Hasta La Ideas

New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) turns ten this year, and it’s celebrating with a blow-out bash and a major exhibition. Illustrator and comic artist Peter Kuper has designed the poster (pictured) for this year’s MoCCA Festival, a two-day comics confab set for April 9-10 at the Lexington Avenue Armory. Among the guests expected are Jules Feiffer, Chip Kidd, Bill Plympton, Adrian Tomine, Julia Wertz, and Al Jaffee, to whom Kuper will present the 2011 Klein Award. Named for MoCCA’s founder, Lawrence Klein, the award acknowledges significant contributions to the field of comics and cartooning.

Meanwhile, today marks the opening of “Will Eisner’s New York: From The Spirit to the Modern Graphic Novel,” an exhibition showcasing work of the Bronx-born comics and graphic novel master that was inspired by, and which spotlighted, his hometown. Curators Denis Kitchen and Danny Fingeroth have rounded up everything from artwork created for Eisner’s noir crimefighter comic, The Sprit, and classic graphic novels to original paintings and art by creators (such as Feiffer and Art Spiegelman) who were influenced by him. Stop by MoCCA on Sunday, which would have been Eisner’s 94th birthday, to catch a 7 p.m. screening of the 2007 documetary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It seems at once as both the most trivial and most important part of the entire Academy Awards, so while your eyes might not be entirely honed on the envelope as a winner is announce, you’ll undoubtedly be eager to have it opened (if just to see if Banksy does in fact take the stage in a monkey mask). Because the Oscar envelope holds such importance, and because the Academy needs to release more information about itself so the public doesn’t lose interest a week before the show, the organization has released information on the design of the folded paper. This year, designer Marc Friedland, of the firm Creative Intelligence has been hired to design them, creating perhaps the most high-profile, finest-to-touch envelopes of the year. They sound much fancier than what our mortgage notices get sent in every month and rightly so. After all, Gweneth Paltrow rarely touches them (or at least we hope). Here are the details:

Friedland’s custom-designed envelope will be handcrafted from a high-gloss, iridescent metallic gold paper stock, with a red-lacquered lining featuring the Oscar statuette hand-stamped in satin gold leaf.

…The winner’s name will be printed in charcoal ink and mounted onto a matching, red lacquer hand-wrapped frame. The back of the card will be printed with the award category.

…After final tabulation of the ballots, Brad Oltmanns and Rick Rosas, the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) partners, will insert the appropriate announcement cards and fasten the envelope with a red double-faced satin ribbon and a red-lacquered and gold-embossed seal featuring the PwC logo.

A small handful of photos of the envelopes can be found here. We’d say that you should feel free to print them out and hand them to your cat as you pretend that you’re James Franco or Anne Hathaway, but that’s really something you should run past the Academy first (and your cat).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The annual best-of-the-best in photojournalism has just recently been announced, with this year’s winners of the World Press Photo Contest. Nearly 6,000 photographers submitted work, totaling over 100,000 images and resulting in 56 winners spread across nine categories. The top winner is South African photographer Jodi Bieber for her image of a woman terribly abused at the hands of the Taliban, her husband, and his family, taken for Time magazine. It’s a painful, incredibly heartbreaking photograph, as are many of the images by winners of the prize, given that the world events that make news aren’t always humanity at its best. The World Press Photo’s site has a full list of all the winners and the Boston Globe‘s popular Big Picture has a high-resolution selection of the wins. Here’s more about Bieber’s photo:

Her winning picture shows Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old woman from Oruzgan province in Afghanistan, who fled back to her family home from her husband’s house, complaining of violent treatment. The Taliban arrived one night, demanding Bibi be handed over to face justice. After a Taliban commander pronounced his verdict, Bibi’s brother-in-law held her down and her husband sliced off her ears and then cut off her nose. Bibi was abandoned, but later rescued by aid workers and the American military. After time in a women’s refuge in Kabul, she was taken to America, where she received counseling and reconstructive surgery. Bibi Aisha now lives in the US.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Now that all the Justin Bieber outcry and Arcade Fire surprise talk has quieted down after Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, attention must be paid to things much more important, namely packaging design. In case you missed it, because the award hand off wasn’t televised and it didn’t arrive in an egg carried by a group of dancers, Brooklyn-based designer Michael Carey took home the Grammy win for best packaging for The Black Keys‘ album Brothers. Outside of the very dry and very funny case, which simply lays it all out by saying, “This is an album by The Black Keys. The name of this album is Brothers,” the thrill of the packaging came from the inside, featuring a disc printed with heat-sensitive ink that would change colors (like a Hypercolor shirt, if you were born before 1990). The LA Times has a short post-win interview with Carey, but for the real deal, we recommend reading Wes Flexner‘s great, lengthy interview with him for all the details. Here’s a bit about how the printing came to be:

I told one of the people at [the band’s label] Nonesuch that I heard about color changing ink and I wanted to find out if we could source it and if we could do some test runs to find out how it works. She found a company that made it and I sent the art to a factory for mock ups. We got it back, thought it was insane so we used it. The funny thing is I didn’t really tell any one other than [band members] Pat and Dan that I used it, so when the final cds came back I got this crazy voice mail from the Black Keys management saying, “The cds are misprinted. What are we gonna do…?” He was freaked out and I called him and I was like take the cd, and hold it up to your forehead for a minute then look at it. He did it and then lost his mind when he saw the heat sensitive ink.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The other day when we were talking about the possible Oscar-campaigning-in-the-form-of-street-art that has popped up in Los Angeles, in one way or another promoting Banksy‘s nominated documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, the most obvious question about the whole thing never even dawned on us: what if he actually wins an Academy Award? Given the illusive, mysterious nature of the artist (or artists, if you believe Banksy is perhaps a collective of street artists, as that’s the theory we’ve been believing lately), it seems like either a) he wouldn’t show up, b) he’d show up wearing a mask, or c) he’d show up wearing a mask and pull a stunt. While we can’t imagine the latter two happening, fortunately, TheWrap.com had the foresight to get in touch with the Academy and learned that they’ve been planning for just such an occasion. Saying they’d thought long and hard about it, they apparently have all agreed that “it would not be dignified for the Academy to have somebody come up wearing a monkey’s head.” Instead, they’ve discussed the matter with the film’s producer, who shares the nomination with Banksy, Jamie D’Cruz, and he has promised that, should Exit win, he will accept the award by himself. However, we wouldn’t discount that possibility that D’Cruz will come on stage with a hooded figure — that person slowly removes his mask and…it’s James Franco. Sorry to ruin your hilarious bit so early, Bruce Villanch.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.