I was lucky enough to get to the Arne Bellstorf event last night in the Goethe Institut in Glasgow where the English language edition of Arne’s Baby’s in Black was being launched by the fine SelfMadeHero as part of a programme by the Goethe to bring German and British artists together. It was a fab night, terrific turnout (despite a sudden return to winter weather) and by the time I had to leave Arne was still happily signing away for a line of readers and it looked to me like Doug from SMH has all but sold out of all the copies of the book he had brought along. The musical and cultural explosion of the early 60s, Hamburg, art, the Beatles and a beautiful tale of young romance, a great event. Bit late by the time I was home to write much but hopefully I’ll bring you a bit more on the evening a little later. Meanwhile, London peeps – Arne will be with the London Goethe Institut this very evening, so get yourself down for a great night. The event kicks off at 6.30pm this evening at Underbar, 53 Dorset Street, details on SMH’s site.

(SMH’s Doug Wallace with one of the few copies left of Baby’s in Black, pic from my Flickr)

A reminder that tomorrow evening (Tuesday 15th March) top German comics creator Arne Bellstorf will be paying a return visit to the Goethe Institut in Glasgow, to celebrate the launch of SelfMadeHero‘s translation of his graphic biography of Astrid Kirchher and Stuart Sutcliffe, the ‘fifth Beatle’, Baby’s in Black, a book I have been very much looking forward to reading. Arne will be in the Goethe Institut, 3 Park Circus, Glasgow, from 7pm tomorrow, check the Goethe site for details and contact info to reserve a space. I was lucky enough to catch Arne last time he appeared in the Goethe in Glasgow a few years back and you can read a transcript of that event here on the blog. All being well I’m hoping to nip through to catch the event myself and will try to bag some photos.

It’s a book I am very much looking forward to reading and it also marks a return visit to Glasgow for Arne, as he was at the Goethe Institut there a few years back for an event with Glasgow’s own Metaphrog, Marc Baines and Paul Gravett which I was lucky enough to attend (you can find a transcript of Paul’s talk from the event here and from the artist’s talk here). Arne will be in Glasgow on Tuesday 15th of March at 7pm in the Goethe Institut – the event is free but space is obviously limited so it is a good idea to contact them to reserve a space in advance. I’ve been lucky enough to go through to a couple of events at the Goethe and they have always been very friendly, open and most enjoyable, well worth going out of your way for, more details and contact info can be found via the Goethe Institut site here.

The best children’s comics prize went to Nadia Budde for Such dir was aus, aber beeil dich! Kindsein in zehn Kapiteln (which the Goethe folk have thoughtfully translated for those of us who have incredibly rusty German skills as ‘pick something out, but be quick about it! Childhood in ten chapters’), Hochschule Augsburg won the best student comic publication for their  magazine Strichnin. Salleck Publications and Carlsen Comics were honoured for their German language publications of classic Will Eisner works, while the lifetime achievement award was given to French creator Pierre Christin.

(cover to Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens by Ulli Lust, published Avant-Verlag)

The Goethe article also notes this year was the first time a people’s choice award was included, with Ulli Lust winning for Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (‘today is the last day of the rest of your life’) – the work is being translated for the Italian, French, Spanish and Swedish comics markets. You can read an interview (in English) with Ulli on the Goethe site:

“Goethe: What significance do the story and the drawing have for you?

Ulli: I always start out with the content and narrative, before I even think about drawing. The drawing emerges from the content. There are draughtsmen who work very formally and produce wonderful panels. In my case, drawing always serves the narrative. If highly atmospheric images appear in my drawing, it is intentional; then this belongs to the atmosphere that must be generated. This pragmatism sometimes also results in some of my pictures looking very matter-of-fact.”

(Lewis Trondheim, Mawil and Marc Baines at the Goethe in Glasgow, overseen by Mr O and Mr I)

Okay, when I posted up the report of last week’s wonderful European comics night with Germany’s Mawil and France’s Lewis Trondheim organised by the Goethe Institut and the Alliance Français in Glasgow I teased you by alluding to some audio of the event. Mawil, Lewis and Marc Baines were kind enough to allow me to record the gig; its on a pocket recorder so its not up there in terms of audio quality with the events our friends at the Edinburgh Book Festival allowed us to borrow and share a couple of months ago, but its still listenable and you can hear the boys okay so I thought some of you might appreciate a chance to listen to it (its around an hour and a half running time roughly).

