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Paris

Arrived in Paris yesterday morning for tonight's opening of the D&Q exhibition at Galerie Martel, and signings tomorrow and Thursday. And an interview was posted this afternoon in French on Real Estate of the Mind, just in time for the festivities.

I'm boarding a plane to France later today. I'm going mainly to support Fin, the French edition of The End. But there's a ton of other stuff going on while I'm there. I'll be in Besançon January 22-24 for the PFC5 exhibition The Goat Without a Face and a few talks. Helping run PFC5 last summer in Minneapolis was a whirlwind, so I'm looking forward to getting to relax and get a new look, with clearer eyes, at some of the weird and wonderful collaborative drawings and comics that came out of that storm.

Then, next Tuesday I'm in Paris for the Drawn & Quarterly 25th Anniversary exhibition at Galerie Martel. It's the first time Big Questions originals will be shown in France, and I'm sending a few examples I don't normally let out of my flatfiles. Other reasons to go, if you're in Paris include original art by Julie Doucet, Lynda Barry, Genevieve Castree and a bunch of other ridiculously talented people.

Wednesday and Thursday I'm signing copies of Fin at Super Heros and Page 198, respectively, and then heading to Angouleme on Friday for a public talk with Jean-Pierre Mercier.

Busy couple of weeks.

Project Astoria: test two: The Brazil Colony at Lula, January 19th

I'm going to be in Chicago next Tuesday for the opening of Todd Baxter and Aubrey Videtto's second installment of Project: Astoria at Lula, from 6-9 (free appetizers, cash bar). The images I've seen so far are as amazing as everything those two set their minds to. Come check it out and say hello. There's more info below about Astoria... but first check out this octopus:

Project Astoria is a narrative photo series exploring life on an imagined new planet and its moons, discovered hidden within our own Solar system by an amateur astronomer in Astoria, Illinois, in 1927. The moons, named for his daughters Elsie and Vivian, are found to be habitable and are colonized by a co-operative multinational expedition from Earth in the mid 1970's. The images follow the moons' immigrants as they explore, adapt and create a new life in their strange new worlds. The first installment, test one was shown at Lula in 2014 and followed colonists from North America. Continuing their progress around the new world test two brings us to the South American and Brazilian colony. Moving between the surreal feeling of a fairy tale and something more familiar and deceptively mundane, Project Astoria takes Baxter's unique visions to an ambitious new level.