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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
First Graphic Novel Winner to be announced at British Library!
Posted: May 6, 2014
Myriad Editions have announced the shortlist for this year’s First Graphic Novel Competition and I’ll be hosting the exciting Award Evening with the finalists and judges in the Conference Centre at the British Library on May 23rd as part of the events programme for the Comics Unmasked exhibition. You can book tickets here for £5/£4/£3 - hope to see you there!
The Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition is a biennial competition open to all previously unpublished cartoonists, writers and artists. Following the 2012 success of Gareth Brookes’ The Black Project, the winner of the latest competition is announced at this special event in the presence of the judges, who include novelist Meg Rosoff and cartoonist Woodrow Phoenix. The prize is publication by Myriad and a week-long artist’s retreat. Check out the six finalists’ entries here!
Article: Comics Unmasked - A Curator’s Perspective
Posted: May 5, 2014
If you’re a comics collector, or historian-cum-hoarder like me, you may have invested in some rare collectors’ items enshrined in their ‘Mylar snugs’ or stashed away some well-thumbed copies in the attic, but who has the biggest and best collection of British comics in the country? It may well be The British Library, headquartered near King’s Cross in London, the official depository for all things published in the UK and Ireland and home to a major new exhibition Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK. Made of ten million bricks, it’s the largest 20th century public building constructed in Britain. And its surface buildings are merely the tip of an iceberg of printed matter, in five basements stretching like a multi-storey Batcave down to a subterranean 24.5 metres. Huge bound volumes of daily newspapers, weekly comics, monthly magazines and books of every description line their shelves and those in an even huger storage facility, their Fortress of Solitude in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Somehow they have to find room for 3 million extra items every year and counting. Read the rest of my article here…
Article: Comics from the Heart of History
Posted: April 29, 2014
The non-fiction graphic novel can make difficult histories approachable and unforgettable. In the follow-up to their 2012 Costa Biography Award-winning Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, Mary and Bryan Talbot join artist Kate Charlesworth on Sally Heathcote Suffragette (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), launching at The British Library’s exhibition Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK on May 2nd with an interview with The Observer‘s Rachel Cooke and premiere screening of the documentary about Bryan Talbot, Graphic Novel Man. While the three co-creators have grounded their account in thorough research and annotations, the Talbots choose to humanise the struggle for women to be granted the vote by showing key events from 1905 to 1916 through fictional eyes. Read my latest PG Tips reviews here… and watch the Talbot movie trailer here…
Comics Unmasked Promo Video Online!
Posted: April 29, 2014
Co-curator John Harris Dunning and Adrian Edwards from The British Library join me in this new video to introduce the imminent exhibition Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK, the biggest exhibition of British comics ever seen in this country, opening May 2nd and running till August 19th:
Article: Francisco Sousa Lobo - The Dying Draughtsman
Posted: April 26, 2014
Like a Kafkaesque ‘K’, ‘Francisco Koppens’ is the metafictional persona of the London-based Portuguese artist and writer Francisco Sousa Lobo (above in his photo entitled ‘Booby Trap’). Everything around Koppens seems to be dying: his marriage, his drawing skills, his job prospects, his body, his faith. For him God has changed into a bristly clownface, grinning from the moon or a pitch-black painting. With Portuguese fatalism, Koppens seems ready to end it all, but holds back because he can’t find the style or method to ‘write that goodbye note’. His solitary, secret compulsion is to draw comics telling ‘stories of sex and violence, where the hero undergoes a dreadful tribulation, at the mercy of strong women’. But these instil such shame in him that he draws over them, obscuring and censoring them until they become almost solid black, like a dark monochrome painting. Some of these strips he posts to the Pope, most he tears to pieces. The scraps where the corners of four panels meet form crucifixes, echoing the cross looming over the couple’s loveless double bed. Read my new article about Francisco Sousa Lobo and an exclusive new 2-page strip for ArtReview here…
Article: Alan Moore - The Exhibitions
Posted: April 26, 2014
The 11th Rencontres du 9ème Art in Aix-en-Provence, France is currently hosting the first major exhibition in France dedicated to Alan Moore and his collaborators and co-creators. Ten years ago, I curated Alan Moore: Les Dessins du Magicien at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Charleroi, Belgium. I had also helped with an even earlier, smaller exhibition in Treviso, Italy in 1991. Read about all three Moore exhibitions and watch my two-part video tour of the French exhibition, on now till May 10th here…
Comics Unmasked Special in Guardian Weekend Magazine!
