I agree the Guardian's week of comics is fun and nostalgic and we should enjoy it for what it is. The factual inaccuracies and historical ignorance of a subject that we the comics cognoscenti know so well is only to be expected. In the corrections column you'll find many articles get many subjects wrong, and that's in instances where the facts are actually well documented. In the case of comics, where does our history lie, except scattered in a very few academic books (we get one a decade if we're lucky) and in fanzines.
Wikipedia holds some information about some comics history, but you already have to know what you're looking for. A comprehensive joined-up history of comics is impossible to find, and where would you begin?
Those of us who were raised on and then worked in British comics are regularly frustrated to realise that our comics remain virtually unknown outside of our tiny island. With the exception of the comics talent Brain Drain that began in the 80s, and which has resulted in 75% of Brits earning a living in comics doing so on American money, our strips have rarely if ever travelled.
Which means the Americans have heard of only one Dennis The Menace, the wrong one, and are aware of Judge Dredd as a naff movie and a short lived series of comics that no-one bought in the 80s. Talk to anyone in Spain, Norway, France or anywhere else they hold comic festivals that we occasionally get invited to and you'll find they've heard of random and bizarre things from Brit comic history (The Trigan Empire, Dan Dare and the IPC girls strips seem to have been very big in Norway in the 1970s) but never anything you want them to have heard of, like The Bash Street Kids.
Talking of factual inaccuracy, I was brought into schools last year when, at the 11th hour, teachers on the Media Studies course realised comics and graphic novels were part of a module, so I had to give the kids a quick catch up. I saw the teachers notes, provided by the exam board. They were riddled with inaccuracies, including attributing drawings to the wrong artists, attributing characters to the wrong publishers, getting comics dates out by decades, and largely skimming over Brit comics. Given that they had about 5 pages to cover the entire history of comics this is hardly surprising.
And the task the pupils had to perform to show their understanding of comics was to design a front cover. Pathetic. That's like showing you understand car mechanics by designing a number plate. Oh my poor poor beloved artform, what does your future hold?
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
In praise of Doctor Who Magazine's comic strips
Re Dr Who Magazine (in response to email for fanzine)
I used to write & draw The Comic Assassins strip in Dr Who Magazine and I now do the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, as well as dreaming of writing Dr Who (though I'd have to do more actual writing to make that become a reality).
As someone who bought Dr Who Weekly No 1 and still has it, complete with stickers, I have to say it's meant a very great deal for me for longer than most people have been alive. The Wagner/Mills/Gibbons strips still stand the test of time, and in fact I was just enjoying reading the Steve Parkhouse/Mick McMahon strip in an IDW reprint last weekend. A high watermark for our artform.
The John Ridgway illustrated strips for Colin Baker's era still remain the one period where the strips were genuinely better, in pretty much every way, than the TV show itself at the time. I wish more fans were aware of them and considered their "canonical" status, instead of wittering on about novels and audio dramas. I recently re-read the Peter Davison era strips and was struck by just how many ideas from there had clearly left their mark on the young Russell T Davies. Half a dozen planets joined together in a big planet-joined-together doom machine, anyone?
I fear I lost touch with DWM when the show went off air in 1989, which coincided with me no longer working for the mag, and I felt being a Dr Who fan to be a bit sad and nerdy for a decade or so. When it returned, and John Ross's brilliant strips began in Dr Who Adventures, it was like a second childhood, and I find those strips to be some of the most exciting work being published today. I comic I can give an 8 year old to read is a rare thing these days. One which is brilliant and stars the Doctor, doubly so. If we could only sort out some comic strips with Daleks and Cybermen in, all would be perfect with the world.
I used to write & draw The Comic Assassins strip in Dr Who Magazine and I now do the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, as well as dreaming of writing Dr Who (though I'd have to do more actual writing to make that become a reality).
