RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter
THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Article: Chihoi & Hong Kong Alternative Comics
Posted: November 5, 2013
Whenever a pencil touches paper and we pay attention to the varying weight and texture of the marks it makes, our awareness is heightened of the human being behind them. Pencil has become the preferred medium of Hong Kong comics artist Chihoi, in intense, exquisite comics and in larger gallery pieces. “Its tip reflects the force of the hand, and the force from the heart. Everybody is familiar with this simple tool because pencil and paper are among the first tools that a kid uses, it’s a more direct tool than a brush. It can be a fast tool when you do sketches. But it can be a very slow tool if you want to fill out the space on the paper. It’s challenging to make a big drawing with pencil. And pencil is among the cheapest tool in an art materials shop. One doesn’t have to learn or become professional to use it.” Read the rest of my new article and Chihoi’s new strip here…
1001 Comics on Czech Radio & TV Today!
Posted: November 4, 2013
Hello from Prague! I am here with publishers Plus to help promote the brand-new Czech edition of 1001 Comics. Last night, we had a great launch at the superstore Comics Point, and today I am being interviewed on Czech TV - Studio 6 this morning, and then on Cro Vitava radio from 3pm and another TV talkshow, Na plovarne with Marek Eben from 4.30pm. Lots of interest here, it’s been picked as one of this season’s twelve hottest books. Thanks to everyone Plus for organising so much media coverage.
Comics Art and Comica Festival Are Here!
Posted: October 30, 2013
Early advance copies of my new book Comics Art have arrived and were first offered for sale at the fantastic first Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal two weekends ago. Thanks to Gary Pleece, co-creator of The Great Unwashed, for this rather manic snapshot!
And Comica Festival is in full swing, with Oscar Zarate and Ilya in a Comica Conversation with me about their brand new SelfMadeHero graphic novels tomorrow night, Halloween, at Foyles in Charing Cross Road, and a lots more exciting events and exhibitions coming up until November 16th.
I’ll be officially ‘launching’ Comics Art at Foyles on Saturday November 9th at a Comica Conversation with five amazing UK creators all featured in the book: Gareth Brookes, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Katie Green, John Miers and Woodrow Phoenix. Full updated Comica 2013 programme online here.
Article: Michael Deforge - The Awe & The Awfulness
Posted: October 27, 2013
The awe and the awfulness of our outer and inner workings permeate the peculiar comics of Michael Deforge. “I used to have a lot of body anxiety and nightmares growing up. Bodies just give you so much to work with - they’re always so pretty and goofy and awful, all at the same time.” Deforge, twenty-six, Ottawa-born and Toronto-based, juggles a “day job” as a commercial illustrator and a character, effects and props designer on the hit Cartoon Network animated series Adventure Time (2010-) with his prodigious, almost profligate authorial comics. Luckily, he doesn’t need much sleep and instead seems to purge the stuff of his waking dreams onto the page. He’ll even use the altered state of a 24-hour flu to draw an eight-page story which he will soon get Risographed into another limited edition collectible. Read the rest of my Article and Deforge’s new two-page strip here…
Dave McKean’s UK Previews from ‘Nine Lives’ Project!
Posted: October 27, 2013
This coming Tuesday October 29th, I am thrilled and honoured to be catching up with Dave McKean. He will not only talking about his recent and future projects, but also be offering the first ever UK Previews of his ambitious new project entitled Nine Lives. Earlier this month, Dave was invited to Sydney Opera House, the prestigious venue for Australia’s most innovative multi-arts comics festival Graphic, where he performed on the piano and sung vocals to this exciting set of new illustrated and composed stories. To give you a flavour, the image below comes from Graphic’s Facebook album on Nine Lives.
Dave and Il will also be in conversation about my own new book Comics Art from Tate Publishing, which features a number of his most innovative projects, including his Hypercomics installation ‘The Rut’. We’ll also have a limited supply of the very first advance copies of Comics Art available for purchase and signing in London! Book your tickets now online for £6 from WeGotTickets, or buy on the door subject to capacity.
Date: Tuesday October 29th
Time: 6.15pm for 6.30pm start, ends 8.30pm
Venue: Foyles Gallery, 3rd Floor, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0EB
Katie Green, Denise Mina, Joe Sacco & Me on Open Book!
Posted: October 27, 2013
Today at 4pm on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, Katie Green, Denise Mina and Joe Sacco join me to discuss graphic novels with Mariella Frostrup, with a contribution from Neil Gaiman. You can listen to it again at 3.30pm on Halloween and online over the coming year. Here’s the BBC’s blurb for the programme.
