SAW podcasts
90s ORAL HISTORY PROJECT PODCAST
Find our most recent episodes with show notes below. Past episodes are on our blog with the tag: 90s oral history podcast.
SAW spoke with YLP Alum and FLOW + Publish member Dusty McGowan about his experiences with comics, his creative process, and his unique perspective as a psychotherapist cartoonist.
Dusty was also a guest on the most recent episode of SAW’s Comics Karma podcast with hosts Tom Hart and Lauren Weinstein. Check out the episode!
We Believe in Comics Free Workshops
Every Friday Night we draw together in our We Believe in Comics free community workshops. If you can’t make it live, you can join in with the recording on our YouTube channel. Find our most recent workshops below, and past workshops on our blog with the tag: fridaynightcomics.
PRO CALLS PODCAST
Find our most recent pro calls and notes below. Find past pro calls on our blog with the tag: pro call.
We had such a splendid and informative time having Sacha Mardou speak with us about her healing journey and career in comics. She gave us a generously in-depth look at her process in making her newly-released graphic memoir Past Tense. We also got a sneak peak at what she's working on next!
About our guest speaker:
"Sacha Mardou was born in Macclesfield in 1975 and grew up in Manchester, England. She began making comics after getting her BA in English Literature from the University of Wales, Lampeter. Her critically acclaimed graphic novel series, Sky in Stereo was named an outstanding comic of 2015 by the Village Voice and shortlisted for the 2016 Slate Studio Prize.
Since 2019 she has been making comics about therapy and healing. Her graphic memoir Past Tense: Facing family Secrets and Finding myself in Therapy published by Avery/Penguin USA is out now. Since 2005 she has lived in St Louis, Missouri with her cartoonist husband Ted May, their daughter and two disruptive cats."
What a pleasure it was to have Yasmeen Abedifard speak with us at the Sequential Artists Workshop! We talked in depth about the making and many iterations of her recently published When to Pick a Pomegranate (2024 Silver Sprocket), as well as her journey through arts, comics, publishing, and teaching. Give it a listen! About our guest speaker: "Yasmeen Abedifard (b. 1996) is an Iranian-American artist born in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently based in Oakland, CA, USA. She holds an MFA from Cornell University, where she received the Charles Baskerville Painting Award. Her work is centered around storytelling mediums, including comics, illustrations, and animation. She is currently teaching in the Comics program at The California College of the Arts (CCA) and the UC Berkeley Art Studio."
It was a privilege to have cartoonist Carl Antonowicz speak at the Sequential Artists Workshop about his journey through comics and performance art, among his many other creative endeavors!
ABOUT CARL:
Carl Antonowicz is a Tulsa-based illustrator, performer, writer, director, cartoonist, and calligrapher. He dabbles in medieval history, the occult, theatre, and any of a number of other enterprises. He is currently enjoying his third year in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
Carl earned his Master's of Fine Arts in Cartooning at the Center for Cartoon Studies in 2011, and his Bachelor of Arts in Studio Arts and English Literature from Austin College in 2008. He recommends both institutions highly.
Hi, welcome! This is Tom Hart. We're really honored to feature Craig Thompson.
Craig is arguably one of the best cartoonists of his generation. In addition to having sold tons of books, he's also got a beautiful way with words and pictures and has garnered the appreciation of hundreds and thousands of people, including a lot of artists.
So, it's wonderful to sit down with him, and it was really kind of a shock to hear him name me as one of his early inspirations; that's very kind. And Craig also expands the web by mentioning some other people at the end of this interview that we should be contacting.
But more importantly, I want to talk about how that web expanded, because we went to a little, not only out of the way, but sort of secret cafe in Providence, Rhode Island to film this interview. It's surrounded by artist lofts, and we hadn't even started yet, and we're filming outside, and a woman, Claire, came up to us and we had her ask the questions because she was interested in what we were doing.
By the tail end of this interview, and especially after the interview, we realized that Claire was deeply interested in these values. So much so that she was probably living them more than Craig or I. She and her partner, Femi, who also appeared for a few moments in the interview, have an art studio nearby where they host events and have art shows, and Claire, for instance, hates Instagram had some things to say about the soothing scrolling that is hurting her generation.
And way more interestingly., the way you find out about events in their art studio is, you have to call their landline, which is a rotary phone. And so we were really happy to connect with artists almost half our age, who really believed in the value of face-to-face contact and walking across town or walking from town to town, and reaching out the slow way, and the the mindful way and also the cumbersome way.
We were really honored to to be speaking with them. It's in the interest of connecting all these generations that these oral histories have been started and preserved.
So, I want to thank Claire and Femi, and I also want to thank Craig for sitting down with us, and thank what's left of the really interesting parts of Providence, Rhode Island for being there, and the secret cafe and everything else have a listen. Thanks!