This Saturday, the Comic-Con Museum not only has exhibits on "Doctor Who" and luchadors, but also hosts a pair of panels focused on Marvel’s Daredevil and Comics in Many Forms.
On Saturday at 11:45 a.m., you can attend a drawing workshop with Vin Deighan (a.k.a. Frank Quitely) in the Prebys Foundation Art Studio at the Comic-Con Museum.
The workshop leads into the panel "Comics, Bande Dessinée, Fumetti, and Manga: Comics in Many Forms," organized by San Diego State University's Center for Comics Studies. The panel will compare English-language comics with ones from France, Italy, and Japan.
Panelists include Deighan; Laurence Grove, director of the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow and president of the International Bande Dessinée Society; Antonio Iannotta (University of San Diego Adjunct Assistant Professor); and Van Tarpley (San Diego State University). Elizabeth Pollard, co-director of the Center for Comics Studies, will moderate.
Iannotta, who is also the artistic director at the San Diego Italian Film Festival, explained, "Italian comics are called fumetti, and so the word fumetto comes from fumo, that is the smoke of the the balloon that comes from, visually, that comes from the mouth of the speaker."
Iannotta sees fumetti as the medium closest to film because it asks readers to make sense of the relationship between visuals and words, as in this example he will be presenting from Andrea Pazienza's "Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal (The Extraordinary Adventures of Pentothal)."
"The use of the visual, the use of the text that in the same page comes from other media like the radio, or comes from the mind of the main character while he's asleep, or it's their thoughts," Iannotta added. "It's all interconnected, all overlapping. It takes a lot of time to figure out what's going on. Forget about simplicity, forget about this is for a kid. You really need to spend time going up and down, down and up, left and right, right and left, reading multiple times all the text that you see and then putting things together and give the right rhythm and the right sense and meaning of what's going on. So it's an example for me of the complexity of the media."
Iannotta has been on a mission to share the art of comics with friends, students and complete strangers.
"For me, comics always have been something as important as literature and film," Iannotta said. "I have had so many conversations with friends that were telling me, 'Why are you wasting your time with comics?' And I was thinking, what you're talking about? You don't know what you're talking about. And so since I was a teenager, I've been spreading — and also 'losing' — my collection of comics — because I was lending my evidence that this form of art can be very complex and important. Something important to read and spend time with."
Chris Ryall shares a similar passion. He will be on the second panel to discuss his new book on his beloved superhero, Daredevil. It's one of the inaugural titles in Bloomsbury Academic and Marvel's New Marvel Age of comics series.
"I'm one of the four launch books," Ryall said. "And my book is all about Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s 'Daredevil: Born Again.' So we'll be discussing all the reasons why I think it's notable and influential and memorable and lasting, and important in all of those things."
Ryall was drawn to Miller’s dark seven-part comic book series about the Daredevil/Matt Murdock character.
"It was this methodical and just vicious destroying of every part of Matt Murdock's life," Ryall explained. "It's just this gripping tale of him getting torn down more and more and more, and trying to split onto that tiny scrap of what made him a hero in the first place. Once you strip away the comfortable home and the money and the job and the support group and the costume and all of that, is there still enough inside him to help him rise again and transcend all of that and return to being a hero? I found that just such a compelling and mature way to look at that familiar story, but in a very different and emotionally resonant way.
Ryall will be signing copies of his "Daredevil: Born Again," as well as his recent graphic novel adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis."
