Bishakh Som in conversation with Ben Passmore (Cancelled)
Bishakh Som in conversation with Ben Passmore
Wednesday, April 29, 6-9pm
The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality: a woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a nonbinary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak.
Painted in rich sepia-toned watercolors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som’s highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds—which ring all too familiar—Som captures the weight of twenty-first-century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.
Bishakh Som is the illustrator and coauthor of The Prefab Bathroom: An Architectural History, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Buzzfeed, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. Her book Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir is forthcoming from Steret Noise Books in August 2020. She has also been published in We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, Beyond II: The Queer Post-Apocalyptic & Urban Fantasy Comic Anthology, and many more. Som is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
Ben Passmore is the author of the Eisner Award-nominated and Ignatz Award-winning comic Your Black Friend, a graphic letter about black alienation, the series DAYGLOAYHOLE, and a graphic novel about revolution and football called Sports is Hell. Ben likes to make comics about monsters, anarchism, sexual dysfunction, police brutality, art theory, and his feels. BTTM FDRS, a graphical novel written by Ezra Claytan Daniels and drawn by Ben, follows a young hipster in Chicago that moves into a condo that eats people.
Author photo credit: Drew Stevens
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