Josh Neufeld Name Story panel 1

The Josh Neufeld Name Story NFT

Comics, Life, Work

There’s a funny story in today’s New York Times about a battle for supremacy that took place on Saturday in Lincoln, Nebraska, with a bunch of guys named Josh. It couldn’t be more apropos because I just drew this humorous one-pager on the story of my name. Touching upon my being Jewish, growing up different, Star Wars, Superboy, and so much more, the comic has fun with our current obsession with identity and self-discovery. (By the way, I have only ever run into one guy with my exact name—the Canadian Josh Neufeld is a professor of microbial ecology and a very nice fellow).

For those in the know, “The Josh Neufeld Name Story” is also an homage to a story by Harvey Pekar, illustrated by R. Crumb, which first appeared in American Splendor #2 (1977). (As I’m sure you know, I was an artist for Pekar on American Splendor for 15 years.) (The best online link to the original story I could find was this mashup of the comic and Dan Castellaneta’s monologue of it from the American Splendor play produced in 1990. [starts at 1:13].)

Furthermore, my piece is not the first comics reference to “The Harvey Pekar Name Story”—Damon Herd did an homage to the Pekar/Crumb piece back in 2013. And of course the story was dramatized in the American Splendor movie… But I like to think my piece puts a different spin on it.

Anyway, I often use the Pekar comic and a set of prompts I created as part of a workshop where I have students draw their own “name story.” Whether they’re high school art students or people who may have never drawn a comic in their lives before, the results are always fascinating. They help the students get into the “comics space” and enable me to learn a little about each participant.

But it always bothered me that—until now—I had never done my own name story. It’s one of the first autobio comics I’ve drawn in a while, and I enjoyed the experience—hearkening back to those halcyon Keyhole days! (Talking about Keyhole, and my long-time collaborator Dean Haspiel, he and I talk about “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” quite a bit in episode 28 of our podcast Scene by Scene with Josh & Dean…)

On a separate note, because I’m fascinated by the emergence of the NFT (or non-fungible token), I am announcing that I am auctioning off the hi-rez NFT of this comic! It seems appropriate that a piece like this—which I created entirely digitally—would become an NFT, which after all helps artists in this age of endless digital copies to benefit from their work. Plus, the comic is a double-layered reference to a previous original story, which somehow also seems appropriate.

To tie it back to Pekar, I will donate 25% of any proceeds from the auction to the  Cleveland Heights-University Heights Library (which features a memorial desk and statue dedicated to Pekar). So hopefully some Pekar/Neufeld fans out there will open their digital wallet for this particular NFT. You can find the auction—and bid it on—here. Otherwise, just read it for free right here!

Anyhoo, enough talk for a frickin’ one-page comic! Here it is, in all its “glory”—“The Josh Neufeld Name Story”:

Josh Neufeld Name Story
A Tale of 2 Pandemics

New comic: “A Tale of Two Pandemics”

Comics, Plug, Work

I’ve been working the last three months on a 10-page comic about COVID-19, “Black immunity,” and historical health inequities. Titled, “A Tale of Two Pandemics: Historical Insights on Persistent Racial Disparities,” it was published yesterday by Journalist’s Resource (out of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center).

The piece springs from the work of three doctors Lakshmi Krishnan, S. Michelle Ogunwole, and Lisa A. Cooper — and a recent paper they wrote for the Annals of Internal Medicine. In their paper, they discuss the similarities between the COVID crisis and the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic, particularly racial health disparities and the spread of misinformation.

With their piece and my interviews with them as the frame, I take readers through some of the misinformation about coronavirus circulating on social media, and the impact of that on communities of color, particularly given that African Americans have been dying at a much higher rate than white Americans during this crisis.

