Massive Space Banana Invasion - a week of comics by kids in Hull

Ten different groups of kids across five days in ten different libraries? That's what I call a solid week's work. Thankyou to Hull Libraries for making it possible. Look at all of these comics. See, there's more...

I have definitely never worked in as so many different libraries in one city before. I don't know if I would have thought there were that many libraries in a city the size of Hull. But I am happy to confirm they are, and their kids make comics that look like these.

Greenwood and Gypsyville libraries on the Monday started off a worrying trend, whereby between 15 and 20 kids had put their names down for the class, but only 5 and 7 respectively turned up. They had fine classes between them and produced sterling comics, but it was a shame I wasn't working with a larger group.

The low attendance continued at The Freedom Centre and Bransholme Library, where I was realising how glad I was to be on a fixed fee rather than a doorsplit for this week's classes. They were, of course, free for the kids to attend. But as often happens when that's the arrangement, it costs the parents nothing to forget about it and take the kids somewhere else instead. So it was that, after two days, we were averaging 6 kids per class.

Waudby library stands in the middle of a wasteland, within sight of Hull Kingston Rovers' stadium. Hull can be a funny place to look at sometimes. It was, for a few days, also quite a smelly one. I'd arrived during the annual stinky period, which no-one can quite explain but seems to be a regular occurence whereby, as a possible result of farmers spreading muck in the surrounding areas, Hull smells like a mix of poo and BO. Most unpleasant, and exacerbated by us being at the end of the longest uninterrupted heatwave for fifty years. Anyway, smell notwithstanding, the classes at Waudby and East Park managed only half a dozen pupils apiece I'm afraid.

The classes at Fred Moores Library and Western Library managed to reach the two extremes of the week, bringing our biggest audience at Fred's, a dozen kids, and my smallest ever at Western, just three. This day, the Thursday, also saw the arrival of the long awaited rain which washed away the smell. So there was that.

I can confirm Hull has more libraries than the ten I worked at this week, because the one I was scheduled to be at on Friday morning, Avenue, suffered a fire so I did my class instead at Central Library, for the usual five kids. In the afternoon, at Lighthill library, there were 4 kids. Meaning that, across the week, I'd presented my Comic Art Masterclass to a total of 60 kids. Which is, of course, the amount I'll usually teach in a day in a school. The classes were of course marvellous fun for everyone involved, and I'm really pleased Hull had me in to do them. I just wish I'd been able to offer them more bang for their buck and sent a few hundred kids away happy. 

The celebrities these ten groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were Taylor Swift, Tom Holland (three times), Cristiano Ronaldo, Tony Hawk (not the Radio 4 one, the skateboarding one),  old creepy evil Michael Jackson, Ariana Grande, Shakira, and I Show Speed.

My Books And Where To Find Them...

Romeo & Juliet (Colour)	Romeo & Juliet (bw)	Richard The Third (Colour)	Richard  The Third (bw)
Shakespeare Omnibus	Findlay  Macbeth	Prince of  Denmark Street	Midsummer Night's  Dream Team
Tales From Bible (Col)	Tales From Bible (bw)	Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories	Space Elain
Book Of Esther	Who Notes	Shakespeare comic	Kids Comics Annual 2027
Kids Comics Annual 2026	Kids Comics  Annual 2025	Socks Do Shakespeare	Colouring Books

Moaning about TV and other August Facebook waffle

Aug 5. I rarely buy comics, and can’t remember when I last sent off for any. But last week I bought three copies of Master Of Kung Fu (by Paul Gulacy and Doug Moench) on eBay to complete this run, from 1976 which I’d started rereading for the first time probably in fifty years, having seen me mention them in my teenage diary.

Turns out I never had the complete run of this story, so I’m reading it for the first time and it’s brilliant. So influential on me at the time. Yet I was never such a fan or completist that I bothered to get the three missing issues

Not that I could have at the time. In 1976 we had no comic shop, I wouldn’t see my first until later that year, and wouldn’t see my first fanzine with ads for back issues till the following year. By which time I’d moved on to something else, like you do at that age.

Anyway, should you be able to get your hands on them, highly recommended Master Of Kung Fu numbers 44 to 50.

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Aug 6. This week in Ai: Well this is a rum do. I wanted to read this article in the Guardian about video director Tim Pope, but I had to drive to work, so I chose the Listen To This Article option

It’s read by Ai.