(from left to right Lewis Trondheim, Mawil and Marc Baines at the Glasgow Goethe Institut; click the pic to see the larger version on Flickr)

Marc introduced both Lewis and Mawil, before handing over to each of them so they could talk to the audience about their work. Lewis began, discussing his work from the earlier days and the autobiographical work he did (although he wasn’t too interested in talking about his earliest fanzine work, he and Mawil having both started out with ‘zine work), saying he wasn’t sure exactly why he went down that route in the beginning and suspecting the fact that friends were doing similar work probably influenced him, plus when you are the subject of your own story you have easy access to the material since you’re always around yourself. He did point out with a laugh that regarding both the early stories and the art he was ‘very young’, while Marc noted that in his earliest work you could actually see him training himself as the art develops quite clearly from the first pages to the last.

Lewis then moved on to some of his later work, moving away for a while from the autobiographical work to more ‘funny animals’ (he likes funny animals, he later said that as a child comics like the Uncle Scrooge work by the great Carl Barks were among his favourites so perhaps those left a mark on some of his own work), humorous work, abstract work (he showed a page from an abstract work which he said was a record for him, whole thing completed within two days, very simply to do), ‘silent’ comics, working with Sfar on the Dungeon fantasy tales, comics aimed at younger readers but fun for adults too like A.L.I.E.E.E.N. (he said he doesn’t really draw directly for kids as such, which may be why they work so well, most of the best children’s books writers and authors I’ve met also have a similar attitude, its how they avoid ‘talking down’ to their child readers and its probably why they are so popular with the kids who appreciate that).

(Lewis Trondheim paints for a young fan, using orange squash from the looks of it!)

As anyone who’s read even a fraction of his comics will know Lewis Trondheim has a pretty diverse body of work in terms of style, age range and content and even the form of the comics themselves; he talked about how the traditional 48-page hardback album form so beloved of the BD movement in Franco-Belgian traditional is fine but you can’t stick with it all the time or it becomes too much of a constraint on how you tell a story, how he felt the need to use different formats and lengths to be free and allow stories to breathe as each tale required rather than making every story fit into the same prescribed format even if it meant shoehorning it in (and the fun we had trying to translate that concept!). He also discusses his foray into digital comics, both talking about his own comics blogging and that of other French comics creators (something Wim has touched on here before) and also his experiment with digital content for mobile phones (which again Wim has covered here).

I asked him about the mobile phone content and he seemed a bit ambivalent about it; on the one hand it was something new to explore and he went down the route of creating new work especially for it rather than simply adapting existing comics of his. He was also insistent on making it a mobile comic, so he eschewed animation or music – its digital and mobile, but he still wanted it to be a comic. It has been translated (as most of his print works have) into numerous languages, but even so he wasn’t convinced that it would be a huge success or that it was yet a medium where you could earn a decent living. Still, one thing that came up several times was that he enjoys a challenge – he likes to try different formats and styles and forms because it keeps him interested and feeling alive and fresh and this was not just a new format for him to try but a new medium, so he wanted to try it, although whether he devotes more time to it or not is unclear. He did make it clear that, like most of us I suspect, he still prefers paper comics – “I like paper,” he stated, before adding with a smile “And I like wine. Maybe more than paper.” There will be a physical print form of the comics work he created for the mobile market at some point though.

