Join

Sarah Glidden, author/artist of HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS

and

Dean Haspiel, artist of CUBA: MY REVOLUTION

at

Heeb Storytelling: The Live Comics Edition

Tomorrow, December 21 at 7:00 pm, $15

Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater

425 Lafayette St (between Astor Pl and E 4th St)

More info can be found at TIME OUT NY: Things to Do

And if you haven’t seen it yet, this week’s double issue of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY includes HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL on The Best Non Fiction Books of 2010 list and an exclusive comic by Dean Haspiel in remembrance of Harvey Pekar (The Quitter).

Join Inverna Lockpez and Dean Haspiel as they discuss and show pages from
CUBA: MY REVOLUTION
Wednesday, October 6th at 7:00 pm
BookCourt 163 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY

This book and its amazing creative team continue to receive terrific press attention!

Inverna Lockpez discusses the book on Public Radio International's THE WORLD

And GRAPHIC NYC has a great piece with photos of the Kentler International Drawing Space exhibit.

Enjoy!

Vertigo On the Ledge: with Inverna Lockpez

I left Cuba in the late 1960s after I realized I could no longer live under the revolution I had once welcomed with open arms. For years, every time I would remember a story about that time — about my family, my artists' collective, my time in prison — I would tell it. Dean Haspiel is a member of my extended family, so he literally grew up hearing these stories. One day he told me I had to write them down. I told him there was too much to write, too much to remember. "You write it as a novel," he said, "and I will illustrate it."
What would happen when I tried to remember the details of what I had spent years trying to forget? I went to Florida for two weeks and returned to New York with more than three hundred pages. My memories gushed like the rush of water over a dam. To select what would move the story forward was like playing chess: every single move was important.
Finally, the collaboration with Dean began. Like me, he is very sure of himself, and I knew we would clash. I had always admired his work and for years I encouraged him to be true to his artistic principles. But now I had to ask myself, what about mine? He would have to recreate my memories and feelings visually, and what if I didn't like them? As a painter, I am accustomed to creating my pieces, identifying the pictorial problems, and solving them myself.
Weeks and months went by, and I learned that when you're working with someone at a similar level of creativity and experience, a miracle happens. We were a match, and after two years my world of words became a visual theater.
Seeing the stories in print, I sometimes remember the biting sting of the hose against my body, and smell my flesh burning from the wires. The fear will never go away, but I don't live at its mercy anymore. I now have a stronger sense of myself. I can write this work of fiction, inspired by my true experiences, with the hope of making my country a better place.

—Inverna Lockpez

We worked very hard on the cover to CUBA: MY REVOLUTION with art director, Louis Prandi, and I came up with a bunch of preliminary concepts, some of which are presented here.

My initial cover designs ranged from presenting the revolution of a country coupled with the revolution of an emerging artist but it felt too linear. I wanted to capture the glamour of Cuban poster art but I’m not a painter and my ink line proved to be too stark. We discussed the qualities of Mondrian, an artist whose abstract work influenced Inverna’s while evoking the page design of a comic book. I created some ideas that would marry the two worlds of fine art and comics while featuring a picture of the author as a young woman in Cuba, one of the only candid photos remaining in Inverna’s archives. Marketing vetoed the clash of reality and fiction, citing conflict, and we dispensed with that portion of the cover. Still, we needed something compelling to compliment the cover narrative.

Frustrated, I asked Inverna what comics she read as a kid and she mentioned Chic Young’s BLONDIE and William Moulton Marston’s WONDER WOMAN. I looked for comics from her childhood era and discovered classic covers and strips that represented heroines and gods and domestic housewives, including the cover to Wonder Woman #108, illustrated by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. But I didn’t feel comfortable featuring Inverna’s avatar, Sonya, in that way. I became distraught with the cover process.

Inverna encouraged me to throw caution to the wind to see what would happen. I am a fan of German expressionism and New Objectivity. One of my favorite painters is Max Beckmann, and I studied the way he paints people like they were anthropomorphized bruises. My girlfriend, Jen Ferguson, is a fine arts painter and she recommended I look at Austrian artist, Oskar Kokoschka, for which I discovered some chilling portraits of human conflict and pain. I wanted to present Sonya at odds with her own ideologies and what emerged was something horrific, not unlike an angel freeing her tortured soul. All parties involved were struck by the image but agreed that the general public would mistaken our graphic novel for a zombie apocalypse nightmare.

Finally, we settled on marrying an artifact from Castro’s Cuban revolution —the original flag of the 26 July Movement, reworked as the title -- with the classic comic book trope of multiple images. We staged it within the frame of fine art minimalism while highlighting a painted portrait of the protagonist. I think it was on the twentieth attempt at doing a watercolor painting of Sonya that I got it right.