I learned a lot while working on this piece — particularly the insidious myth of “Black immunity” to disease that was used in our country as rationale for all sorts of horrible things, from Benjamin Rush urging Philadelphia’s Black citizens to act as nurses for white people during the 1793 Yellow Fever outbreak, to J. Marion Sims’ 19th-century experiments on enslaved Black women, to the infamous 20th-century Tuskegee syphilis study.

No wonder polls show that many African Americans are distrustful of any potential COVID vaccines in the offing!

But I also learned about the work of Black newspapers and columnists from the World War I era, who worked to combat misinformation about the Spanish flu as it related to their readers. So one thing I really appreciate about the doctors’ paper and my conversations with them is their commitment to finding paths forward — like working with “trusted voices” and with modern organizations devoted to protecting the lives of BIPOC. As we enter a new, deadlier third wave of the virus, that’s something to look forward to.

Right?

Anyway, check out the story (and looks for cameos from Idris Elba, Cardi B, and Ariana Grande!): https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-health/pandemics-comic-racial-health-disparities/

P.S. As a companion piece to the story, Journalist’s Resource also published a Q&A with me on comics journalism and my particular approach. You can find it here: https://journalistsresource.org/coronavirus-research/documenting-pandemic-comics-journalism/

Supply Chain Superhero

“Supply Chain Superhero” in PANDEMIX benefit anthology

Comics, Plug

I’m excited to share a new comics piece that’s just been published in a benefit anthology. “Supply Chain Superhero” is about New York City and the COVID-19 pandemic, and it features my very own brother, Jake Neufeld.

We’ve all seen a lot of stories about the medical professionals on the front lines of this crisis. But the doctors and nurses aren’t the only ones in the hospital. Jake, my bro, is the assistant director of emergency management at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK), NYC’s cancer hospital. The story covers the way he and his team responded to one of the worst days of the crisis. The story sheds light on what challenges the “behind-the-scenes” people at hospitals (now in other parts of the country) are facing during the pandemic.

I’m proud of Jake, and I’m proud of how the story came out. And I’m triply proud to have the story featured in the benefit anthology PANDEMIX: Quarantine Comics in the Age of ‘Rona.

Put together by Dean Haspiel and Whitney Matheson, PANDEMIX has 56 pages of comics related to these crazy times, by 18 creators, most of them based in New York. It’s a fabulous collection, with a variety of different takes on what we’re all going through.

PANDEMIX is available for PDF download on Patreon, with all proceeds going to The Hero Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps comics creators with emergency medical aid and/or essential financial support. All you need to do is donate $5 and it’s all yours!

UPDATE: The PDF is now available directly from The Hero Initiative! Here’s the link: https://www.heroinitiative.org/shop/books/pandemix-56-page-digital-download-comic/

PANDEMIX cover
pickle hurricane

Food/Riot Comix Collab with my Mom!

Comics, Publicity

Announcing a new collaboration between my mother, Martha Rosler, and myself: “Food Riot? Food Riot!,” a comics story just published by e-flux journal.

The piece is an adapted excerpt from my mom’s mid-1970s manuscript, The Art of Cooking, which features a mock dialogue primarily between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne (with various interlopers.) We took the excerpt and adapted it into comics form—and I am confident in saying that this is a very different representation of Child and Claiborne than you’ve ever seen before!

Why now? Good question! Here’s an excerpt from my mom’s intro to the piece:

The [story] centers on access to food. Specifically, it takes on the people’s right to affordable high-quality food—and the repeated effort to either get fair prices, with government support, from producers and middlemen or otherwise obtain and distribute food by other means, such as by seizing and allocating it via actions often called food riots, which are a recurring form of people’s justice.

Josh Neufeld and I have worked on this comic off and on for about a year, and its topicality and resonance have varied as we did so. In the run-up to publication, when hoarding and price gouging scarred the coronavirus pandemic response, the comic, as already written, seemed to pitch itself in one direction. But as we are about to go to press, with the comic still unchanged, a different question of justice is at stake: people’s right to demand justice and equal treatment as well as equal access to social goods under the law in every aspect of life. No justice, no peace.

