The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

John and Sandra from Glasgow’s Metaphrog have been out and about in the UK recently, with more events to come. In addition to the Bristol Comics Expo they’ve been making appearances at the Cardiff Central Library and also at Booked!, the West Dunbartonshire Festival of Words, working with eager groups of school kids: “These sessions were really fun! The kids were keen to flick through Sandra’s sketchbook and also asked some very interesting questions, such as “What’s the most difficult part of making a book?” or “How long does it take to make a book?” And of course they did fantastic drawings too.” From the various postings on the Metaphrog blog it looks like both they and the kids had a great time and it also looks as if the librarians and even someone with the daunting title of Director of Education who was present were also pretty pleased with the way the events went, which has to be good for comics if the kids are loving getting involved in them and the librarians and educators are seeing it clearly demonstrated as a good way to inspire creativity and reading among kids.

(Metaphrog’s Sandra and John at the recent Booked! festival)

Metaphrog have more events coming up in the summer, including a comics class for more school pupils as part of Hillpark Secondary’s Book Week in Glasgow on June 19th and they tell me there is a planned series of comics workshops due for later this summer in various libraries in the west of Scotland (with more details on these to follow soon, check their blog and their events page for updates). And for those of you like me who are huge fans of their wonderful (and deceptively simple looking) Louis books, the new volume, Night Salad, is progressing well; I’m really looking forward to that.

I should also mention a special project Sandra and John are involved in too – the Association for Scottish Literary Studies has asked them to make a comics adaptation of the poem The First Men on Mercury by my favourite living Scots poet, the brilliant Edwin Morgan, first ever Poet Laureate for the City of Glasgow and the first to be the Scots Makar (essentially the Scottish poet laureate). I’ve loved Edwin’s verse for years – he has a real touch of fun and delight in many of his works and he often uses space exploration and science fiction as subjects, which endears him to me even more; I’m quite keen to see what Sandra and John do with his work. The adaptation will be in the form of a four page, full colour comic which will be part of a free pamphlet being given out in Scotland in the autumn. Isn’t it nice to see the comics medium again being used to create awareness and interest in our literary heritage? While we wait for that and the new Louis though, if you haven’t seen it before why not enjoy this lovely Louis animation that got many of the school kids in the workshops all excited:

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