Shannon Wheeler recently tweeted this photo of his drawing table with pages in progress of our upcoming book Oil & Water. Learn more about the book at the link.

At Examiner.com, Christian Lipski has a great writeup of the "Comics for Social Justice" panel at Wondercon last week which featured Shannon Wheeler (recent recipient of an Eisner nomination) and Steve Duin, creators of our forthcoming book Oil & Water, about the impact of the BP disaster on residents of the Gulf Coast.

(Photo: Deborah Curtis Lipski)

Fantagraphics won't have a table at WonderCon 2011 this weekend, but attendees can get a behind-the-scenes look at a wonderful upcoming title of ours: Oil and Water, written by Steve Duin, a columnist for The Oregonian, and illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler.

Saturday, April 2nd, from 4:00-5:00 pm, in Room 220

Comics for Social Justice: The Making of Oil and Water: Oil and Water is a book-length comic (Fantagraphics, Fall 2010) that is a partly fictionalized account of a 10-day trip 22 Oregonians (activists, teachers, business owners, scientists and artists) took last summer to "bear witness" to the BP oil spill. Steve Duin (Comics: Between the Panels and Oregonian columnist) will briefly present the historic impact of comics on issues of contemporary social relevance. Mike Rosen (Portland to Gulf Coast Project Leader) will give a quick overview of why this project was conceived and what it hopes to accomplish. Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man and cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine) will present his sketches from the Gulf Coast and show how he and Duin transformed them into a compelling portrait of what hope and challenges remain along a ravaged coastline, and one awash in both seafood and oil, that will be changed as irrevocably as those Oregonians that chose to bear witness to the tragedy. Q&A session to follow.

WonderCon 2011 runs this weekend from Friday, April 1st to Sunday, April 3rd at the Moscone Center South in San Francisco, CA.

The Cartoon Bank Blog's new interview with cartoonist Shannon Wheeler gives you your first glimpse at his artwork for Oil & Water, which we are publishing this Fall. Wheeler explains the book: "Mike Rosen, a manager at the Bureau of Environmental Services, Watershed Division, organized a group of writers, scientists, activists, environmentalists, teachers, and students to go to the Gulf Coast to get a better understanding of the oil spill and its implications. It is possibly the greatest manmade disaster in our history. Steve Duin, metro columnist for The Oregonian, is fictionalizing our side of the story to build a strong narrative, keeping the local characters and situations real. Our main goal is to help keep the situation on the national radar."