Indeed!

My mother and I have done some collaborative comics before, including one on gardening and Guantanamo Bay, and one on Jonas Salk. This is the longest one yet. E-flux journal (to quote their own description) “is a monthly art publication featuring essays and contributions by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today. ” They also happen to be the sponsor of the Martha Rosler Library traveling exhibition, which was (to quote Wikipedia) “a reading room in which over 7,500 volumes from her private collection were made available as a public resource in venues in and around art institutions, schools, and libraries.”

Enough blather! Go check out “Food Riot? Food Riot!” on e-flux journal.

A non-narrative graphic narratives narrative

Comics, Life, Work
"Still Life" by Chris Ware

When I saw this week’s cover of The New Yorker, “Still Life,” by cartoonist Chris Ware, I was immediately reminded of a comics piece I had drawn nearly 30 years ago. Chris’ cover is a multi-panel non-narrative portrait of New York City under coronavirus lockdown. My piece, from the fall of 1991, is a multi-panel non-narrative portrait of the U.S. in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm (the first Gulf War).

Untitled by Josh Neufeld

The origins of my piece stem from a period when I was first starting to think about different ways I could use the comics form. Up to that point, pretty much all I had ever drawn were superhero-style comics, but I was losing interest in the genre and I was confused about what other possibilities there were for the form. So this piece, which is untitled, came out of that search.

The page mostly features familiar motifs of the first Gulf War era — camouflage, American flags, military helicopters — and some signs of the season — bare tree branches, fallen leaves. But it also has other more fanciful features. It’s like an impression of a certain time — in the life of the city, and in the psychology of a young man of that era.

One of the most striking similarities between the two pieces are images of New York City’s iconic skyscrapers in the page’s lower-left areas: Chris’s portrait of the illuminated Empire State Building at night, and my portrait of the towers of the World Trade Center, shrouded in fog. (If you are darkly sentimental, it’s easy to imagine those are the towers surrounded by the smoke of their own destruction on 9/11 — still some 10 years in the future.)

It just so happens that I know Chris Ware. We met in Chicago a few after I drew this piece, through a mutual friend, and our occasional get-togethers were very meaningful for me as an aspiring “alternative cartoonist.” Chris was always encouraging to me, and he taught me a lot about the practice of comics; and it was fun getting together with him and his wife Marnie.

Before you ask, he definitely never saw my non-narrative comic, and it has never been published — or until now, even publicly exhibited. I was just struck by the two piece’s superficial similarities.

(By the way, I colored the piece directly on the page with Design markers — probably the last time I ever used markers of any kind on my comics. Pre-PhotoShop!)

P.S. My very astute wife points out that Chris’s piece is very clearly NOT non-narrative (now that’s a confusing sentence). If you “read” it left-to-right, top-to-bottom, you realize that the story progresses through a day from morning to evening, and much of it is from the perspective of one person stuck in their apartment. There’s so much more to his piece than just an aspect-to-aspect series of images. Proof once again that Chris Ware is a genius!!

Copying Feiffer

Comics, Tribute, Work
Jules Feiffer Kill My Mother

Back in 2013 I posted a comics page that I had copied from R. Crumb. It was an exercise assigned by the great Phoebe Gloeckner, who was teaching a comics class I was auditing at the University of Michigan. (This was during my Knight-Wallace Fellowship in Journalism at Michigan.)

I really enjoyed the exercise, and ever since I have incorporated it into my own teaching, especially when I’m working with comics students who lack confidence in their drawing. The rules of the assignment are no tracing or light-boxing; just to copy the page as best you can. As I always tell my students, there’s nothing like “getting into another artist’s hand”—following their process, step for step, and appreciating they way they solve pictorial problems…

Recently, I had the occasion to assign the copying drill for a comics class I was teaching, and I took the opportunity to again do the exercise myself. The page I chose to copy was from Jules Feiffer‘s 2014 graphic novel Kill My Mother.

