Nancy Burton & Alex Dueben, Sept. 3, 2024 at 7pm EDT
The 396th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024 at 7 pm EDT. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.
Hurricane Nancy: The Work and Life of Underground Cartoonist Nancy Burton
Underground comix artist Nancy Burton and writer/editor Alex Dueben talk about the new book out from Fantagraphics, Hurricane Nancy, a retrospective of Burton’s work, and a first-person account of a fascinating moment in counter cultural America. One of the earliest underground cartoonists, Burton drew on abstract expressionism, art nouveau and formline art, working in parallel to the psychedelic art movement and outsider artists. In playful comics that feature birds and people, dreamlike landscapes, and psychedelic imagery, readers can see how her work grows darker as the 1960s come to a close, reflecting the darkening mood of the era and her uniquely personal vision of the world. Burton stopped making art in the early 1970s and seemed to disappear, but in 2009 she began drawing again, posting artwork online without explanation.
Under the pen names Panzika, Nancy Kalish and Hurricane Nancy, Nancy Burton was one of the earliest female underground cartoonist who's comics were published in The East Village Other, Gothic Blimp Works, It Ain't Me, Babe and other publications before leaving comics in 1971. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, she began making art again. This is her first book.
Alex Dueben is a writer and public historian who has written extensively about comics and poetry, history and art, film and literature. He has contributed to eleven books and written more than 1200 articles for The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vulture, and elsewhere.