Return from the Thing!

I had a fun ol’ time at the London Thing last Saturday. After the agonizingly slow start me, Gould, and Joel (who appeared to be cosplaying as a luchadore bank manager) got into the groove. We were also sharing the table with theses awesome Sugar Skull badges Joel’s sister makes, I love those things. If we’re back next year we should totally have a Mexican Day of Dead theme on the table!

It’s nice to be able to pick up comics from the cartoonists themselves without having to wade through a shambling group of slack jawed Joker nurses. I didn’t take any photos because I prefer to save space on my camera memory card for more important London sights like the filled in crack at the Tate Modern (which I find strangely hilarious) but there’s a nice con report with pics on The Super Comics Adventure Squad Blog.

And now here’s links to some of the cool stuff I bought.




Roger Langridge

Knuckles The Malevolent Nun: Special 1
Mugwhump The Great: The Show Must Go On
(I hope my local comic place gets some copies of the Muppet book through the grey market soon…)

Caroline Parkinson

Do Not Feed the Bear

Kate Beaton

Bigger Ruffs for Everyone
(Yes, I was one of the lucky few to get one before they ran out.)

David O’Connel

Man and Troll

Meredith Gran

Octopus Pie Vol.1

Nicola Stuart

Thank Goodness for Herald Owlett Vol.1
(came in an awesome handpainted envelope with a free colour sketch inside!)

Mark Ellerby

Chloe Noonan: Monster Hunter

James Turner

Beaver and Steve Vol.2: The Owl of Regret

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey

All Knowledge is strange

Sarah McIntyre and David O’Connel

Airship

Kelly Hernandez

Daytripper No.1
Lowborn No.1

Luke Toomey

The Secret Origin of Shark Attack Three
(a free comic and CD!)

Woodrow Phoenix

Count Milkula

R. Stevens

How I Blew my Thursday Night
(I gave R. Stevens a bacon scented Mini-Comic, this fullfils a long held ambition of mine.)

Watch out London!

There's plenty of good reasons to go to this year's UK Web and Mini-Comics Thing:

Sarah McIntyre
Meredith Gran
John Allison
Kate Beaton
Roger freakin Langridge

And a whole host of others. I, however, am not that great a reason to go but if you're there anyway you might as well pop by and say hello. Me, Gould, and some other guy called Joel (I've never met him but I'm sure he's very nice) have a table and if you feel the need to stimulate my economy a little you can buy some short poorly photocopied comics.


A sampler of some of my work with the fine people of The Action Age. It'll feature the first part of The Chronicles of Solomon Stone before any where else ever if this excites you.


Also joining with fellow member of The Royal Society for the Preservation of Sub-Literature Prfs. Samual Bridgett I will help in reconstructing some forgotten tomes from the past.


So come to the UK Web and Mini-Comics Thing and watch a guy with receding hair feel like a bit of a worthless fraud when surrounded by his betters...

Believe it!

Defective Fish Colon?

I was a bit apprehensive about subscribing to The DFC, the brand new British weekly kids comic, as it sounded like one of those things I appreciate rather than enjoy and anthologies always have their ups and downs.

But it's great, thoroughly enjoyable. The strips are of excellent quality and it actually felt like something kids would enjoy (unlike so make comics which are aimed at adults who want to read kids comics).

Particular highlights for me were Spider Moon by Kate Brown, which I'm not just saying to stop her beating me up (though she totally could), Vern and Lettuce by Sarah McIntyre which is beautifully done and features a rabbit, Monkey Nuts by The Etherington Brothers which has plenty of laughs and the usual quality art work, and a special mention must go to Super Animal Adventure Squad by James Turner for featuring a unicorn secret service director with an eyepatch -

It's Nick Fury as a unicorn! That's gold.

My only quibbles are the matt paper which stopped it feeling like a real magazine to me, and that everything seemed to be printed a little dark which hurt the art in a few strips.