As someone who bought Dr Who Weekly No 1 and still has it, complete with stickers, I have to say it's meant a very great deal for me for longer than most people have been alive. The Wagner/Mills/Gibbons strips still stand the test of time, and in fact I was just enjoying reading the Steve Parkhouse/Mick McMahon strip in an IDW reprint last weekend. A high watermark for our artform.
The John Ridgway illustrated strips for Colin Baker's era still remain the one period where the strips were genuinely better, in pretty much every way, than the TV show itself at the time. I wish more fans were aware of them and considered their "canonical" status, instead of wittering on about novels and audio dramas. I recently re-read the Peter Davison era strips and was struck by just how many ideas from there had clearly left their mark on the young Russell T Davies. Half a dozen planets joined together in a big planet-joined-together doom machine, anyone?
I fear I lost touch with DWM when the show went off air in 1989, which coincided with me no longer working for the mag, and I felt being a Dr Who fan to be a bit sad and nerdy for a decade or so. When it returned, and John Ross's brilliant strips began in Dr Who Adventures, it was like a second childhood, and I find those strips to be some of the most exciting work being published today. I comic I can give an 8 year old to read is a rare thing these days. One which is brilliant and stars the Doctor, doubly so. If we could only sort out some comic strips with Daleks and Cybermen in, all would be perfect with the world.
How to put on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe
I've just been emailed by someone asking how to go about putting a show in in Edinburgh (planning for 21010, obviously). I thought this would be a good place to rehearse my answer. What would your advice be, fellow Fringers?
Firstly, I assume he means the Edinburgh Fringe. Speaking as someone who plays in Edinburgh the rest of the year ( I was there throughout December last year, and popped up in Feb, April, and July too), I still fall in to the trap of saying "Edinburgh" when I mean "that period in August where lots of idiots from the south of England take over Edinburgh and forget it exists the rest of the year". But let's plan to do Edinburgh, knowing what we all mean.
First thing to do is have a show ready. Maybe others would advise differently, but I would say that if you go up to the Fringe and try and play for an hour without being good enough or ready to fill an hour, then you are likely to put on a bad show that you won't enjoy and might regret. That said, both Frank Skinner and Jonny Vegas leapt in at the deep end like that, and it didn't hurt them. On the other side of the coin there are some shows on at the Free Fringe and Free Festival (and one I saw at the Gilded Balloon this year) which show that I'm right.
Next thing to do is find a venue. The aforementioned Free Fringe & Festival are a good place to start. They won't charge you to play, though there are other costs (see below), and they make taking part in the Fringe very easy, Google their respective websites. They support mostly comedy, and your show will benefit from being on at the same venue as other shows. Increasingly FF shows include high quality shows by good talents, so I'd recommend them for a first timer.
Then come the venues which will cost you. Whether you go with the "big 4", Pleasance, Gilded Balloon, Underbelly or Assembly Rooms, or Just The Tonic, GRV, C Venues, Tron or similar, you will have to pay to hire the venue, and will end up getting a share of the door takings if you take more than the cost of the venue hire. In the case of an average GB or Pleasance space, that will be around £1000 a week for 3 weeks. So if you sell 3 grand's worth of tickets (at 10 quid each, that's 300 tickets, or a dozen a day) you'll be nominally in profit. Other spaces cost less.
But you need to pay to be in the Fringe prog (£600), play for accommodation (I hire a flat for £1500, you can pay a lot less, I once got a place for £150 a week), print posters and flyers, and live for a month. So costs can mount up. But it's do-able, and I love doing it. I've made money and I've lost money, and I'm sure anyone who's done the Fringe more than once will say similar.
Any other advice folks?
Firstly, I assume he means the Edinburgh Fringe. Speaking as someone who plays in Edinburgh the rest of the year ( I was there throughout December last year, and popped up in Feb, April, and July too), I still fall in to the trap of saying "Edinburgh" when I mean "that period in August where lots of idiots from the south of England take over Edinburgh and forget it exists the rest of the year". But let's plan to do Edinburgh, knowing what we all mean.
