cartoonists on the evening news
May 17th, 2007 | Uncategorized
My local TV station, WCAX, has been doing a series this week called “Drawn Here,” about cartoonists who live in Vermont. It’s in honor of the first graduation ceremony at the Center for Cartoon Studies this weekend. Tonight the segment about me aired. Many Vermonters refer lovingly to WCAX as WGOP-TV, so I was a little skeptical about how they’d tailor a bunch of dykes and my closeted dad for the six o’clock news. But the reporter Jack Thurston did a dang good job, I think. Times have really changed.
They also did segments on James Kochalka, and New Yorker artists Harry Bliss and Ed Koren. I managed to record the segment with Ed too. You know Ed’s stuff, those gentle, furry monster people. They look just like him.
I just figured out how to transfer stuff from the VCR to my DV recorder, and thence to YouTube. So I’ll post these quick before someone tells me I’m breaking the law.
15 Responses to “cartoonists on the evening news”
I’ve read your comic strip since I was a young dyke ! It’s fun to watch the characters over the years. Congratulations on the book and all that you have been up to!!
From a fan and new cult follower!
Wow, what a great story! Very nicely done, and lo-o-ong, at least for a local news broadcast. The camera took a good look at your artwork.
And it reminded me that it’s time for me to re-read Fun Home again.
That’s a pretty cool story, as local TV news goes! Who ever thought that you’d hear a TV news reporter talking about Dykes to Watch Out For? Of course, he had to include the apparently obligatory “cartoons aren’t just for kids” line, but I suppose that’s to be expected.
I tried to link to a Christian Science Monitor story about the Center for Cartoon Studies in another thread, but it looks like I messed up the link. If I’ve got the HTML right this time, people can go to page 2 to see Alison mentioned in the same breath as Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware — that is, in the top echelon of cartoonists — where she belongs.
That is lovely. As an upper valley native, I’d always thought of Channel 3 News as “that loud, abrupt thing that comes on if I keep watching television for too long after whatever it is I turned it on for is over,” but that’s actually nicely put together and fairly quiet. I liked the motion between the drawings and the “real” space and the way some of the real, (like the photographs of “Take Back Vermont” signs) fit together, both records of the same history. It was good to see so much time given to Dykes to Watch Out For as well, I love Fun Home, but it makes me sad when it’s treated like the first worthwhile thing you’ve done.
(Um, hi everyone. I suppose I’ve been lurking for awhile without much to say, but seeing this reminded me of my home and how close Alison is to it. I think I had forgotten, when I read the strips from the civil union trip, that not everyone actually saw those signs.)
25 years of dtwof? am i that old?
at first i thought the video was going to be a bit national geographic (here’s a lesbian in her natural habitat) but they actually did quite a good job.
I think it’s funny how the voice-over guy kept saying really dramatically, “spending more long hours in her studio ALOOOONE.” I expected a scary bear to come out of the woods or something!
This is a test to see if I can turn off[/I] the italics.
One more try: Mad coding skillz?
The times they are a changing. I was watching Wheel of Fortune the other night and when the winner’s family came up on stage it was his partner. That, and CAX doing a spot on AB, is what is going to finally bring around Middle America to acceptance (fuck tolerance).
Yelena, I think these days, introverts may even be a “weirder” minority to the general public than lesbians!
Yep,that was a dang good (or wicked good) report from Jack.What’s the next step–DTWOF sold at the Vermont Country Store? The DTWOF folk music group?
Is James Kochalka a fellow Vermonter?!?!? I love his stuff- he got me into doing a daily cartoon, which I kept up for a little over a year. And his “Superfuckers” book is hilarious. I guess Vermont is a real cartoonist’s paradise (and all the snow must give you a perfect excuse to hibernate and meet all those deadlines!)
Alison’s a Superhero! Woo-Hoo!
Hi All,
I clicked on the link to the t.v.station Allison was on, but couldn’t find anything about her. I’m not very web-savvy. Could someone please tell me how I can see it? Thank you. j.b.
j.b., go to this page and click on the link next to the videocamera icon (where it says “Drawn Here, Part 7” in blue). That will take you to a Windows Media file with the entire news broadcast, including the story on Alison.
Or you could search for “AB on WCAX” on YouTube, and skip the other local Vermont news stories.
(I understand and respect why, having discovered that the news station made the video available online, Alison removed the link to the story on YouTube — but it is true that the YouTube version is a lot more user-friendly. Copyright? We don’t need no steenking copyright!)