Etherington Brothers Baggage Launch

From spe­cial guest con­trib­utor Alex Fitch of Res­on­ance FM’s Panel Bor­ders. With pho­tos by Sarah McIntyre.

On Octo­ber 13th, an unusual book launch took place in Hol­land Park.

At Daunt Books, a wooden fron­ted shop that com­pli­ments the afflu­ent boutiques and del­icates­sens between the sta­tion and the Edwar­d­ian squares to the West, card­board cut-outs of mon­keys and robots were placed on dis­play as cham­pagne glasses were set out for expect­ant fans.

The shop is part of a small chain which also has branches in Ful­ham, Hamp­stead, Bels­ize Park and Cheapside with a flag­ship branch in Maryle­bone. The loc­a­tion of each reflects the upper middle-class cli­entèle the chain attracts and suit­ably, for a shop with a branch just west of Not­ting Hill, it spe­cial­ises in travel books.

So, the launch of an unknown graphic novel for chil­dren by rel­at­ively obscure cre­at­ors, was a sur­pris­ing event to find in one of their branches on an unseason­ably warm Autum­nal night. The book, Bag­gage by Lawrence and Robin Eth­er­ing­ton, is a light-hearted romp through a fantasy city remin­is­cent of the work of Terry Pratchett.

Bag­gage is part of a range of books pub­lished by Oxford based children’s pub­lisher, David Fick­ling Books, which until now has reprin­ted stor­ies from a children’s sub­scrip­tion based comic called The DFC, that ran from May 2008 to March 2009.

Lawrence, who draws under the pen name Lorenzo, provides the art while Robin writes the dia­logue and draws the let­ters in the word bal­loons for their col­lab­or­at­ive pro­jects, which also include a strip in The Beano, and the lat­ter has also writ­ten com­ics for Star Wars and Trans­formers magazines.

At the launch, the Eth­er­ing­ton broth­ers spoke about how, after the weekly comic was can­celled, Mr Fick­ling had the inten­tion to bounce back from that and launch a lib­rary of European style graphic albums, hard­back books with 80–100 pages of comic strips inside. They decided to pitch him a brand new book, fol­low­ing the suc­cess of their strip Mon­key Nuts in the comic. With Bag­gage, they said: “It was for the love, it was for the pas­sion and it was a story we thought would be immense fun.”

The graphic novel tells the tale of a hap­less clerk in a lost lug­gage office who, on the brink of being fired for his care­less­ness, tries to impress his boss by return­ing the old­est piece of lost lug­gage to its owner. This adven­ture, which criss-crosses vari­ous exotic loc­a­tions, gives the book a fla­vour of travel writ­ing, so per­haps its launch in Daunt wasn’t so unusual after all.

They added: “it’s won­der­ful to be here today and actu­ally pass this book into the hands of new read­ers and old read­ers and start to take it out to the schools.”

The range of books has star­ted to attract young people who might be drift­ing away from read­ing out­side of the cur­riculum. The Eth­er­ing­tons explained: “you still have great pub­lish­ers in the UK, like David Fick­ling, who fight the sort of stigma that is hold­ing back graphic nov­els and comic storytelling.”

One of the earli­est books in The DFC lib­rary, a graphic novel called MeZo­lith, was another launch at Daunt Books, Hol­land Park in April 2010. That title also has a touch of travel writ­ing in its pages as it fol­lows the cross-country adven­tures of a Meso­lithic boy, 10,000 years before Bri­tain became an island.

Writ­ten by oral storyteller Ben Hag­garty, who has per­formed at the Hay Lit­er­at­ure Fest­ival and Carne­gie Hall, New York, and illus­trated by Adam Brock­bank, a con­cep­tual artist on the Harry Pot­ter films, the title became one of The Times’s Graphic Nov­els of the Year in 2010.

Although MeZo­lith gained plaudits for its con­tent, it is still dif­fi­cult to sell most graphic nov­els to aver­age book­shop vis­it­ors. Man­ager of Daunt in Ful­ham, Max Porter, advises other branches in the chain on their pur­chases of the medium. Mr Porter is a fan of com­ics, but admits many of the ones he stocks are there because he likes them him­self. He wor­ries about the graphic novel sec­tions you find in big­ger chains. Although they might have a lar­ger selec­tion else­where, chain store staff take little care in cur­at­ing it or keep­ing it in order.

He said: “I kind of prefer our smal­ler selec­tion, where at least if you took me over to it, I could more or less say I’d read every single one and I can give you the right one.”

Although the cre­at­ors of many books in The DFC lib­rary are not yet well known, a con­trib­utor to the ori­ginal seri­al­ised comic is one of Britain’s most fam­ous authors. Philip Pull­man wrote a strip called The Adven­tures of John Blakein DFC, which he hopes to com­plete one day as a graphic novel or film. He said that he read the weekly adven­tures of Dan Dareas a child and that he found the epis­odic format made it rel­at­ively easy to write a comic. He added: “It tells a story in a visual, cine­matic, excit­ing way and yet it has the pri­vacy, the per­sonal con­nec­tion, that you have with a book.”

With the release of school­boy crime caper The Boss by John and Patrice Aggs in Novem­ber, which joins Bag­gage and anthro­po­morphic com­edy title Super Animal Adven­ture Squad by James Turner in the latest ‘wave’ of releases, there are nine hard­back titles in The DFC Lib­rary altogether.

Hope­fully this range will con­tinue to grow on the back of good pub­li­city and sales, com­pli­men­ted by the launch of a new weekly comic – The Phoenix – by many former DFC cre­at­ors in Janu­ary 2012. The Eth­er­ing­tons them­selves are con­trib­ut­ing to the new comic, with strips called The Dan­ger­ous adven­tures of Von Doogan and Long Gone Don. 

The broth­ers are optim­istic about the state of com­ics in the UK at the moment, with new cre­at­ors and new titles arriv­ing on a reg­u­lar basis. They added: “for now, we can­not wait for people to get hold of Bag­gage and see what we’re bring­ing in 2012, because it’s going to be epic!”