya Poetry. September will see the release of his graphic novel Rise of the Halfling King, which Kirkus calls “an unmissable adventure of mythical proportions.” Next spring, the first volume in his steampunk graphic novel series Clockwork Curandera will drop. David’s work has also been published in multiple anthologies, plus venues such as School Library Journal, Apex, Strange Horizons, Rattle, Translation Review, and the Journal of Children’s Literature. In 2017, David was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

James Otis Smith
Black Heroes of the Wild West
James Otis Smith is illustrator of the graphic novel adaptation Showtime at the Apollo, by music writer Ted Fox. He studied writing and film before becoming a production artist for independent movies in New York. Years of growing up reading comics had taught him how to write with both words and pictures, which was good training to become a film and video editor. Missing the straightforward honesty of ink on paper, he eventually returned to his first love, comics. In addition to the Apollo Theater history, he drew the children’s book adaptation of the fantasy novel Ancient Lands by Jason McCammon and the mature-readers cyberpunk Gang of Fools. As a childhood fan of old serials and the classic American aesthetic, he has long hoped to reclaim those stories lost in our oversimplified telling of our own history, and expand who and what we mean when we say America. Black Heroes of the Wild West (coming September 2020 from TOON Books) is his first book as both author and illustrator.

James Otis lives in the last apartment free of cats in Brooklyn, New York.

Moderated by Adam Kullberg
Pop Culture Classroom
Adam Kullberg is the education director and interim executive director for Pop Culture Classroom, a Denver-based nonprofit.

Sponsored by the CBC Graphic Novel Committee

5:00 pm

Watch When Available!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/o0y4sKddiII

Jerry Craft (Class Act, New Kid) and Faith Erin Hicks (One Year at Ellsmere) join exciting comics artists Robin Ha (Almost American Girl), Derick Brooks (Bright Family), and Jonathan Hill (Odessa) in a discussion about new kids graphic novels. Moderated by Candice Mack (YALSA) and sponsored by the CBC Graphic Novel Committee.

Faith Erin Hicks
One Year at Ellsmere
Faith Erin Hicks (she/her) is a Canadian writer and artist. She worked in the animation industry for several years before transitioning into writing and drawing comics full time in 2008. She started making comics “for fun” and putting them on the web when she was in college. Her first published work was Zombies Calling (SLG Publishing) in 2007. Since then, she has published a number of other graphic novels including Brain Camp, Friends with Boys, Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, The Adventures of Superhero Girl, The Nameless City and Pumpkinheads. Faith Erin won an Eisner Award in 2014 for The Adventures of Superhero Girl and in 2019, her debut Young Adult prose novel, Comics Will Break Your Heart, was published by Roaring Brook Press.

Robin Ha
Almost American Girl
Robin Ha (she/her) is a Korean American cartoonist and illustrator based in Washington D.C. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling comic cookbook Cook Korean!: A Comic Book with Recipes. Her work has been published in independent comics anthologies including Secret Identities and The Strumpet, as well as in the pages of Marvel Comics and Heavy Metal Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Almost American Girl, talks about immigrating from Seoul, Korea to Huntsville, Alabama as a teenager in the mid-1990’s.

Jerry Craft
New Kid
Jerry Craft (he/his) is a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator. His book, New Kid, is the winner of the 2020 John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature. It is the first graphic novel in the Newbery’s nearly 100 year history to receive the award. Craft is only the fifth African-American author to land the coveted prize. New Kid was also awarded the Coretta Scott King award for an outstanding work by an African American writer. Craft is the second person to have simultaneously won both awards in the same year. Craft was born in Harlem and grew up in the Washington Heights section of New York City. He is a graduate of The Fieldston School and received his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts. He resides in Connecticut with his two sons and two beagles.

Derick Brooks
Bright Family: Versus the Multiverse
Derick Brooks (he/him) is a cartoonist from Richmond Virginia working in comics literary publishing and animation. Derick loves to create adventure fantasy, soft sci fi, and slice of life stories about BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color.) He is currently illustrating the book series Bright Family (Epic!) and in production of his first graphic novel Grip Up! (Iron Circus Comics) coming in 2022.

Jonathan Hill
Odessa
Jonathan Hill (he/his) is an Ignatz-nominated cartoonist, illustrator, and educator living in Portland, OR. His first two graphic novels, Americus (2011), and Wild Weather: Storms, Meteorology, and Climate (2019) were published by First Second. His third book, Odessa, will be published in November of 2020 (Oni Press) and he has another forthcoming book True Tales of a Seventh Grade Lizard Boy in 2022 (Walker Books).

Jonathan teaches comics in the illustration department at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Literary Arts and chairs the Youth Programs Advisory Council.

Moderator
Candice (Wing-yee) Mack
Vice President, Asian Pacific American Librarians Association
Candice (Wing-Yee) Mack and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I manage systemwide Young Adult services, programs and collections at the Los Angeles Public Library, the third largest library system in the United States and am the incoming President of the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association. As a lifelong Southern Californian, I’ve attended San Diego Comic Con since I was a teenager myself and served on the 2018 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards jury. I also served on the 2018 We Need Diverse Books Walter Dean Myers Award Jury and am past president of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). On Twitter, I post about food, music, libraries, YA lit, social justice and Star Wars as @tinylibrarian.

by the CBC Graphic Novel Committee.

Thursday

The first full day of Comic-Con@Home is stacked! The con will be in full gear with panels starting at 10:00 AM and it boasts a full day of geektastic glory. The Body Talk panel about diverse bodies in media is an important one; Michelle Yeoh will be at the Star Trek Universe panel so that’s all you really need to know about that; Batgirls! has a genuinely impressive list of diverse panelists, which is a good reflection of the creative diversity behind Batgirl of late; personal favorite Gene Luen Yang is on another panel on managing the pandemic; How to Build a Girl Squad has a fantastic premise and list of panelists, including Sarah Kuhn and Afua Richardson. I’m also excited about A Look Inside “Marvel’s 616” on Disney+ which is a panel on a documentary series on the impact of Marvel Comics on pop  culture from diverse perspectives. Angélique Roché, who hosts the Marvel’s Voices podcast and was one of the writers on Marvel’s Voices #1, is moderating.