I’ve always admired Feiffer “from afar”—his style is so different from mine! —the devil-may-care look of his figures, and his comfort with white space and borderless panels. So copying a page of his was a real exercise for me in getting out of my normal head space as an artist.

As with the previous Crumb copy, I tried to do as little penciling as possible and work directly in ink. The original page was two colors and utilized a faint ink wash, but I chose to do my copy in simple black—although I left in the faint blue pencil marks I made as I was sketching in the figures and lettering. It also appears that Feiffer did his art using a nib (and a brush for the wash?), while I chose to retain my trusty Kuretake Sumi Fountain Brush Pen.

One challenge I faced was that the paper I used to make my copy had a slightly different size ratio than Feiffer’s—mine was a bit “fatter.” So in the end I had a bit more horizontal space to work with than he did.

I really enjoyed this exercise! For the first time I saw what a solid understanding Feiffer has of the human figure—that despite the looseness of the art, how grounded it is in real human anatomy. It was also fun for me to draw “heroic” figures again, a practice I basically abandoned 25 years ago when I stopped drawing superhero comics. I tried my best—not always successfully—to capture the fluidity of his forms, to not let my figures get stiff. I especially enjoyed copying Feiffer’s lettering—the distinctive way he forms his T’s, K’s, Y’s, and G’s is so different than mine.

And as with the Crumb assignment, this process really helped me appreciate what a masterful cartoonist Feiffer was and is—especially when you consider that he produced this book when he was 85 years old!

It’s fun to compare the two pages and see where they differ (mostly in unintentional ways). So without further ado, here are the results: first Feiffer’s page and then my copy…

The Feiffer page from Kill My Mother.
Jules Feiffer Kill My Mother
My copy.

Bonus question: can you spot the typo in the Feiffer page? I fixed it in the copy.

Scene by Scene with Josh and Dean DEBUT

Comics, Geek, Plug, Publicity, Tribute
Scene by Scene logo

I’m excited and proud to announce the launch of SCENE BY SCENE WITH JOSH & DEAN, a new weekly podcast I’m co-hosting with Dean Haspiel.

This season we will be breaking down the 2003 film American Splendor, scene by scene (thus the title!), talking about Harvey Pekar, our collaborations with him, and the joys & challenges of being professional cartoonists.

I was inspired by the burgeoning movement of “minute-by-minute” podcasts to launch this show, and am so thrilled to have Dino as my co-host. We’ve been friends and comics colleagues since high school, and Dean is one of the most talented and entertaining human beings I know. The fact that he also worked for Harvey for a long time — AND was integral to the American Splendor movie happening — made it a no-brainer.

Harvey Pekar has been deceased now for almost ten years, and it’s time people started talking about him again. (After all, it’s impossible to imagine iconic TV shows “about nothing” like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm without the example of the original “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff” American Splendor.)

In the podcast Dean and I will analyze each scene of the movie in order, episode by episode, with analysis, humor, and inside information. We promise to reveal previously unexplored connections between the original American Splendor comics and the film’s construction, and Harvey’s life & career,

Just as importantly, each episode will also serve as a jumping-off point for talking about Dean’s and my own careers. Topics will include the nature of identity, truth in art, and the realm of memoir/autobiography.

We’re having a lot of fun doing the podcast, and I think it shows — the tone is very much in the spirit of our friendship, irreverent and playful. 

Guests on the podcast will include other former Pekar collaborators, as well as actors, filmmakers, and producers. 

And it all starts today! All you need to do to prepare is watch the movie again (or watch it with us, scene by scene!)…

Scene by Scene can be found on all major podcast platforms and distributors. To listen, visit SceneByScenePodcast.com or your favorite pod-catcher. The Scene by Scene website also features examples of our illustrations, comics samples from American Splendor and other places, process drawings, and a store.

