Less than two months to go before this years Thought Bubble Festival, but things are certainly falling into place. The anthology Thought Bubble comic is due out at the start of November in all good comic shops, the guest  list is growing ever longer with highlights including Posy Simmonds, Tim Sale, Adam Hughes, Jeff Lemire, Cameron Stewart, Becky Cloonan, Ben Templesmith, Dave Gibbons, Bryan & Mary Talbot and many, many more.

But this week the folks behind the show announced a full (very, very full) programme of events across the week of the Leeds Comic Art Festival and particularly for the two day comic convention.

During the week Thought Bubble have commissioned Matt Sheret and Kristyna Baczynski as their writer and artist in residence, collaborating on a story for the 2012 Thought Bubble anthology, and doing so in public each day. Sheret also hosts the We Are Words + Pictures Independent Publishing Forum on Saturday 19th Nov.

There are cinema screenings all week, including the Anime Colourful, Mars, Waltz With Bashir, Persepolis, Children Who Chase Voices From Deep Below, Milocrorze, Detroit Metal City and culminating in a double header of Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods and Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts on Fri 18th.

But the events schedule really kicks in over the 2-day convention - I count 39 different things just on the Saturday and Sunday. A busy, busy time.

There are various comic launches across the weekend, and we’ll try and feature many of those in the run-up to the festival, but they include Blank Slate’s Nelson charity anthology, Timebomb’s Dick Turpin and the Crimson Plague, Unseen Shadows’ Tales Of The Fallen, Metaphrog’s Louis Red Letter Day – and I’m sure many more will be announced leading up to the weekend.

As you’d expect there are a great number of fun events for all-ages at Thought Bubble as well. Molly’s already volunteered to be part of Sarah McIntyre’s Crazy Pirate Fun Drop-In Art Workshop (hopefully Sarah wont mind!), Hexjibber have their colouring in art installation, Cinebook are running a French masterclass, there’s a young people’s storytelling workshop and of course there will be the Cosplay Masquerade.

There will also be various comic panels including a Tim Sale Legends panel, Blank Slate presents Nelson, Bryan Talbot in conversation, Nobrow press and SelfMadeHero on publishing, an talk on all things Alan Moore by Gary Spencer Millidge, and lots more besides.

Head to the Thought Bubble website for all the details. And I shall see you there.

Then the Internet came along. And suddenly everything changed, and anything no matter how obscure, is there somewhere, a Google search away.

A recent post on The Comics Journal site pointed out that Ben Towle has posted James Sturm and Art Baxter’s response to Scott Mccloud’s Understanding Comics that originally ran in The Comics Journal 211 (1999). Well worth a read for the alternative take on McCloud’s work, and make sure you read the notes from Sturm and Baxter. The whole thing is at the link, but here’s page 1:

We first mentioned this a few weeks ago….. but Hugh Raine sent out a press release with a few more details, a couple more names…..

“In keeping with previous events, our small but perfectly formed event hopes to bring you some of the best Northern, alternative comics makers, print-makers and illustrators, who will be selling their wares in the quirky, relaxed bar on Cookridge Street.

Don’t like comics? There’ll be lots more on offer, such as craft wear, badges, art and music.

We are also reintroducing the communal table, giving non-exhibitors the chance to bring their comics along to sell. All we ask is that you help man the table for a short period of time.

The event will run from 12 noon until 5pm and is FREE to enter! So come along, have a browse, a chat, a drink and a fish finger sarnie!”

Repeat guests include old boys and girls Steve Tillotson (Banal Pig), Hugh “Shug” Raine (REET! Comics), Gary Bainbridge, Andy Waugh, Gareth Brookes, Helen “Memo” Entwisle, Huw “Lem” Davies, Ben Clark, Kristyna Baczynski, Geof Banyard (Fetishman).

And there’s a few newbies as well: James Downing (COUK), Jim Medway, Isaac Lenkiewicz, Kelly Walton, Bob Milner (Milk Two Sugars) and “a cameo appearance” from Darryl Cunningham, of Psychiatric Tales fame.

More details as and when here and on the Leeds Alternative Comics Fair website.