First thing to do is have a show ready. Maybe others would advise differently, but I would say that if you go up to the Fringe and try and play for an hour without being good enough or ready to fill an hour, then you are likely to put on a bad show that you won't enjoy and might regret. That said, both Frank Skinner and Jonny Vegas leapt in at the deep end like that, and it didn't hurt them. On the other side of the coin there are some shows on at the Free Fringe and Free Festival (and one I saw at the Gilded Balloon this year) which show that I'm right.
Next thing to do is find a venue. The aforementioned Free Fringe & Festival are a good place to start. They won't charge you to play, though there are other costs (see below), and they make taking part in the Fringe very easy, Google their respective websites. They support mostly comedy, and your show will benefit from being on at the same venue as other shows. Increasingly FF shows include high quality shows by good talents, so I'd recommend them for a first timer.
Then come the venues which will cost you. Whether you go with the "big 4", Pleasance, Gilded Balloon, Underbelly or Assembly Rooms, or Just The Tonic, GRV, C Venues, Tron or similar, you will have to pay to hire the venue, and will end up getting a share of the door takings if you take more than the cost of the venue hire. In the case of an average GB or Pleasance space, that will be around £1000 a week for 3 weeks. So if you sell 3 grand's worth of tickets (at 10 quid each, that's 300 tickets, or a dozen a day) you'll be nominally in profit. Other spaces cost less.
But you need to pay to be in the Fringe prog (£600), play for accommodation (I hire a flat for £1500, you can pay a lot less, I once got a place for £150 a week), print posters and flyers, and live for a month. So costs can mount up. But it's do-able, and I love doing it. I've made money and I've lost money, and I'm sure anyone who's done the Fringe more than once will say similar.
Any other advice folks?
In Praise of Philippe Starck's "Apprentice"
I liked Philippe Starck's "Design Apprentice" last night on BBC2 (actually called School Of Design, where budding designers compete to work for him).
Now I will admit I also like the actual Apprentice (with Sir Alan Sugar), it being the reality show you can follow in one hour bursts that are full of detail, and you get it over with in a few short weeks. I admire its manipulative editing and its crass light entertainment that manages to pass itself off as in some way informative and insightful, and I have no doubt School Of Design will amount to the same shallow froth.
However I will stand up and shout the praises of SOD (someone didn't think that acronym through) far more than I ever would the Apprentice for one simple reason, I value the end product.
The Apprentices manque are striving for a job, a boring job, as a lowly drone in the Amstrad business empire whose only aim from there can be to work themselves up. To where? The top of the Amstrad business empire. Just how worth the effort is that? Which small child when asked what they want to be when they grow up says I want to be quite big in a company that makes, er, naff computer peripherals and owns some property. There really is only one thing on offer in the Apprentice and it is, a long way down the career line from the end of the show, lots of money.
Whereas School Of Design's raison d'etre is design. So at every step the contestants are thinking, doing, practising, and leading the viewer to think about design. And design is a good thing. Albeit there is good design and bad design, as this first episode concentrated on demonstrating, either way the very existence of design is something that advances cultural thought.
And more than that, design gives. Every design does something for everyone else, it is intended to be used or rejected by a consumer, whereas money, the raison d'etre of the Apprentice, doesn't. In competing to become part of Philippe Starck's team, each contestant wants to share their undeniable talent and ability with the world and, though they obviously hope to make their living doing so, their first concern is creating works of design that have never existed before and making the world a richer place through their efforts.
Whereas the Apprentices want to make money and they want to keep that money. They are greedy, self-serving, competitive people whose aim is to be richer than other people and who see anyone who doesn't compete with them as losers.
So, to sum up, the Apprentice is evil and a cancer in the heart of society, and School Of Design is good and beautiful. The end. Signed Kev.
Now I will admit I also like the actual Apprentice (with Sir Alan Sugar), it being the reality show you can follow in one hour bursts that are full of detail, and you get it over with in a few short weeks. I admire its manipulative editing and its crass light entertainment that manages to pass itself off as in some way informative and insightful, and I have no doubt School Of Design will amount to the same shallow froth.
