The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

(Somersault is (c) Richard Cowdry; if you want to reproduce any part of it you should ask him first; click the pic for the larger version. If you’ve missed any episodes you can find all of the strips archived here)

When you click through to the larger version enjoy some of the details of the crowded Tube scene Richard’s created here; I particularly appreciated some classic old-school comics devices like the squiggly lines radiating from a stinky armpit.

Chris Lynch, esquire, one part of Monkeys With Machineguns (stalwarts on the British comics scene) has a new graphic novel, The Dark, coming out from Markosia this spring and the advance word on it is that its full of comicy goodness (check out the Geek Syndicate boys talking about the first few issues). I’m really pleased to say Chris will be celebrating the launch of The Dark in the Cardiff Forbidden Planet on Thursday the 8th of April from 5 to 6pm. MWM gun signings are always a hoot and I’m pretty sure this will be a blast too, so please do come on down and lend your support to Chris.

Sherlock Holmes – A Study In Scarlet

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Adapted by Ian Edginton and I.N.J.Culbard

SelfMadeHero

The second in SelfMadeHero’s Sherlock Holmes adaptations gets it’s release at almost the perfect time, hot on the heels of the recent big budget, and by all accounts rather entertaining movie outing with Robert Downey and Jude Law. The first in the series; The Hound Of The Baskervilles was released last year and I concluded that:

This is the Holmes of the books, all genius and cunning, relishing the problems to be solved and enjoying the thrill of the chase…. This is the Sherlock Holmes you always imagined when reading the books, this is the voice you always heard.

Study In Scarlet sees both Edginton and Culbard return to the iconic detective and if anything A Study In Scarlet is better than The Hound Of The Baskervilles – it helps that the story is less well known making the whodunnit fresher and more intriguing but both Edginton and Culbard have settled into the rhythms of the work, meaning both adaptation and art are a far more naturalistic and relaxed but effortlessly classy affair.

A Study In Scarlet is where the Holmes legend began – with Watson agreeing to take 221B Baker Street as lodgings with the elusive and mysterious Holmes. The first quarter of A Study In Scarlet is given to observing the two main players size each other up. And for non-Holmes scholars there’s so much of interest, chiefly the observation by Watson that Holmes is far from the all round genius we’ve all come to see him as:

(Watson’s analysis of Holmes’ particularly directed genius from A Study In Scarlet, by Conan Doyle, Edginton and Culbard, published by SelfMadeHero)

The deliberate decision by Edginton to stick closely to the source pays off handsomely – gone is any idea of Holmes as some omniscient genius and Watson merely his bumbling comedy relief – whilst it may be true that Holmes is a genius in many areas of knowledge, he is woefully inept in others and it is quite clear that for the majority of areas of common knowledge, it is Watson who finds himself the intellectual superior. Where Holmes’ does tower over Watson is in the study of his chosen field – chemistry, detection, criminality – a deliberate decision on his part it turns out – he considers his ideaspace too precious to allow stray knowledge on subjects not conducive to his chosen work to intrude.

After this initial sizing up of our characters, we move forward with the whodunnit. The game is afoot; there’s a murder in London, a man’s body discovered in a bloodstained room, yet there’s not a scratch on the body. Scotland Yard, as we might expect, are perplexed.

But the world’s only consulting detective is on the case. All it takes is one more murder and Holmes has the case solved. The final Act occurs post capture, with the murderer explaining his actions in flashback to a tale of love and revenge that spans continents. Both the pursuit of the murderer and his confession are full of excitement and the thrill of the deductive process. Edginton really captures everything that Conan Doyle brought to his prose so very well.

(Watson stands perplexed as Holmes carries out his work as London’s only consulting detective. Wonderfully caracatured figures,  opulent background details and even a moment or two of perfect comic timing. From A Study In Scarlet, by Conan Doyle, Edginton and Culbard, published by SelfMadeHero)

Culbard’s art, so gorgeous in The Hound Of The Baskervilles is even better here. The entire story takes place in two locations – London, with much of those scenes occuring inside 221B Baker Street, and on the parched and barren frontier salt plains of Utah. The London scenes are deliciously embellished, with Culbard’s backgrounds almost threatening to steal the show from his figure work. Almost …. but not quite, for his figures are stylish caricatures that create simple, iconic figures, instantly recognisable throughout the book. This simplicity is ever so effective and Culbard shows complete control over both page layout and pacing throughout. Even the colours are subtle yet effective – muted city browns and blues in London give way to sunset oranges and burnt umbers of Utah. And every so often there’s a slash of scarlet, as blood flows across the page, vivid and shocking.

