Zine Club Chicago is excited to announce that the April meeting will feature guest artist Sarah Becan, a local food fiend dynamo whose work has been a longtime staple at Quimby’s.
Zine newbies and longtime enthusiasts alike are always welcome at Zine Club Chicago, the city’s only book club-style event for people who read zines. This free monthly series is produced by Chicago Zine Fest/Midwest Perzine Fest organizer Cynthia E. Hanifin and hosted by Quimby’s Bookstore.
Sarah Becan is a comics artist, illustrator and designer, and the creator of “I Think You’re Sauceome”, a food-centric autobiographical webcomic. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Saveur Magazine, Eater.com, The Chicago Reader, and TruthOut.com.
She was awarded a Xeric Award and a Stumptown Trophy for Outstanding Debut for her first graphic novel, The Complete Ouija Interviews, and her work has twice been nominated for the Ignatz Award. Becan’s second graphic novel, Shuteye, was funded with a successful Kickstarter campaign and released in early 2012. In 2014, she wrote and illustrated Luna de Cuernos, a long form graphic story for Fifth House Ensemble’s spring 2014 concert series.
Becan illustrated the cookbook The Adventures of Fat Rice (2016), and Let’s Make Ramen!, a comic book cookbook, published July 2019 by Ten Speed Press.
Zine Club Chicago: Food Edition, at Quimby’s with Sarah Becan
Landis Blair was the winner of the Best in Adult Books at the Excellence in Graphic Literature awards in 2018. He illustrated Caitlin Doughty’s recently New York Times bestseller From Here to Eternity and is the author of the prize-winning graphic novel The Hunting Accident. Now this award-winning author presents a macabre yet playful book in the tradition of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, with a decidedly twenty-first century sensibility. Landis Blair’s THE ENVIOUS SIBLINGS [W. W. Norton & Company; October 8, 2019; $20.00 hardcover] contains eight nursery rhymes that are both mordant and macabre, as playful as Charles Addams —and every bit as unnerving.
THE ENVIOUS SIBLINGS begins with “The Malicious Playground,” a recognizable landscape of youthful horror. Little fingers get caught in the slats of a rope bridge, sand from the sandbox is kicked into young eyes, while “The jungle gym at best condones / The shattering of all your bones.” This last bit features a stark illustration of a half dozen kids smiling as one of their friends goes sailing off to his or her doom. In the title story, sisters Abbie and Angie fight so viciously that, in the end, the mother is depicted happy and resting on the ground: “Mother, tiring of the fuss,” Landis tells us, “Murdered both and envy thus.” This is the delightful genius of THE ENVIOUS SIBLINGS: every story catches humans at our worst and yet revels gleefully in all of the horrid imperfections.
In “The Awful Underground,” a wordless comic told only through illustration, Landis uses his considerable skill to create a crosshatched and ominous underground landscape where a little girl becomes separated from her mother in a subway station. As this is a common fear of children and guardians alike, the reader is compelled to continue turning the pages, expecting some resolution, some help—and yet the ending, while perhaps unhappy, is both amusing and unexpected. And, in “The Refinement Tree,” Blair narrates the story of a boy who climbs a tree that those who read “The Giving Tree” will relish (a drawing near the end of the story nods to the Silverstein classic). As the boy in the story tumbles down branch by branch, he feels his life falling apart:
With his head now a growing expanse, His shins became known to a branch, The flourish of feet Along with a beat, Young Simon forgot how to dance.
It is the poignancy of these tales, the refusal to look away from human violence and cruelty, yet with an almost sweet optimism that things will work out, that makes THE ENVIOUS SIBLINGS so groundbreaking. Landis Blair has created a book that is both enormously enjoyable and an unexpected balm for readers of all ages in this difficult century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Landis Blair illustrated the prize-winning graphic novel The Hunting Accident and the New York Times bestseller From Here to Eternity, and has published illustrations in the New York Times, Chicago magazine, and Medium. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
“Landis Blair’s work is a fusion of Grand Guignol horror and delicately layered poignancy that can’t be found elsewhere. He is a singular, morbid talent.”
— Caitlin Doughty, best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity
“Rarely have I seen an artist whose crosshatched phantasms are more evocative or more disturbing. Landis Blair weaves a world of dark discontents that is as disquieting as it is addictive.”
—Emil Ferris, author of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
“The Envious Siblings gave me the fantods, in the nicest possible way”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Bizarre Romance
A major graphic novel event more than 16 years in progress: part one of the masterwork from the brilliant and beloved author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories.
