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WELCOME
I hope you will join me and enjoy exploring the worlds of comics, graphic novels and manga at the annual Comica Festival and other special Comica events held throughout the year.Paul Gravett, Comica Director
COMICA NEWS
Comica Comiket 2011: Reviews & Photos
Posted: November 15, 2011
“A grand day out in Bishopsgate: After five years of attending Comica’s Comikets, the event has finally come of age. Though previously held in some wonderful locations such as the ICA and the Pump House in Battersea Park, this the first time that the combination of venue and location has worked so well to bring in the kind of footfall that I’m sure made every exhibitor’s day worthwhile. With plenty of passing trade, free entry and a magnificent continuous large-screen live drawing display kept visitors in the hall.”
Francesca Cassavetti, Fabtoons
“Hurrah! This year’s Comiket, part of Comica Festival, was a brilliant success. Three cheers to Paul Gravett, Peter Stanbury, events co-ordinator Megan Donnolley and all the other people who worked so hard to make it happen!”
Sarah McIntyre, Vern & Lettuce
“Paul and Peter do an excellent job with Comica, and Comiket has a great social vibe, lots of my current comic buds were met at the early ones.”
Sean Azzopardi
...and Bleeding Cool has a nice write-up of the Warren Ellis conversation with Lenny Henry which happened later that evening.
Come to Comica Club Night Tuesday 15th!
Posted: November 12, 2011
Next Tuesday, November 15th, Comica Festival is presenting its first ever amazing COMICA CLUB NIGHT in the cool Shoreditch venue The Book Club, 100-106 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4RH. For a mere £5, bookable via Paypal, or in cash on the door, you get a whole evening of exciting Comics-Art-Music-Film Happenings from 7pm to midnight.
Highlights include:
Drawings before your very eyes with projections to comics-themed music by The Stool Pigeon‘s ascerbic rock satirist and DJ savant Krent Able.
Giant two-man action-painting by Savage Pencil & Chris Long of Battle Of The Eyes, accompanied by their inimitable choices of music from their vast collections.
Live performance of SelfMadeHero’s brand new Hellraisers graphic multi-biography about Sixties’ acting and drinking legends Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton and Richard Harris, by writer Robert Sellers & celebrity caricaturist extraordinaire JAKe.
The Caterer comics creator, writer and comedian Steve Aylett unveils his insane film, Lint The Movie, co-starring Stewart Lee, Alan Moore, Robin Ince & others.
Nobrow’s Isabel Greenberg, winner of this year’s Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize, makes a live presentation of her world of imaginary fables.
There are bars on both floors, plus upstairs, Katja Spitzer’s lovely exhibition of her new Nobrow book Quodlibet - and more surprises!
Capacity is limited so to be sure of a place please book via PayPal now for £5 a ticket. There may be some tickets available on the door on the night. For latest updates and info, you can also reach us via this event’s Facebook page. Come and share your passion for comics in a new setting and a whole new light!
See You At Comica Comiket…
Posted: November 11, 2011
...followed by the screening of Captured Ghosts with Warren Ellis and Lenny Henry. Full details of the Comica 2011 programme of events right here...
Graphic Short Story Prize At Foyles
Posted: November 11, 2011
I thought I’d share with you all the current window display at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road in Central London, which celebrates the winner and runner-up of this year’s Graphic Short Story Prize. Just think of all those thousands of people seeing our winner and runner up as they walk past this week. Lovely.
And don’t forget, until December 4th, while you are sipping a latte or cappuccino on the first floor of Foyles Bookshop Cafe, you can also admire and read a free exhibition of four-page graphic short stories by five of the finalists as well as the winner, Isabel Greenberg, and the runner-up, Michael O’Kelly and Olu Oke, in this year’s Graphic Short Story Prize. Also, a free e-comic Shorties: The Best Of The Graphic Short Story Prize 2007-11 is now available to read online in which competition judge and graphic novelist extraordinaire, Bryan Talbot, selects his favourite entries from 5 years of the prize.
Posy Simmonds & Luke Pearson Launch This Saturday’s Comica Comiket!
