Local Book Notes: Someone Please Have Sex With This Talented Young Woman

"Chicago-based artist Gina Wynbrandt's Someone Please Have Sex With Me, released last month by indie comics publisher 2dcloud, is an intense, weird, vulnerable dive into the underbelly of young adulthood," Julia Wright writes for Paste.

"As the title suggests, the 5-comic collection follows Gina, a horny woman making increasingly desperate, futile attempts to get laid.

"She smokes weed, stalks Justin Bieber and gets sexually bullied by anthropomorphic feral cats - all illustrated in lurid candy pinks, yellows and greens.

"In the proud tradition of gross-out alt-comics doyennes like Julie Doucet and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Wynbrandt revels in smashing the beauty myth, and she seems to be doing well at it.

"At age 25, she's already been featured in The Best American Comics 2015 compilation, nominated for SPX's prestigious Ignatz award for her comfort-zone-annihilating 2015 comic Big Pussy, and named one of five comics artists to watch by the LA Times."

Click through for the interview.

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FYI, Wynbrandt went to Payton and SAIC.

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Her blog.

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Martellus Bennett's Black Kid Adventures
"Martellus Bennett had already noticed the problem. But it was put into sharp focus after his daughter, Austyn Jett, was born two years ago," Sam Laird writes for Mashable.

"There aren't many children's books about black characters that are just going on adventures," the NFL star told Mashable this month.

Black characters, he found, tend to star in children's books with directly racial themes.

"My library has over 2,000 children's books in it, and most of the protagonists are either white or creatures."

"So Bennett did something unusual - he wrote a children's book with a black protagonist named AJ, based on his own daughter. The first story, called Hey AJ, It's Saturday, comes out Father's Day weekend. A series will follow."

Here's a Boston TV report on Martellus and the book:

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Origins Of Chicago's New Negro Artists
"The mass exodus of Southern Blacks to northern cities during the early 1900s set the stage for an awakening of Black consciousness. Life in the segregated communes of Chicago's south side fostered an unprecedented explosion of music, visual arts and literature from the start of the Great Depression to 1950, dubbed the Chicago Black Renaissance," Shaundra Selvaggi writes for the Atlanta Black Star.

"But Black Chicagoans were leading cultural and intellectual revolutions long before Lorraine Hansberry and Louis Armstrong arrived on the scene, researchers have found.

"Noted history scholar Christopher R. Reed and colleagues at the National Endowment for the Humanities documented the beginnings of African-American patronage dating as far back as 1890 for their project, which began more than two years ago.

"'There's been an assumption that intellectualism among African Americans in Chicago was rare prior to the Depression, but we have found ample evidence of a black arts community being active nearly 50 years earlier,' Reed said in a press release . . .

"Root, Branch and Blossom: Social Origins of Chicago's New Negro Artists and Intellectualism will be presented at the Roosevelt University library in Chicago on June 26 . . .

"Researchers plan to record their findings in a book to be published next year by the University of Illinois Press."

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Egypt's Urban Planners
"The pyramids and temples of Egypt, which still stand as magnificent monuments to ancient Egyptian civilization, were the result of some of the world's first urban planners - the ruling pharaohs who invested in town planning," William Harms writes for Phys.org.

"New research at the University of Chicago offers additional insights into how the pharaohs invested in town planning. Their innovations included the development of the first grid system as part of communities they established around their kingdom, according to Nadine Moeller, associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the Oriental Institute . . .

"Moeller writes about her discoveries and reviews the work of other archaeologists in The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt: From the Predynastic Period to the End of the Middle Kingdom. The book is the first volume of a comprehensive study of the rise of urban civilization in a society that many scholars have thought was dominated by village life."

Here's Nadine:

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