There’s even delightful moments of comedy here – look at poor Watson’s befuddled, blank face in the panels above – that’s a trick Culbard and Edginton aren’t afraid to use when it’s called for – resulting in their audience laughing along at some impossible statement of Holmes’ or his barely concealed sarcasm and contempt for those who he considers beneath him. But he never does it with Watson, more than anything else, what we get from A Study In Scarlet is the beginnings of a great friendship based on mutual respect (although perhaps not mutual understanding) between these two iconic figures.

SelfMadeHero’s Sherlock Holmes is turning out, thanks to the combined brilliance of Mssrs Conan Doyle, Edginton and Culbard, to be a wonderfully entertaining series of books. I can heartily recommend them and I’m already finding myself lamenting the fact that there are just two more in the series after this.

Richard Bruton.

As Tom Spurgeon noted earlier this week on Comics Reporter it’s all fine and dandy when governments and other official bodies start recognizing comics for the artform that it is, and start getting involved in the organisation of comics festivals, as long as they have the money.  As was discussed marginally earlier, there were some to-and-fro’s between the organisers of the Angoulême Festival and the city of Angoulême, which refused at least initially, and at least partly, to fund those parts of the festival’s logistics that it had vouched for in the past, which nearly caused some problems and concerns for the important festival.

Next on the list, it would seem, is the Comic Salon in Erlangen, Germany.  This festival, the largest comics-themed event held in the German language, largely exists thanks to the support of the Erlangen City Council, which announced recently is to cut back its funding to a mere 50 000 Euros due to budget pressures brought on by the economic situation.  According to Bodo Birk in the Nürnberger Zeitung, this potentially may leave the festival with simply not enough to even continue to exist; we’re all concerned and waiting to see what the word will be once the organisers have absorbed the details of the cut and considered their impact.

It would be a shame to see this festival, which is slated for June, disappear, as it has had a rather impressive list of events in the past, such as exhibitions on François Schuiten, Lorenzo Mattotti, Moebius, Alex Barbier, Will Eisner, Don Lawrence, Art Spiegelman, François Bourgeon, Joost Swarte, and Ulf K.  Erlangen has also been quite instrumental in the introduction of lesser known comics, such as the Chinese Manhua, to the German public, as well as being the venue for the prestigious Max und Moritz prize. Fingers crossed something can be sorted out and the Erlangen Salon is secured to continue for many more years to come.

Leading German comics artist and creator of one of my favourite works of last year, Reinhard Kleist, has created an animated promotion for Zitty, a Berlin events magazine (”always know what’s happening”), guessing a bit like Time Out in London or The List in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The short animation also includes contributions from Mawil (our own Kenny, who publishes the English language editions of Mawil’s work, points out the monster is by Mawil and you can see the German cover of We Can Still be Friends in the clip), Fil (Didi and Stulle) and Naomi Fearn (Zuckerfish). Cool!

Jamie McKelvie created a how-to on making your own comics for Imagine FX: “In this workshop I’m going to walk you through my process for creating a page of my comic, Suburban Glamour. We’ll start with the script and end on the finished digital file, ready for printing. There are key differences between creating artwork for print and making art intended for the monitor – what looks good on screen can often print horribly. While everyone has their own methods for creating comic book artwork, there are some basic rules you have to follow to get the best out of your work.” Now Imagine FX has rather generously shared it online for free as a downloadable PDF, so check it out. (via Jamie’s Twitter)

Valerie from the British Animation Awards (BAA – hence the sheep logo they use), kindly updates me to events relating to the 2010 BAA. The BAA happens every two years in the UK and again in the run up to the announcement of the winners in April the public will get their chance to view some 35 animations in cinemas around the country and be able to vote for their favourites. Regular readers will know I usually follow the BAA and that there are often some real animation gems to be found – they cover work created for advertisers and for band’s music videos, which some of us will have seen (without knowing who actually made the animation usually) to work from fresh, new talent which rarely gets seen in cinemas these days, outside of film festivals, and that’s such a shame, because I’ve seen some lovely work, from old hands and very young total newbies on some of BAA’s DVDs and wish they would get a wider screening. Its like reading a great work from one of the independent presses and thinking, this is clever, inventive, imaginative and dammit, a lot of folks will never see it.

(Black Dog’s Progress by and (c) Steve Irwin, one of the contenders for this year’s British Animation Awards)

Well at least this year that problem will be addressed somewhat – there are no less than 27 venues taking part in screening a programme of BAA 2010 contenders throughout February: “The Public Choice awards allow the film-loving public to have a say about which animations have captured their imaginations. We’ve put together a shortlist which reflects the best and most innovative talent that the British animation industry has to offer,” BAA director Jayne Pilling. Entries range from Rhiannon Evans’ Heartstrings – “if falling in love means being tied together, what happens when you discover the length of string?” – to Manchester’s Philip Bacon with the wonderfully titled Yellow Belly End (”a man who meticulously records the deaths from an enormous cliff edge”), alongside animations created for bands like Coldplay and Gravenhurst.

