One week from today (Tuesday, December 16th at 6pm) I’ll be at my beloved local outdoor bookstore, Bart’s Books, for an interactive evening with fellow Ojaian and powerhouse cartoonist Shay Mirk.

We’re celebrating the publication of Making Nonfiction Comics, a comprehensive illustrated guide for everyone who’s ever wanted to tell stories about the world around us in words and pictures. (If you can’t make the event, that link takes you to bookshop.org where you can buy the book online.)

This beast is a collaboration between Shay and fellow cartoonist Eleri Harris and it is so!! good!!! In addition to Eleri and Shay’s hard-won expertise, there are also interviews and tips from so many big names in the field. You can learn about crafting everything from on-the-ground protest reportage to deep dive historical research to authentic personal narrative. This book is going to be the gold standard for years to come.

I feel lucky to have a brief cameo talking about running a community drawing night in Portland for several years in the twenty teens. Here’s a look at that:

If you’re in the area, do come by. I’m gonna show off some kelp farming comics, Shay’s gonna talk about making the book, it’s gonna be very fun. Ojai may be 80º during the day right now, but it gets chilly after dark, so bundle up! We’ll have zine templates for folks to fill out and fun slides to share and, knowing Shay, killer snacks.

Billionaire’s role as honorary chair and main source of funding has led to boycotts and criticism event has lost its cachet

The Met Gala in New York is the grandest and ritziest event in the fashion calendar, and an indicator of the growing ties between designers, celebrity and power. But with tech billionaires now joining the cohort, this year’s party may be its most controversial yet.

All eyes are on the guest list – and their outfits – to launch the fashion exhibition Costume Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Nicole Kidman are chairing the event with Vogue’s Anna Wintour, and tickets cost about $100,000 (£73,500). But in a plot twist worthy of the new Devil Wears Prada film, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, the Met Gala’s new honorary chairs, will be joining the 450 guests on the museum steps on Monday.

Students taking part in university’s annual ritual say images of them in swimwear are being published without consent in national newspapers

When the sun rises at dawn on Friday, hundreds of St Andrews University students will brave the chilly North Sea for the annual May Dip, an undergraduate ritual said to bring good luck in exams. But the students won’t be alone at the beach. In recent years this quirky ritual has become a target for agency and freelance photographers looking to cash in on images of students in bikinis, including some who camp out overnight on the East Sands dunes near the Fife coastal path.

“It ruined my night,” said Anna, one of the students whose photo appeared in a spread published by the Scotsman. “Now when I think about that May Dip, I think about that image, and that’s it.”

Media tycoon honoured in absentia as critics decry his 20-year sentence under national security law

The jailed media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai has been awarded Deutsche Welle’s freedom of speech award for his contribution to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.

The German public broadcaster said on Thursday that Lai would be presented in absentia with the 12th iteration of the award on 23 June at the DW Global Media Forum in Bonn.

Journalists face rising threats while media ownership is concentrated in fewer hands, leading civil liberties group warns

Journalists in the EU face increasing levels of harassment, threats and violence, while news outlets are owned by a shrinking number of proprietors and public trust in the media has plummeted, a report has found.

The Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties) said the findings of its fifth annual media freedom report, released on Tuesday, should place EU officials “on high alert”, with media freedom and pluralism “under sustained attack” across mainland Europe.

Magazine/fanzine about comics.

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Magazine/fanzine about comics.

This item belongs to: texts/comic_fanzines.

This item has files of the following types: Archive BitTorrent, Comic Book RAR, DjVuTXT, Djvu XML, Item Tile, Metadata, OCR Page Index, OCR Search Text, Page Numbers JSON, Scandata, Single Page Processed JP2 ZIP, Text PDF, chOCR, hOCR

Magazine/fanzine about comics.

This item belongs to: texts/comic_fanzines.

This item has files of the following types: Archive BitTorrent, Comic Book RAR, DjVuTXT, Djvu XML, Item Tile, Metadata, OCR Page Index, OCR Search Text, Page Numbers JSON, Scandata, Single Page Processed JP2 ZIP, Text PDF, chOCR, hOCR

Magazine/fanzine about comics.

This item belongs to: texts/comic_fanzines.

This item has files of the following types: Archive BitTorrent, Comic Book RAR, DjVuTXT, Djvu XML, Item Tile, Metadata, OCR Page Index, OCR Search Text, Page Numbers JSON, Scandata, Single Page Processed JP2 ZIP, Text PDF, chOCR, hOCR

Magazine/fanzine about comics.

This item belongs to: texts/comic_fanzines.

This item has files of the following types: Archive BitTorrent, Comic Book RAR, DjVuTXT, Djvu XML, Item Tile, Metadata, OCR Page Index, OCR Search Text, Page Numbers JSON, Scandata, Single Page Processed JP2 ZIP, Text PDF, chOCR, hOCR