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Andy Oliver reviews Comiket 2011 on Broken Frontier
Posted: December 18, 2011
A comics web-journalist, small press reviewer, and contributor to 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, Andy Oliver has written a very positive and perceptive report about this year’s Comica Comiket, held on Saturday November 12th 2011. Andy astutely echoes many of the fundamental principles behind these independent comics fairs. Here’s the highlights of what Andy wrote:
“Last Saturday the latest Comiket, the semi-regular London independent comics fair, took place at the Bishopsgate Institute as part of the Comica Festival. I was there in an unofficial Broken Frontier capacity, hunting down some gems of small press books for potential future coverage in this very column and taking the opportunity to say hello to faces both familiar and unfamiliar amongst the attendees.
“On Twitter on Saturday I described Comiket as ‘an Aladdin’s cave of small press and Indie treasures’ and, despite the forced economy of articulacy of that particular social networking environment, that soundbite does rather effectively encompass the variety of independent comics wares on sale. Comica master of ceremonies Paul Gravett was there working his usual magic on the stage behind the main fair, introducing a succession of creators drawing live on a projected big screen as part of ‘Artists Parade’. While I did stand still for a short period of time to watch Brecht Evens (the gent behind the remarkable The Wrong Place, published in translation by Drawn and Quarterly), I must admit my greedy, rapt, wallet-draining attention was largely elsewhere. But the likes of Posy Simmonds, Luke Pearson, Sarah McIntyre, Warren Pleece and Roger Langridge, amongst many others, were all scheduled to appear as part of the parade throughout the day.
“It’s the egalitarian feel of an event like Comiket that reignites that feeling of joy about comics for me that the cynical shenanigans of the bigger commercial publishers have done their best to erase. There’s something quite splendid indeed about buying a copy of ten-year-old school boy Zoom Rockman’s lively and enthusiastic comic The Zoom (current issue including a voucher for free chips at George’s Fish n’ Chips in Crouch End doncha know) and then walking a few short feet away to see Tom Humberstone selling copies of the polished and innovative Solipsistic Pop. It was that tangible lack of cynicism, and an all-pervading sense of diversity, that were the admirable hallmarks of an event where everyone attending was focused primarily on the same shared goal: selling their personal vision of the very best of what comics can be. A tiptop day on every level and an experience I look forward to replicating at the next Comiket in 2012.
“As for my own acquisitions, well from picking up Sally-Anne Hickman’s beautifully handmade diary comics and discovering with glee a Lizz Lunney minicomic I didn’t already have, to grabbing pro publishers Blank Slate’s Nelson and Nobrow Press’s Nobrow #6, my Comiket stash was a many-splendoured haul indeed.”
