THINGS I’M MAKING

• Smoo #4 is nearly complete. The artwork is done, and we’re just working on compiling it into a very nice new zine for all interested parties. Should be available for Thought Bubble (see below).

• In November, I’ll be following Derik Badman and other worthy artists into the #30DaysOfComics challenge. As the name suggests, the idea is to produce 1 page of comics everyday for each day in November. I was looking for an excuse to do something like this, and now I’ve found one. What will I draw? What will it look like? Will I manage it? The unresolvedness of those questions will keep you up at night, I am sure. I’m excited at the very least.

• Working on something quite different at the moment that might end up being a) my submission to Bearpit #3 or b) its own 8 page zine or c) cast aside like dandruff from a dark suit. Whatever. Some sort of preview might materialise here in the next few days (but don’t hold your breath).

• There’s something else very exciting but a little bit secret in the works, too. But that’s news for another day. Unless it doesn’t happen, in which case I’ll deny this post ever happened. Capisce?

WORDS OF WISDOM

• Do you like Lynda Barry? Good. Read this and remind yourself why. You don’t like Lynda Barry? Read the same thing and change your mind. It contains salient points about the need for self-reflection and reminds us that if somebody tells you that what you are doing isn’t art, or that you’re not allowed to consider yourself an artist, you can tell them in no uncertain terms to fuck right off.

EVENTS

• Nick will be tabling with Lando at the upcoming Comica Comiket. It is a free event at the Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London on Saturday  November 12th from 11am to 6pm. I won’t be there, but my comics will be: copies of the Escapologist #1 and #2 will be on sale, as well as some other bits and bobs.

• The following weekend is Thought Bubble an excellent comic festival in Leeds. I’ll be there on Thursday 17th November giving a paper entitled “Rethinking the comics ‘community’: making, participation and the (de)construction of stigma” as part of the Comics Forum conference. Nick and I will then be selling comics galore on Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th November in Savilles Hall with lots of other folks.

…and that was the news.

Chalkboard, handily decorated by Lando

The inaugural Bristol Comic and Zine Fair was held on Sunday 25th September 2011. The venue was the friendly and trendy Start the Bus, companion pub to The Nation of Shopkeepers in Leeds (which hosted the recent Leeds Alternative Comics Fair). Organised by the Bristol-based Bearpit Zine crew (whose number also includes Dave ‘Decadence Comics’ Lander and Nick ‘Misinterpreted Complications’ Soucek), the event was underpinned by a focus on underground, alternative publications. Mainstream comic fans and artists are catered for well by the regular Bristol International Comic and Small Press Expo each May, but we wanted to push something a bit different. Instead, it was the DIY ethos of the zine movement and the belief that creativity begins anywhere and is for anybody – as much as the medium of comics itself – that inspired us to organise this event. That and the strong desire to flog our wares to an unsuspecting public.

Decadence Comics.

The well-stocked and splendidly maintained communal table.

The breadth of talent who made it out for the show was genuinely exciting. Stallholders familiar to the world of small press comics included Nick and Dave, new-Bristol resident and artist behind webcomic Private Study, Graham Johnson; Thom Ferrier, Gareth Brookes, Paul Ashley Brown, Rob Jackson and comics-scene stalwart and Comics Bits Online head honcho, Terry Hooper. We also had a number of zine distros present, including Kebele Community co-op, anarchist press Last Hours, Bristol printers Pigeon Press and a host of other excellent makers.

Comics by Gareth Brookes and friends.

The day itself got off to a damp start, with the stallholders braving the unappealing swathes of early morning rain for the 11am setup. There was a bit of trepidation on our part: the tables supplied by the venue were a bit saggy and wonky – the sort of spindly, spidery wallpapering aides, so familiar from family DIY disasters – and we were worried there wouldn’t be sufficient for our stall holders. But it turned out just fine: we had plenty, and besides, they were lent to us by the excellent folk at the venue for no cost and we’re not about to bite the hand that feeds. So it turned out our organisational skills were even more accomplished than we thought; we even had a tick-sheet. There was also free cake, baked for the stallholders by stitcher of fine goods, maker of fine foods, and provider of fine photos, Bianca. This was nothing if not an inspired piece of bribery to curry good favour from our stallholders. Initial reports suggest success…

Terry Hooper (l) and Paul Ashley Brown (r) point and laugh at someone.

