Art in the Subway: Depending on where you live and the type of person you are, the subway can represent a useful tool, a means to an end, a site of stress and panic, or a repository for dirt and pee. For New York’s Jowy Romano, the subway is a place where art lives. His Subway Art Blog collects a wide variety of photos from various subways, and each captures a moment of creativity, no matter how large or small – the work of a particularly inventive tagger, for instance, makes up one post, while a furtive poem written on a Post-It Note is captured in another. There’s culture-jammed advertisements, historical shots, subway-related art, and a lot more. It’s amazing how much Romano’s photos capture the culture of the city up above. He also has a subway art zine coming out soon. Keep up with the site to figure out how you can get one.
Women and Comics: This one’s for all the ladies…who make, read and love comics. The blog Women Write About Comics recently posted a terrific interview with former DC Comics editor Janelle Asselin. Asselin, who now works at Disney, put together a thesis that examines the relationship between women and comics and makes suggestions to comic books publishers about how to increase sales. Her answer – market more towards the female demographic. The interview reveals some surprising and interesting insights, including the fact that only one woman ever reached out to Asselin looking for work at DC during her entire tenure at the company. You hear that, women? Starting making more comics!
Book Stack Poems: According to this blog post, artist Nina Katchadourian invented book spine poetry – you stack one title, spine out, beneath the other, and keep stacking until you have a poem-length array of words. Katchadourian’s versions are quite high-concept, and insanely clever, poking fun at many different aspects of the art world. There was even a book spine poetry contest during National Poetry Month this year, with contestants displaying great ingenuity and cleverness. Clearly, book spine poetry is not quite as easy as it looks! I am going to try it ourselves the next time I re-arrange my apartment (which is often.) Our favorite book spine poem is here.
Favorite New Tumblr Alert: BP publisher Hal Niedzviecki tipped me off on this amazing Tumblr called Archie Out of Context. Contributors submit a single panel from an Archie comic. The more unintentionally ridiculous, ribald or weird, the better. The result is a hilarious collection of non-sequiturs and unintentionally erotic misadventures. The world of Archie has always been ripe for mockery, and this blog – like its subversive godfather, Garfield Minus Garfield – has only compounded the innate silliness in the sanitized world of Riverdale.