So when you see Evan Shaner do a six panel piece on Captain Marvel (below) and then read Mike Maihack’s reasoning for his fantastic Supergirl/Batgirl strip you see a pattern about to develop. Nate Cosby seems to be to blame for these though – coming up with a great little idea.

Nate Cosby:

“…sometimes when I like to take a pre-established character I like and write a little monologue for them. Helps me get in the mood to delve into characterization with “someone” I’m familiar with. This is handy, because the majority of what I write features characters I’ve created myself. Helps to see how other characters are built…I use the dialogue exercises as inspirational blueprints.”

Here’s a couple of these monologues:

“Just took all your money. The accounts in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and China. Canceled every credit card. I also gave your child up for adoption, started a viral campaign that strongly implies you killed your best friend when you were 18 (of COURSE I included pictures), posted your phone number on the front page of USA Today and as of 12 seconds ago the FBI database shows you as the 14th most wanted man in America.
So please. By all means. Keep underestimating me.”
— Oracle (if I wrote Oracle)

“It’s very simple: Superman is cancer. He exists through no fault of our own, developing into a bigger and more dangerous influence on our way of life, choking the normal. He’ll kill us. All of us. No one sees this.
But I do. I see the progression. And I have the tools to surgically remove him. Cancer doesn’t deserve mercy. It deserves the knife. And nothing more.”
— Lex Luthor (if I wrote Lex Luthor)

Evan Shaner:

Nate Cosby, the writer I’m working with on Buddy Cops, has been doing these small quotes from different characters as if he were writing them. After begging him to do one for Cap, he wrote this. Taking a quick break the other night, I thought this would be fun to adapt to a 6-panel comic and practice a little “acting”.

Mike Maihack – not quite sticking to the monologue, but when the duologue is this cool, we’ll let it go eh?

So Evan “Doc” Shaner drew this nifty little 6-panel Captain Marvel comic based on this monologue his Buddy Cops collaborator Nate Cosby wrote. I casually mentioned that it looked like a great exercise and that it would be fun to draw one. And then Nate Cosby wouldn’t stop bugging me until I drew a Supergirl/Batgirl one. So here you are Nate! Hope you like (you really didn’t have to twist my arm that much).

So…. who’s next to do it with text or pictures then?

By Steve Orlando, art by Chaz Truog

Poseur Ink

I mentioned this a while back, along with another post where I banged on about Octobriana, the made-up heroine of the Russian people.

Since getting a copy of Petr Sedecky’s “Octobriana And The Russian Underground” from Dudley library as a boy I’ve been intrigued by the character and the story of her creation. So every time something comes along in comics featuring her, I’m inclined to have a look.

The latest Octobriana comic is the just released Octobriana: Samizdat Edition graphic novel, an 88pg graphic novel, deliberately presented in classic newsprint form to mimick the samizdat movement in the old USSR. And, as you might expect, especially if you know anything about Octobriana, it’s an adults only thing, where Octobriana spends a lot of time sans clothes, especially during the first part.

This Octobriana story takes place in a slightly different Russia of 1968, where a psychic  ”thought-plague” is ravaging the country, driving passion beyond reason and setting lovers against each other in a murderous rage. And it’s all being caused by one woman, locked in a Siberian gulag, lashing out in vengence with her psychic powers

It’s up to Octobriana to stop her, free the Russian people and allow everyone to get naked without fear. Or something like that.

It all kicks off when the psychic’s attack possesses one of Octobriana’s lovers, who attacks and nearly the other man in her love triangle. With this, she’s on the trail, and the remaining chapters of the book rather fly by, as she ventures out on a very enjoyable adventure to find and confront the psychic, and in doing so, confront her own mythological nature.

