Christy-Blanch

Very few comic creators are talented in both story-telling and art, so they need to work with other creatives who will help push their vision forward. This relationship can lead to even better results, but it can also contain pitfalls. Bob Salley and Shawn Daley discuss their writer-artist relationship while Travis McIntire talks about it from his point of view as their editor. Christy Blanch will also be collaborating on story-telling with Bob Salley on a new project and there’s a bit of discussion about that relationship as well. ...

Tara Strong is right up there with Rob Paulsen as being a key voice of my childhood. She was in lots and lots of cartoons that I saw growing up. And she continues to work and is in lots of cartoons that my kids are watching. I don’t have as much experience with Greg Cipes, but I have enjoyed him when I’ve been at my parents’ house and Teen Titans Go has been on. ...

Noir has been a part of comics since the beginning of the medium. It has waxed and waned in popularity since its heyday in the 1930s and 40s, but there’s usually at least once book being published in the genre. At Baltimore Comic-Con this year, three noir comic creators were brought together to discuss what it means to them and how they use it in their work: Christy Blanch, Brian Azzerello, and John K Snyder III. This was a highly interactive panel, taking lots of audience questions (one of my favorite aspects of Baltimore Comic-Con). Enjoy! ...

Comics might not contain music, but music can be a big part of comics. This panel discusses all the ways music intersects with comics - inspiration, background noise to help the writers, and as the subject of comics themselves. https://youtu.be/0xv3_OIE6Bo This is another one of those panels I wish lasted longer. Here are some topics I wanted to bring up: Had Amy Chu heard of or read Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor and did it inform her musician-based comics. What they thought of the soundtrack that accompanies Kyle Higgins’ C.O.W.L. How the music writers felt about the parallels between the fact that despite only a few possible chord progressions we have so many creative songs and the fact that there are only like five story archetypes, but we still have such fabulous stories in comics.

Christy Blanch, who Comic POW! readers will know as the writer of The Damnation of Charlie Wormwood and the professor behind the MOOC that led to the redesign of this site, was the moderator for all the spotlight panels at Baltimore Comic-Con 2016. If you haven’t seen her moderate a panel at BCC, you’re in for a treat. Ms Blanch has a talent for keeping the conversation going thanks to her research and her ability to key in on the right questions to ask the panelists. ...