For the most part it sounds like a plummy voice over artist reading the words, but every now and again it puts the emphasis on the wrong word, and in some parts, eg a exchange of dialogue between two people, turns it into gibberish. It clearly is not checked or corrected. It’s given to Ai to read, and another nail is hammered in the lid of the voice over talking book industry. By The Guardian.

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So sad to see Leicester Comedy Festival go. But isn’t it amazing how long it’s lasted? Has there been anything like it before or since it started?

Since I first put a show on at LCF in 2001 I’ve also performed at dozens of other “comedy festivals”, most of them a collection of Edfringe Previews desperate for a gig in the summer, and almost all of them winding up after two or three years at the most. Glasgow is the nearest rival to Leicester, for quality and longevity (Edinburgh doesn’t count, different kettle of fish)

I hope Leicester City Council manage to pull something together for next year. I’ll definitely be performing there if they do. Will you?

PS: Fringe Festivals are another whole story, and I’ve written screeds about them over the years. Starting with Edinburgh, they grew in the 60s, boomed in the 70s, and didn’t really get taken over by comedy till the 90s. But they remain, at heart, theatre and art festivals. Leicester was the first actual Comedy Festival, something we must never forget.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4kqvdggg5o

Aug 2. I actually have a real fear of loss at the threat of them turning off Freeview. Having a TV that you can just turn on and instantly get a choice of hundreds of channels, starting with BBC1 and working up from there, is one of the simplest and greatest things we have.

And WiFi-only telly is a living hell!

I say this as I wake up in my second hotel this week that has a WiFi only telly. Your only choice is apps. Which, if you don’t already subscribe to them, you can’t use. And if you settle for nice reliable iPlayer, you are then a hostage to the WiFi. Which, if it’s dodgy, which of course it is, you’re buggered. You’re sat in silence

No Talking Pictures TV? No pressing “707” and listening to 6 Music? No BBC Breakfast with an actual clock reminding you what the time is? How do people live without these vital lifelines?

And don’t get me started on LG’s own channels! What is this hell on earth supply of Only Stuff You’d Never Want To Watch?

Is there an app you can put on a WiFi tv that gives you all the live Freeview channels to scroll through?

(above) What’s a good way of making my email look like it’s a) not spam and b) written by a human?

I know, I’ll begin with “Hey team (insert performers name)”

And I’ll be from a company called Capture Accounting. Cos the name Phishing Accounting was taken.

Happiness is: the library that makes special Evaluation Sheets with your picture on. Which all the kids then fill out with 5 stars all asking for the class to be longer. Sorry kids, I charge by the second.

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Aug 3: on seeing poll from Clacton

I knew the pro-Binface commentary on my FB was a bit skewed, cos everyone comes from Camden and Brighton and no one from Clacton. But blimey I never realised how wide of the mark all the “Binface could win” posts actually were.

Well, we had fun while it lasted. Christ Clacton is a cesspool of racists.

Aug 11. A report from the chalkface of kids summer holiday art classes: they don’t do the “6-7” hands anymore. Apart from the occasional outlier, usually young or less hip, they’ve totally stopped doing the hands. I know cos I’d incorporated it into my routine. I’ve now dropped that bit.

This gives me hope that right wing radicalisation could go the same way. They’ve always struck me as similar, the knee-jerk reaction to “woke” (and all the nonsense that extends from that, from transphobia to stop the boats) is like 8 year olds doing the 6-7 hands. They don’t really know why they’re doing it, and their explanations never stand up to logic and reason, but they do it every time.

Watching the “Nigel” voters in Clacton, and Maga heads, it’s the same thing. They’ve got a head full of 6-7 hands, and they could forget it all, like waking from a dream

Imagine, it could go the same way as hating all Argentinians, or Libyans - remember when they were the bogeymen? Or anti-vaxxers, whatever happened to them? Gosh, it could even be like trying to find a nazi in 1950s Germany.

We can hope.

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Aug 9. It was quite the week for comicons this weekend. Am I right that I just missed MCM in Birmingham, Caption in Oxford, and the Wales Comic Con all this same weekend?

Me, I was doing classes in Rickmansworth, Rochester and Chatham, after which I ended up selling just one fewer book than I'd sold last weekend at the Liverpool Book Fest, and I got paid for the classes too.

