Jason Rodriguez's Blog, page 2

Locust Moon Recap

Another year, another great Locust Moon Comics Festival. Once again held in Philadelphia’s rotunda, where the paint-chipped walls give way to a massive organ that is likely filled with dust and spiders - a perfect spot for a Halloween show.

I got to Philly early on Friday to help with the set-up before checking in to my weirdest Air B&B to-date: a completely empty apartment except for a bed and a nightstand. No curtains or blinds on the window, no soap in the bathroom, no couch to relax on. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be spending too much time in this place.

I headed on over to the Drink & Draw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Met some new folks but also saw many of my comic friends. It was crazy standing back and watching Chris Claremont, Craig Thompson, David Mack, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dean Haspiel, Ronald Wimberly, Gregory Benton, and others sit around a table and sketch Kelly Phillips dressed as mom from FUTURAMA but that’s what happens at a Locust Moon show.

After the Drink & Draw, Rafer Roberts and I went to watch the World Series. We drank a bit and made up a comic called President True Love and it’s the greatest comic you’ll never read. Oh well.

The show itself was wonderful - I sold out of my copies of ARTISTS against POLICE BRUTALITY in about three or four hours and then just decided to coast and have fun with the rest of my time. I sat next to Craig Thompson who showed up at around 3PM or so and that was a real treat.

Back in the early-2000s, it was books like Thompson’s BLANKETS that didn’t just get me back into reading comics but made me want to make comics. Once Thompson’s line calmed down I even told him that. He thanked me, and said that he heard of COLONIAL COMICS. In my head I was saying, “Awww…Craig…you’re so sweet. There’s no way you ever heard of this book.” But then he reminded me that we were both currently in Whitman College’s comics gallery show (Colonial Comics has its own alcove at the show). I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of my work as I was at that moment. 

Craig signed a copy of SPACE DUMPLINGS for my niece…

…did a sketch for Matt Dembicki’s son…

…and even honored me with a #sadfight…

To say that he is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met is an understatement.

After the show was the after party, where beer and wine flowed all night and eventually all of the guests got to drawing. It started with a Dean Haspiel vs. Rafer Roberts Darkseid vs. Thanos draw-off and then instantly turned into a battle to see who could draw the best uncircumcised penis.

Oh, Locust Moon. Don’t ever change.

ARTISTS against POLICE BRUTALITY (APB), my new anthology...

ARTISTS against POLICE BRUTALITY (APB), my new anthology co-edited by Bill Campbell and John Jennings, comes out this Monday from Rosarium Publishing. All proceeds from the book go towards The Innocence Project. This book was born out of anger on the evening of December 3rd, 2014, when a Grand Jury opted not to indict Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, and after talking about how we would do such a book, we opened submissions on December 15th, 2014. We compiled over 50 comics, cartoons, pin-ups, essays, and short stories from over 60 creators and, on 9/11/2015 (10 months later), the book went to print.

I’d like to talk about five pages from the book. The first two pages (which are the first two pages of the book), make up a two-page pin-up by the amazing Ashley A. Woods. Titled “Family Portrait,” this piece shows 12 victims of recent (at the time) police violence: John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Carry Ball Jr., Amadou Diallo, Tanisha Anderson, Miriam Carey, Yvette Smith, Rekia Boyd, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones. Woods’s piece, which was one of the first pieces we received, knocked us right out with its simple yet powerful approach to saying names and remembering the deceased. 

Over the ten months we spent compiling this collection, we saw more and more reports of police violence and increasing tensions between communities. #blacklivesmatter was hijacked by #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter, the conversation we were supposed to be having was turning into a group of people thumbing their nose at the issues while kids were getting beat at a pool party in McKinney, Texas. While Freddie Gray’s back was being broken in Baltimore. While Sandra Bland was dying in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas.

So that brings me to the next three pages I want to talk about. When the book was finished, I told Bill Campbell I had three pages left. “Don’t put ads in it,” he said, “This isn’t the right book for that.” He gave me carte blanche, so I put together three pages that I felt closed the book out in a way that Woods’s piece opened it. By saying names. 881 names, to be exact. The 881 people killed by police between the time we opened submissions and the the time we went to print. 881 people in ten months.