Overall, we feel the day went really well – and the feedback from the stallholders was similarly positive. Any event like this can do with improving: there’s some refinement to be done on table layout, advertising and the like, but generally we’re pretty pleased with the way it went.

Our thanks go to the Start the Bus for their help, to Claire Carter for staffing the communal table and to everyone who helped spread the word or who came down and checked out what was going on. Watch this space for announcements about the next event. Alternatively, email the Bearpit Zines crew to join our mailing list!

For more reports on the fair, look here and here.

All pictures © 2011 Bianca Soucek.

I’m happy to announce that  I’ll be exhibiting at Thought Bubble in Leeds this coming November. I’ll be sharing a table in Saviles Hall with Nick S., under our collective name of Things in Panels. You can read my report from last year’s event here.

As I mentioned in a previous post, during this year’s Bristol Comic and Small Press Expo I took part in a panel discussion on comics and mental health, organised by Ian Williams of Graphic Medicine. We had around 15 people in attendance, and, despite technical difficulties (that is, no cable to run the laptop into the projector), the panel went well. Ian, Nick, Katie and I all spoke about our different experiences with mental illness and comics, as the attendees crowded around the laptop screen to see the images we were showing. This lent a peculiar sort of intimacy to the proceedings, which suited the subject matter, but did make the audience scrutiny of our words that little bit more apparent. After we had spoke, we opened up the floor for a more broad discussion and fielded some questions. As is often the case, the conversation was just getting going by the time we had to call it a day.

Anyhow, the event left me thinking a little about my relationship with depression and anxiety, the (all-too-common) ailments that many people are afflicted by, and about which I spoke on the panel. It also left me thinking more generally about my relationship with comics.

First of all, I’d like to say that talking about depression is helpful, if hard, because it provides validation. Some days, I don’t even know if I really do have depression, or if I just use mental illness and an excuse to deal with a profoundly psychological set of problems that mean I just don’t always function very well, that I should pull my socks up and crack on with being. Depression, it seems, has a good way of talking itself out of existence, or shifting its form – rather, to use that oft-quoted quote of a quote from the Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” (Baudelaire, if you’re curious). Depression is very good at convincing the sufferer that it doesn’t exist, either.

But that’s just it; a great deal of the time, the popular discourse of depression is often reducible to “depression comes and goes”, suggesting that in those times of absence, we function the same as anybody and everybody else. Disregarding for a moment the notion that anybody is ‘normal’ to begin with, my experience of depression doesn’t fit this binary on/off analogy.  On an almost daily basis, I (and many others I am sure) have to mediate, moderate or otherwise scrutinise what I do, just in case I cause, for want of a better phrase, my brain to crash; if I drink this cup of coffee, will the caffeine accelerate my adrenaline levels to a point where my brain cannot process them, and I will spend the rest of the day panicked, paranoid, and miserable? If I do not sleep enough, will I be lethargic and de-motivated the next day (probably) but will that lead to a deepening sense of sadness, self-disappointment and existential inertia (sometimes)? This doesn’t mean I am miserable all the time – I’m not, far from it – but it does mean I have to take care of myself. After all, I have an illness.

Perhaps I make it sound worse than it is. But my point is that it interweaves itself into my everyday life, the same way that every other proclivity and predilection of mine does. I like pork pies; the smell of rain is nice; being fed up at work is not being depressed; depression is not an excuse for being rubbish at organising my own life; organising my own life can sometimes prompt spells of feeling low; depression can emerge at any time; pork pies are still nice. At the end of the day, everyday, I try hard not to give it too much sway over my everyday life, while not forgetting its presence. It’s a game of balance, and one that I don’t always manage to win.

