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A tornado hit some parts of Minneapolis this afternoon. I was able to take a few pics of the aftermath. Take a look.
UPDATE: Added a few more pics to the set. These are closer to home… a few blocks around Franklin and 5th.
Big Funny: Opening Night
Friday night saw the opening of the Big Funny exhibition at the Altered Esthetics gallery. The exhibition features the art from the titular Big Funny: a big (48 newspaper sized pages) collection of comic-strips by an assortment of Minneapolis cartoonists. More info on the collection here. I brought a camera and acted like an annoying paparazzo. The results are here.
Doodle Dump 012
Doodle Dump‚Ñ¢ returned once before… unsuccessfully. It returns again. Click images to enlarge them.
Above: a few doodles based on Jesse Marsh drawings.
Resolution
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Dash Shaw already posted a small glimpse of our 15 page collaboration, “Resolution”. I wrote and Dash did the art, though the process was more fluid than that. When the piece comes out, I’ll do a post on the process. My layouts above correspond roughly to the page Dash posted on his blog. It will appear in MOME vol. 17.
Utopia Adrift: The Drifting Classroom
I should have posted this earlier. I wrote a review of Kazuo Umezu‘s The Drifting Classroom for Rain Taxi. The review is not online, but the magazine is available for free in most independent book stores around the country. You can also get a copy by ordering direct from Rain Taxi. Here’s an excerpt:
The distance between the present and utopia is measured in centuries. We locate utopian societies in the future, and prefigure them with premonitions of apocalypse; the dysfunctional order of the present must be swept aside by some vaguely grasped apocalyptic event to allow a new and better world to emerge. Every generation faces their own unique brand of the end of the world: religious rapture, nuclear annihilation, natural disasters, clash of civilizations, Malthusian overpopulation, and so on. Ecological collapse caused by industrial pollution fuels the horror in Kazuo Umezu’s inventive, eleven-volume manga horror epic, The Drifting Classroom.
The titular classroom is actually Yamato Elementary School, which due to unknown circumstances finds itself ripped out of time and flung into a devastated future. The school, housing 863 students and teachers, becomes an ark adrift on the sea of toxic sand that covers the remains of Tokyo and the rest of the world. The school’s temporal realignment brings the kids and adults face to face with the deadly consequences of Japan’s famed ‚ “economic miracle.” They become the last remnants of civilization and, at the same time, the last hope for humanity’s survival.
It’s clear that Umezu perceives adults as part of the problem, for he dispenses with the teachers early on. One by one the grown-ups succumb to madness and die off quickly. They can’t process what is happening to them‚ “the idea that the school might be in the future is utterly impossible,” and unable to imagine the impossible they have to die off, like dinosaurs. The children, not yet saddled with dogmas of adulthood, are able to imagine the possibility of time travel and thus grasp the reality of their predicament. Their capacity to imagine the impossible becomes their salvation, but also the source of the horrors to come.