(a page from Les Petits Riens/Little Nothings by and (c) Lewis Trondheim, borrowed from his site where you can see more)

Trondheim handed over to Mawil with “try to be funny, I know you’re German, its difficult…”, cue much laughter, not least from Mawil himself, who replied “I don’t know about funny but I have more pictures than you”, indicating the artwork on display on the walls of the Goethe. Mawil began by sharing a picture of his studio space and discussing how he normally approaches creating a comic strip, beginning with “a pencil” before changing slides to a half finished pencil and adding “this one.” More laughter; in fact laughter was pretty much a constant throughout the evening from both artists actually, they both had the audience completely forgetting the yucky weather conditions outside and it was pretty obvious both audience and the artists were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

(Mawil shows us his studio space, leading to more banter between him and Lewis regarding who had the better studio and who was more or less tidy than the other)

Mawil continued on, gamely trying to fight distractions such as Lewis leaning across the table to fiddle with the laptop controlling the projector so he could bring up some more of Mawil’s art before proceeding to zoom in on certain body parts with a mischievous grin on his face (which is usually the best place to put a mischievous grin, after all). Mawil talked us through different methods he had for creating his pages, from the aforementioned pencil for roughing out scenes and how bodies should move in them to also using a computer for some aspects of some of his work, especially colouring – “one touch and its coloured” as he remarked modestly although I’m sure everyone present would be well aware it wasn’t quite that simple.

Marc asked him about the use of certain traditional comic devices, such as the sweat drops coming off a character’s face when under stress, or speed lines. Mawil responded that he had used some of these traditional conventions and would still from time to time, but mostly tried to avoid them these days. When talking about the use of a bunny rabbit character (in fact Marc noted both artists had a minor bunny thing going on in their respective works, although I think Lewis may have killed his off now; Mawil said his use of the bunny had resulted in friends always buying him bunny related gifts and pictures which he doesn’t really need!) Mawil explained that this began when he took an existing character he thought needed something more around the head design, added bigger ears which then became bunny ears so he went with a bunny character. And the advantage of the bunny character was that he didn’t need things like speed lines as the ears are perfect visual semaphore for the character’s movements and actions – the ears can be arranged to show the character’s direction of movement when running or falling, when he’s excited or alarmed they can point straight up, when he’s tired or despondent they flop down and when he’s hurt they can go all twisted (his Meister Lampe/Sparky O’Hare is a great example of this as anyone who’s enjoyed it will know).

Mawil also talked about different formats, using the traditional four panel gag cartoon strip approach for Meister Lampe to using a nine panel layout for much of the autobiographical We Can Still Be Friends, although he added that it was necessary to play about even when remaining with a form he’d decided on like that, pointing to an example on the screen which was a page I’ve always particularly liked in We Can Still Be Friends where he sticks with nine panels for a picnic with friends scene; it is, essentially one image broken into nine panels, he said, but I thought it was a lovely design, giving in effect an overheard shot of the picnic, but where a single large image would have been adequate I think it would have been static and breaking it into nine panels leads the reader around like a clock face, a full 360 rotation, giving a feeling of movement that a single large image wouldn’t, while also allowing the artist to remain within the framework of mostly using nine panels for the story. He did feel that giving himself some layout rules before starting work could help him “sometimes if you organize some rules for yourself its easier to have ideas”.

(the picnic scene from the English language version of We Can Still Be Friends by and (c) Mawil, published Blank Slate Books)

Working for newspapers was another area Mawil talked about and how it was a different sort of discipline to have to sit down and create a strip pretty much every day for a prolonged period of time for a major German newspaper, although he seemed to have enjoyed the challenge and appreciated the fact that the editors had decided not to do what many other papers in the country did and simply buy in syndicated strips from the US such as Peanuts or Garfield but commission home-grown cartoonists to create fresh work (especially nice to hear when it seems every week brings news of more newspapers cutting back on the funnies pages as part of their economy drives).

It can also prove quite useful – Mawil told us how his bicycle was stolen. Quite an old one, but special to him since it had been his father’s bike and he’d passed it on to him. So he decided to turn it into one of his newspaper strips, with a few small panels at the top then a single large splash image of the actual bike with details and the promise of a reward. If he actually had to place a ‘lost  – reward’ notice in the paper it would have cost him money to place it in the personals ads, but here he was getting a big art page to do it and also be paid for doing it! More laughter. Lewis grins appreciatively and asks Mawil how much. Well, not a huge amount of money but enough to pay the reward if someone had come forward with the bike, he replied. Sadly the bike was never to be seen again.

