[Middle Room Gallery] Sequential and Comic Art @ The Middle Room Gallery (10/11)

[Jason Pitzl-Waters]

The Middle Room Gallery
@ The Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center
218 W. Main Street, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.gallery.ucimc.org/

The 2003-2004 season at The Middle Room Gallery continues in October with 
the first annual Midwest Sequential Art Exhibition.

Join us during the month of October for a exhibition of comic and 
sequential art talent from the Midwest. Ranging in visual and narrative 
style from political to fantasy, from Japanese Manga to the familiar 
super-heroic conventions, this show will help shine a light on one of the 
most misunderstood and overlooked art forms today.

There will be a opening reception on Saturday October 11th from 7-9pm.
Wine will be provided by The Corkscrew Wine Emporium.

The show runs Monday October 5th and runs through Friday October 31st.

Artist Bios:

Pam Bliss:
Pam Bliss has been making comics of all sizes in Northwest Indiana since 
1989. Her cartoon stories have appeared in many anthologies, and range from 
kid's adventures to tales of time travel to celebrations of the absurdity 
of everyday life, and, of course, dog stories. She has made more than 65 
minicomics, and collected some of the best of her stories in her first 
trade paperback book "Dog & Pony Show", which was published in 2001. The 
second volume, "Jackalope Moon", is due to appear next year. She is also 
the author of the popular essay series "Hopelessly Lost but Making Good 
Time", which combines comics how-to with philosophical digressions. 
Hopelessly Lost 
" appears monthly on the comics webzine Sequential Tart 
(www.sequentialtart.com) and in a series of print collections. Her current 
project is something new for her: a spooky graphic novel of Gothic romance 
for readers of all ages called "Fox Acre". www.paradisevalleycomics.com on 
the web.

Tim Broderick:
• Born and raised on the southwest side of Chicago, for the last 10 years 
Broderick has lived on the northwest side with his wife and identical twin 
daughters.
• Possibly the first webcartoonist voted full, Active membership in Mystery 
Writers of America.
• Third year of doing online comics (starting in May of 2000)
•Quote: "I've always said doing a webcartoon is a lot like performing live 
on a street corner. It's earthier, less finished work but I think much more 
rewarding. My present style is designed to be loose, influenced by artists 
like Ralph Steadman, Hugo Pratt and cartoonists like Chester Gould who 
weren't afraid to draw outlandish but believable characters. The minimal 
style is meant to reflect the minimal writing style best used by Dashiell 
Hammett. "
http://oddjobs.keenspace.com/

Jacen Burrows:
A 1996 Sequential Art Graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, 
Jacen Burrows has become known for his unique style of intricate linework 
which reflects a blend of American, Japanese, and European influences. 
Jacen entered comics professionally as Scott Clark's background assistant 
on a number of Wildstorm projects, and subsequently worked on indie 
projects such as King Zombie for Caliber and Skid Roze for London Night 
Studios. Jacen has also worked in the RPG industry on properties such as 
Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and the video game industry on the 
properties Quake, Oni and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. At Avatar Press, 
Jacen has provided artwork on Cimmerian (written by Tom Snigoski), the 
Ravening, Quantum Mechanics, and Razor among others. His best known Avatar 
works have been for Warren Ellis Avatar projects Bad World, Bad Signal/From 
the Desk Of... and Dark Blue and Alan Moore's The Courtyard with Antony 
Johnston. http://www.jacenburrows.com/

Darrin Drda:
Darrin Drda has been making silly drawings for about 15 years. His work was 
published regularly in C-U's first alternative newsweekly, The Octopus, for 
over 5 years, and has been published in its successor, The Paper, since its 
inception in May, 2003. Channel X has also appeared in The San Francisco 
Bay Guardian, The ACTivist magazine (Ontario, Canada), High Country News 
(Colorado), and a handful of other progressive publications in the US and 
abroad. It is posted regularly to Znet (the online version of ZMagazine) 
and to the newswires of various IMCs.
Darrin's website: www.darrindrda.org.

