Release party for Smoke Signal #2. Saturday, August 29th at Death By Audio, 49 S. 2nd st, Brooklyn.

Featuring new and unseen work by Dash Shaw, Michael Kupperman, Gabrielle Bell, Shoboshobo, Leslie Stein, John Brodowski, Matthew Thurber, Marc Bell, and many others!

Smoke Signal is a free all-comics newspaper published by Desert Island to help expose the work of local and international artists. We aim for a mix of established independent artists and up-and-coming unknowns. Copies are available for free at our shop, through the mail, and at a few locations around Brooklyn.

I’m back from Iceland, where the friendliest and most beautiful people in the world live. I miss them already. This is my story.

I am leaving for Iceland to ride horses, so things will be on hold for a week. When I return, I bring tales of High Adventure. Songs of elves, giants and dragons.

At Rocket Ship this Saturday, August 15h 8:00 p.m. – ? (208 Smith St., Brooklyn, New York 11201):

Join us as we host a book signing and mildly-delayed release party with Julia Wertz (The Fart Party), and a host of cartoonists from Indie Spinner Rack‘s AWESOMER anthology, including Charlito and Mister Phil, Liz Baillie, Chris Duffy, Ryan Dunlavey, Sean Ford, Jesse Post, Fred Van Lente, and MK Reed!

Happening Saturday, August 15, 2009. 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. At Union Pool, 484 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211.

Austin English (Windy Corner, Christina and Charles), Lisa Hanawalt (Stay Away From Other People, I Want You), and Dash Shaw (Bottomless Belly Button, BodyWorld) will discuss the relationship between image-making and drawing for comics. How do pictures work differently in comics than they do on gallery walls?

Then stick around to get a book signed, hit the taco truck, and sip a summer drink with our featured cartoonists.

This panel discussion will be moderated by series curator Bill Kartalopoulos (The New School, Print Magazine).

$5 suggested donation. All proceeds go to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

This is what’s going on at the Cinders Gallery Thursday, August 6th, 7-10 p.m. I have a prior engagement to pick up some pants that I’m getting hemmed (!) but I’m thinking I should stop by and check out this show along the way. Maybe you should too?

Blok and Elisita Punto met at a music show in their hometown of Santiago, Chile where they ended up painting a mural together in an empty lot. Since then they’ve become fast friends, hanging out, traveling to the desert and collaborating on art.

In his first show in the US, Blok will feature drawings and paintings created in Chile over the past 2 years. Long-limbed characters dressed in hot pink shirts and tennis shoes are caught in a dream like state; floating, bending over, or reaching for something in the distance. His murals are like discovering colorful little secrets worked into the scenery: bold fluid lines with muted and flat colors create figures that you want to hug and get to know and that stick with you long after you’ve come across one.

Elisita Punto’s abstract paintings and collages have a rhythmic quality similar to music compositions while also exploring optical illusions with geometric shapes and colors. Indigenous patterns from Andean culture provide an inspiration for these abstract works that reinvent themselves in the modern world while revealing our timeless obsession with repetition and shapes.