Posted: November 9, 2011
Who better to start our amazing Comica Comiket Independent Comics Fair this coming Saturday November 12th than this country’s much-loved doyenne of sequential art, Posy Simmonds? She has very kindly agreed to launch the day and officially open the Fair at 11.00am. Then Posy will be the first brilliant artist to kick off our all-day Drawing Parade, drawing live on stage with her artworks projected onto a giant screen for all to enjoy. Afterward she will be doing some short signing sessions of both her Jonathan Cape graphic novels, Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, and the very first copies of Blank Slate’s outstanding anthology Nelson, on sale for the first time anywhere at the Comiket with all profits going to the charity Shelter. Posy can only be with us for the first hour or less, so make a point of being there in time for 11.00am when the doors of the Great Hall burst open!
Earlybirds will also get the chance to watch the rising prodigy Luke Pearson, famed for Hildafolk and Everything We Miss from Nobrow, who is next up in the line-up from 11.30am till noon. Luke will also be signing right after, so be sure not to miss his appearance.
Below you will find the complete timetable for the 2012 Drawing Parade - come along and enjoy the spectacle. We’ll have a seating area for you to sit in and relax and gaze in wonder at the fascinating artistry being created before your very eyes. And yes, the whole day is completely free, so come one, come all!
11.00-11.30:
Posy Simmonds (Tamara Drewe, Gemma Bovery, Nelson)
11.30-12.00:
Luke Pearson (Hildafolk, Everything We Miss)
12.00-12.30:
JAKe (Hellraisers, Mighty Book of Boosh, Nelson)
12.30-13.00:
Warren Pleece (Incognegro, Life Sucks, The Great Unwashed, Nelson)
13.00-13.30:
Sarah McIntyre (Vern & Lettuce, Morris the Mankiest Monster)
13.30-14.00:
Frederik Peeters (Sandcastle, Blue Pills)
14.00-14.30:
Sally Kindberg (The Comic Strip Big Fat Book of Knowledge)
14.30-15.00:
James Jarvis (De Profundis, Vortigern’s Machine)
15.00-15.30:
Karrie Fransman (The House That Groaned)
15.30-16.00:
Hannah Berry (Britten & Brülightly, Adamtine)
16.00-16.30:
Brecht Evens (The Wrong Place, Night Animals)
16.30-17.00:
Battle of the Eyes: Savage Pencil & Chris Long (Nyak-Nyak!, BOTE Prints)
17.00-17.30:
Roger Langridge (Snarked!, The Muppets)
Graphic Short Story Prize Exhibition at Foyles Cafe
Posted: November 7, 2011
From today November 7th to December 4th, while you are sipping a latte or cappuccino on the first floor of Foyles Bookshop Cafe on London’s Charing Cross Road, you can also admire and read a free exhibition of four-page graphic short stories by five of the finalists as well as the winner, Isabel Greenberg, and the runner-up, Michael O’Kelly and Olu Oke, in this year’s Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize. Here’s the list of the titles and creators and short bios of those on show:
WINNER:
Love In A Very Cold Climate
by Isabel Greenberg
Isabel Greenberg is a London based illustrator and comic artist. Her work has appeared in publications by Nobrow Press and Solipsistic Pop. Love In A Very Cold Climate is a story from a graphic novel she is currently working on called The Encyclopaedia of Early Earth.
RUNNER-UP:
Ding!
written by Michael O’Kelly and drawn by Olu Oke
Michael O’Kelly is a writer, film maker and assistant director. Every award he has ever won has been for pieces set on the upper decks of buses, which is beginning to make him worry about his range. Born and bred in London, Olu Oke was the quintessential latch key kid. Her artist training started on various walls in and around the home. These skills were further nurtured at Edinburgh College of Art where techniques such as printmaking, digital illustration and book binding, were added to her pen and ink repertoire.
FIVE FINALISTS:
Present
by Matilda Tristram
Matilda Tristram works as a writer on children’s TV programs, including BAFTA award nominated Dipdap. She studied animation at the Royal College of Art. More of her drawings, comics, films and photographs are online by clicking on her name above.
Teapot Therapy
by A. J. Poyiadgi
A. J. Poyiadgi makes films by day and comics by night. He likes the collaborative nature of one and the solitary demands of the other. He has produced work for several advertising agencies and has won numerous film-festival awards. The backgrounds for Teapot Therapy were made using honest-to-goodness English Breakfast tea, brewed for about 6-8 minutes. Any leftover tea was used as late night fuel.
The Cat Ladies Of Czechoslovakia
by Faye Moorhouse
Based in Sussex, Faye Moorhouse studied on the illustration course at the University for the Creative Arts in Maidstone, Kent, where she gained a First Class Honours. Faye loves to tell stories through her illustrations; to create atmospheres, landscapes and characters. A lot of her subject matter is often a little strange; it has a definite thread of dark humour running through it. She creates her own self-published, hand-bound, illustrated books and zines.