One of the things about doing autobiographical comic work is trying to find a balance between the specific and the universal, between cataloguing the events in my own life, while flagging up the common things to which we can all relate. Writing about depression itself directly is hard, because depression is boring; it is boring to have. It is probably boring to be around. When depressed, I can’t imagine I’d make for a very dynamic character in a drama, unless I were to do something either poignant or outlandish (and my idea of poignant or outlandish when depressed would probably be neither of those things). It is boring to write about, and may well be uninteresting to read about, too.

I also find it terribly reductive, or overly didactic to write about in too much detail (this post notwithstanding). By this I mean that seeing as depression is so prevalent, seeing as it masquerades itself in such a huge number of different outfits for different people, at different times in their life, different stages in the day, different seasons of the year, to use the primacy of the written word to state THIS IS DEPRESSION is incredibly unhelpful. I mean, sure, writing about it for myself is a good thing, but for the reader? If you don’t suffer the same symptoms as I do, is one of us wrong? Can you relate if I only describe MY illness and not your illness?

This is what brings us back to comics (thanks for your patience). We touched upon this in the panel, and I think it is an important point – the importance of the way in which sequential art is an excellent medium to explore issues of mental health and, really, everyday life, because it relies on the fact that different readers will interpret the same images in different ways. By virtue of how each reader or viewer responds too, reads, and makes sense of the images in infinitely different ways, comics allows one story to have many, many different interpretations in a way that some other media sometimes can’t. Unlike words (the danger, in their quest for exposition, of becoming too rigid) or moving images (affective, moving, absolute, but often coercive – the director directs the viewer), comics provide an excellent opportunity to get at the essence of things, ideas, feelings, abstract concepts.

Now, I’m not saying there isn’t ‘direction’ at work in comics, in panels, in the layout, composition and so on of a page, because there is; nor am I suggesting other media can’t represent mental illness - of course they can, and do, often very well. But something about the visual medium lends itself to being interpreted more widely; different people see different things in the same combination of words and pictures. I think this gives comics an ability to distil themes and ideas in a manner that can still be warm and relatable (I actually think poetry is the closest relation, imagining what is between the words being what makes that medium so powerful, but that’s for another day). Comics - sequential art - offers potential.

This is where it gets a bit tricky for me. Because of their relative liminality in mainstream culture (especially here in the UK), those of us who operate as comic creators and fans will find solace amongst one another, having that medium (and our relative marginalisation) in common. Reading comics has, for a long time, been a means of distinguishing oneself from others, whose imaginations or values or hobbies differ from those of us as readers. The worlds comics create offers an escape and a refuge from the outside world, especially (but not exclusively) when we are younger, allowing us to create worlds away from the prying eyes of people who just don’t get it. I certainly read comics in this way as a kid.

But the medium of sequential art is such a broad church, and it can be sometimes difficult to position myself within it - partly because of the public perception of the so-called ‘fanboy’ or  ‘fangirl’. It’s not that I don’t like comics that operate in other genres (for want of a different word) - I do - but sequential art is also a format, that is, a way of telling a story. Just as readers of fiction may choose one genre over another within the the format of prose, so to do we do with comics. That’s pretty cool. But for me, as a creator, producing art and making sense of my own life is the thing that drives me. Comics, insofar as this distinction is being made, is just happens to be the medium that makes the most sense for me to work in. I guess it just becomes difficult for all of us, as fanboys and girls in our own rights, to challenge the stigma that lumps us together as one thing in the public consciousness. That harms us, and it harms comics.