(a frame from Philip Bacon’s Yellow Belly End, another of the contenders for this year’s British Animation Awards, (c) the artist)

The screenings start today and will be shown throughout February in 27 cinemas across the UK, including Belfast (Queen’s Film Theatre), Bradford (National Media Museum), Bristol (Watershed), Cardiff (Chapter Arts), Derby (QUAD), Dundee (DCA), Edinburgh (Filmhouse),  Glasgow (GFT), London (BFI Southbank), Liverpool (FACT), Manchester (Cornerhouse), Norwich (Cinema City), Wolverhampton (Lighthouse) and more. The screening dates and times will vary from cinema to cinema so check with your local venue for screenings – a full list of the various programme strands can be found here on the BAA site and there’s also a full list with links to the participating cinemas around the nation, so do consider going along and supporting some interesting Brit artists. Who knows, you may get the first glimpse of our next Nick Park. The British Animation Awards will be announced in London on April 8th.

Strip For Me: Live Static

by Douglas Noble

Self published

“It’s a horror story about love. It’s a romance about memory. It’s a dream of forgetting.”

That’s how Noble describes the 3 part Live Static – told in issues 28-30 of his Strip For Me series.

There’s a man, there’s a woman, they live together in something that may once have been a good, loving relationship. But now it all seems lost, they communicate so badly, disconnected from each other. He watches too much television, seeing programmes full of strange, apocalyptic messages, shows unlike those he’s seen before, he imagines giant spiders that reach out from behind the screen and take him inside. Is he in the middle of some sort of breakdown? Or is it something stranger?

The couple bicker, they argue, they go on holiday to a deserted beach where they continue to converse in ever increasing frustration, never really talking to each other, just going through the motions of togetherness.

And that’s just the first issue. From there it get’s stranger. Reality and fantasy begin to blur and we’re left wondering what we’re seeing. Is he hallucinating, is he divorced, are they together, does he really carry out those murderous thoughts or is he just imagining it all? Perhaps it’s all just the memories of a man who killed his love. But was it a murderously violent physical death or merely an emotional, metaphorical killing of the love they had together? That’s left to the reader to decide.

(A picture of domestic disintegration. From Live Static issue 1 by Douglas Noble)

In three issues, seventy odd pages in total, Noble tells a fascinating, compelling and really haunting story of love, loss, desperation and melancholic isolation. There’s also layer after layer of deliberately disconnected ambiguous events and nightmarish fantasy interludes that make this a difficult and confusing read – in all the best ways – intriguing enough to get me to read it three times to properly get a handle on it.

Except I’m still not sure how much of a handle I have… the first time I read it I saw something dark, dreamlike and murderous in it, the second time something tragic and telling of lost loves and a relationship beyond repair and the third time…… well, I’m just not sure.

So one thing is certain with Live Static, it’s a compelling work and Noble certainly tells his tale with depth and multiple layers, making it a haunting, complex work that demands your attention.

(Darker, stranger, more disconnected. A couple falling apart – but how will it end? From Live Static 1 by Douglas Noble)

Of course, to do this so effectively takes great skill and craft, and this makes Live Static so much more than just the story it tells – the real talent on show here is Noble’s ability to perfectly capture all the dark emotions of a couple dealing with the realisation that their love is lost and the naturalistic and dramatic dialogue he delivers through his characters. These are people you believe in, people you empathise with and people you want to understand. On top of that he adds the extra dreamlike layers of ambiguity, with that potential for something dark and nasty going on.

Or possibly I’m reading far too much into it. If so, Noble’s still managed to create a work that allows that sort of over-analysis by keeping everything uncertain and not spelled out to the casual reader. Each reading of it gave me something new, something different, some new layer and question about the events I was reading. There’s a fine line between writing difficult, complex work and writing overindulgent nonsense. Noble’s Live Static is most definitely the former, and that’s a very skilful and rare thing for a work, especially something this small, to be able to do.

Live Static is a complex, difficult, ambiguous work, but it’s an extremely rewarding one that will leave you determined to unravel it’s mysteries. It’s excellent stuff.

Unfortunately Live Static has sold out right now but Noble tells me that this year he’s planning to self-publish two books; the first containing the recent issues of Strip For Me and a new story and the second containing these three issues of Live Static and more which should be called “What We Know about Falling Apart”. Difficult but essential reading.

Richard Bruton.