Halloween Parade
by Robert Wells
Robert Wells has been writing, drawing and occasionally self-publishing comics since the early-1990s. His comics include Crisp Biscuit, Crisp, The Devil’s Daughter, Colin Comix, and Crisp Biscuit Comics. He doesn’t particularly like crisps and rarely eats biscuits.
The Wolf
written by Alex du Cros and drawn by William Grill
William Grill is currently in his third year at University College Falmouth studying Illustration BA. He has a keen interest in the natural world and enjoys working in traditional media such as crayons, gouache and linocuts. Alex du Cros is 21 years old and is a philosophy student at the University of York. He met William Grill in school and they both developed a love of comics. After years of talk and false starts their passion for comics finally resulted in a creative partnership. Alex wishes to use comics to explore moral and political issues.
A free e-comic Shorties: The Best Of The Graphic Short Story Prize 2007-11 is now available to read online in which competition judge and graphic novelist extraordinaire, Bryan Talbot, selects his favourite entries from 5 years of the prize.
More Comica Comiket Drawing Parade Videos!
Posted: November 6, 2011
Here’s your chance to see the second and third videos of three recording last year’s Drawing Parade, recorded at the November 2010 Comica Comiket. This second video interviews Ellen Lindner of Undertow, Whores of Mensa and the new anthology The Strumpet and Paul Grist, creator of Kane, Jack Staff, Burglar Bill and new Mudman. Between the two of them talking and drawing you can also watch Garen Ewing of The Rainbow Orchid, all drawing before your very eyes.
The third video starts off with Roger Langridge doing a stunning pic of Animal, the drummer in The Muppet Band. Roger is coming back next Saturday for Comiket where he’ll be drawing his new characters from his own Lewis Carroll-esque series Snark’d! Darryl Cunningham is next up, author of Psychiatric Tales and the forthcoming Science Tales from Myriad Editions and his all-ages book Uncle Sam from Blank Slate, the character he draws here. And then you can watch Hunt Emerson sketching his insane creation Citymouth and larking about to camera at the end! Finally, Woodrow Phoenix talks about Rumble Strip while illustrating two strikingly graphic pages. And finally enjoy a sombre discussion between Woodrow and Darryl about who would win in a battle between Superman and Galactus!
Huge thanks to Steve Poulacheris for the filming and interviewing and Claude T.C. for the editing. Don’t miss the delights of the first Drawing Parade video, introduced by Comica co-directors Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury and spotlighting Charlie Adlard, Paul Duffield, Gary Northfield and Ed Pinsent.
And see you this coming Saturday November 12th for 2011’s spectacular Comica Comiket Drawing Parade on the giant screen and on the stage of the Great Hall at Bishopsgate Institute featuring Roger Langridge, Luke Pearson, Warren Pleece, James Jarvis, Savage Pencil & Eyeball of Battle of the Eyes, Frederik Peeters, Brecht Evens and more,
Graphic Short Story Prize 2011 Winner!
Posted: November 6, 2011
In today’s Observer newspaper Rachel Cooke announces the winner of this year’s Graphic Short Story Prize:
The Observer’s graphic short-story prize, in association with Comica and Jonathan Cape, is now in its fifth year. This year’s winner, chosen from more than 200 entries, is Isabel Greenberg.
For Isabel Greenberg, the winner of this year’s Observer / Jonathan Cape / Comica graphic short story prize, it is a case of third time lucky. “I’d entered twice before,” she says. “And once, I’d been a runner-up. But to win is such a nice thing. I’m so happy about it. Everyone tells you when you leave art school that it is going to be hard, but you never really know quite how hard until you’re out there. It can be a bit depressing.” How will she spend her £1,000 prize money? “I’m not sure. I should do something really sensible, like buy myself a copy of Photoshop.” She laughs. “Or maybe 500 bottles of Winsor & Newton ink.”
Greenberg, who is 23, graduated from the University of Brighton, where she studied illustration, last year. She is now working as a freelance illustrator, and trying to finish her first graphic novel. Her winning entry, Love In A Very Cold Climate, tells the story of a marriage - only this couple, a south pole dweller and a north pole dweller, will never be able to touch one another, surrounded as they are by a magnetic force field. It’s beautifully drawn, of course, from first to last frame, but it’s also exquisitely written. In particular, the judges admired the way Greenberg handles time, somehow capturing a shared lifetime in just four pages.
