The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I enjoyed my first-ever trip to the Bristol International Comic Expo yesterday and indeed my first-ever visit to the city of Bristol. Finding my way from the airport into a town I don’t know I spot streams of people in black clothing, dark hair and cosplay costumes moving along the streets and realise, yes, I am obviously reading my map the correct way. When I turn the corner and spot a group of Imperial troopers posing with a local police officer I know I’ve arrived at my destination.

After travelling several hundred miles it is curiously uplifting to realise you have arrived among your fellow geeks.

The first group of fans I saw in costume, but not the last by any manner of means. Welcome to Bristol 2007.

This year’s Expo was a good mixture of the professional publishers like Rebellion and Tokyopop and a whole brace of the UK small press creators such as Accent UK (who were doing brisk business with their Zombies anthology and the graphically bold Wolfmen (which you can see a ‘trailer’ of in the comics insert in the current FPI catalogue), alongside well-known comics creators on their own stands like Ian Edginton, Bryan Talbot, Glenn Fabry, Hunt Emerson, Duncan Fegredo and others.

(Hunt Emerson creating some original art for a delighted fan)

Being at Bristol gave me a rare chance to meet folks in the flesh – our web-connected world is a great way of swapping news and keeping in touch, but it’s still nice to actually meet folks, even if Hunt Emerson surprised me by recognising me before I introduced myself – Hunt drew the terrific pirate caricatures of the FPI webteam for a Comics International advert last year and he recognised me from his sketch, despite not having met be before. This taught me two things – that Hunt has an even better eye for faces than I realised (another reason why he is such a good cartoonist, no doubt) and that I should never take up a life of crime since the moment police released an artist’s sketch of me I’d be rumbled…

Walking round the very busy con – not to mention very hot con (how some heavily costumed fans coped, I don’t know) – I bumped into a smiling Paul Grist (above), who extended greetings from New Eden to readers everywhere (and seemed very pleased with Richard’s special feature on Kane here recently – hopefully we’ll be talking to Paul again in the near future). Interspersed between the comics creators and the comics vendors I was delighted to see a number of the UK small press community, a number of whom will be no strangers to regular readers since they and their works have appeared here on the blog numerous times and also in the comics inserts we’ve featured in our last couple of catalogues, such as Trains Are Mint creator Oliver East, pictured here in the check shirt.

Seated behind the stall Oliver is leaning on is Steve from Banal Pigs, who, in addition to his comics had also brought along this terrific canvas, which I just had to get a shot of:

The UK small press contingent even boasted a genuine Eagle Award nominee in the shape of the Ventedspleen (below), who has more art exhibitions coming up in the near future – we’ll try to bring you the details when we get them.

Dropping by the Top Shelf display I was sorry I missed Chris Staros who would only be there for the Sunday, but I did get the chance to say hello to the excellent Jeffrey Brown, who kindly took a moment from signing and creating sketches to pose for the camera.

Glenn Fabry was busy creating sketches and signing for fans, but he also posed for a quick snap; Glenn was also showing some work which is intended for a forthcoming art portfolio of his work, which is something I think a lot of us will want to get a closer look at closer to publication.

Chris and Stu from top Brit small press Monkeys With Machineguns were hoping to do some live web video over the weekend, but they were having a few technical problems when I swung by their stand and appeared to be considering a literal interpretation of the term ‘computer hacking’ which involved a uncooperative machine and a large axe.

The guys did say they had recorded some video though, and would be editing and posting it online when normal service is resumed; meantime they have created a ‘virtual tour‘ of the small press folks at Bristol which you can check out, while I’ve uploaded more photographs from the Expo onto our Flickr stream for you to browse here.

The official Bristol site has some more pictures from cosplayers from Saturday to view as well; now if only they would update the information on last night’s Eagle Awards! Strangely there’s no mention of this year’s winners to be found via (much) Googling today and even Technorati turned up only a single reference – to Warren Ellis, who reports receiving a message from Brian K Vaughan to say he “won about 600 Eagles Awards… including best villain, best writer and the Roll of Honour”, but Warren seems surprised by this message and he can’t find anything up online to confirm who won what so far either (which makes me glad it isn’t my brain fried by a ridiculously early start time to fly home being unable to find the results).