The SFX Weekender was held over the weekend (well, duh!) and among the panels and cosplay and discussions and drinking there were, of course, the annual SFX awards. The Geek Syndicate boys were live-Tweeting them as they happened (thanks, Nuge) and SF Awards Watch has handily compiled them all. Neil Gaiman won the Best Novel award for The Graveyard Book, David Tennant won the Best Actor gong, although Who lost out to Supernatural for Best TV Show, a bit surprising considering its often hidden away on cable channels and has nothing like the audience figures for Who, but it does boast a very devoted following who doubtless voted their support for it. Neil Gaiman won again for the Best Graphic Comic/Novel category for Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader, which has already sparked a bit of discussion on Twitter – we all love Neil’s work and that was an interesting short tale but the best comic of the year? Really? Or was that more likely folks voting for their favourite writer rather than the best comic? And before anyone writes in to say how dare I criticise, please bear in mind I’m a huge fan of Neil’s work, but I still can’t see how that took the gong over some much more deserving works. Still, its not an SF or comics awards ceremony until we all start debating it, is it?!

(Neil Gaiman signing at last summer’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, pic from my Flickr; you can listen to audio of the entire event with Neil, Ian Rankin and Denise Mina on the blog here)

There was even more exciting Gaiman-related news from the SFX bash though – for years now its been hinted that Neil had been asked to pen a script for the ultra successful revived Doctor Who series. The thought of that made me and many others rather delighted, but so far its been only a teasing fantasy (see Pádraig’s 2008 interview with him here). Last night it came out on Twitter that Neil was indeed to write for the show at last and since Neil later said he’d given the SFX boys a scoop, as Cheryl Morgan notes that sounds like proper confirmation and later SFX posted it on their site too. Neil’s story should appear in an episode due to air in 14 months, so the second Matt Smith season by the sounds of it. Many will recall J Michael Straczynski pestering Neil for years to pen a script for his mould-breaking Babylon 5 series before it eventually happened (”Zooty – Zoot Zoot!”) with the Day of the Dead episode late in the show’s run. Well its something to very much look forward to and since Neil, like many of us of a certain age in the UK, grew up with the original show I’m guessing he’s pretty pleased about a chance to be involved with it too.

We’ve had plenty of zombie comics, movies and prose recently but here’s a short teaser trailer for A.D., a CG-animated zombie flick, directed by Ben Hibon (Codehunters) and produced by Bernie Goldmann (300), Tarik Heitmann and Renee Tab.Its currently looking for a home at a studio -- I know a lot of studios will just think no, animation = kid’s movies because they tend to think in fairly rigid ways, but I reckon plenty of adults would go along to see this if they made the whole thing. (via BoingBoing)

Simple, one panel work from Howard Hardiman’s always interesting Cute But Sad Comics site and, I thought, quite lovely:

(borrowed from Cute But Sad, by and (c) Howard Hardiman; extra brownie points for spotting where the post’s title was paraphrased from)

We really are in awards season right now and the latest this weekend were the Annies, the gongs given out to the year’s best animation works in many categories from Best Animated Feature to Best Animated Short to categories that celebrate the individual technical feats that create those animations, such as Best Animated Effects. There was strong competition in the Best Animated Feature category with Coraline and one of my faves of 2009, the Secret of Kells, in contention, but the mighty Pixar scooped them with the wonderful – and quite moving – Up. Futurama: Into the Wild, Green Yonder took the Best Home Entertainment gong, Robot Chicken’s Star Wars 2.5 got the Best Animated Short Subject award. Surprisingly Miyazaki’s latest offering, Ponyo, wasn’t in the running for the feature category (check the Annies’ site for the full list of winners). Next up for animation fans should be the BAA, British Animation Awards, which come along every two years and usually highlight some interesting work (and if you love animation you should check out some of the DVDs they have available collecting work by previous winners)

(scene from Up!, directed by Pete Docter, (c) Pixar/Disney)

This recently released movie poster for the new Losers movie does seem to point out one fundamental flaw in transferring comics to movies. No matter how good the movies are, sometimes you just can’t do it as well as the vision of an artist. It’s a great poster, iconic, striking, everything it needs to be. Except then you compare it against a similar piece by the comic’s artist Jock and you realise that it’s so far inferior as to barely be worth comparing:

By such is the way of these things. Just figured you’d like to see the comparison anyway. And it’s a nice way to be able to point out that DC have finally done the right thing and re-released the Losers Volumes 1 & 2, this time in one big 300 page volume, just in time to catch the film. Like all great comics made into movies, please, please – read the comic first.

Latest on the 69 Love Songs project – Love is like a bottle of gin by Cynthia B. Lovely, light artwork, great lyrics from the magnetic Fields song and featuring gin. What more could you want?

69 Love Songs is a webcomic project curated by Julia Scheele. Taking The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs 3 cd concept album as it’s starting point the idea is to rework each track into comic form. Well worth some of your time.

Over on his Cobblers blog Jason Cobbley has started posting finished pages from his new collaboration with artist Mitzi – a story of Keiko Panda. Keiko first appeared in Jason’s excellent Bulldog Adventure Magazine (review of the collection) and I’m hoping that the print version of this will be finding it’s way out into the world early this spring.