With a subscription it doesn't work out much more expensive than a regular American comic (and several times the quantity and quality), so I'd suggest that if it sounds like your kind of thing you should give it a go. If you don't like it you can always just give it to a kid.

Birmingham Comic-Con 2007

Yes, The Birmingham Comic-con running on the 13-14th of October. Unlike Bristol I won't have a table but I will be milling around the floor picking fights with strangers and taking occasional sly sips from a hip flask.

Also in attendence will be Zak, Chigs, and possibly The Rascal himself.

If you want copies of any of our mini-comics from last year, (The World that's coming by me, Spirit of The Sky by Zak and Eddy Reynolds, PAW by Chris, and Attack of the Zombie Ninja by Rob) let us know and we'll print up some more copies. Well I will at least.

But I'm fairly certain that everyone reading this blog already owns a copy, actually my entire readership might have been in that list just now.

See you there!

Space Feminism: 1996

Girls, tired of all your strong female characters being co-opted by the the manstream?

Had enough of phallic tentacles dripping their slime suggestively over a whimpering woman's cleavage?

Dismayed by artists whose only knowledge on how to represent breasts is that they must be at least as large as the subject's head and need not bear any relationship at all the rest of the anatomy?


well don't give up, there is hope...

In spaaace!

Professor Peabody: dashing girl space pilot

Dan Dare - Pilot of the Paleo-Future

Back at the half way point of the last century comics were getting a lot of media attention. The post war increase of violence and adult content (along with actual maturity) was scaring the parents of the impressionable kiddies. Soon drastic measures were being taken.

In America this consisted of mass public book burning and a special US Congressional inquiry.

In Britain Vicar Marcus Morris was also concerned about the import of American horror comics but he had a different solution. Eagle was an anthology comic set up to other a more moral alternative to the horror imports, and it’s star was one Colonel Daniel McGregor Dare.

England 1996

Frank Hampson’ Dan Dare strip was a beautiful piece of work, fighting the horror comics shock appeal with shear quality and craftsmanship. While tales of manly adventuring in space were hardly a novel concept, the fully formed world Dan Dare adventured in was a wonder. The technology fetishism of the stories brought something from the cut-away drawings of spitfires and war ships, there was an inner logic too the 50’s visuals beyond mere fanciful drawings of space rockets. This attention to world building also led to giving the various alien civilisations their own distinctive technological aesthetic, from the Spacefleets curves to the Treens almost Kirbyesque Aztec transport.

The characters were rendered with a mixture of cartoonish exaggeration of facial characteristics and expression with realism that’s pretty rarely seen these days (mainly because it’s so bloody hard to achieve), Dan’s ‘Satanic’ eyebrows are a thing of wonder. Also in the cast is Professor Jocelyn Peabody who avoids all the usual ditsy space bunny troupes and instead tends to be the smartest, most competent, and, well, dashing of the crew, happy to disobey direct orders and dive a rocket into the atmosphere of the planet with a joyous shout of 'Tally Ho'

Dan Dare went on to have as massive an impact on British science fiction and comic as you’d expect from a magazine selling two million copies a week. The near obsessional attention to detail of the technology gave us Thunderbirds and the other Gerry Anderson shows, direct inspirations appear in Doctor Who, and the significantly more down beat Quartermass. And the British comics tradition which descended from Eagle eventually merged with the horror comics it was set up as an antidote to giving us 2000AD and all that followed. Dan Dare’s paleo-future world is also a clear starting point for Warren Ellis and Chris Weston’s Ministry of Space and Ian Edginton and D’Isreali’s Scarlet Traces sequel, not to mention the updated 1990’s political view on Dan Dare from Grant Morrison and Ryan Hughes in Crisis.

So maybe there’s a lesson there for contemporary times. Perhaps those concerned parties in Georgia should stop using legal manoeuvering shenanigans to try and drain the funds of a charity and instead put out a beautiful comic history of cubism without any nudity in at all.
Who knows what it could start.