“The cartoonist Joe Sacco brings political awareness to the art of illustration. His book Palestine, which depicted everyday life inside the Territory, won the American Book Award in 1996, while Safe Area Gorazde is an account of his visit to Bosnia during the Civil War there. Joe has now turned his attention to the First World War. With no words and a book of pictures that pulls out to 24 feet long, this latest book, The Great War, focuses on one day of the conflict - the first of July 1916 - the opening day of The Somme, when almost sixty thousand British soldiers were killed or wounded.
“Sales of graphic novels and comics have increased in the UK by over a thousand per cent in the past 10 years and it’s also no longer the preserve of Spider-Man et al ker-powing their nemeses into cowering submission; today’s graphic novels can be a serious business, featuring topics from reportage and anorexia to politics and crime fiction. To explore the rise of the graphic novel Mariella is joined by Katie Green, who has just published the autobiographical Lighter than My Shadow about her battle with anorexia, the award winning novelist Denise Mina who has also written the comic series Hellblazer and has recently been adapting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo into graphic novel form and Paul Gravett, the Editor of 1001 Comics you must read before you die and author of Comics Art.
Joe Sacco in London and His First Digital Comic!
Posted: October 25, 2013
After headlining at last week’s spectacular premiere of the Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal, Joe Sacco is in London over the coming few days. For the first time ever, he is speaking with Pat Mills, legendary writer of the First World War series Charley’s War at an exclusive Comica Conversation at the Platform Theatre, Handyside Street, London N1C 4AA near King’s Cross on Saturday October 26th from 7.30pm. He will also be signing copies of his latest book, The Great War. You can book tickets online or buy on the door.
Sacco will also talk about his first digital comic for new journalism publisher Acuerdo from Madrid. You can support this important new space for “pissed-off readers” via their Kickstarter page. Like me, make a pledge by November 4th and make this happen!
More info from Acuerdo:
Joe Sacco returns to Bosnia with ‘Srebrenica’, his first digital comic Srebrenica, the long-awaited digital debut of one of the world authorities in comic journalism. His first journalistic web comic investigates the open scars after the Balkan War with one of its survivors as a thread for a chronicle as real as it is heartbreaking: Sacco in pure form.
Joe Sacco will publish this winter Srebrenica, the first digital comic of his career, a heartbreaking news story in which the award-winning American cartoonist returns to Bosnia 18 years after one of the iconic genocides of the twentieth century occurred during the Balkan War, to portray the open scars after that massacre from the hand of one of its few survivors. A web comic with which the author of Palestine and Safe Area Goražde debuts in the digital universe at hand of Acuerdo, a new biweekly media that focuses on investigative journalism and interactive content that will be born this winter in Spanish, English and Portuguese.
The comic is available at an exclusive price of £2 during the Kickstarter campaign of Acuerdo, in which one can also reserve the rest of the reports and other subscriptions for this future media. Acuerdo is a biweekly publication for tablets and computers that will be born this winter and blend the best of investigative journalism with the latest trends and digital resources. Interactive reports in three languages and a network of partners distributed across five continents coordinated by a team of journalists, designers and programmers based in Madrid and London.
How is a comic digital? Srebrenica will be an animated comic being that much of the action unfolds by reading, although it will put forward sufficient interaction in the form of elements that will emerge to the reader on demand. However, the story will be sequential to respect the narrative proposed by the author. The most complicated thing, in the words of Sacco, is “finding the beat” to each animation.
Article: Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Violent Cases
Posted: October 14, 2013
Dark Horse Comics are releasing a new deluxe edition of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s first graphic novel collaboration, Violent Cases, published by Escape Books in 1987. The photo above shows them both when they won an Eagle Award for the book. It’s good timing to run my introduction for the Tenth Anniversary version, published in 1987 by Kitchen Sink Press. Dave McKean will be talking with me at a Comica Conversation on Tuesday October 29th at Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London. And Neil Gaiman is talking at a sold-out Foyles/Time Out evening on Tuesday October 15th. It shows how far things have changed over some twenty five years. In 2013, Neil is filling the entire Central Hall Westminster, about the biggest live audience he’s ever addressed here, and the same venue where Violent Cases all began very modestly all those years ago at the regular Saturday Comic Marts.
In addition, this week Knockabout Comics and the digital graphic novel app Sequential are offering a free digital download of Neil Gaiman’s Lost Tales, a bunch of “lost” Neil Gaiman comics, including collaborations with Bryan Talbot, Dave McKean, and others. Simply download the free Sequential app and then download Lost Tales from there. For every download, a donation of $0.50 will be made to the charity Malaria No More, with a target of raising $15,000 to fight malaria. The book, called Neil Gaiman’s Lost Tales, will also include a very rare 1980s interview, Gaiman’s original typed notes for The Sandman, sample scripts, project proposals, and more, including an original cover by Hunt Emerson. As a modest Extra, I’ve been interviewed for a short audio clip on how Violent Cases came to be. Read the rest of this Article here…
All Roads Lead to Kendal for 1st Lakes Comic Art Festival!
