The Comics Bureau

I should have pos­ted this long ago, but being a very slack blog­ger means I didn’t. What makes it worse is that not only am I a con­trib­utor, but also helped Jim out in a tech­nical capa­city, util­ising my wordpress-wrangling skills. My apo­lo­gies. Anyway;

Com­ical Animal has launched! Head over right now to see some rein­ter­pret­a­tions of vin­tage funny animal strips by Rob Jack­son and Francesca Cas­savetti, read an essay on The Mouse by the head keeper him­self, Jim Med­way and a host of ori­ginal funny animal strips by the likes of Gary North­field, Dave Shelton, Lizz Lun­ney, the affor­e­men­tioned Jim Med­way and myself.

As if this wasn’t enough, you can spon­sor an animal (just like a real zoo) Spon­sor­ship so far comes from Good Grief com­ics in Manchester, which you should all check out and Blank Slate Books, which has pub­lished books by Com­ics Bur­eau favour­ites Oliver East and Darryl Cun­ning­ham, and is there­fore auto­mat­ic­ally also a Com­ics Bur­eau favourite.

Need­less to say, you all need to sub­scribe to the mail­ing list to be informed of upcom­ing funny animal activ­ity, con­sider con­trib­ut­ing if you have a funny animal strip of essay idea that you are eager to share and finally, con­sider donat­ing money to keep it going.

Com­ical Animal is a labour of love, and it would be great to see Jim recoup some of the costs of web­space etc. You can either adopt an animal as an indi­vidual or a busi­ness or simply paypal over what you con­sider to be a fit­ting donation.

Why are you still read­ing this? Go there NOW!

Head over to the World Com­ics India site to look at some superb Wall­poster Com­ics — inform­a­tional com­ics cre­ated by com­munit­ies that deal with local issues, includ­ing cor­poral pun­ish­ment in schools;

The school teach­ers of Maha­ra­jganj in Uttar Pra­desh are a wor­ried lot. Gone are the days when they could pun­ish stu­dents at will, for the most ridicu­lous reas­ons, slap them, beat them with sticks, or make them sit or stand for hours in uncom­fort­able, pain­ful and awk­ward pos­i­tions. The age-old notions of a good teacher – a strict dis­cip­lin­arian who would use the rod lib­er­ally on his stu­dents – is being ques­tioned and chal­lenged, by the stu­dents themselves.

Well worth check­ing out is their  Com­ics Manual, that runs through the entire Wall­pa­per Com­ics pro­duc­tion pro­cess, from con­cep­tion to deploy­ment. Not just a com­ics manual, this is a primer for social act­iv­ism and social engage­ment. Drop everything imme­di­ately and devour the entire site right now.

Once you have fin­ished read­ing the site, head over to Zee­news to read a fas­cin­at­ing inter­view with World Com­ics founder, Sharad Sharma;

It is simple, easy, non-threatening and can con­vey a power­ful mes­sage. But it is not just World Com­ics India, which is using comics/ car­toons to deliver social mes­sages, but across the world sev­eral organ­isa­tion are doing the same. The dif­fer­ence is they have done the same job by hir­ing artists, and we have done it by teach­ing com­mon people. Since the com­mon people are the ones who pro­duce them, so the 100% own­er­ship of the con­tent is theirs. They know the artists liv­ing next door. It is not for mass dis­tri­bu­tion, but for local use – so they pro­duce say 20 copies.

Barath Murthy writes up some thoughts on how to build a suc­cess­ful Indian com­ics pub­lish­ing scene here;

This essay is a present­a­tion of my views on the com­ics medium in India, and my solu­tion for the growth of the form. These ideas are the res­ult of the last few years spent try­ing to under­stand the medium. My back­ground is in paint­ing, (I stud­ied paint­ing in col­lege) and I want to cre­ate as well as pub­lish com­ics suc­cess­fully to the end of my life. These views come from this com­mit­ment to the form. I also stud­ied film mak­ing, and strangely enough, I had an oppor­tun­ity to make a fea­ture length doc­u­ment­ary film in Japan about its vast self-published com­ics (doujin­shi) cul­ture. I learnt about the manga industry and found out why it is the the most suc­cess­ful com­ics industry in the world. I met many manga authors, pub­lish­ers, print­ers, read­ers and real­ized how little west­ern­ers and Asi­ans like us know about Japan­ese manga. Before mak­ing this film, I also sniffed around a little bit into the Indian com­ics scene, hav­ing received a grant from the India Found­a­tion for the Arts, Bengaluru, to study Indian com­ics. I wrote a 5000 word essay about Indian com­ics which is to be pub­lished in Marg magazine. While doing this, I star­ted a dis­cus­sion forum on the Inter­net called Comix Dis­cus­sion Board of iNDIA (CDBi) http://www.comixindia.com/cdbi .What fol­lows is a ‘fact find­ing report’, and the ‘recom­mend­a­tions’ of this report on how we can have fun, make money and gen­er­ally enjoy cre­at­ing and con­sum­ing com­ics in India.

