Pulp Culture

Just back from a conference that I have to post about because it was rich with information and guidance for my thinking about comics right now. The Vermont Folklife Center curated last week’s “Pulp Culture Comic Arts Festival and Symposium” and I am very grateful I was invited to attend and participate.

Though I was not able to attend two important opening events, lectures by Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, I was able to participate in the full day of panels on Saturday. Below are my sketch notes from those panels, augmented by those of Kurt Shaffert, who generously permitted me to photograph his wonderful notes for the Graphic Medicine panel on which I was a speaker.

Really looking forward to reading all the comics I brought home.

Want to give a shout out to one project which accounts for the many brightly colored comic zines on the bottom row above, a project done in collaboration with the Vermont Folklife Center, “El Viaje Mas Caro” (The Most Costly Journey).  It’s a project that started as a public health intervention and ended up gathering stories to heal. This project is doing the work of oral history, narrative medicine, ethnography and graphic medicine. As the website describes, “The Most Costly Journey (in Spanish, El viaje más caro) is an ethnographic cartooning project that employs collaborative storytelling as a tool to mitigate loneliness, isolation, and despair among Latin American migrant farm workers on Vermont dairy farms.”

I suspect I’ll be sharing more about terrific this project in the near future.

Special thanks to Andy Kolovos and the Vermont Folklife Center, as well as all the generous sponsors who made this conference a reality.