#ali fitzgerald

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In this episode we discuss:

The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea: A Graphic Memoir of Modern Slavery by Vannak Anan Prum 

Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe by Ali Fitzgerald

You Can Try Again by Olivia Walch

I Feel Machine

Tongues #2 by Anders Nilsen

Bio: I started doing comics professionally about five years ago (before that, I was concentrating more on painting and installations). After laboring over a never-quite-finished graphic novel, I started a weekly and then bi-weekly comic for McSweeney’s called “Hungover Bear and Friends,” that ran until 2016. After that, I made a weekly comic for New York Magazine’s The Cut called “Bermuda Square.”

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In late 2016, I started contributing to The New Yorker (one hundred heart emojis). I’ve also published some art-world columns for Art Magazin and Modern Painters as well as interviews and other visual things for Gastronomica, Bitch, The Huffington Post, Berlin Quarterly, and Art21.

Tools of choice: A few years ago a friend gave me a Pentel brush pen and it was kind of revelatory for me—I love its fluidity and control. I mostly use that, and a smaller Pentel sign pen for lettering on bristol board. I do minimal sketching beforehand with a mechanical pencil—I try to keep things fairly loose. For larger areas, I use a brush and ink.

I usually like mistakes and try to incorporate them instead of using whiteout—I have a thing with whiteout—in the past, I’ve redone a drawing completely instead of using it. I’ve become less of a purist in recent months though.

Right now, I’m drawing at 14’’ x 17’’ for my graphic novel (with Fantagraphics, due out in 2018). I generally use Strathmore, although I love to fetishize thick, smooth, expensive paper (I’m a not-so-secret paper snob).

Tool I wish I could use better: I just started using a tablet for coloring, which I really enjoy, but most definitely have not mastered. It doesn’t give me the same thrill as paper, but it makes certain things a lot easier and quicker.

Tool I wish existed: I wish I had an adorably retro Jetsons robot who could scan, clean up, resize and organize all my drawings and put them into titled folders on my desktop. All these technical things take time, and it bums me out when I would rather be drawing or taking melancholy walks.

Tricks: Hmmm, if I’m stuck on a layout, or a character’s positioning, I often look at artists I admire, to see if they have a similar scene anywhere and how they handled it. I never copy, but I think it helps to get visual cues from outside yourself. I recently drew a picture of myself on a bike for a page in my graphic novel, but I don’t really know what I look like biking—-I remembered Lena Dunham clumsily riding a bike on Girls, so I used her photo as a kind of template.

Misc: I’m really into ASMR videos and watch them sometimes while working. And also really bad German television (I live in Berlin).

Website, etc.

Website

New Yorker Pieces

Twitter 

Instagram

Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 12/11/18: This year’s packrat confessions

§ Nice art: Julia Gfrörer’s art has always been obsessed with the sea so her comic (with Andy Warner) about about rescuing refugees at sea is both beautiful and harrowing.

§ It’s that time of year when I do my annual huge cleanup. I wrote about this seven years agoat about the same time of year. For 2018, I had to take an entire week of staycation. I travelled so much this year that everything…

The full title of Ali Fitzgerald’s first book is Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe. The book details time that the Berlin-based cartoonist spent teaching comics workshops in a refugee center and the people she met there. To add a depth to their stories and Fitzgerald trying to understand the changing face of Berlin, she turns to Joseph Roth and his book What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, where Roth documented the lives of refugees in Berlin, demonstrating how this is not a new phenomenon. Moreover, while the refugees have not found the Berlin they were hoping for, neither did Fitzgerald, who was first inspired to visit the city from her reading of Christopher Isherwood and others.

Fitzgerald has been making comics for years. She made Hungover Bear and Friends for McSweeney’s, and Bermuda Square for New York. Fitzgerald has contributed to many publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Bitch Magazine. She was kind enough to answer a few questions over email about her book.