While we are on the topic, visit Barath Murthy’s site (we are word­press theme-buddies), read his books, Learn­ing to See and the Col­lec­ted Blog Writ­ings and then buy them. Also have a nose around the fas­cin­at­ing Comix.India site.

Get over to We Love You So and read up a great inter­view with Jordan Crane of ‘Uptight’ fame. A lot of covered in this inter­view, from Maurice Sendak to The Simpsons to tar­get audiences;

When I’m writ­ing some­thing I usu­ally have a par­tic­u­lar per­son in mind that I’m writ­ing it for. Not a gen­eral thing like “I’m writ­ing for someone between the ages of 25 and 50” but rather an actual person.

First of all, I think that people are more alike than they are dif­fer­ent. So let me start with that premise. When I’m writ­ing, I kind of use the guide that if some­thing reads as per­tin­ent or good to me, that other people will like it too. I’m pretty con­fid­ent in using my own edit­or­ial voice for other people. So first and fore­most, it has to pass my own brain. If it’s good, good. I don’t dumb any­thing down.

Paul Gravett writes an art­icle on Angouleme 2010. I really want to get to this. Really badly.

It’s that time of year again when people start mak­ing their ‘Best of the Year’ lists. When it comes to com­ics, I’ll be doing mine quite soon, as well as tip­ping you off on the Most Anti­cip­ated Graphic Nov­els to come out through 2010. Also, as before, I’ll be sound­ing out inter­na­tional con­nois­seurs for their favour­ites. Mean­while, over in France on Fri­day 4 Decem­ber, the 37th Angoulême Inter­na­tional Com­ics Fest­ival announced at its Press Con­fer­ence their three offi­cial selec­tions of the 86 best bande dess­inée books out of nearly 5,000 pub­lished in France in 2009. Can you ima­gine hav­ing this much choice, this huge an annual production?

I spent the day yes­ter­day at the Women in Com­ics con­fer­ence at the New Hall Art Col­lec­tion in Cam­bridge. What fol­lows is a brief skim through the notes I took dur­ing the ses­sions I sat in on. I couldn’t make it to every ses­sion as there were par­al­lel ses­sions, but I’m assured that they were all recor­ded, so I may update this post if I get my hands on a copy of the ses­sions I couldn’t attend.

I’ve seen Asia Alfasi speak a couple of times now, and each time I’ve seen her, I have thought the same three things.

1. This is brilliant

2. What inspir­a­tional enthusiasm

3. I can’t make notes quick enough!

Asia spoke (rather rap­idly) about being a female Muslim car­toon­ist, her ideas on cul­tural iden­tity and what wear­ing the hijab means to her. She talked about the tend­ency of some manga artists out­side of Japan to attempt to assume some kind of ‘Japanese-ness’, instead of embra­cing their own cul­tural her­it­age and try­ing to cre­ate some­thing new.

Much of her talk could prob­ably be broadly clas­si­fied as the com­ics equi­val­ent of motiv­a­tional speak­ing. She summed it all up quite nicely with this call to action;

Don’t wait for someone else to say what is on your mind.

Wise words.

Sarah Zaidan, who is cur­rently work­ing on a practice-based PhD at King­ston Uni­ver­sity spoke about her ideas of super­her­oes and why we need them, to how they evolve both phys­ic­ally and them­at­ic­ally through­out the his­tory of the genre.

Sarah McIntyre spoke about the over­lap between children’s pic­ture books and com­ics. She argued that comic books and pic­ture books are pretty much the same, but with a testoster­one imbal­ance. Much of her talk was look­ing at the work of a num­ber of female cre­at­ors, a list of which I’ll be post­ing and link­ing in the com­ing days, so stay tuned for that.

Melinda Gebbie spoke about her early career as an under­ground comix artist, and how she gained accept­ance from the male mem­bers of the group through drink­ing, swear­ing and push­ing the lim­its with her art­work. She told stor­ies of the early days of the brit­ish under­ground comix scene, and how manga has encour­aged ‘nice girls’ into comic shops, places that were once the exclus­ive domain of ‘boys that smelled of wee’.

She spoke about the pro­cess of cre­at­ing Lost Girls with Alan Moore, the troubles encountered on the way and some of the tech­nical aspects of pro­du­cing the art­work, stat­ing that it took her roughly 3 days to com­plete one panel!

She also gave insights into her ideas on the uses of com­ics, explain­ing that as they are visual, aural and kin­etic, they are great ways of teach­ing and inform­ing. She encour­aged every­one to write a work of comic auto­bi­o­graphy that explains who you are for future gen­er­a­tions, a sen­ti­ment that I share.

