Our Modern Dystopia: Featuring Aisha Franz

German illustrator Aisha Franz will be a featured guest at the 2019 MoCCA Arts Festival, where she will present her third graphic novel Shit is Real (Drawn & Quarterly, 2018), a nominee for the 2019 LA Times Book Prize. The MoCCA Arts Festival is a 2-day multimedia event, Manhattan’s largest independent comics, cartoon and animation festival.
 
Networked technology has invaded every aspect of daily, social and personal life, and comics, like all other forms of narrative, increasingly reflect the impact of technology on our exterior and interior lives. At the same time, the static, mediated, and intangible nature of interactive life presents particular challenges to artist working in comics. Artists Aisha Franz (Shit is Real), Abby Jame (Prophecy of the Flesh Virgin), and Florent Ruppert (The Perineum Technique) will discuss the use of fantasy imagery to depict current reality in a conversation moderated by BOMB Magazine Associate Editor Chantal McStay.

Aisha Franz is a Berlin-based comic book artist and illustrator. Her graphic novel Earthling was first published in Germany in 2011, followed by Brigitte (2012) and Shit Is Real (2016). Her short stories have been published in several anthologies such as KUŠ and as an illustrator she has worked for clients including the MIT Technology Review and the New York Times among others. In her free time she loves to travel to different graphics festivals with her self-published zines and is also co-running a collaboration project called CLUBHOUSE with Berlin-based publisher Colorama.

This event received support from Books First, the Goethe-Institut’s new program for bringing literature in German to English-speaking readers.