The first events in the Paul Gravett curated Comica festival at the ICA start in a couple of weeks with a packed first weekend:
EXHIBITIONS running 14th – 26th November:
Po-Com2: Potential Comics Continued:
Neal Fox, Bill Bragg, Emma Rendell and other members of Le Gun with guest artists join webcomics wizard Daniel Merlin Goodbrey to extend the gallery and online project initiated at the first Comica exhibition in 2003 and fill our long wall with a multi-path mindmap of interconnecting graphic stories.
Amputee Love! Hansi, The Girl Who Loved The Swastika! Trucker Fags in Denial! My Friend Dahmer! Mod Love! Reel at the outrageous exploitation of the world’s weirdest comics: American presidents as musclebound superheroes, warnings about the perils of smoking, communism and the A-bomb and promotions for popsicles, prunes and poultry feed.
SYMPOSIUM - Friday 14th November:
Archetypes v Stereotypes In Comics & Graphic Novels
Examining the formation and function of archetypes and stereotypes – racial, sexual, social and political – in British and American comics and graphic novels. The day explores the extent to which the images and text associated with this genre can be progressive or reactionary; do they subvert dominant stereotypes or endorse them?
TALKS:
Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie: Lost Girls - Friday 14th November
Legendary anarchist, occultist and comics writer Alan Moore is famous for his subversion of the classic American comic book genre and for groundbreaking works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. A celebrated recent work is Lost Girls, three volumes portraying the adult erotic lives of storybook characters Alice, Wendy and Dorothy who meet in a pre-World War One Austrian hotel created with the artist Melinda Gebbie. Moore and Gebbie talk about their collaboration with the writer Kevin Jackson.
Dave McKean’s Imaginings - Sunday 16th November
An indefatigable innovator, this year Dave McKean has conjured up The Graveyard Book with Neil Gaiman, The Savage with David Almond, drawing books Squink and Postcard from Paris, and Heston Blumenthal’s huge autobio-cookbook. Take a tour of his newest imaginings and his next solo comics as Dave McKean talks with illustrator Andrzej Klimowski. Followed by book signing.
Between The Panels 3 - Sunday 16th November
How do you make a graphic short story? How do you develop it into a graphic novel? To coincide with the second Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Competition, go behind the scenes to discover the methods of rising graphic novelists Hannah Berry (Britten & Brülightly), Paul Duffield (Freak Angels), Oliver East (Trains are… Mint) and Marcia Williams (My War Diary). The discussion concludes with the announcement of this year’s winners by members of the jury including The Observer’s Rachel Cooke and Jonathan Cape’s Dan Franklin. Followed by book signings.
Turning Classics Into Comics – Sunday 16th November
William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde are getting visual makeovers as graphic novels. How does prose transfer to panels? What is lost, and found, in translation? Adaptors Richard Appignanesi and Ian Edgington talk with their visualisers Mustashrik (Julius Caesar), Chie Kutsuwada (As You Like It) and Ian Culbard (Picture of Dorian Gray), and writer Jason Cobley, illustrators John M. Burns and Mike Collins reveal how they adapted Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and A Christmas Carol.
Comica 2008 runs from the 14th – 30th November 2008.
Comica 2008 – ICA website.
Comica 2008 – Paul Gravett site.
Sun, Nov 9, 2008
Comics and cartoons, Conventions and events