Still, it would have been good to get to those cons I missed. Remember when there was just one con a year? Three every weekend is giving me Lake Fomo

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Aug 12. An eclipse, you say? I am reminded of the last one, glimpsed from Clevedon seafront. Ruined by some idiot who played Total Eclipse of the Heart from his car radio at full blast for the duration.

Also I tried to film it on a video camera with the exposure set on automatic. So as the sky darkened, it opened the aperture more. The result, a film where people stand on a seafront and then nothing happens.

To the sound of Bonnie Tyler

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Top tip for wearers of Meta Pervert Specs: you can look directly at the eclipse right the way through.

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Aug 14. Oh well done Welsh Government. This alert just came up in all our phones. In Welsh only. Cannot find an English translation. I assume if we don’t speak Welsh we just have to burn (or whatever its warning against)

That alarm made me drop my crepe suzette just as it was flambé-ing. Luckily it went over next door’s hedge, and they’re out. Phew.

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Aug 15. I hate to share the Daily Hate, but because it’s free on BorrowBox I occasionally read it, to see how the other half think. (Usually evil things, about ‘woke’). Here’s a classic from yesterday’s edition: Ian Botham has an explanation for the wildfires. You’ll never guess what. Go on, have a guess.

Is it global warming? Of course not, remember where you’re reading this.

Is it lack of police? Lack of things for teenagers to do in rural areas? Pure bad luck and coincidence?

No. Ian Botham explains that the cause of the wildfires is… rewilding.

Yes, everything’s burning because we’ve made more stuff to burn. Why did no one else spot this genius solution?

Moron

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On the death of Jason Arday: How the right behave. Just one right wing publication (out of many) hounding just one man, I believe the correct term would be “disproportionately”

A pile on. Bullying.

Try and excuse it how you will. Bring up “but what about the left and Ann Widdecombe” as much as you like. This is how bullies behave.

This is how bullies who would like to pretend they’re not in the slightest bit racist behave. Remember all of their names and be slow to forgive them.

Last night I found on YouTube and watched, for the first time in 51 years, episode one of Rock Follies. I loved it.

It’s very much of its time, but lots of the humour still works and it makes we want to keep watching the rest of the series.

I loved it at the time, though I was a bit young to understand a lot of the adult content, and bought both of the albums, which I also still love.

I don’t know whether this is a legit upload, and whether the rights owners get paid. I know with a lot of YouTube these days that actually happens, so I’d like to hope that’s the case here. If not, I apologise. However I pay for YouTube, so I hope someone who deserves it (and is still alive) is getting their share.

Recommended.

How you know you need new pencils: when you start sharpening your own name off.

Aug 17. Just answered a question in a comics group, then discovered I wasn’t a member of that group! So my waffle is about to disappear into the ether. Before it does, here’s my answer to the question “why are comics taken more seriously in the US than the UK?”

I’d say culture. In the US their newspaper strips were always a bigger part of everyone’s life, while they were much more downplayed here. Similarly we had a very big snobbery about comics being for kids (ie nursery comics and The Beano) and an insistence on kids growing out of them, while the US (& Europe) was developing comic books for older readers in the 1960s.

In the 60s and 70s you get the first academic and high brow coverage of comics as culture, and this is much bigger in US and Europe, much smaller in UK.

Likewise underground comics which are at the heart of counter culture in the US, and much less here.

So by the 80s when you get Raw, Speigelman, Burns and the Miller and Moore graphic novel explosion, you have a generation of intelligent grown ups who accept comics as a part of literature and high culture, which is pretty much the opposite of the situation in the UK where any press coverage will still be from the standpoint of The Beano and “smash pow” sound effects.

Hence the 21st century, where comics had never become anything bigger than a minority interest in the UK but had long been a familiar staple in the US.

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Aug 17 Anyone else make the mistake of trying to drive up the M6 this afternoon? My original eta in Wigan, from Chepstow, was 5:52.

After passing a nasty smash and a completely closed bit of motorway that took 4 hours to get off, I finally arrived at 9:55. A nearly nine hour drive, which satnav tells me I can do in three hours home if I set off now.

Worst thing about missing University Challenge and Only Connect is I’ve already seen a couple of spoilers. Eeh, is there no end to my #firstworldproblems?

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Aug 19: What’s the difference between manga and comics?

I want to see these classes. I have a real problem defining the difference between manga and western comics. And remember I teach comics. A lot.

When kids and teachers ask me what’s the difference between manga and comics, what should I tell them?

How do you explain the difference, fellow comic makers?

