animation, comics, exhibits, events, etc!

On the last Sunday of every month at 12pm, join the Sequential Art Collective for group drawing in and around New York City. The meeting will last between 2 to 4 hours (approx). Bring your own drawing pads, pens , pencils, eraser etc. Each month we will be venturing to different locations ranging from zoos to museums, baseball games, parks, etc.

The object is to have fun with fellow artists and like minded individuals — and to take your drawing to the next level by sharing and critiquing your art with your peers. There will be no charge to attend other than whatever fee the locations charge. If we are aware of enough attendees ahead of time, all attempts will be made to book special group admission rates as applicable.

The first meeting will be this  Sunday, May 31st. We will be heading over the Museum of Natural History. The main focus will be the Mammal Room and the Sea Life Room. We will meet outside of the museum in front of the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt at 12:00PM.

Date: Sunday, May 31, 2009
Time: 12:00pm – 4:00pm
Location: American Museum of Natural History
Street: Central Park West at 79th Street
City/Town: New York, NY

If you have any questions or comments please email Allan at tellmemore@sacart.org

See You There!

-The Sequential Art Collective

In Media Madness, Matt. Murray reviews, revisits and rambles about comics, cartoons and their interactions in and with related media.

In Media Madness (on Mondays and other days) I’ve focused much of my attention on adaptations of comics into movies, television shows and other temporally sequential art forms. Largely, that’s probably what one thinks of when one mentions the adaptation of the comic medium into another.  However, there is a whole other strain of adaptation that has been around basically since the birth of the comic itself: the translation of comics and their characters into other print media that lack pictures… short stories and books.

Historically,  Stan “The Man” Lee’s first job at Timely comics was writing “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” a text-only filler story that ran in Captain America #3.  Pieces like this were a necessity for comics in the Golden Age, so that a comic could be considered a proper “magazine” making it eligible for a mailing certificate with USPS.  To this day, there still exists a school of thought that comics are in some way a lesser form than text-only fiction, simply because they have pictures.

I actually witnessed an institutionalized version of this “thought” first hand a couple of years back  at a conference of Nassau County Public Librarians.  I was invited to their annual breakfast to speak on a panel in favor of the comic book as a form of adult literature, and although I applaud the organizer for even trying to posit this thought into the head of her colleagues, the feeling of the room was essentially summed up in the closing comment of an attendee who stood up thanked the panel for coming and then shook her bee-hived head and said “…but these ‘books’ are still for children.”

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In Media Madness, Matt. Murray reviews, revisits and rambles about comics, cartoons and their interactions in and with related media.

Poor Frank Miller.

Twenty some odd years ago, after being at the forefront of a revolution in the comics industry with his legendary run on Daredevil and his seminal take on Batman (Dark Knight Returns and Year One) he turned his sites to Hollywood and was completely crushed by the film making machine when he was hired to write the Robocop sequels. Misunderstood and re-written to the point of barely being recognized as his work, Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 literally sent Miller back to the drawing board, where he would cook up Sin City and 300… which of course would become hot Hollywood properties which would revolutionize comic book movies to an extent.

Poor Frank Miller.

Although he was rightfully billed as “co-director” of Sin City and would get the reverential treatment he deserved from the actors, producers, directors and critics that he definitely deserved in the wake of the direct translation of City and the less literal adaptation of 300 (which was filtered through the directorial sense of Zack Snyder), anyone with a sense of history and an understanding of Mr. Miller’s ambitions could see that he was chomping at the bit to get the training wheels off… to take a shot at writing and directing his own movie.

Poor Frank Miller.

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