Your favourite online comics social is back! Our fortnightly Gosh! Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw returns this Thursday, March 3rd with guest artists Kay Sohini and Štěpánka Jislová. This edition of Drink and Draw is being organised by Jenny Robins to mark International Women’s Day as part of her ongoing Art Council funded project exploring feminist art history through collage comics.
Not only do our online D&Ds keep all those who would meet at The King’s Arms in Soho, London every month (in those fondly remembered pre-March 2020 days) in regular contact, they also allow us to expand our reach for the event to a more global audience.
(Poster art, above, by Jenny Robins )
We’ll be starting this week at 7.15pm to give everyone taking part on Twitter the opportunity to introduce themselves to each other as we look to continue fostering an even stronger sense of community. Drawing rounds begin at 7.30pm UK time as usual.
So, once again if you’re joining us online, here are the “rules”…
We’re using our regular pub format, adapted for a digital platform. So if you’ve never attended one of our monthly sessions this is how it will work. Our guest artists will each choose a drawing theme for three sessions across the evening. We’ll post each of these prompts with the hashtag #GoshBFDD in three batches at 7.30pm (UK time), 8.15pm and 9.00pm from both the Gosh! Comics Twitter account and the Broken Frontier Twitter account. You have 30 minutes to draw something fitting that theme, after which we’ll spend 15 minutes picking a winner before the next round begins. Don’t forget to post your drawings with the #GoshBFDD hashtag so everyone can see and join in. And also so we can easily retweet!
International Women’s Day is marked annually on March 8th, and is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. As we have seen at Broken Frontier there is a huge wealth of female-identifying comics talent working today, not least those highlighted by the great work of organisations like LDComics and Creating Comics UK in their Comics Time Capsule project. Dividing creators by gender is not necessarily particularly helpful in categorising their output, just as any other identity label can both help and hinder understanding, women are not all the same. But IWD’s theme this year of #BreakTheBias is a timely reminder that while the legislation may be in place to protect us from discrimination in much of the world, the battle to create real equality of opportunity and understanding is far from over.
Let’s meet our guest artists…
Kay Sohini is a comics-maker/researcher/writer based in New York, originally from Calcutta, India. With comics work appearing in The Nib, Covid Chronicles, and writing in Women Write About Comics and The Comics Grid, she is currently working on drawing her doctoral dissertation as a comic. Picking apart the comics medium and her own identity, Sohini pitches her work as ‘Comics As Resistance’, highlighting the participatory nature of comics-reading that makes it an effective tool to appeal to social justice. She has a great list of examples of this on her website here. You can also see an extract from her graphic dissertation drawing Unbelonging here, a beautifully realised and warmly coloured investigation that looks like it’s going to be an absolute tour de force. You can read an online version of her comic Breathless on The Nib.
And our other artist…
Štěpánka Jislová is a Czech comics artist and illustrator based in Prague. She has published her short comics stories in various Czech (Aargh!, Caves, Bubblegun, Xerox) and foreign (Bobla, Dirty Diamonds, CBA) magazines. Her comics story The Tree was awarded first prize in 2013 edition of CZ.KOMIKS, and has been around the world as comics-artist-in-residence including in California and Kendal. Her graphic novels include the 2016 How Beneš yielded to Hitler, analysing Czechoslovakian history before the Second World War. 2017 dystopian original story The Holy Heart Abbey and a recent collaboration with writer Tereza Čechová, the striking pink volume Hairless. She’s also a co-founder of the Czech branch of Laydeez do Comics. Her versatile style has been honed over the years with a range of approaches, but always a beautifully balanced and expressive sense of character and immediacy. Also quite a lot of naked people. Her reflections on autobiography on Instagram last summer, brought up a lot of really interesting points about a genre that has been dominated by female voices.
Whether you’re a regular or a newbie all are welcome so please do join in and be part of our international Drink and Draw fun! And if you enjoy this event why not check out the Gosh! Comics webstore here?
