Uncomics

In which Uncomics podcast host Allan Haverholm meditates on Kafka's tangled and ambiguous character, the odradek. Please see shownotes on uncomics.org for transcript.

When Mark Badger started out as a comics artist working for Marvel and DC Comics, his fine arts influences alienated his editors so much they singled him out as the very worst artist in their freelancing roster. Times have changed, though, and Badger's continued explorations into the duality between comics and modern art makes him the perfect, final guest in the Uncomics series of artist talks!

You will be hard pressed to find a better exemplar of an artist bridging contemporary art and comics than Aidan Koch. She is a long time alternative comics favourite, exhibited and published by the Whitney museum and MoMA — her suggestive and fragmented narratives spanning comics, animation, art installations and jewellery. Make yourself comfortable as Uncomics host Allan Haverholm sits down to talk to Aidan Koch about straddling two very different art worlds; making comics inspired by classic works of art; and applying her art to urgent environmental concerns.

As often as other artists have cited Oliver East on the Uncomics podcast, it was a matter of time before host Allan Haverholm sat down to talk with himself about the life and process of a walking cartoonist, poet, university lecturer, and painter of street rubbish. Learn how skateboarding is an act of remixing architecture, about transforming space into place, and how East has made up his career as he goes along. All this, with a healthy serving of self deprecation, in this episode of the Uncomics podcast!

Through the 2010s, Dunja Janković churned out dizzying, confounding and increasingly abstract comics, before she turned her creative focus to other art media like art installation and screen printing. Talking to Allan Haverholm in 2020, however, it becomes clear that comics never really lost their grip on her. Hear about her nomadic life and practice (even during a pandemic!), the allures of abstraction and the need for immediacy in this episode of the Uncomics podcast!

Between her ambiguous comics, gorgeous illustrations, installation art, and quilt making(!), Peony Gent is a renaissance multi-hyphenate. In this episode, she sits down with host Allan Haverholm to explain how they're all connected, how she creates gaps for her readers' interpretations to live in, and to declare her great love for Dungeons and Dragons.

In this very wholesome threesome, Simon Russell and Gareth A Hopkins rejoin Uncomics host Allan Haverholm to discuss what really sets uncomics apart from, say, a Google image search; the "sound" of individual fonts; the singer Sting's sex life, and how a Finnish audience might be more open to uncomics performances. Please note that this conversation builds on the ones in the last two episodes, and it is recommended that you listen to those first! Visit uncomics.org/podcast.html to find all episodes.

Simon Russell is a man of many hats in the British comics scene — (un)comics creator, editor, graphic designer, and more. He talks to host Allan Haverholm about miscolouring Garfield, setting comics on a chemical formula, using the ashes of his own burnt works in paint to make new work, and putting a highly collectible comic book into a concrete slab.

Gareth A Hopkins started his comics career by making an abstract reworking of his favorite 2000 A.D. comic book. Since then, he has returned to his own work time and time again — published work, misprints and discarded art — to use it as the foundation for new uncomics. Your host Allan Haverholm talks to Gareth about comics, musical inspiration, personal grief and the paranormal.

A silk spinner, textile artist and sculptor, Erin Curry weaves comics into most of her work. Her early exposure in "Best American Comics 2014", of an abstract work made on translucent plastic sheets, showed only the beginnings of an artist whose deep engagements with materiality continue to evolve into interactive works and installations. Uncomics host Allan Haverholm sat down with Curry to talk about silk worms, mushrooms, and dentistry — oh my!

The Uncomics Craghead-aganza continues in this second talk with Warren Craghead III, where he and host Allan Haverholm expand upon his practice, the amount of talent at comics festivals compared to Art Basel — and the interdisciplinary field of uncomics. Be sure to first listen to our previous episode for the full picture!

Since his 1996 Xeric Grant-winning zine "Speedy", Warren Craghead III has been at the forefront of North American avantgarde comics. Whether he is chronicling his daughters growing up, witnessing atrocities play out on his TV screen, or reporting World War I and the Armenian genocide at a century's delay, his work is a radically open, unflinching engagement with the world. This 2018 interview is the first of two talks Uncomics host Allan Haverholm had with Craghead. The next part, recorded in our pandemic year of 2020, is out tomorrow!

A life long artist, Rosaire Appel spent years in the dark room and as a writer. Even if asemic comics and art books were a later shift in her oeuvre she arrived in the formative years of comics abstraction and uncomics. Her works explore visual sound and music; the shifting sands of being in the world; and the tensions between lexicality and visuality. Host Allan Haverholm talked to her about a selection of her works during the 2020 pandemic.

Comics is a fuzzy term to begin with. Ask a hundred people what comics are, and you will probably get as many different answers. To discuss things on the intersection of "comics" and contemporary art, we need a different terminology.