The empowerment of self-publishing, of creating our own little worlds of readers and distribution in a way that blurs the maker/consumer boundary, is a vital part of challenging this process. As the vitality of the zine scene shows, it doesn’t have to be comics that provides the common format for self-expression and empowerment: it is a collective need to create and share and relate to one another. Mental health issues are discussed and explored widely among the scene, in multiple ways; directly, indirectly, as comics, as writing, as poetry and as illustration. Furthermore, because, often, the readers are also makers, or also sufferers, the loop of response and creation, devoid of recourse to an overarching canon (which does happen in comics, I think), allows the self-expression to develop in helpful and hopeful ways. So while, I’m not saying that these scenes are devoid of evaluation or aesthetic judgement, or that there aren’t benefits to having a critical network for honing the art that we create, what I am saying is this: it is the attitude, the drive to make and explore, and finding that in other people, that I also find empowering. That isn’t only because I have an audience of like-minded individuals who might ‘get’ my prose, but it’s because there are people out there who want to listen.

As my own work moves away from direct autobiography, and towards a more abstract attempt to deal with some of these little ideas and issues surrounding illness, the power of comics becomes more and more important to me. I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing, and never really have, but this experience of thinking and making is helping me to make sense of things. Sure, there’s the challenge of creative work – any work – like getting stuck, getting angry, bored, disappointed, upsetting others, upsetting yourself, losing track of workloads, forgetting to have a life, but those challenges are worth it. I believe this strongly, because using art, in any form, to make sense of the world is one of the unique things that people do, and have done, for the longest time. High art or low art, whether it is to your taste or not, words or pictures, has something to say.

These are old arguments in the arts, and I can’t lay claim to them. But what I would like to suggest is that making comics, or zines, or paintings, or photographs, or whatever, as a technology of the self (to crib a phrase from, I think, Foucault) offers a way of becoming who you would like best to be, by exploring yourself, and the lives of others, in an attentive way. So mental illness, for example, may be the lens that will forever shape how I see the world, but through making comics I am learning to see that same world in other ways. Hopefully, too, such an attitude to making will encourage others to explore their own medium of self-expression, comics or otherwise, and that piece by piece, we can collectively come to understand one another, and ourselves, better.

This year, by a mixture of design and accident, the task of getting up early in the morning was not hampered by a hangover. Given the shenanigans of last year’s event, and the London Small Press event earlier this year, this was a relatively novel (and refreshing) experience, meaning that we arrived at the venue bright eyed and bushy tailed (actually, that’s a lie) and ready to sell lots of comics and have a good time (that bit’s true). Our table was in the main hall, tucked in a corner at the back of the room (I chose the table, so cannot complain about this). We tethered our banner betwixt a dreadful ‘painting’ (wallpaper design on canvas, but then, this is a hotel) and a fake bush in the corner (ditto). We spread out our wares. We were ready.

Saturday went by smoothly, and sales were good. In the afternoon, we took part in a panel on Comics and Mental Health, organised by Ian Williams. We spoke alongside Katie Green and Ian about our own experiences with mental illness and making comics, and it turned out to be an important, and in many ways, empowering experience for me (more on that in Part 3 tomorrow). After the panel, the last couple of hours of the Expo slipped by, and Nick, Ian and I retired to the pub for a quick pint, before Nick and I headed to mine to watch Eurovision (Moldova were our favourites, should you be curious). Sunday also rolled by much the same as Saturday, slow and steady. As usual, the delirium and fatigue of being sociable and approachable took its toll, and by the end, I think Nick and I had lost the power of coherent speech (if we ever had it). However, we hung on to the last minute while others packed up around us, hoping for one more sale. Our patience paid off with an 11^th hour sale to a nice man whose name we don’t know, but who was who good enough to take pity on the needy look, writ large across our wan, Dickensian-urchin faces.

It was a strange couple of days in some ways. On the one hand, it seemed slow, quiet, and there also appeared to be an ever-present patch of carpet in front of our table upon which nobody seemed to be prepared to walk. This phenomenon was noted by the chaps on the tables either side of us, as we pleadingly looked to the passers-by not to cut the corner and come see us. Things definitely never got busy – not in the way we had experienced at previous events, and that felt mildly perturbing. On the other hand, we met interesting folk, had interesting conversations and had, overall, a good time. Also, the Sorry Entertainer, which was enjoying its debut, went down a storm, and we actually made more, and sold more, than we have at any Expo to date.