How did she get the idea? “I’ve got a bit of a thing for the north pole, for nature programmes, and living in yurts, and open fires. I live in London, so it’s probably rather a romantic perspective. And then I started thinking about how magnetic poles repel, but opposite kinds of human being attract.”
Our prize is now in its fifth year, and the judges (David Nicholls, the best-selling author of One Day; Bryan Talbot, graphic novelist extraordinaire; Paul Gravett, director of the Comica Festival; Dan Franklin, of Jonathan Cape; Suzanne Dean, Random House’s creative director, and the woman whom Julian Barnes, in his Booker prize acceptance speech last month, thanked for being the best book designer in town; plus yours truly) felt the standard was higher than ever.
Spread out on the Random House boardroom table, our final shortlist of eight, selected from 200 entries, looked quite dazzling. Nevertheless, Love In A Very Cold Climate was our unanimous choice: we loved its poetry, we loved the way it was touching without ever, quite, veering into sentimentality, and most of all we loved Greenberg’s wonderfully evocative drawings, all ice and light. (She counts among her influences the Canadian cartoonist Seth; the French cartoonist David B, best known as the author of Epileptic; and Kathleen Hale, creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat). Past winners of our prize have gone on to win book deals (Julian Hanshaw) and to bag jobs as cartoonists on national newspapers (Stephen Collins). What does Greenberg hope her victory will lead to? “I would like to find a publisher for my graphic novel,” she says. “But the best thing about winning is to know that I’m right: that my work is coming on, and that people have noticed it.”
The runner-up is Ding! by Olu Oke (pictures) and Michael O’Kelly (words), which tells the story of a somewhat eventful bus journey and is, according to Oke, the result of their shared addiction to eavesdropping (“a glorious habit”). Oke, who works as a freelance illustrator and as a film projectionist, and O’Kelly, a filmmaker, met on their first working day at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, south London, and are now firm collaborators. “We’re a team, there’s no doubt about that,” says Oke. “For Ding!, Michael came up with our storylines (there are seven) and then I came up with the characterisations.”
Her drawings, like O’Kelly’s dialogue, are waspish and very funny. So what are her influences? “Oh, I’m a massive graphic novel fan. I’ve been collecting them since I was about 15. It started with X-Men, but now I’d say that I’m most influenced by David Lapham [the American author of the Stray Bullets series] and Terry Moore [another American, and author of Strangers in Paradise]. The way Moore uses the panels, in particular, is something that has had a big impact on me.”
So what next? “The dream is to work full-time as a comic artist, and I’m grateful for anything at all that helps me on the way. The fact that a group of people looked at our work and liked it is important. It means that we can tell ourselves that we are good, after all.”
Love In A Very Cold Climate and Ding!, together with a number of other commended entries from this year’s prize, can be seen at an exhibition in the cafe at Foyles bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2, until 4 December. Shorties: The Best Of The Graphic Short Story Prize 2007-2011, is available to read online as an e-comic, with a cover by Adam Cadwell.
Exhibition: Hannah Berry
Posted: November 1, 2011
There’s SOOO much great stuff happening during this year’s Comica Festival, with more events to be announced this week. Let’s continue with this great exhibition of Hannah Berry’s stunning original artworks from her graphic novel Britten & Brulightly at Trichrome, the international illustrators’ art gallery recently opened in Fulham. You are all invited to the opening Friday November 4th to meet Hannah. Here’s the flyer, cu there. It runs till the 20th. More details…
Comica Comiket Drawing Parade Video
Posted: October 31, 2011
Steve Poulacheris, one of the Vanilla magazine conspirators, kindly filmed and edited some of the live Drawing Parade at last year’s Comica Comiket. Take a look at this first YouTube video, introduced by co-organisers Peter Stanbury and Paul Gravett, and watch Charlie Adlard, Paul Duffield, Gary Northfield and Ed Pinsent drawing their pieces and being interviewed. Hopefully, the second part, featuring Ellen Lindner, Roger Langridge, Paul Grist and Hunt Emerson, will go online in the coming week, ahead of this year’s Comica Comiket and Drawing Parade on Saturday November 12th at the magnificent Great Hall of Bishopsgate Institute, London. This year we’re going bigger and better with projection onto a giant screen on stage. European guests Brecht Evens and Frederik Peeters will also be taking part. Make sure you’re there!
