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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Battle Of The Eyes Storm Streatham Festival!
Posted: July 3, 2013
Don’t miss the chance to experience Battle Of The Eyes’ performance The Noise Of Our Art next Thursday July 11th as part of this year’s Streatham Festival. BOTE’s head-cameras will feed projections onto big screens, so the full impact of their live painting technique can be viewed directly. They premiered this piece at Comica Comiket at Central Saint Martins on April 20th - see some photos of it here. This time they are joined by Nick Franglen with video projections by Mario Cavalli. It’s happening at Beacons Bingo, 110 Streatham Hill, Streatham, London SW2 4RD from 7.30 to 8.30pm. And it’s free!
Children’s Media & Comics and Medicine Conferences!
Posted: July 3, 2013
Next up on my travels it’s Sheffield tomorrow Thursday for the 10th Children’s Media Conference, where I am hosting a panel on digital comics at 1pm entitled The Shapes of Comics to Come. Joining me will be Chloe Martin, UK editorial director of Panel Nine and Sequential, artist David Blandy and Dan Tucker from MediKidz.
Then on Friday I am off down to Brighton to give the introductory keynote speech for the 4th International Conference of Comics and Medicine, where David B. and Nicola Streeten are also speaking. I look forward to seeing friends old and new at both of these events.
Article: Stripped at Edinburgh Book Festival
Posted: July 2, 2013
This August’s 30th Edinburgh International Book Festival is really pushing the boat out for comics and graphic novels with Stripped, its most ambitious line-up of guests and events. Major creators like Posy Simmonds, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Rutu Modan, Mary and Bryan Talbot, Warren Pleece, Tom Gauld, Jon McNaught, Hannah Berry and so many more pack the schedule. The Festival has also published a separate Stripped programme, appropriately on newsprint and in a comic-book format. I was asked to write a piece for this, which you can read here…
Five-Day Glasgow & Dundee Comics Conference!
Posted: July 2, 2013
Glasgow and Dundee hosted this year’s five-day double-whammy of the annual International Comics & Graphic Novel Conference and the biannual International Bande Dessinée Society Conference. While absent North American friends Robert Beerbohm and Bart Beaty were much missed, the conference welcomed back plenty of other colleagues in Comics Studies and attracted many first-timers from around the world, notably from Brazil and Turkey, as well as creators like Grant Morrison, who gave the opening keynote, and French guests Tanitoc, Nicola Witko and new Asterix scriptwriter Jean-Yves Ferri. Thanks to the University of Glasgow for letting us see wonderful rarities from their special collections, including a gloriously coloured edition of The Glasgow Looking Glass from 1825, and to Morris Heggie for his selection and tour commentary of a display of Dudley Watkins’ original artworks. I always find the sharing and exchanging of information and ideas at these conferences truly stimulating and inspiring. Thanks to all the organisers and delegates for making this 2013 session such a pleasure.
Article: Marion Fayolle
Posted: July 2, 2013
Graduating from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, renowned for nurturing a remarkable number of highly individual illustrators and comics artists, Marion Fayolle co-founded the narrative image magazine Nyctalope (below), where she initially presented several of these pages. Coming to the comics medium afresh, unencumbered by conventions and expectations, Fayolle has stripped it back to its essentials by removing speech balloons and narrative captions and limiting her texts to the briefest of typeset titles offering intriguing clues to the tale that lies ahead. Her choice of wordlessness seems naturally to suit the experience of dreaming, where purely visual reveries can unfold before our eyes. It also returns us to a child-like, pre-literate mental state where our only choice is to look attentively and read what we see. Read the rest of my Article and Marion’s new 2-page Strip here…
David Small & Typex in London This Week!
Posted: June 16, 2013
Two outstanding international graphic novelists are in town this coming week. First up, David Small, acclaimed American children’s book author and creator of the powerful autobiographical graphic novel Stitches will be talking at the next monthly Laydeez Do Comics meeting in the 3rd Floor Gallery at Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London, on Monday June 17th, from 6-8.30pm.
Small will also be giving a Keynote presentation on Wednesday June 19th at the Narrative Medicine conference at New Hunts House, King’s College from 2.45pm. Limited non-delegate tickets are available just for David’s two sessions till 5.45pm at £10. Book online here!
And then from The Netherlands arrives Typex, pseudonym of Raymond Koot, writer and illustrator of the remarkable graphic biography Rembrandt, published in English by SelfMadeHero.
Typex is being interviewed on Thursday June 20th from 6pm by the BBC’s Rosie Goldsmith at Waterstones Covent Garden in Gower Street. Tickets are £5 or £4 with a Waterstones loyalty card. Typex will also be signing copies on SMH’s stand at this Saturday’s excellent one-day 2nd East London Comics & Art Festival, or ELCAF, at York Hall in Bethnal Green, tickets £3. Don’t miss these opportunities to meet this pair of stellar comics creators!
Article: Enki Bilal - Haunted by the Future
Posted: June 16, 2013
A vigorous and smouldering sixty-two years of age, Enki Bilal has been instrumental in expanding the potential and prestige of ‘bande dessinée’ or the comics medium in his adopted homeland of France. Over the last forty years, Bilal has risen from his promising short strips in Pilote magazine in the early Seventies and powerful graphic novel collaborations with Valerian & Laureline writer Pierre Christin to the status of a respected solo comics author, film-director and contemporary artist. It’s not every comics artist who is given carte blanche by the Louvre Palace in Paris to paint twenty-two ghostly portraits of entirely fictional figures from history, each one intriguingly connected to a particular work of art in the museum, and exhibit these paintings there to an admiring public. Like his Phantoms of the Louvre, Bilal is a haunted man, haunted by both the past and the future. To understand him and his unique, brooding oeuvre means understanding the history he’s lived through, and lives with still. Read the rest of my new Article here…
Article: PG Preview for August 2013
Posted: June 15, 2013
A cornucopia of previously unreprinted marvels rescued from newsprint limbo fill the pages of Society is Nix, reproduced immaculately in their ‘polychromatic effulgence’ and at the same generous dimensions as they originally appeared around the turn of the 20th century in America’s remarkable Sunday “Funnies” supplements. This is less a coffee-table book, more a coffee table in itself. It’s just one of my PG Tips for new titles due in August or soon after. I hope you find one or a few of them here to tickle your fancy. Join me here each month as I preview my recommendations for treats in store a couple of months in advance - there’s nothing quite like anticipation! Read the rest of my PG Previews here…
Beano, Baxendale & Phoenix on Radio 4’s PM!
Posted: June 12, 2013
Amid the rather artificial media hullabaloo about Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall appearing in this week’s Beano to promote reading and healthy school lunches, I was called into the studio of BBC Radio 4’s PM Programme with Eddie Mair this afternoon to discuss the state of British children’s comics. Joining me on the phone was Terry Deary of Horrible Histories fame. I managed to give a bit of credit to Leo Baxendale, creator of Little Plum, The Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx, sixty years ago this year, and to The Phoenix weekly comics, even slipping in a plug for outlet Waitrose! You can listen in here for the next few days and the piece begins at 51.25 mins into the programme.
The ZOOM! @ George’s Fish ‘n’ Chips, Crouch End!
Posted: June 6, 2013
The super-talented 11-year-old British comics prodigy Zoom Rockman is exhibiting his original drawings from The ZOOM! Comic as part of the Crouch End Festival till June 16th. Fish ‘n’ chips ‘n’ comics - a perfect combination!