I guess, in many respects this year was a bit of a full circle for me and Nick; Bristol last year was our first ever Expo, and I think the anticipation, the lovely weather, the new faces and new experiences of the 2010 event lent to it an air of the unknown, that made the experience much more exciting. This year, I think, we were just a little more familiar with the process of selling at an Expo, and with it being in our home town, we felt like it was less of an adventure. I think also, although we know there’s not a great deal of money in this game, our own circumstances meant that the pressure to make more, so that we could afford to eat and whatnot, was greater this year. There were fewer trades than last year, too (though that also has as much to do with capacity in my little flat, as it does with anything else). In all, however, it was worthwhile, and depending on where life takes us, we have every intention of being back next year.

Here we are, me scaring the punters, Nick (Mis-Comp) looking on. Note the delicious fake painting.

Tomorrow – Bristol Comic and Small Press Expo 2011, Pt. 2 – On Comics and Mental Health

Waiting in for parcels to be delivered to your house is truly one of the more universal experiences of contemporary living, out here in the Western hemisphere; it’s like Waiting for Godot, only rather than experiencing any (or no) transcendental or existential insight, you mostly just end up really needing a wee (or worse) but knowing that as soon as you commit to the act, the doorbell will ring and you’ll be left with the most awkward of dilemmas. I’m sure we’ve all been there.

Anyway, such were the challenges I was facing last Friday, as I sat in the flat, restless in my anticipation of the arrival of some couriers, but unable to commit to doing anything productive; I’d run out of Bristol board to get some drawing done; my other finishing-the-PhD work was tied up, awaiting comments from my internal examiner; I couldn’t shower; I’d already seen that episode of Gilmore Girls; I’d nearly run out of milk; I’d already seen that episode of Friends (though that’s a fairly universal condition in itself). Tough times.

‘Oh, the despair!’ I wailed. ‘Oh, the woe!’ I gnashed, as I took to playing Solitaire with ACTUAL CARDS, or, as I was taught it, Patience (how apt) and drank my fourth cup of tea (boredom lends itself well to counting, it seems). Then, abruptly, midway through my sixth game of Patience (see, counting) the doorbell rang and I bounded like an excited puppy down the stairs to open the door and gain receipt of… 500 copies of the Sorry Entertainer!

Yes folks, it’s here! It exists, and it looks… amazing! Given our Modus Operandi normally involves pens, paper and photocopiers, to hold something that Nick and I had put together ourselves, that had been printed by people far away, and that had arrived, en masse, in a stack of five parcels, was a new and rather exciting experience. I can’t lie – I was rather proud. All the hard work from the artists who had contributed, the folks who donated and spread the word, the printers, and our efforts, had all come together in newspaper form.

There you have it: the Sorry Entertainer! All those who invested money into the IndieGoGo fundraiser will be receiving your copies over the course of the next few weeks as we get ourselves sorted out, make sure we have all those minicomics ready for the perks, buy some big envelopes, and hit the Post Office. For those who haven’t yet got a copy, there are limited quantities available for sale in my shop. As all the artists who took part in the project will also have extra copies, once I run out, it is perfectly feasible that they may have some copies available, too. We’ll keep you up to date.

It just falls to me to thank everyone who contributed, in whatever way, and a special thanks to Anne and the rest of the Newspaper Club team for helping us realise this project so seamlessly. Thank you!

Here are some photos from delivery day:

Coming tomorrow… Bristol International Comic and Small Press Expo Part 2 – the event itself!

