The Comics Bureau

Hey! Are you aged between 16 & 25? Are you affected in any way by the reces­sion? Can you draw com­ics? Do you fancy win­ning £1000 and hav­ing your work dis­played in the Design Museum?

Well, head over to TheSite.org to read up on how to enter and to browse the competition.

You need to get your entries in before April 30th.

The strip above is by Ste Hitchen. You should prob­ably go and check his very nice work out.

Get your­self over to Little White Lies and have a look at the com­pet­i­tion brief they are run­ning, inspired by the upcom­ing Kick-Ass Movie.

What you need to do is to con­dense an entire movie into just six black and white pan­els. Shouldn’t be too much hassle for any­one famil­iar with plot structures…

Read up fur­ther, down­load the tem­plate and enter the com­pet­i­tion quickly! The dead­line for entries is the 12th Feb!

Thanks, Down­TheT­ubes for the heads-up on this pro­ject; Win­dow Works.

Mantle Arts and North West Leicester­shire Dis­trict Coun­cil wish to appoint a num­ber of artists, to cre­ate work to trans­form empty shops in the town centre of Coalville, N.W. Leicester­shire. Each art­work will com­pletely fill the win­dow of a shop, cre­at­ing a spec­tac­u­lar exhib­i­tion of con­tem­por­ary art.

The dead­line for this is the 11th of Janu­ary, so head over to the site, down­load the brief and get your pro­pos­als in sharp­ish. I love the idea that some of the shops that are being vacated in this eco­nomic down­turn aren’t simply being left to rot. Who wouldn’t want their small town to be turned into a huge gal­lery of con­tem­por­ary art? Bravo, Mantle Arts!

We were lucky enough the other day to have a day of Jim Medway’s time with us at NWSAD. He kindly treated us to a slideshow of his career and influ­ences thus far and then spent some time with the stu­dents. He kindly wrote up a quick note about the visit, which you can read here.

I also had the oppor­tun­ity to read through a rough draft of Jim’s new book ‘Play­ing Out’ which looks great — very excited to see the fin­ished product. It is a com­ing of age story that tells the tale of a group of kids doing what kids do; muck­ing about, which Jim cap­tures superbly. Although the story takes place in one after­noon in the Arndale Centre in the sum­mer hol­i­day, it explores the anxi­et­ies and expect­a­tions of the young­est mem­ber of the group who is in the trans­ition between ‘big’ and ‘little’ school. The after­noon that the story occu­pies in turn becomes the story of the entire sum­mer hol­i­day. Have a look at some of Jim’s mus­ings about media and this pro­ject here.

While we are on the sub­ject, have a look at Jim’s Observer entry this year, ‘Paul Crys­tal, Graphic Designer’. Bril­liant.

In cel­eb­ra­tion of the launch of the Playl­ounge site, they are run­ning a com­pet­i­tion to com­plete a six panel strip star­ted by big names such as Pater Blegvad, mr clem­ent, Tom Gauld, Jeremyville, Nathan Jurevi­cius & Kozyndan.

Get over there and enter before the 30th of Novem­ber for your chance to get some work published.

The 24 Hour Com­ics Day this year is the 3rd of Octo­ber. For those of you unfa­mil­iar with the concept of a 24-hour-comic, head on over to 24hourcomicsday to find out how it works.

The 24 hour comic chal­lenge is for a car­toon­ist to com­pletely cre­ate a 24 page com­ics story in 24 straight hours. A “24 hour comic” is any com­ics story you make while facing the chal­lenge, even if you take more than 24 consecutively-awake hours to make the comic or if you end after 24 hours with a story that’s shorter than 24 pages.

As part of the Com­ica Events this year;

Cor­rup­tion is both a cause of poverty and a bar­rier to over­com­ing it. It is one of the most ser­i­ous obstacles to erad­ic­at­ing poverty. Ctrl.Alt.Shift, the exper­i­mental ini­ti­at­ive politi­cising a new gen­er­a­tion of act­iv­ists for social justice and global change, gives you the chance to cre­ate a unique comic style story in col­lab­or­a­tion with musi­cian and writer Dev Hynes aka Light­speed Cham­pion.

Every­one should con­sider enter­ing this.