I hope you think about picking up a copy of APB. Whether you buy your own or get it at the library. The anthology is meant to highlight the issues. To move the conversation along. To say names. And, remember, all proceeds benefit The Innocence Project. We felt, from the start, that no profit should be made on this book. It should be used as a weapon of improvement, from the contents to the profits.

Thanks for listening.

Jason Rodriguez

APB will be available at local booksellers and libraries, and online at Amazon.

jijennin70:After the non-verdict around the Eric Garner case...

jijennin70:

After the non-verdict around the Eric Garner case went down, Bill Campbell; owner and publisher of Rosarium Publishing hit me up enraged. The end result of that conversation is this book. Along with the amazing Jason Rodriguez we managed to pull together a collection of power, creativity and change in the form of a trade paperback. All proceeds go to the INNOCENCE PROJECT. the book will premiere at MICE this weekend (Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo) and drop for real on the 28th. : http://www.amazon.com/APB-Artists-against-Brutality-Anthology-ebook/dp/B0165WNB02/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444876044&sr=1-1&keywords=artists+against+police+brutality

Yo…look at what EXISTS right now. I still can’t believe we made it to print. This book had over 50 pieces, a combination of essays, cartoons, pin-ups, and comics of varying lengths and sizes from over 60 artists and writers. It took every minute of my free time in the final stretch, but man it was worth it. 

If you’re at MICE, I’ll have a few copies at my table but the Rosarium table will have the bulk of them. Come by and grab yourself some. 

Webcomics Wednesday: The 9 Lives of Garfield

Webcomics Wednesday: The 9 Lives of Garfield:

And here it is, the complete NINE LIVES OF GARFIELD on The Robot’s Pajamas. From the intro:

My friend Jason Rodriguez is a writer and editor of comic books (Colonial Comics, Try Looking Ahead, Once Upon a Time Machine). What he is not is a cartoonist. But when we began a conversation about how bland and repetitive Garfield is, Jason was inspired to draw a few strips about Garfield’s tropes coming back to do him in. He filled his strips with ennui and philosophical ideas. They contrast with Garfield’s dumb jokes in a way that I adore. Eventually, Jason completed 10 strips and dubbed them the Nine Lives of Garfield. Here they are all in one place for the first time.

Go read and enjoy! 

So, I just pressed the final version of the ARC, so I think it’s...

So, I just pressed the final version of the ARC, so I think it’s time to start talking about my new anthology (co-edited by Bill Campbell and John Jennings), ARTISTS: AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY.

Back in December, Bill, John, and I were talking about Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and John Crawford and Michael Brown and etc, etc, etc when Bill (publisher at Rosarium Press) said that we should do a benefit book called APB: ARTISTS AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY. John and I signed on to co-edit the anthology and we put out a call for submissions - comics, essays, short stories, and poems - in order to put together a collection of personal narratives, representative accounts, and thought-provoking analysis and solutions of a systemic problem in our society.

Seven months later, I pressed the ARC. It was the hardest book I ever had to work on. It defeated me, at times, especially as I sat down to work on it and was bombarded with news of another slaying and yet another slaying and a pool party and a church getting shot up and black churches burning. You’d think incidents like that would motivate you to sit down and finish the book, but you’ll be surprised how easily they defeat you. 

You start to think to yourself, “What difference can a book make?”

It’s easy to answer, “It can’t make a difference.” You look around at this epidemic of anti-intellectualism in the United States and you start to believe that a book is the last  thing that could make a difference.

But then I re-read the final piece in the book, an original poem by Mondo We Langa, who has been in prison since 1971, convicted of killing an Omaha police officer on controversial evidence. These particular lines from his poem:

I know Akai Gurley fell
I hadn’t heard of him before
Nor of Amadou Diallo or Sean Bell
Prior to their killings
Which of these two took slugs in the greater number
I don’t recall
My memory is too encumbered
With the names
Of so many more before and since

And I realized…this is happening so frequently, that it has become impossible to remember the names and circumstances. That one story bleeds into the next and you forget who was in a Walmart and who was just walking down the street and how many shots were fired into who. 

So maybe the book doesn’t need to make a difference - maybe it just needs to stand as a recording of the problem as it exists right now. People who have stories to tell and these stories deserved to be remembered, all of the details, so that our eyes don’t gloss over when we try to remember who killed who with what weapon in what room from yesterday or the day before or the day before or last month or last year or last decade. 

