Since finishing Smoo #5, I’ve been doing some anthology pieces. Here are some pictures of some pages from them.

Untitled

Untitled appearing in Moonshot Magazine #4. Two pages about spring-time walking.

Evacuee

Evacuee from Decadence #9. I try and use anthologies as an excuse to experiment a little bit with my comics. This one is 5 pages long and is science fiction, which is a departure for me.

Working

I submitted this story to Kuš! Komiksi, an international anthology out of Latvia. The editors are going through the selection process at the moment, so fingers crossed this makes the grade. If it doesn’t I’ll put this out as a minicomic. This story is 8 pages long.

Pre-CAF

In May this year, I headed to Canada for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival with my friend and fellow comics maker, Ian Williams (AKA Thom Ferrier). We did some teaching and exhibited and sold our comics. This is the first of three posts about my trip.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

After an extremely difficult 4am start, and a wholly insufficient four hours of sleep, I managed to marshal my faculties sufficiently to get to Bristol airport. What followed was eighteen hours of aeroplanes, Parisian airport food, Parisian airport navigation failures, Parisian airport shuttle buses and food in little trays, Canadian buses and subways, and a grateful arrival in our hotel in downtown Toronto. I had met my comics comrade, and roommate for the week , Ian Williams, at Paris CDG, and soon after arriving in Toronto, he got in touch with Suley Fattah, man behind Drawing the Line. Suley promptly appeared at the hotel to give us a driving tour of downtown: Yorkville, the frat houses, the Royal Ontario Museum, the streets. We met his wife, magician Julie Eng, and her colleague David Ben. Then it was beer, thunderstorms, rainstorms and 12 hours sleep.

On a muggy and sunny Thursday we headed to the University district, where I was to give a talk in the Geography department. The talk was based on a paper I am working on, which is drawn from my PhD. A small but receptive audience fed-back some good suggestions, and my jetlagged and somewhat hazy performance was seemingly forgiven. After the talk, Ian and I headed down St George and saw hipsters and students and posts thick with staples from years of flyering. We drank beer before heading into Kensington Market. Kensington Market is most similar in my experience, perhaps, to Camden in London, a sort of chaotic area, marked by similar shops and similar spaces and similar people, but with its own logic of restaurants, bars, clothes shops, vintage shops, junk markets and vegetable shops. Here, we once again met Suley and British magician Will Houston. We ate burritos and talked about the history of magic and sleights of hand, before taking another ride around a thunderstorm smeared city in Suley’s car.

Photo by Ian Williams

Photo by Ian Williams.

On Friday we headed out to University of Toronto Mississauga, a newly revived, shiny campus out in the green suburbs and big houses. We skipped through the rush-hour traffic as our gracious host Shelley Wall showed us various blocks of town on our way out to the campus. The purpose of the visit was for Ian and I to run a workshop on comics and narrative in stories about health and illness. We spoke about our own work and experiences, got the students and staff to participate in making some jam comics, and led them on a Lynda Barry-inspired guided visualisation exercise. The resulting comics were ace (you can read more about this workshop on Ian’s blog). The faculty were incredibly warm and enthusiastic, as were the students. Feeling buoyed we were taken to lunch, where we learned of MCA’s passing and a friendly, if persistent, waitress found repetitious ways to hear me speak and demonstrate my accent.

Photo by Ian Williams

That night we headed to the Pilot Tavern, where I put a whole host of faces to names of Twitter friends, including (but likely not limited to) Box Brown, Chuck Forsman, Melisa Mendes and Doug and Emma of British publishers Self-Made Hero. Bed at a sensible hour, hazy but happy.

Tomorrow: TCAF itself.

The ever so kind Richard Bruton of the Forbidden Planet blog has written an ever so kind review of Smoo #5. This is made all the more curious because the comic is about Falmouth and the people sitting behind me at the airport as I type this are from Falmouth. The small South West. He writes

“Frankly, I’m running out of ways to praise Moreton for what he’s doing. His development in the last couple of years has been a joy to behold. It’s a pleasure to receive each new work, knowing I’ll spend some time simply taking in the imagery he so effectively evokes within.”

You can read the full text here. You can order if from my shop or pick it up this weekend at TCAF, to which I am currently on my way.

Two of my comics have been reviewed by Rob Clough at High/Low. Of Smoo #4 he says, “Moreton takes the reader on a recapitulation of his perceptual journey of Marlow, going from the awe of childhood to the contempt of his teenage years to the ways in which he and his friends tried to create meaning. The revelations Moreton provides about his sense of growing old externally but not feeling it internally are not especially innovative, but that does not diminish the impact of the revelation as he feels it, nor the beautiful way that he expresses it on the page”. Here is a page from that comic:

Of The Escapologist #2, he says: “this is a comic about being from a particular place and knowing particular people, and how the sum total of our personality is constructed in part by our relationships with others. It’s a short and sweet depiction of a feeling and a sense of loss, of being connected and feeling apart.”

He also reviews recent work by Derik Badman and Jenny Zervakis. Having actually read the other comics Rob has reviewed, I can also whole-heartedly recommend chasing them up. Speaking of which, if you’d like to chase my comics up, look no further as you can buy both these titles here.

Oh how the month of March has rattled its way away from me over here; unseasonably sunny, and startlingly productive (well, it startled me). Here are some highlights:

Smoo #5: new issue available for pre-order now.

Hot on the heels of January’s release of Smoo #4, the next issue of my autobiographical zine is done and dusted.  Smoo #5 was completed in record time - 40 pages in three months - in preparation for my imminent trip to Toronto. The comic is all ready to go to the printers as soon as I’ve got enough pre-orders to help the process along. The zine contains 8 stories covering seaside landscapes, stone-throwing youths, going fishing, swimming in ponds and excerpts from an 18th Century Medical Journal. You can read about it in on the Forbidden Planet International blog, or you can get it here.

Meet Oliver Harris

Now that ‘The Sorry Entertainer’ newspaper comics anthology that Nick and I put out last May is out of print, you can finally read my story on-line. ‘This is Oliver Harris’ is a detached glimpse of one child’s imaginative escape from other people. In no way autobiographical. Here are some panels (click through to read the whole thing).

Stay in touch with Smoo News

In a staggering step of sepia nostalgia, I’ve decided to party like it’s 1996 and started a mailing list. Sign-up to be kept up-to-date with the latest news, advance deals on new comics and special offers/discounts for my online shop. In the blink and you’ll miss it world of Twitter and Tumblr, it’ll be a way to keep connected to what is going on over here from the comfort of your nicely appointed email client inbox. Click here to sign up.

Remember Things in Panels ? No? Well it’s back.

Things in Panels is the collective name that Nick and I use to put out publications and the name we use when we table together at conventions. While Nick is floating around Australia for a while, I’ve updated the website with some of our latest news. We have plans for more publications later this year, so do keep an eye out. If you’re a Tumblr user, do consider following us.

Flogging comics across the world:

Two up-coming events of note. First, I’ll be at flying solo at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, May 5th and 6th 2012. Then, in November, Things in Panels will once again be appearing at Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds. Nick will be back for this one.

That’s it for now. More news to follow in the coming weeks..