The Bristol Small Press and Comic Expo

Nick and I will be appearing again at the Bristol Comic and Small Press Expo, Saturday 14^th – Sunday 15^th May, at the Mercure Hotel in Redcliffe, Bristol. It marks our second appearance at Bristol, and closes our very first year of distributing our comics in the small-press world.

On Saturday, at 4pm (I think), Nick and I will be taking part in a panel discussion with Ian Williams (Graphic Medicine) and Katie Green (Green Bean), talking about comics and mental health. It looks set to be an interesting debate, and one that is very important to me – given my own experiences, and those of others close to me, I believe mental health issues need to be discussed more openly, and I think drawing is an important tool in communicating ideas about, and dealing with, these challenges.

The Sorry Entertainer:

The Sorry Entertainer is fundraising is storming ahead. If you haven’t yet donated, and would like to back the project – receiving the newspaper, comics and even original artwork in the process – do check out our IndieGoGo page. The newspaper will (all being well) see print next week, and be ready to debut at Bristol Expo. Watch this space for confirmation news.

First three panels of my contribution to the Sorry Entertainer

Smoo Comics:

As you may have noticed, Smoo #4 was, just the other month, all lined up to be finished, and then it dropped off the radar. It remains pencilled and largely unlinked, as I’ve been in all sorts of turmoil about what I want the zine to be, what I want it to do, what it represents for me. After much thought, I have decided that I will be moving Smoo to an annual schedule, after the release of Smoo #4 this summer. It will continue to contain comics, but most likely also writing, illustration and other, less-comicky things. I have made this decision because I would like an outlet for more than just comics, and I’d like Smoo to be that outlet. I have plenty of things lined up to go in future issues of Smoo, including a write-up of a trip to Berlin, a holiday in Spain, and countless other shorter ideas. I didn’t want to give up on Smoo, but I just wanted it to be something different to what it has been to date.

The Escapologist

Alongside Smoo’s annual release, I will be working on a much shorter form minicomic, called tentatively, The Escapologist. It’ll be 100% comics, but perhaps more abstract than Smoo has been to date. It’ll still deal with many of the central concerns of my comics to date – philosophy, everyday life, mental health, making sense of the world – but will try and remove some of the obviously narrative or ‘straight’ autobiographical context in order to explore other avenues of story-telling. The images below will appear in the first issue of the Escapologist. I have submitted a shortened version of the story to JM Shivelely’s Hive Anthology.

Panels from The Escapologist #1

Each issue will also be much, much shorter (and cheaper) than the average issue of Smoo. This will enable me to work in bite-size chunks, getting ideas fleshed out and into print quicker than working on longer-form comics. They will be stand-alone issues, but designed that once they are put together, to flow as one long, disjointed yet interconnected narrative. They should be released with more regularity, and, every four issues or so, I will collect them together in volumes. I intend to keep the series going as long as I have something to explore. The Escapologist will debut at Bristol Expo, alongside the Sorry Entertainer.

So that’s it: that’s the news. All this new stuff will be available on my online shop soon. In the meantime, get donating!

Waking up on a friend’s floor somewhere near Elephant and Castle after a handful of hours asleep, a handful of pistachio nuts and a bucketful of wine, is not always the best way to start the day. Especially not at 7am. It does, however, betray the hallmarks of an evening well spent: eating nuts, drinking wine, playing Carrom and generally engaging in good, clean fun. (Now, I say clean; clean, if we ignore the insistent cough caused by inhaling the chalk dust used to lubricate the Carrom table; clean, if we ignore the way the chalk dust glued itself to our lungs when mixed with the hairspray we were using as fixative on the covers of our Bearpit zines; clean if… well, yeah, the booze. Unsurprisingly, however, I considered the whole thing pretty awesome, lungs be damned).