I think this is an important book for that reason alone - just to help people remember the details. And this isn’t necessarily self-promotion, all of the proceeds from this book are going to the Innocence Project. They already signed off on it, none of us will ever seem a dime for our work.

But we don’t need to see dimes, we need to see these stories, because seeing these stories will at least change one thing: the record. Our collective narrative. Our attention to the details.

ARTISTS AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY will be released October 1st. You can pre-order it from almost any on-line retailer. All proceeds go to the Innocence Project. Please consider supporting this book.

I made a dumb cartoon.

I made a dumb cartoon.

This pic was taken on the second day in our first apartment in...

This pic was taken on the second day in our first apartment in DC. We moved to the area late May 2000 and moved into an apartment about two weeks later. So this pic was basically taken exactly 15 years ago. On our first night there, we slept on a pile of clothes. The next day we got an air mattress.

I had to blow that queen-sized behemoth up myself because we only had enough money for the air mattress, not enough for the pump. Well, we apparently had enough for a case of Budweiser, too.

A couple of days later we had our second piece of furniture - a television set. I got it for “free” at RadioShack when I signed up for 5-years of MSN internet service. That was with a modem, kids.

The apartment itself was a tiny studio in NW, near Van Ness. Robin lived there for the summer before returning to BU to finish up her bachelors. That was a weird year for me - I got really into doing sit-ups while listening to Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. Didn’t really have much else to do, only had one friend in the area (my friend Max, who I knew since grade school) and I was the youngest person at my job by about 20 years.

Eventually, Robin’s friend Gerry moved in with me for a couple of weeks, maybe even a month? I had no idea who he was, she just told me he was coming. Gerry ended up marrying us nine year’s later.

I had to move whatever possessions we owned to a one-bedroom apartment in SW a year later. I didn’t even have my driver’s license, tho, so Max and Gerry had to help. Lived there for six months before Robin and I moved to Arlington which is where we lived since.

15 years in the DC-metro area. Crazy. When we originally talked about this, we thought it would be five years, tops.

Time, man.

PS - I had hair!

Way back in 1999, Gail Simone coined the term “Women in...

Way back in 1999, Gail Simone coined the term “Women in Refrigerators” to describe the comic book trope where women get killed, maimed, or de-powered, often in service to the male protagonist’s story line. The term references back to Green Lantern #54, where the Green Lantern discovers that his girlfriend was murdered and stuffed in a refrigerator. 

I put GAME OF THRONES on watch after the Sansa Stark rape. Not because it wasn’t in the books, I don’t read the books, but because the rape seemed to serve the sole purpose of progressing Theon/Reek’s story-line. Admittedly, the White Walker attack on Hardhome was way too awesome for me to give up on the show completely even though, once again, Karsi was the only major death. GoT was still on watch, but not as bad as the Sansa scene since Karsi had a pretty strong, albeit short-lived character arc.

But last night, man. The burning of Shireen Baratheon was the most vile scene put into GoT to-date, and once again we have a woman being sacrificed to further the story-line of a male protagonist. In this case, to make Stannis take a Heel Turn in a way that is so seemingly out of character. 

The problem with these deaths, when looked at episode after episode after episode, are that these woman are being portrayed as innocent and kind just for the sake of making their rapes and deaths all the more shocking. It’s as if they were always nothing but eventual plot devices. Nothing furthers a male protagonist’s story-line better, I guess, than the blood of a woman that isn’t even playing the game.

It’s hard to watch. Last night was hard to watch. The screams - I was nauseous. I had nightmares. Not even sure if I can hate-watch the show anymore, it feels so vapid now. 

Women in Refrigerators, Women on Pyres. The song remains the same.

Try Looking Ahead...Again

Try Looking Ahead...Again:

This Amazon giveaway for TRY LOOKING AHEAD, my new collection of sci-fi stories for middle grade and young adults, ends on June 11th. Three copies are still available and one of them is very close to being unlocked. All you need to do is click the link and then click the box to see if you’ve won!

Six years ago today, my first comic book collaboration with my...

Six years ago today, my first comic book collaboration with my wife was released. Oh, yeah - I guess we got married, too.