Unterzakhn GNMedia Release -- The Cartoon Art Museum welcomes cartoonist Leela Corman on Thursday, April 12 from 7:00-9:00pm for a discussion and booksigning of her latest release, Unterzakhn, published by Schocken Books/Pantheon. This event is free and open to the public.

About the artist:

Leela Corman studied painting, printmaking and illustration at Massachusetts College of Art. Her book Queen's Day earned her a Xeric Award in 1999 and was called "music to my eyes" by Scott McCloud. She has created two more graphic novels including her latest, Unterzakhn, published by Schocken/Pantheon. In her successful illustration career, she has illustrated books for major publishers on crafts, fashion, gardening, dating and other topics. She is also an accomplished bellydancer and bellydance instructor. Corman and her husband, Tom Hart, are the founders of The Sequential Artists Workshop, a non-profit organization dedicated to the prosperity and promotion of comic art and artists, offering instruction in comic art, graphic novels and visual storytelling in vibrant Gainesville, Florida.

About the book:

A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths.

For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York's Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life's lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for "Underthings") tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the "golden land," where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.

LEELA CORMAN PRESENTS UNTERZAKHN
Thursday, April 12, 2012, 7:00-9:00pm
Free and open to the public