Rusty Brown is a fully interactive, full-color articulation of the time-space interrelationships of a couple people in the first half of a single midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit. A sprawling, special snowflake accumulation of the biggest themes and the smallest moments of life, Rusty Brown aims at nothing less than the coalescence of one half of all of existence into a single museum-quality picture story, expertly arranged to present the most convincingly ineffable and empathetic illusion of experience for both life-curious readers and traditional fans of standard reality. From childhood to old age, no frozen plotline is left unthawed in the entangled stories of a child who awakens without superpowers, a teen who matures into a paternal despot, a father who stores his emotional regrets on the surface of Mars and a late-middle-aged woman who seeks the love of only one other person on planet Earth.
CHRIS WARE is widely acknowledged to be the most gifted and beloved cartoonist of his generation by both his mother and fourteen-year-old daughter. His Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian First Book Award and was listed as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade by The Times (London) in 2009. Building Stories was named a Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year in 2012 by both The New York Times and Time magazine. Ware is an irregular contributor to The New Yorker, and his original drawings have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and in piles behind his worktable in Oak Park, Illinois. In 2016 he was featured in the PBS documentary series Art 21: Art in the 21st Century, and in 2017 an eponymous monograph of his work was published by Rizzoli.
Chris Ware will be in conversation with Marnie Galloway.
Marnie Galloway is a Chicago cartoonist who makes literary & poetic comics that experiment with book form and narrative structure. She is best known for her Xeric Award winning wordless comic, “In the Sounds and Seas,” which made the Notable Comics list in Best American Comics, and was highlighted in the Best Comics of 2016 by the AV Club. Other comics of note include Particle/Wave, published by So What Press; Burrow, self published with support from the Pulitzer Arts Foundation; and Slightly Plural, a short collection of poetry comics. She served as an organizer for CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, for four years, and has had comics published by the New York Times, Cricket Magazine, Saveur Magazine, Cambridge University Press, and Ask Magazine, where she currently works as the staff cartoonist. marniegalloway.com
“Remarkable . . . Masterfully illustrated, brilliantly designed, and bursting with compassion . . . This is without a doubt one of the most exciting releases of the year.”—Library Journal [starred Editor’s Pick]
Previously circulated:
“Ware delivers an astounding graphic novel about nothing less than the nature of life and time as it charts the intersecting lives of characters that revolve around an Omaha, Neb., parochial school in the 1970s . . . Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating seemingly normal lives into something profound, unforgettable, and true.” —Publishers Weekly [starred]
“Ware fans rejoice . . . Curious and compelling . . . As with Ware’s other works of graphic art, the narrative arc wobbles into backstory and tangent: Each page is a bustle of small and large frames, sometimes telling several stories at once in the way that things buzz around us all the time, demanding notice . . . a beguiling masterwork of visual storytelling from the George Herriman of his time.” —Kirkus Reviews [starred]
Celebrate June as National Adopt a Cat Month! In honor of this special month, don’t miss this a night of zinesters, cats & refreshments at the Windy Kitty Cat Café (1746 W. North Ave), just two blocks east of Quimby’s — in a night we’re calling Whiskers + Writers + Whiskey. The fine folks there save orphan kittens, abandoned or stray cats and mama cats with kittens, looking to find homes by offering them for adoption.
Join these zinesters for cat-themed readings amongst feline friends:
Anne Elizabeth Moore + Sara McHenry + Jonas + Cynthia Hanifin
About the readers:
Anne Elizabeth Moore is the author of books including Body Horror, Threadbare, Cambodian Grrrl and Unmarketable. She has two ineffective feline personal assistants, Thurber and Captain America. anneelizabethmoore.com
Sara McHenry is a cartoonist, writer, and lifelong cat. She publishes the zine Hard to Love and has been drawing cat comics since 2006. Your McHenries
Jonas writes mostly zines with names like We the Drowned, Fixer Eraser and Cheer the Eff Up. He has also written a book of fiction called The Greatest Most Traveling Circus. @FixerEraser
Cynthia Hanifin is a social worker, writer, zinemaker, and storyteller. She is a Chicago Zine Fest organizer and a co-producer for Story Club South Side. @Cynthia_MSW
Quimby’s is proud to welcome back tarot readings by Sarah Luczko. Sarah is a poet, dancer, performance artist, bookstore owner, and Tarot reader. Her readings are down to earth, while still keeping one foot in the other world. Sarah works with querents to produce a reading through collaboration with the cards. She embraces the traveling tradition of party readings. She prefers to read in loud bars, outdoors, in a garden, at art openings, or anywhere away from more traditional settings. Follow Space Oddities bookstore & gallery on Instagram: @5paceoddities
Quimby’s has launched a print and design service! We now offer publication design, in-house risograph, letterpress, and tabloid color Laser Printing and binding for zines and comics! We can also assist in realizing your larger art book projects!
