SKYLIGHT BOOKS presents CHRIS WARE and LYNDA BARRY at the ARATANI THEATRE

Rusty Brown (Pantheon Graphic Library) // Making Comics (Drawn and Quarterly)

****PLEASE NOTE: This event will be at the Aratani Theatre located at 244 San Pedro St, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

This ticketed event will feature Chris Ware and Lynda Barry in conversation in support of their new books, RUSTY BROWN and MAKING COMICS.There will be no public signing, but copies of RUSTY BROWN and MAKING COMICS purchased with ticket will be presigned. Your admission fee to this event goes directly to Skylight Books to cover rental costs, thereby supporting a vital independent retailer. 

Purchase your tickets here.

Tickets for General Admission are $10, $32 if you'd like a copy of MAKING COMICS with the ticket, and $42 if you'd like a copy of RUSTY BROWN with the ticket. The Lynda Barry book-with-ticket costs $29 and the Chris Ware book-with-ticket costs $39 for our Friends with Benefits members. To access the FWB membership code, use the first half of your email address (before the @).  

About Chris Ware's Rusty Brown:

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.

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About Lynda Barry's Making Comics:

The idiosyncratic curriculum from the Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity will teach you how to draw and write your story

Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, dont miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions as we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images.

For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus and this time she shares all of her comics-making exercises. In a new hand drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they cant draw that they can, and most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn.

Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

"Barry's recent 'activity books' which weave dense, brightly colored collage, narrative comics, and expressionistic drawing into philosophies of memory, pedagogy, and storytellingare groundbreaking."--Hillary Chute, Artforum

"Lynda Barry [is] one of the greatest visual artists of our time"--Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek as well as numerous comic books and graphic novels, and is the recipient of both the Eisner Award and the R. R. Donnelly Award. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is an associate professor of art and a Discovery Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Madison.