Truog’s art is, like Octobriana herself, an old, familiar thing, that I’m inclined to be more forgiving over than perhaps I should. His art is associated with two series that got me at just the right moment; Steve Englehart’s Coyote and Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

And it’s very much what I remember, open, loose, a good storyteller but sometimes guilty of some bad faces or poses. And all the way through, I can’t get over the fact that she’s just been prettied up a little too much, and has lost the unique look that I love. But the thing is, for every bad panel, for even the occasional bad page, every so often Truog will pull something really lovely out, and all is forgiven:

The very nature of Octobriana lends itself to making her exactly what you want her to be – and that’s what Orlando and Truog have done here. And it includes creating a long backstory for the character, going so far as to raise her to Godhood, connect her to the ancient Egyptian Pantheon and use that throughout her search for the psychic in Siberia. And although it works very well in the context of the story they’re telling, there’s something that didn’t sit right with me, I prefer my Octobriana mysterious and elusive. I don’t want to know her origins, don’t want to undertand her motives, her past, just want to experience her adventures.

But my dislike of that particular aspect of Octobriana: Samizdat is merely my own personal prejudices and preferences for the character I consider in some way my own. The beauty of the character is that everyone has the chance to feel that way, so I can hardly object too much to Orlando and Truog’s version, can I?

In the end, no matter my gripes and small problems, Octobriana is such a great character that I really enjoyed reading her exploits once more, and hopefully I’ll be telling you all about the next incarnation of the character. It should tell you a lot when I end by saying that if Orlando and Truog keep going with their series I’ll be reading along and enjoying it. She may not quite be my Octobriana, but she’s a fine version.

For further information on her long and interesting history head to the Octobriana Online site.

You can buy the newest edition through the Poseur Ink site by itself for $3.00, or a combo pack of the graphic novel and a previous volume for $5.75.

Then the finished page, fully coloured – have a look to see what changed as Luke worked on the artwork:

(both pages by and (c) Luke Astorigin, to be published Blank Slate Books)

The Photographs is a short comic work by Sandra and John of Glasgow’s Metaphrog (home of the gorgeous Louis graphic novels, which I adore). The guys explained to us that The Photographs is the result of a commission by Glasgow Life and is a response to a series of workshops they did with groups of teens in drop-in centres in the east end and senior citizens in day care centres around the city. As part of it Metaphrog gave a talk recently at the Growing Bolder Intergenerational Art Festival for Glasgow’s Active Ageing Week 2011 in the CCA in the city. It is a short but emotionally touching piece; I found the final image especially moving. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it is a simple but highly effective image that reminded me strongly of the loss of my grandfather, a long time ago because I remember almost the same image when we went over to check his house after we’d lost him, which drove it home to me he was really gone, that there was an empty space where once there was someone I loved. And that one drawing there cut right through those decades to bring that memory right to the surface right now and I find myself blinking away furiously. The Photographs has been printed as an A6 booklet, but you can also read it online on Metaphrog’s site here.

(above and below: pages from The Photographs by and (c) Metaphrog; top cover for The Photographs)

On related Metaphrog news the guys tell me that they contributed a short article recently about some of the comics which have inspired them for Word Up, the online newsletter from Edinburgh City Libraries:

“Neither of us were comic collectors or what might be considered typical comic fans but we both enjoyed reading comics, in much the same way as we would enjoy reading literature, listening to music or watching films.

As a teenager, Sandra was able to borrow Bande Dessinée, from her local libraries. And although in France BD are a bigger part of the culture, and comics is seen as the 9th art, in truth: they still are not taken particularly seriously – even viewed with some suspicion and snobbery by the art world. This probably attracted us to comics.

We had both grown up in parallel reading the Adventures of Tintin. Hergé’s books are classic page turners and still feel incredibly modern.

I was already aware of other European creators such as Moebius, Hugo Pratt, and Tardi, but Sandra introduced me to a whole array of new artists such as Enki Bilal and Comès.

As we started experimenting, making the comic stories that would eventually become Strange Weather Lately, we read and tried to understand the particular dynamics of the comic form, discovering and rediscovering books and comics through each other’s eyes.

Old, battered copies of Zippy and Yow were comics I was reading when we met. Created by Bill Griffith – and famous for the phrase “Are we having fun yet?”  – the character Zippy the Pinhead is almost Dadaist.”

I am liking this Beatles/Doctor Who mash-up, the various incarnations of the Doctor meets the Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road album cover. Found on the Beatlemaniac’s Tumblr, via Gallifrey Panic Moon. Sadly as seems to be common on a lot of Tumblr blogs no artist info included – as ever if anyone knows who it was let me know so we can credit them)