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Was what Nikil and I were treated to on Friday night, at Studio 40 in the mission. Both Eric Drooker and Seth Tobocman are comics art activists who have been in the game for more than a few decades now. Drooker has a long history of doing beautiful painted covers for the New Yorker (“undermining the mainstream”, as he calls it) while Tobocman is a self-professed radical who wears his politics very much on his sleeve.
Here’s a clip to give you a sense of what his performance was like.
Tobocman is also one of the founders of the political comics anthology World War 3 Illustrated, which will hopefully be running one of my pieces in their next issue.
His latest book, Understanding the Crash, uses his aggressive stenciling and arresting visuals to explain the economic flatline the US economy is currently straining to recover from and the roots of the housing crisis, which Seth puts down to the prevalence of “flipping”. That is, people mortgaging their first home in order to buy a second home so they can sell it quickly for a profit. Drooker showed us his photos from a recent trip to Gaza, where he joined local communities in painting on the towering Israeli security wall that looms over their homes. With an electric banjo accompaniment, he also showed us wordless panels from his latest collaboration with the folks at City Lights on an illustrated version of Ginsberg’s Howl, as well as his latest wordless graphic novel, Blood Song.
For more, voila: Eric Drooker and Seth Tobocman‘s websites.