For the papers he also used his strip to indulge in a personal bugbear, the enormous amount of building work going on in Berlin since the fall of the Wall and reunification (I must admit I hadn’t actually realised Mawil was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain in the old GDR, what we used to call East Germany) and the fact that this has all too often resulted in some very ugly buildings, so he made a strip about a tour of Berlin and as new structures seem to pop up everywhere his character becomes more and more agitated. I suspect many Berliners can sympathise. He also observed that his work in the paper reaches a bigger audience than his comics, which he finds useful given that the comics market in Germany isn’t as large as the one in France.

(Mawil persuses the Blank Slate edition of Sparky O’Hare)

On the subject of the Wall Marc asked him how growing up in East Germany has affected his comics reading, if all he could get were state-approved works or if Western material made it across, but it seems that some of it did cross the divide and some of the underground GDR work is also being collected and republished. In fact he’s now working on a new project about growing up in the old East Germany although he noted wryly he missed the boat a bit, he should really have planned to have that work finished and published in time for the celebrations around the 20th anniversary of the Wall being breached, but as he said next year is the anniversary of reunification so perhaps that gives him a good date to work towards to complete and issue it. Its certainly something I’d quite like to read.

All in all it was a good, long, friendly and pretty jolly session, ending with some questions from the audience; one woman asked Lewis why he didn’t have more female characters in stronger roles and he said that he wasn’t sure he could write a female character properly, perhaps, he observed, if he had been an elephant he would only have done comics about elephants before laughing again and apologising for not having enough leading women. Mawil answered quite honestly that he had plenty of women characters but he wasn’t sure if he wrote them saying and acting as real women might or if it was just how he’d like them to (more laughter), before Lewis interjected explaining it was basically impossible for them to understand women, they were a mystery (even more laughter). After the questions concluded both Lewis and Mawil were more than happy to chat to individual readers, sign books and create quick sketches (Lewis has brought along a cracking sketchbook he was happy to let everyone look through) and there was a wonderful array of work from both artists hanging on the walls to enjoy, plus some work from one of Marc’s students who, he told me, had recently signed a contract with Cape for a graphic novel in 2011 (which I’m sure we will be telling you more about in the future) and various books from both artists in English, French and German, as well as some other comics work from the libraries of the Goethe and the Alliance Français readers could peruse and Mawil’s English language works from Blank Slate, published by our own Kenny.

All in all a terrific night, well worth braving the dreadful weather for – I mean how often do we get the opportunity to see two top European comics creators like this in the UK? It was terrific to see how many other folks felt the same and defied the wind and rain to squeeze in until there was only standing room left and all of them and Mawil and Lewis seemed to really enjoy the evening. Mawil and Marc Baines are holding a comics workshop this Saturday (November 28th) at the Goethe in Park Circus, Glasgow from 11am to 1pm; you have to book it as spaces are limited, but I’m told they can still fit in one or two more people if you want to go along (details here). I’d like to thank the folks at the Goethe and the Alliance Français for putting on such a great event and inviting us all along and to Marc, Lewis and Mawil for being kind enough to let me take some pictures and record the evening. On which note I’m just testing out the audio from my small recorder and while I’m afraid its not up to the quality of the recordings the Book Festival were kind enough to let us air on here recently (not being from a direct live feed but the simple method of sitting recorder on the table and hoping for the best) it seems mostly listenable, so I’ll see if we can do something with that and hopefully post up audio of the whole thing for you to enjoy in the near future. You can see more photos from the evening on the FP Flickr here. Mawil’s own site can be found here and you can find his book on our website here; Lewis Trondheim’s site is here and there is a selection of his work on our webstore.

(cover to the English language edition of We Can Still Be Friends by and (c) Mawil, published Blank Slate Books)

On Saturday 28th from 11am to 1pm Mawil and Marc Baines will be holding a comics workshop; as with the Mawil/Trondheim event its free but space is limited so you should book first. Its not often we get visits from such respected creators from the vibrant European scene, so if you’re in town I’d highly recommend going along (I was lucky enough to attend a previous European comics lecture organised by the Glasgow Goethe folks and it was extremely interesting). Full details on the Mawil/Trondheim event can be found here on the Goethe site and how to register for the comics workshop with Mawil and Marc Baines here.

(a page from Little Nothings by and (c) Lewis Trondheim, published  NBM)