However I will stand up and shout the praises of SOD (someone didn't think that acronym through) far more than I ever would the Apprentice for one simple reason, I value the end product.
The Apprentices manque are striving for a job, a boring job, as a lowly drone in the Amstrad business empire whose only aim from there can be to work themselves up. To where? The top of the Amstrad business empire. Just how worth the effort is that? Which small child when asked what they want to be when they grow up says I want to be quite big in a company that makes, er, naff computer peripherals and owns some property. There really is only one thing on offer in the Apprentice and it is, a long way down the career line from the end of the show, lots of money.
Whereas School Of Design's raison d'etre is design. So at every step the contestants are thinking, doing, practising, and leading the viewer to think about design. And design is a good thing. Albeit there is good design and bad design, as this first episode concentrated on demonstrating, either way the very existence of design is something that advances cultural thought.
And more than that, design gives. Every design does something for everyone else, it is intended to be used or rejected by a consumer, whereas money, the raison d'etre of the Apprentice, doesn't. In competing to become part of Philippe Starck's team, each contestant wants to share their undeniable talent and ability with the world and, though they obviously hope to make their living doing so, their first concern is creating works of design that have never existed before and making the world a richer place through their efforts.
Whereas the Apprentices want to make money and they want to keep that money. They are greedy, self-serving, competitive people whose aim is to be richer than other people and who see anyone who doesn't compete with them as losers.
So, to sum up, the Apprentice is evil and a cancer in the heart of society, and School Of Design is good and beautiful. The end. Signed Kev.
Monday, 14 September 2009
Facsimile comics in the Guardian, nice idea but...
Every day this week the Guardian and Observer are running facsimile editions of classic British comics. Today's Roy Of The Rovers is a brilliant facsimile and fun to read, but I have one big problem with these comics in the Guardian - they make it look like comics were crap!
We've had a Beano from 1980 and a Roy Of The Rovers from 1981. The Beano shows that precious little has changed in its storytelling style in 29 years and is pleasantly nostalgic, but the Roy, ostensibly for an older reader, is atrocious. The artwork is as dull as comic art has ever been and the storytelling style wouldn't have been out of place in a 1950s Tiger comic.
This is a comic from December 1981. A time when 2000AD was at a high, with Alan Moore's Time Twisters & Robo Tales, Wagner & Grant's Judge Dredd and Pat Mill's Nemesis. This is the very month Warrior was launched, with V For Vendetta and Marvelman. I vaguely recall StarLord or Tornado may still have been going, certainly the relaunched Eagle was. And Dave Gibbons was drawing some of the best Dr Who strips there have ever been.
And what do the Guardian show the public, as the state of the art of comics in 1981? Roy of the bloody Rovers. I cannot imagine a single person looking at that travesty of comic art being in the least bit surprised that Britain doesn't have a comics industry any more if, at our peak, that's the best we could do.
It's like summing up the best TV of 1981 by showing an episode of Triangle.
And don't get me started on the article in Saturday's Guardian Guide about Misty comic. If we're setting records for factual inaccuracy, (how about the suggestion that Sid's Snake was the first animal in a comic strip because they'd previously been banned because they scared kids?) My poor poor favourite artform.
We've had a Beano from 1980 and a Roy Of The Rovers from 1981. The Beano shows that precious little has changed in its storytelling style in 29 years and is pleasantly nostalgic, but the Roy, ostensibly for an older reader, is atrocious. The artwork is as dull as comic art has ever been and the storytelling style wouldn't have been out of place in a 1950s Tiger comic.
This is a comic from December 1981. A time when 2000AD was at a high, with Alan Moore's Time Twisters & Robo Tales, Wagner & Grant's Judge Dredd and Pat Mill's Nemesis. This is the very month Warrior was launched, with V For Vendetta and Marvelman. I vaguely recall StarLord or Tornado may still have been going, certainly the relaunched Eagle was. And Dave Gibbons was drawing some of the best Dr Who strips there have ever been.