Posted: April 25, 2014
A week today, Friday May 2nd, Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK opens to the public at The British Library, the biggest exhibition of British comics this country has ever seen! As part of the pre-promotion, co-curator John Harris Dunning and I helped The Guardian to co-ordinate more than twenty pages of totally original new comics by a stellar line-up of creators. Read more about it including Dunning’s introduction here.
Here are some previews of the first pages. Be sure to pick up multiple copies when they hit the newsstands tomorrow! They will also be going online throughout the weekend.
Roger Langridge (Fred the Clown) and Michel Faber’s (The Crimson Petal and the White, Under the Skin) created a political satire, “Art and Anarchy”:
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife) and Eddie Campbell (From Hell) penned a modern tale of love and paranoia, called “Thursdays 6-8pm”:
“Masks”, by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) is a chillingly dark tale of maternal vigilantism:
Up-and-coming talent Christian Ward (Infinite Vacation) adapted Margaret Atwood’s short story “Freeforall”, a typically dystopian vision of love and marriage:
Dave Eggers wrote and drew his own comic, a tale of a lonely but impassioned bison, called “Having Renewed My Fire”:
AM Homes’s short story “Do you hear what I hear”, a chilling tale of an unwelcome phone call, was transformed into an astonishing comic by Frazer Irving (Batman):
Article: Oscar Zarate - A Lifelong Passion
Posted: April 20, 2014
A Londoner from Argentina, Oscar Zarate’s enthusiasm for comics has shaped his life and fuelled collaborations with comics scribe extraordinaire Alan Moore and alternative comedian Alexei Sayle, and now his first solo graphic novel, The Park. In Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires in the Fifties, no youthful dreamer could resist those tantalising comic strip advertisements for the PanAmerican School of Art. The short strips claimed to be ‘a real story’ about ‘How An Artist Is Born’. It opens with a 17-year-old who supports his family by labouring in a factory, but he has a talent for drawing. Sending off for the free introduction, he is accepted into the ‘Twelve Famous Artists correspondence course. On graduation, his teachers recommend him to a magazine, where in no time he becomes a success, creating comic characters and sketching glamorous models in his studio. The last panel shows the likely lad beaming and relaxing with his pretty female companion over a poolside drink, saying “I feel really happy. This profession is marvellous, it gives me lots of satisfaction.” A young Oscar Zarate couldn’t resist. Read the rest of my Article here…
Article: PG Previews June 2014
Posted: April 18, 2014
What grabs your attention? What floats your boat? How do you choose what to pick up and what to put down? We all have our personal quirks and taste buds and these gleanings from the upcoming month’s new releases are clearly unapologetically biased. If you’ve seen a lot of comics, and believe me, I have, you see a lot of repetitious writing, drawing and above all thinking. Styles, compositions, poses, faces, ideas, that ring alarm bells, because they sure feel awfully familiar. What lies beneath the veneer, the tropes, the sheer unthinking? Sure, sometimes, but only sometimes, looks, first impressions, can be deceiving and there’s more there than meets the eye. And then there are those special times when you pick up a comic and almost immediately you start to see things you’ve never seen before, read texts and enter a story that catch you off-guard. You feel it as it forces you to think and feel afresh, and literally ignites your brain and starts building new synapses. Those sort of comics are rarer but they are out there and worth hunting down. They might well be among these PG Tips. Happy hunting! Read my PG Previews for June 2014 here…
Bryan Talbot Documentary Premieres at British Library!
Posted: April 10, 2014
Here’s the trailer for the revealing and inspiring documentary movie about the life and art of Bryan Talbot entitled Graphic Novel Man, directed by Russell Wall from Digital Story Engine. Be among the first to see this film as the opener for a Comics Unmasked event at The British Library on its opening day, Friday May 2nd. Book your tickets now and join Bryan and his wife and co-creator Mary Talbot, winners of the Costa Biography Prize, and Kate Charlesworth, artist on their brand new graphic novel Sally Heathcote Suffragette from Cape, in conversation with critic Rachel Cooke from The Observer.