Posted: October 13, 2013
The beautiful Lake District town of Kendal is preparing to welcome comics creatives and readers from across the UK and beyond next weekend for the first Lakes Comic Art Festival. Its director, Julie Tait has ensured that their programme of events, workshops, exhibitions and activities from October 18th to 20th is full-to-bursting and mouth-watering. A Who’s Who of British talent will be converging with international guests including Ed Brubaker, Kurt Busiek, Joe Sacco and Gilbert Shelton from the USA and José Muñoz from Argentina (via Italy & France).
Here are the events I’m involved with over the weekend and there will be a table for Comica Festival/Escape Books and myself with the very first advance copies of my new book Comics Art - looking forward to seeing you there!
The Write Comic Stuff
Fri 18 Oct 2013 - 20:45 - 21:45
Ed Brubaker and Kurt Busiek, two of the USA’s best known multi-award winning comic writers, make a rare appearance on stage together in the UK to discuss the art of writing great comics. Ed is famous as the man who killed off Captain America and more recently for his work with Sean Phillips on Criminal and Fatale. Kurt Busiek took well-known superheroes in a new direction in Marvels and has created his own superhero universe in Astro City. Ed and Kurt will be in conversation with one of the UK’s leading authority’s on comics, Paul Gravett, who will help to tease out the answers to questions about their work and their approach to writing comics.
Nobrow – A Different Aesthetic?
Sat 19 Oct 2013 - 10:30 - 11:30
Nobrow prides itself on working with the best illustrators and artists in the world creating “stand out books which deserve to be printed” and “with their inherent qualities in mind”. In just five years it has made a distinctive contribution to the comic art medium. Paul Gravett will explore how Nobrow has achieved this and what lies ahead for this ambitious publishing company. The event will feature the work of two of Nobrow’s best-known, award-winning creators, Jon McNaught and Luke Pearson. Jon was the first Briton to win the Prix Révélation, The Best Newcomer Award, at Angouleme, for his first full-length book Automne (entitled Dockwood in English). Luke writes and draws the popular Hilda series of books. The New York Times described his latest book, Hilda and the Bird Parade, as “visually arresting: exuberant and lively”. Both are Eisner Award nominees in 2013.
The Ninth Art?
Sat 19 Oct 2013 - 18:45 - 20:00
The French refer to comics as ‘The Ninth Art’. In the inspiring setting of the Abbot Hall Gallery, an international panel will discuss this European perspective on comics, their coming of age in the UK and what the future holds. Is comic art a legitimate medium which can stand on its own two feet? How is it viewed within the visual arts and literary worlds (and does it matter?). Observer critic Rachel Cooke will explore these questions and more with, amongst others, Dan Franklin (Publisher of Jonathan Cape), Paul Gravett, Bryan Talbot, Joe Sacco and Posy Simmonds.
Crime Lords
Sun 20 Oct 2013 - 15:30 - 16:30
Four of the greatest exponents of the crime/noir comics genre join Paul Gravett (author of The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics) to discuss their work and to interrogate the strengths and limitations of this genre in comic art form. An exclusive insight into the award-winning work of Ed Brubaker, David Lloyd, José Muñoz and Sean Phillips.
Article: Interview with Enki Bilal
Posted: October 13, 2013
In his early sixties, Enki Bilal feels in his prime, enjoying the freedom of being able to apply his brooding, speculative visions and narratives fluidly between comics, films, paintings and other projects. An ex-Yugoslav naturalised as a Frenchman in 1967 and an acclaimed author of bandes dessinées since 1972, Bilal remains something of an outsider, at one remove from France’s cultural elites, despite such honours as two one-man exhibitions this year in Paris, one at the Louvre, the other entitled Mécanhumanimal. All the accompanying images come from this show, on view at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, until 5 January.
Born in Tito’s Communist Belgrade to a Czech Catholic mother and a Bosnian (nonpractising) Muslim father, Bilal grew up amid the fault lines that would eventually fracture his homeland. Becoming an attuned observer of global tensions, he anticipated in his fully painted graphic novels the breakup of the Soviet state and visualised the attack on the World Trade Center years before 9/11. His latest trilogy introduces a looser, stripped-down technique in crayons with added highlights on tinted paper. His story envisages the planet traumatised by our abuses into an unrecognisable, untameable sentient environment, in which humans and animals are realigning and hybridising to survive. As Bilal takes a seat in his Paris studio for this conversation, a stuffed zebra’s head stares down from the wall behind his head. Read my interview with Bilal here…