So click here and join us as our story begins on Halloween evening in the year 1950

AS 1: 1950 — Our Story Begins
AS 1: 1950 — Our Story Begins

Josh / Hang Dai Etsy store

Comics, Plug, Work
Etsy

I’ve set up an Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/hangdai! To make available my various custom- and hand-made art, prints, and self-published publications!

Items available include original art, A.D.-related gicleé prints, my autobio travel book A Few Perfect Hours, select issues of my solo comix series The Vagabonds, and one-offs like Terms of Service and my exquisite corpse collaboration with Dean Haspiel, Because of You!

Talking about Dino, the Etsy store — Hang Dai — features both our work, with much more of Dino’s stuff to come…

Most items on the store come personalized, often accompanied by an original sketch. So start shopping!

THE VAGABONDS #6 debuting this weekend at MoCCA Fest

Comics, Plug

My homage to Captain America Comics #1 (with apologies to Jack Kirby and Joe Simon)

I’ll be tabling at MoCCAFest this weekend (table I 270 A) with the latest issue of THE VAGABONDS. 24 thrilling pages of COMICS JOURNALISM and other great features!

A lot has changed in this country—and the world—since the last issue of The Vagabonds, so it’s only fitting that this issue features a Donald Trump story. My explainer on the former British spy Christopher Steel’s “dossier,” originally published by Columbia Journalism Review in the fall of 2017, remains surprisingly relevant, as the special counsel seems to be using the memos as a “road map” for his investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. This issue’s longest story—originally published by The Nib in the fall of 2016—looks into the influx of costumed characters into New York’s Times Square. In the piece I explore the phenomenon — who are these unlicensed Elmos, Spider-Men, and Minnie Mice, and why are they there? This issue also features a fun story I did for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge. Do you often find yourself losing or breaking your old phone just when a new model reaches stores? Well, you’re not alone… The story shows how researchers — using the game of Jenga and a precious coffee mug—were able to get test subjects to replicate this risky, self-destructive behavior. THE VAGABONDS #6 closes out with a couple of shorter pieces, including a collaboration with my mother, the artist Martha Rosler.

I look forward to seeing you at MoCCA Fest this weekend and handing you an autographed copy of THE VAGABONDS #6. (And of course I’ll have copies of previous issues of The Vagabonds, as well as A.D., The Influencing Machine, Terms of Service, Flashed, and much more!)

MoCCA Fest 2018—April 7-8, 2018
11:00AM – 7:00PM on Saturday; 11:00AM – 6:00PM on Sunday
Metropolitan West
West 46th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues, NYC

 

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Fake News? My comics piece for COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW on the Trump-Russia Dossier

Comics, Work

Remember the Donald Trump-Russia “dossier”? Released by BuzzFeed in January (shortly before Trump was sworn in as U.S. President), the 17 short memos (compiled over seven months) featured some pretty wild claims—sex parties, etc. But the main takeaway was that Trump and his cronies were in the pockets of the Russians.

Amidst the furor over the memos’ contents was an equally strong uproar in the journalistic community. Was it ethical of BuzzFeed to publish the so-called dossier, which was unverified and contained some specific errors? The backstory, of course, is that during the previous months, the memos—and their author, former British spy Christopher Steele—had passed like a hot potato through every major news organization before BuzzFeed finally pulled the trigger. So was the outrage honest, or really just a case of sour grapes at being scooped? A new piece I just did for Columbia Journalism Review“The Trump-Russia memos”—tracks that long strange journey.

The events described in the five-page comics story are based on reporting and research, including interviews I did with journalists who sought to verify the memos and wrote about them—or chose not to…

As far as the actual contents of the memos, none of the more outlandish claims have been verified—although the FBI and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller apparently are using the memos as a “road map” for their ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia…

So check out the piece and see what you think. (Thanks to Vanessa Gezari for commissioning the piece and shepherding me through the whole process.)