Anyway, as dawn broke upon our sleeping forms, and our tandem alarms whittled away our collective patience (snooze buttons got a bashing), we were a pretty sorry sight to behold: the bit of my face where my eyes normally live was sagging like a pensioner’s settee and Nick was exhibiting signs of floorboard-induced sleep deprivation and an inability to string together sentences. (This latter condition was one that afflicted us both throughout the day and certainly led to some weird attempts to explain who we were, what we were doing, and why we smelt like the inside of a wineskin to the Expo punters). Nonetheless, we successfully bade farewell to our genteel host, and, burbling to one another in our ‘are we still-drunk or still-asleep?’ purgatory, we made it onto a bus. Better still: the right bus.

We arrived, fresh faced (arse faced) in New Cross. After some challenging supermarket navigation and breakfast/self-serve till negotiation, we made it to the venue to set out our wares.  The space was great; comfortable, friendly and, to our eyes, pretty well organised. We were full of hope that the day was going to be a good one that would line our pockets with silver and stop the throbbing of our heads. Sadly, this wasn’t necessarily what happened…

As most reports will probably suggest, the event was painfully slow at the beginning - our little hearts skipped a beat every time someone walked nearer our table, only to be disappointed as we detected the purple lanyards that denoted the figure was yet another exhibitor, roaming the room for customers. It was pretty difficult going. Still, it did give us plenty of chance to catch up with a bunch of names from the small-press scene (and meet some for the first time): Freddy and Kirk of Dirty Rotten Comics, Rob Jackson, Andrew Cheverton, Rob Davis, Joe from Good Comic Books, Ian Williams, Katie Green, Lando, David Ziggy Greene, Matthew Murray and more.

By the afternoon, the pace picked up, with more than a brisk trade happening at our table (to the gentleman who bought one copy of everything I had on sale: thank you). Perhaps our patter got more refined as the day wore on, or perhaps pity took hold of the folks walking by, but we ended up doing pretty well, Nick in particular. The pub afterwards was also good fun, and it was a shame we couldn’t have stayed longer than we did. Probably for the best, really: I think I would have ended up getting drunk and ranty. Whoops.

So, overall I’d like to think that the event was a success. The atmosphere was convivial and the work on display was varied, but united by a really strong commitment to self-publishing and small-press work. The punters were friendly and willing to chat (on the whole) and that made a difference. It was just a shame that an apparent lack of signage and publicity meant that the day started so slow, and had to end so abruptly. That said, I’m not one to bite the hand that feeds (well, I am – but not in this instance) and I think with a later start time, a later finish, more publicity, and some patience and good-will from us exhibitors, this event could do very well. I, for one, hope it will be back next year.

I am busy. I am eating apple. I am busy, eating an apple

Fointy pinger

(photos from Nick and Ian)

Over the last month or so, I’ve been busy scribbling away at pencils for Smoo #4. As I’ve said in a previous post, this issue is more an illustrated essay/piece of prose than a comic, but nonetheless I hope you’ll all still like it. Plus, I’ve certainly enjoyed drawing it to date, and I guess that’s something. Anyway, I had hoped to have the whole issue completed before we head to the Small Press and Comic Expo in London, but seeing as I leave for the big smoke on Friday afternoon, I doubt this will happen. That said, I’ve pencilled nearly all of the 40 pages that will comprise the issue, and probably should be ready for release sometime in April. In the meantime, here is a gloriously lo-fi scan of one of the pencilled pages. More news soon.

Speaking of London, good friend, and culinary wizard Bianca (of food blog ‘A Pinch of Salt’ fame), has made us some bunting for our table. Looks awesome. We’ll look dead smart, if nothing else. Have a peak:

Also, I’ve hastily thrown together a contribution to the new Bristol-based zine ‘Bearpit’, which Nick has been diligently organising. My contribution is lacking, certainly, but from what I’ve seen of everyone else’s pitch, it’s going to be a great zine nonetheless. Should be out very, very soon.

Finally, just for you lovely Tumblr users, I’ve added an ‘ask me a question’ facility on this blog. This means if you are curious about anything, want to find out what I think I’m playing at, or otherwise contact me, you can now speak your brains. Oh, the joy of technology.