Kate Evans talked about her par­al­lel careers as car­toon­ist and act­iv­ist. While she lamen­ted the lack of a dif­fi­cult child­hood, and the sub­sequent lack of juicy auto­bi­o­graph­ical writ­ing mater­ial, she spoke about the uses of com­ics to inform and enlighten. Check out her book ‘Copse’, about protest­ing the New­bury Bypass.

Corinne Pearl­man and Woo­drow Phoenix dis­cussed whether auto­bi­o­graphy is a trap. They dis­cussed Corinne’s work explor­ing her Jew­ish iden­tity, and Woo­drow spoke about some of his appre­hen­sions sur­round­ing auto­bi­o­graphy. He and Corinne spoke about his res­ist­ance to mar­ket­ing Rumble Strip as a mem­oir. (I don’t want to spoil any­thing, so I won’t go into too much detail, but GO AND BUY IT immediately)

Woo­drow expressed some of his con­cerns about auto­bi­o­graphy, describ­ing it as a way of legit­im­ising the story in a way that fic­tion would struggle to do effect­ively. Head over to Myriad Edi­tions for some stream­ing audio of Corinne and Woo­drow hav­ing a sim­ilar conversation.

Their talk also fea­tured a huge col­lec­tion of slides that explained some of both their influ­ences, which again, will have to become a sep­ar­ate post fol­low­ing exhaust­ive research.

All in all, the day was very well organ­ised, the speak­ers were both insight­ful and inspir­a­tional and there was a very def­in­ite sense of ‘so can you’ from all of the speak­ers. Very inspir­a­tional stuff, lets hope this is some­thing that can be repeated and developed upon.

As a mat­ter of urgency, get yourselves over to Elec­tro­com­ics, an online pub­lisher that relies on dona­tions to main­tain them­selves. There is so much great work to see on this site — get over there and show them some support.

The com­puter screen, con­sidered a bad part­ner, when it comes to read­ing lenghty texts, is all the bet­ter suited as a space to pro­ject the advanced pictorial lan­guage of comics.

The inter­net is provid­ing dir­ect and afford­able means of dis­tri­bu­tion and thus helps even dar­ing and less com­mer­cial com­ics pro­jects to become avail­able worldwide.

Via vol­un­tary dona­tions, read­ers are in a pos­i­tion to hon­our the artist’s work. The mode of vol­un­tary pay­ments can be main­tained longterm, if enough read­ers are will­ing to act fair and pay accord­ing to the com­par­at­ively mod­est price sug­ges­tions (ca. 1,50 Euro an e-book).

This image is taken from ‘Alien in Rus­sia’ by Finnish artist Marko Tur­unen. Head over to his site ‘Super­tur­unen’ and ‘Daada’. This makes me wish I could read Finnish…

The Bas­tards include;

• Dan Lester, David Bail­lie, Douglas Noble, Emma Price, Francesca Cas­savetti, Oliver Lambden, Paul Rainey, Philip Spence, Sally-Anne Hick­man, Schmur­gen Jon­er­haffs & Sean Azzo­pardi
• and they are intent on tak­ing over Angouleme!

Derik Bad­man writes a brief post on Grand­papier, a pro­ject star­ted by Bel­gian pub­lisher L’Employé de Moi. The site fea­tures work in French and Eng­lish as well as a num­ber of word­less strips.

Recent Com­ics Bur­eau pos­tee Darryl Cun­ning­ham com­ments on Derik’s post;

I was recently asked if I wanted to con­trib­ute to Grand­Papier, and have now been doing so for a num­ber of weeks. I find the style of the com­ics on the site to be so much more play­ful than US or UK com­ics. There’s a real fresh­ness about the approach there which made me real­ise how staid Eng­lish lan­guage comix have become.

Look­ing at the qual­ity of the work, this is a hard opin­ion to dis­agree with.

Daniel Lau of Daniel.au writes up his impres­sions of Comiket and Comitia, two com­ics con­ven­tions in the same venue one week apart.

On Comiket;

Comiket is more about fan­dom than it is about com­ics. What I learnt was that in a con­ven­tion that per­mits deriv­at­ive work, the major­ity of out­put seems to be 1) fan favour­ite char­ac­ters in com­prom­ising situ­ations, 2) fan favour­ite char­ac­ters being repeatedly com­prom­ised by other, same-gendered char­ac­ters, or 3) any­thing + Fist of the North Star.

On Comitia;

Comitia prides itself on being all about ori­ginal com­ics. When you take out all the fan­fic­tion, even going so far as to ban cos­play, the bar gets raised a little. Cre­at­ors have to get a bit more ser­i­ous or stay home.

Is Comiket the Japan­ese equi­val­ent of the com­ics con­ven­tions where you spend all your time queuing to meet a guy that once wore an ewok costume?