And what do the Guardian show the public, as the state of the art of comics in 1981? Roy of the bloody Rovers. I cannot imagine a single person looking at that travesty of comic art being in the least bit surprised that Britain doesn't have a comics industry any more if, at our peak, that's the best we could do.
It's like summing up the best TV of 1981 by showing an episode of Triangle.
And don't get me started on the article in Saturday's Guardian Guide about Misty comic. If we're setting records for factual inaccuracy, (how about the suggestion that Sid's Snake was the first animal in a comic strip because they'd previously been banned because they scared kids?) My poor poor favourite artform.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
New Socks comic, sounds likely
It was this time last year that I started producing the first Socks Comic, and it's proven popular. I mean it's only sold coming up to 200 copies, which is hardly a publishing empire in the making, but it's got 100% positive feedback, and whenever people get a chance, they buy it.
There's been a lot of talk about publishing and selling a Socks Christmas Card this year, so maybe I should just go the whole hog and produce a second Socks comic book. There's certainly the material waiting to be adapted.
2008's Socks comic (or should I call it the 2009 Socks Annual?) contained strip adaptations of our sketches Halloween, Torchwool, Deforestation, Primeval, Life On Mars and Romeo & Juliet. And looking at the set list from SFSPT Goes To Hollywood I can see that we have, waiting to be adapted:
Western
Frankenstein
Casablanca
James Bond
Star Wars
Perfumes
Word Association
Facebook Song
Racing/Parliament/Love Story
On top of which I have "Space Journey" which is a Socks strip that I wrote purely as a comic strip 2 years ago, and have neither performed nor published anywhere. I've drawn it in a simple newspaper strip style, but I think that's definitely getting drawn up in full comic style for the new book.
And then there's 12 Days Of Christmas. We performed that every night from Nov 30 to Jan 6th in Edinburgh last year and it would make either a cracking chapter in the comic, or even a stand-alone Christmas card.
If I can get the buyers (and you know I think I can) one or other or both of these projects seems like a goer. I've been bursting to draw comics again, and the Christmas card I'm currently drawing for a client has got my scribbler's head back into gear.
So, the second annual Socks Annual is very nearly underway. Do I have any takers out there?
There's been a lot of talk about publishing and selling a Socks Christmas Card this year, so maybe I should just go the whole hog and produce a second Socks comic book. There's certainly the material waiting to be adapted.
2008's Socks comic (or should I call it the 2009 Socks Annual?) contained strip adaptations of our sketches Halloween, Torchwool, Deforestation, Primeval, Life On Mars and Romeo & Juliet. And looking at the set list from SFSPT Goes To Hollywood I can see that we have, waiting to be adapted:
Western
Frankenstein
Casablanca
James Bond
Star Wars
Perfumes
Word Association
Facebook Song
Racing/Parliament/Love Story
On top of which I have "Space Journey" which is a Socks strip that I wrote purely as a comic strip 2 years ago, and have neither performed nor published anywhere. I've drawn it in a simple newspaper strip style, but I think that's definitely getting drawn up in full comic style for the new book.
And then there's 12 Days Of Christmas. We performed that every night from Nov 30 to Jan 6th in Edinburgh last year and it would make either a cracking chapter in the comic, or even a stand-alone Christmas card.
If I can get the buyers (and you know I think I can) one or other or both of these projects seems like a goer. I've been bursting to draw comics again, and the Christmas card I'm currently drawing for a client has got my scribbler's head back into gear.
So, the second annual Socks Annual is very nearly underway. Do I have any takers out there?
Monday, 7 September 2009
The Swine Flu Song
This song was a hit in our Edinburgh show, though its apocalyptic warning seems to have been unfounded, so far. Enjoy. I've annotated the video for your extra viewing pleasure.
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