Words and Pictures

  Harry Smith is best known as an experimental filmmaker, but he was so much more.  He was a painter and collage artist, a mystic, a student of anthropology, a collector of folk music and indigenous art, and an important — though unsung — figure in the Beat Generation. Ha... Read more

  From 1974 to 1995, Stan Mack tagged along on the adventures of ordinary New Yorkers, then combined their stories with his frenetic pen-and-ink artwork to create the documentary-style comic Stan Mack's Real-Life Funnies.  Now, Fantagraphics has published a collection of ... Read more

  As part of the 20th anniversary commemoration of Words and Pictures, we revisit our October 2018 conversation with Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore.  Ezra and Ben grew up loving comics and science fiction, and have expanded both genres to address pressing issues of ... Read more

  Tessa Hulls' debut as an author is the sprawling graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, a story of her own family, of survival and madness and love, seen through the lens of three generations of women and covering nearly a century of Chinese history. Tessa is an illustrator, pa... Read more

  In this extended conversation with Feeding Ghosts author Tessa Hulls, we spend an extra 20 minutes digging into the story of her family's struggles and of a graphic memoir nine years in the making. Feeding Ghosts is a sprawling saga of survival and madness and love, seen... Read more

  Darrin Bell has been a professional cartoonist since his teenage days, and his syndicated comic strips Rudy Park and Candorville are longtime reader favorites.  He was the first African-American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, and his debut gra... Read more

Barbara Brandon-Croft is the very first African-American woman whose nationally-syndicated comic strip ran in the mainstream press.  Now a new collection of her work, Where I’m Coming From, has been published. Barbara sits down with S.W. Conser to talk about the comics comm... Read more

  As part of the 20th anniversary commemoration of Words and Pictures, we revisit our January 2010 conversation with Portland artist and self-styled "war junkie" Joe Sacco. Sacco has carved out a niche in the publishing world for his war reportage comics.  For more than t... Read more

  Portland Community College has hosted the Cascade Festival of African Films for 34 years, inviting filmmakers from the African diaspora to Oregon and welcoming the community to attend screenings free of charge. This year's festival co-directors, Eugenie Jolivett Fontana ... Read more

  As part of the 20th anniversary celebration of Words and Pictures, we revisit our January 2005 conversation with Jack Ohman. Jack is the Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist who spend 20 years in Portland drawing cartoons for the Oregonian newspaper before moving ... Read more