Comics Festival Saturday
Oct. 22nd, 2013 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWe started the day with a visit to the Clock Tower, where we acquired our wrist bands (for free access to the Clock Tower - it's recursive) and had a look round the stalls and goodies on offer, may have bought a few trinkets, had a very enjoyable chat with David Lloyd and then moved on to the Library, where Dr Mel is holding her surgery for the duration. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler and I had chosen different events for our four item season ticket, so we split up at this point, and he set off to hear Steve Bell speak while I continued to nose around the town, heading down alleyways and into charity shops, buying a leek and potato pasty for my lunch at the market (the stallholder said, oh, yes, the comics festival, maybe he should have done something about that, maybe dressed as Batman - well, next year he would!) and made my way to the Brewery just in time to catch up with durham_rambler and say hello to Bryan Talbot before joining the queue.
My first event was Sean Phillips in conversation with Peter Doherty: I liked Phillips's artwork on Sleeper, he's a patron of the festival, time to learn more.
What I found fascinating about his early career was its period charm: it felt like a story of the post-war years, not the career of somewone born in 1965. First paid work aged 13, with a regular strip in the Haverhill Echo's youth section; professional training while still at school, given a dispensation to attend an adult education class in drawing for comics (at which his art teacher was a fellow student); becoming a sort of assistant to the course tutor and ending up pencilling pages for him, published in a variety of girls' comics...
Takeaway message: the joy of comics as a collaborative medium - when you are working with someone you can trust, and who trusts you. He asks Ed Brubaker not to give him advance storylines, so that he can read and react to the scripts as a reader (and yes, occasionally this creates problems when he misses a detail which will turn out to be significant) - and Brubaker doesn't ask to see page breakdowns, but sees the finished pages as a reader.
Takeaway lesson: the fellow-professional / long-time friend / general good guy is not necessarily the ideal interviewer / interlocutor. What the session gained in relaxed and matey atmosphere it paid for in lack of focus and random time-management.
There was just time to rendezvous withdurham_rambler and find a cup of coffee with a side-order of pick-and-mix chocolate before we both joined the audience for two underground greats, Hunt Emerson and Gilbert Shelton in conversation with Kevin Jackson. The session was so full of quotable one-liners that I wished I were live-blogging it - though I'd have had no chance of keeping up. As with the sixties, to remember it would be an indication that I wasn't there...
A few moments, though. Hunt Emerson's admission that he had dropped out - but out of Art School, which isn't quite the point. Gilbert Shelton confirmed that Fat Freddy's Cat foesn't have a name - but he may be based on a real cat, who belonged to a friend in Venice, Ca. Both men talked about the early influence of MAD magazine: it was Hunt Emerson, I think, who described how you would go out into the school playground at break, and there'd be a pile of boys with a copy of MAD at the bottom. He acknowledged MAD's version of The Wreck of the Hesperus, which placed the text of Longfellow's poem alongside parodic illustrations by Wally Wood, as an inspiration for his own Ancient Mariner, which delighted me, because I have vivid memories of that particular strip ("Not pillows! Billows!").
Takeaway message: Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope - no, no-one actually said this, but once the conversation touched on the continuing relevance of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, it popped into my head and wouldn't pop out.
Takeaway lesson: is a variant of the preceding lesson. If your presenter, however much he admires the work of both artists, is an old friend and long-term collaborator of Artist A, who also shows every sign of being naturally the more outgoing, you probably aren't going to get the best out of Artist B. Unless designing the Official Festival Beer counts.
We returned to the hotel for a brief intermission before the evening event, and to drop off the day's purchases: what could I have bought that was so heavy? Naturally, this was the cue for a complete downpour - and as we had followed an interesting side-alley, which might have been a short cut but wasn't, we found ourselves crossing the river on a very exposed footbridge, and then walking along the edge of the sports field, while the skies hurled cold water at us.
It's all part of the Lake District experience.
Thanks to the heated towel rail in our bathroom,durham_rambler's map-researching skills and the fact that the rain had stopped, it was a pleasant stroll beside the river to the Abbot Hall Gallery for a panel discussion on why the French regard comics as the ninth art, why we don't, and what are the other eight anyway?*
This was to have been chaired by Rachel Cooke, who had been obliged to cancel, so Mary Talbot had been drafted at the last minute, and managed the discussion with great fairness and charm, and a very light touch. So we had less a rigorous brains' trust, more the very best sort of dinner-table conversation, and I don't think we lost anything by it. The panel were Posy Simmonds ("I have elves!"), Paul Gravett (who read to us from Wordsworth on the iniquities of combining words and pictures), Bryan Talbot, Cape editor Dan Franklin and Joe Sacco (whom I would never have recognised from the self-portraits in his work).
Takeaway message: I got the final question from the floor, and - since two of the three practising comics artists on the panel (I exclude the chair) work exclusively solo, and Bryan Talbot substantially so - asked whether we would have had a different view of whether comics are art if we had a penel of creators who work mainly collaboratively? Dan Franklin simply said "Yes!" which I liked. Bryan and Paul Gravett talked about the fragmentation of the work into a sort of industrial model as being a comparatively recent phase historically: which is interesting, but for what it's worth, I do see the strengths of collaboration as well as its compromises. (And laughed about this the following morning, when I saw the breakdowns Bryan has been doing for Sally Heathcote, Suffragette - from Mary's scripts, for Kate Charlesworth's finished art.)
Takeaway lesson: don't know. Should have had me on the panel?
