Art show in NJ to benefit Jack Kirby Museum, October 15, 2011

By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:56 pm Tuesday, Oct 11

This Saturday (October 15) at 5pm, legendary rock club Maxwell's in Hoboken will open its Kirby Enthusiasm art show in its front room. More than 30 visual artists have contributed work paying tribute to "The King of Comics."

At 7pm, in the back room, the Kirby Enthusiasm rock show will start, with WEEP (featuring the Venture Brothers' Doc Hammer), WJ & The Sweet Sacrifice and (formed for this occasion) The Boom Tubes!

If you're at New York Comic Con, Maxwell's is easy to get to from the Javits Center - take a ferry at 39th Street across the Hudson to Hoboken North and walk a few blocks to 1039 Washington St.

The art is awesome - the music is gonna rock - Kirby Enthusiasm!

Here's my contribution to the show: A 24x24" painting of Carroll Baker starring in the reel-to-reel tape audiobook, Flower, Daughter of Googam.

There might be a 12x12 print for sale at the show, which is based on the Illustrator preliminary drawing I made. I'll find out if it is available for sale online.

Kirby Enthusiasm Art Show Tags: Art and Design, Event, Jack Kirby

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Ruben Bolling wins Society of Professional Journalists award for Tom the Dancing Bug comic

By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:40 pm Tuesday, Oct 11

Congrats to our friend and colleague Ruben Bolling for winning the Society of Professional Journalists Award for his Tom the Dancing Bug comic strip!

"Combining rapier wit with an astute sense of kitsch, Ruben Bolling's weekly comic strips play on (and play with) conventions of American pop culture and psychology as well as any artist today. 

Nothing is sacred in Bolling's work; and giving lie to the sacredness American society invests in its golden calves (military machismo, Christian exceptionalism, the WASP-y, superficial idealism of the 1950s and early '60s) is what gives the work so much of its power.

 Bolling's work takes corporations' "rights" to task, in the form of a bedtime tale told by a suit-wearing father to his young daughter, a la "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best."  The strip foretells a future that peers back to a horrific past, when corporations were not granted the rights of individuals -- before the days of "too big to fail" and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

In the end, we learn the father is, himself, a corporation.

 Judges called the work "smart, clever and, more important, unique."  They praised Bolling's willingness to creatively subvert convention - in part by incorporating and recontextualizing those conventions in his work."

Well deserved, Ruben!

Ruben Bolling wins Society of Professional Journalists award for Tom the Dancing Bug comic

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Faces of Occupied Wall Street: Molly Crabapple

By Xeni Jardin at 10:54 am Tuesday, Oct 11

Molly Crabapple's "Faces of Occupied Wall Street."

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Mexican Narcogangs' War On Digital Media

By Xeni Jardin at 12:09 pm Tuesday, Oct 11

Neal Ungerleider interviewed me for a (very good) piece in Fast Company about drug cartels in Mexico, and a new assault on digital media:

“The factors that are remarkable about the narcoblog phenomenon don't exist together in any other current expression of media," Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, who has reported regularly on narcoviolence, tells Fast Company. "You have the threat of horrific, violent consequences for publishers, if their activity falls afoul of cartel (or perhaps police or army) approval. You have huge, huge traffic and correlating ad revenue. The public is hungry for the information they publish as a matter of their own life and death, and the content is published incredibly fast and wide--but the content is traumatizing."

Meanwhile, American print, web, and television media have largely ignored the massive wave of Mexican narcoviolence. This is despite the fact that many of the worst attacks (such as the Nuevo Laredo social media killings) take place within a half hour's drive of the border. There have been rare exceptions such as Boing Boing, and newspapers in cities with large Mexican diaspora populations such as the Los Angeles Times and border publications such as the El Paso Times have consistently provided excellent coverage. However, most coverage of the Mexican narcogangs in the United States press is limited to novelty pieces about private drug cartel zoos and drug-trafficking submarines.

The big question that observers have been curious about is whether, given the porous nature of the Mexican-United States border and the narcogangs' extensive ties to the U.S. underworld, violence could spread into El Norte on a mass scale. There have already been isolated attacks in Arizona and Texas, and an American consular worker was the subject of an attempted hit from the Sinaloa cartel. Ironically enough, Mexican narcogangs appear to be a greater threat to American homeland security than the Middle Eastern terrorists who dominate the popular discourse.

Read the full article: Mexican Narcogangs' War On Digital Media | Fast Company.

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Mountain biker taken out by Red Hartebeest buck during race in South Africa

By Xeni Jardin at 6:47 pm Tuesday, Oct 11

[Video Link] Evan van der Spuy, a mountain biker with Team Jeep South Africa, is thrown from his bike in this video during a cross-country race by a Red Hartebeest buck. His teammate Travis Walker shot the video from his bicycle on a GoPro Hero Camera (those things are awesome). Buck Norris! Mr. van der Spuy is lucky not to have been more seriously injured. I can't believe he just gets right up afterewards.

(via @gstrompolos)

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Portraits from Occupy Wall Street (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

By Xeni Jardin at 10:13 pm Tuesday, Oct 11

Boing Boing reader Joe Holmes shares this set of portraits of Occupy Wall Street participants, in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Tags: occupy wall street, ows

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Occupy Wall Street: Protests travel to homes of ultra-rich

By Xeni Jardin at 10:45 pm Tuesday, Oct 11

A doorman looks out the entrance to a Park Avenue building as members of the Occupy Wall Street walk past in protest through the upper east side of New York October 11, 2011. The Occupy Wall Street movement took protests to the New York homes of super-wealthy executives on Tuesday as rallies against economic inequality were planned this week for over 50 U.S. college campuses and in several cities around the world. Police response in New York City is expanding. (REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton)

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