(many comments follow, might need new thread)

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Aug 21. The good news? I recently discovered reading papers on BorrowBox and just found the Washington Posts’s daily spread of all the latest newspapers strips!

The less good news? They are mostly shit.

But free. Get them while you still can, kids!

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Watched an excellent movie last night, The Player. And good luck trying to do the same yourself.

Ever since loving The Studio last year, which is very much inspired by The Player, we’ve wanted to watch Robert Altman’s dark comedy classic again, having seen it in the cinema thirty years ago. But could we find it anywhere? No streamers have it, it’s not on YouTube, and when I looked online for DVDs they all had silly prices. For the last year I’ve been scouring the charity shop shelves hoping a copy would turn up.

Then last week I looked again on eBay and found a copy, pristine and still in its shrink wrap, for a fiver. Sometimes you just have to wait.

Coincidentally Marina Hyde mentioned it on this week’s The Rest Is Entertainment, and recommended it as an example of a movie with a certain plot feature (no spoilers, though if you listen to the episode, that whole item is spoiler central). Someone ought to tell her it’s nearly impossible to see.

Anyhow, if you can, watch the brilliant The Player*, it has stood the test of time. And the cameos! I had forgotten how many there were.

Afterwards we watched episode one of The Studio again. Also still great.

(* Has anyone found anywhere else you can watch The Player? I’d like to recommend it if there is)

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Aug 26. Surprised to find myself welling up at the Dolly Parton tributes on BBC Breakfast. And I'm reminded that what makes me sentimental is not people dying, that's just what happens, but what people have done in their lives. And when someone does good things who, in a way, didn't have to, that's what always gets me. Dolly's altruistic work, for kids reading, for covid, as an LGBT ally - in her country musical environment which is very much not supportive in that way - that is just so impressive.

So many people get rich and start acting selfishly, entitled, mirroring the self-interested people who surround them. But despite the odds Dolly didn't do that.

There is an excellent podcast about her that I heard a couple of years ago (I forget its name) which told her story really well. She comes out of it better than stars usually come out of bio-podcasts.

So, well done Dolly. (Apart from, as James Cook has pointed out, her abysmal UK chart performance, which saw her having next to no hit singles on her own. 9 to 5 got to number 47 for godsake. Honestly, why did she have to have her musical heyday at the height of New Romanticism? For all her qualities, she was never going to beat Adam Ant and Haircut 100, was she?)

For someone who’s spent so long in Northern Ireland lately, the name of my hotel in Hull is a little unsettling.

Andy Burnham Goes To Greggs -- comics by kids

Three days worth of comics by kids in my Comic Art Masterclasses in Wigan, Belfast, and Limavady. Have I ever mentioned distance is no object?

Wigan & Leigh libraries came after the longest drive I can remember for many a year. When I set off on Monday lunchtime, satnav suggested my three hours would be nearer four. What it didn’t anticipate was a two car crash on the M6 that blocked it for a few hours, followed by a closed stretch of M6 which took four hours to escape from. Having thought I’d get to my hotel in time to eat and watch Only Connect and Uni Challenge, I finally got there at 9:50 after a journey of slightly over eight and a half hours! Anyway, the classes the next day were smashing. 

Grand Opera House Belfast was quicker to get to than Wigan. Left the house at 4.30, caught a 7.05 flight, picked up my hire car, and was parked and loaded into the Opera House by just after 9, ready for a class starting at 10. Could I make this paragraph more prosaic and boring? Of course both classes were delightful 

Roe Valley Arts Limavady was another treat and joy, though we only attracted four punters to the afternoon session, which is a shame. What do I care, I’m not on a doorsplit. Smiley face emoji. 

The celebrities these six groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were Mr Beast, Scary Evil Old Michael Jackson (twice), Damon Albarn, Taylor Swift, and David Attenborough.

My Books And Where To Find Them...

Romeo & Juliet (Colour)	Romeo & Juliet (bw)	Richard The Third (Colour)	Richard  The Third (bw)
Shakespeare Omnibus	Findlay  Macbeth	Prince of  Denmark Street	Midsummer Night's  Dream Team
Tales From Bible (Col)	Tales From Bible (bw)	Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories	Space Elain
Book Of Esther	Who Notes	Shakespeare comic	Kids Comics Annual 2027
Kids Comics Annual 2026	Kids Comics  Annual 2025	Socks Do Shakespeare	Colouring Books