*I believe that the eighth is cinema, tacked on to the medieval seven liberal arts (Wikipedia has a lovely picture), though I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the notion had now been retrofitted with a list of activities which a modern person would recognise as arts...
durham_rambler and I had chosen different events for our four item season ticket, so we split up at this point, and he set off to hear Steve Bell speak while I continued to nose around the town, heading down alleyways and into charity shops, buying a leek and potato pasty for my lunch at the market (the stallholder said, oh, yes, the comics festival, maybe he should have done something about that, maybe dressed as Batman - well, next year he would!) and made my way to the Brewery just in time to catch up with durham_rambler and say hello to Bryan Talbot before joining the queue.My first event was Sean Phillips in conversation with Peter Doherty: I liked Phillips's artwork on Sleeper, he's a patron of the festival, time to learn more.
What I found fascinating about his early career was its period charm: it felt like a story of the post-war years, not the career of somewone born in 1965. First paid work aged 13, with a regular strip in the Haverhill Echo's youth section; professional training while still at school, given a dispensation to attend an adult education class in drawing for comics (at which his art teacher was a fellow student); becoming a sort of assistant to the course tutor and ending up pencilling pages for him, published in a variety of girls' comics...
Takeaway message: the joy of comics as a collaborative medium - when you are working with someone you can trust, and who trusts you. He asks Ed Brubaker not to give him advance storylines, so that he can read and react to the scripts as a reader (and yes, occasionally this creates problems when he misses a detail which will turn out to be significant) - and Brubaker doesn't ask to see page breakdowns, but sees the finished pages as a reader.
Takeaway lesson: the fellow-professional / long-time friend / general good guy is not necessarily the ideal interviewer / interlocutor. What the session gained in relaxed and matey atmosphere it paid for in lack of focus and random time-management.
There was just time to rendezvous with
durham_rambler and find a cup of coffee with a side-order of pick-and-mix chocolate before we both joined the audience for two underground greats, Hunt Emerson and Gilbert Shelton in conversation with Kevin Jackson. The session was so full of quotable one-liners that I wished I were live-blogging it - though I'd have had no chance of keeping up. As with the sixties, to remember it would be an indication that I wasn't there...A few moments, though. Hunt Emerson's admission that he had dropped out - but out of Art School, which isn't quite the point. Gilbert Shelton confirmed that Fat Freddy's Cat foesn't have a name - but he may be based on a real cat, who belonged to a friend in Venice, Ca. Both men talked about the early influence of MAD magazine: it was Hunt Emerson, I think, who described how you would go out into the school playground at break, and there'd be a pile of boys with a copy of MAD at the bottom. He acknowledged MAD's version of The Wreck of the Hesperus, which placed the text of Longfellow's poem alongside parodic illustrations by Wally Wood, as an inspiration for his own Ancient Mariner, which delighted me, because I have vivid memories of that particular strip ("Not pillows! Billows!").
Takeaway message: Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope - no, no-one actually said this, but once the conversation touched on the continuing relevance of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, it popped into my head and wouldn't pop out.
Takeaway lesson: is a variant of the preceding lesson. If your presenter, however much he admires the work of both artists, is an old friend and long-term collaborator of Artist A, who also shows every sign of being naturally the more outgoing, you probably aren't going to get the best out of Artist B. Unless designing the Official Festival Beer counts.
We returned to the hotel for a brief intermission before the evening event, and to drop off the day's purchases: what could I have bought that was so heavy? Naturally, this was the cue for a complete downpour - and as we had followed an interesting side-alley, which might have been a short cut but wasn't, we found ourselves crossing the river on a very exposed footbridge, and then walking along the edge of the sports field, while the skies hurled cold water at us.
It's all part of the Lake District experience.
Thanks to the heated towel rail in our bathroom,
durham_rambler's map-researching skills and the fact that the rain had stopped, it was a pleasant stroll beside the river to the Abbot Hall Gallery for a panel discussion on why the French regard comics as the ninth art, why we don't, and what are the other eight anyway?* This was to have been chaired by Rachel Cooke, who had been obliged to cancel, so Mary Talbot had been drafted at the last minute, and managed the discussion with great fairness and charm, and a very light touch. So we had less a rigorous brains' trust, more the very best sort of dinner-table conversation, and I don't think we lost anything by it. The panel were Posy Simmonds ("I have elves!"), Paul Gravett (who read to us from Wordsworth on the iniquities of combining words and pictures), Bryan Talbot, Cape editor Dan Franklin and Joe Sacco (whom I would never have recognised from the self-portraits in his work).
Takeaway message: I got the final question from the floor, and - since two of the three practising comics artists on the panel (I exclude the chair) work exclusively solo, and Bryan Talbot substantially so - asked whether we would have had a different view of whether comics are art if we had a penel of creators who work mainly collaboratively? Dan Franklin simply said "Yes!" which I liked. Bryan and Paul Gravett talked about the fragmentation of the work into a sort of industrial model as being a comparatively recent phase historically: which is interesting, but for what it's worth, I do see the strengths of collaboration as well as its compromises. (And laughed about this the following morning, when I saw the breakdowns Bryan has been doing for Sally Heathcote, Suffragette - from Mary's scripts, for Kate Charlesworth's finished art.)
Takeaway lesson: don't know. Should have had me on the panel?
*I believe that the eighth is cinema, tacked on to the medieval seven liberal arts (Wikipedia has a lovely picture), though I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the notion had now been retrofitted with a list of activities which a modern person would recognise as arts...