Brion Foulke:
If you have ever read more then one webcomic then chances are you have 
bumped into Brion's FlipSide, an online fantasy comic/manga, chronicling 
the adventures of two women: Maytag, a jester-girl with split 
personalities; and Bernadette, a protective and knightly swordswoman. 
Foulke also produces the webcomic "Lotte vs The Dead" for WirePop. 
http://www.flipsidecomics.com/

Hope Larson:
Hope Larson, a senior at the School of the Art Institute, was thrust into 
comics without warning during the summer of 2003. She writes and draws the 
digital webcomic I Was There & Just Returned (updated every Saturday on 
Girlamatic.com), and maintains an illustration portfolio at 
thingwithfeathers.com.

Layla Lawler:
Layla Lawlor was (literally) born in a log cabin and grew up on a farm in 
the wilderness of Alaska. She has been writing and drawing since she could 
hold a crayon, and hopes someday to juggle dual careers as a novelist and a 
comic-book artist. In 2001 she began self-publishing "Raven's Children", an 
Arctic fantasy comic influenced by her Alaskan background, which earned her 
two nominations for the Friends of Lulu Kim Yale Award for Best New Female 
Talent. This year, she added another project to the mix: "Kismet: Hunter's 
Moon", a webcomic that appears on the subscription website Girlamatic.com. 
She has also had short comics stories published in several anthologies, 
including two benefit books for 9/11 victims; sold a prose story to the 
web-based anthology "Another Realm"; and writes reviews and interviews for 
the webzine "Sequential Tart".

Dirk Tiede:
Born in southern California to a pair of South Dakotans, raised in Texas, 
and schooled in Illinois, Dirk likes to think he had a somewhat diverse 
American upbringing. He discovered the world of comics in high school and 
somehow managed to land himself a place in art school with his doodles. 
Choosing the path of graphic design, he graduated the four-year program at 
Millikin University in 1997 and soon found himself working in Chicago as a 
way to ply his newly discovered digital skills.

After reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics in the spring of 1998 
inspiration stuck. Combining a basic premise resurrected from his early 
comics days with his love of Japanese comics and fascination with the city 
of Chicago, Dirk began writing what would become Paradigm Shift, which he 
began drawing in later that fall.

In early 1999 created dynamanga.net as a place to put Paradigm Shift, and 
in the spring of 2000 joined forces with Barrett Lombardo to create 
Comics2U.com, for which he created the weekly series Tesseract. In 2002 
Paradigm Shift was selected as a title on ModernTales.com, the leading 
professional webcomics service, as was featured as one of the launch titles 
for the site. Dirk’s artwork also appeared this summer in Steven Winthrow’s 
Toon Art: The Art of Digital Comics (2003).

This year Dirk finally brought the first book of Paradigm Shift to print as 
a self-published effort using the new technology of Print-on-Demand for a 
small initial circulation. He hopes to bring Paradigm Shift to a wider 
audience in the coming months with a larger print run and nation-wide 
distribution, if he doesn’t find a publisher first.

He currently resides in Chicago with his charming fiancée and attempts to 
pay the bills working as a freelance graphic designer.

Dann Tincher:
Dann Tincher is an artist residing in Champaign Illinois. Dann got his 
start with the locally produced fine-arts zine "The Ides of March" and is 
now working with writer Damien Duffy on the interactive web comic "Rehab25" 
(http://rehab25.net/) and their first print project out soon distributed by 
Diamond.

Charlie "Spike" Trotman:
C. Spike Trotman lives in middle of the city of Chicago and works as 
cartoonist full-time, much to her continuing amazement and elation. Her 
meager credits include the strip "Lucas and Odessa" on Girlamatic.com, The 
upcoming "Sparkneedle," also on Girlamatic, and her Al & Gideon minicomics, 
one of which is currently featured in the BadAzzMofo anthology SOLID!. She 
likes roast beef sandwiches, rude cartoons, and dolls that look like Edward 
Scissorhands.

Jason Pitzl-Waters
jason at ucimc.org
Curator, Midwest Sequential Art Exhibition

Emily Johnson
emily at ucimc.org
Coordinator, The Middle Room Gallery

http://www.gallery.ucimc.org/