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And the inhabitants were friendly! Stuart and I headed up to Scotland for our first-ever visit to the Highlands International Comics Expo or Hi-Ex. It was also Stuart's first experience of running a festival table, and I think he's still decompressing from the strange voyage.

Photo thanks to Joe Gordon (whom I met in person for the first time, yay!) at Forbidden Planet International

Here's a comics jam I did with DFC crewmates Jim Medway, Dave Shelton and Gary Northfield.
(Click on pic to embiggen)



Hi-Ex had some great photo ops, here's Dave, Jim and Gary:



And after months of only managing to grab a few rushed words in passing with Asia Alfasi, I finally got to have a long chat with her in Jimmy Chung's Chinese restaurant, hurrah! She'd been drawing portraits all day, but I talked her into doing one more with me and we swapped.


Gary and I led a workshop called Stupidmonsters & Aliens: comics from outer space. (Stupidmonsters is a mini comic Gary did awhile back.)

(Click to enlarge)

Here's a picture from the workshop and another book of comic strips a guy brought in that he'd made:



Here are Ishara and Freya with their alien pictures; these gals spent 18 hours on a coach to get from Bath to Hi-Ex. that's dedication!


Gary, Jim, Dave and I did several comics jams right at our table with some of the visitors. This one's by Jim, me and a girl named Amy.

Here's a fab example of four people making three panels: Amy did the first, Jim did the second, I inked the third and Fiona coloured it in. The other one has panel borders by Jim and comics by the beautifully face-painted visitor.



Jim Medway's table and his alien:

Here's an amazing cat picture I got from Jim, which reminds me of some very old Russian woodcut pictures. I'm totally going to treasure this one.

Today's costume at the fab Discover centre in Stratford was more pink princess than space princess, but the princess prize goes to cartoonist Faz Choudhury for giving the best tip for getting big black scuff marks off white PVC boots. (Cif cleaning cream, it was. I tried every other chemical in the bathroom, kitchen and drinks cabinet but Cif worked best.)



Here's Rebecca the excellent Stage Manager and the rest of the Discovery team that made things go so well today. I was worried the book might only appeal to girls because of the whole princess thing, but the boys were totally into ALIENS, and SPACE, all was good. I didn't realise that my hair was all over the place from our rather rambunctuous session. We did a lot of shouting and talking about bogeys and stuff. (I never thought this book would slide into Morris territory when I took on the script, but there you go.)



Yesterday my favourite animator, Marc Craste, had the session just after me, and today, just as I walked in the front door, the amazing David Roberts was coming out from his session! I should just hang out at the Discover centre all the time to catch glimpses of Britain's best talent.

Linky links! -----------
The Etherington Brothers have posted Lorenzo's great fan art for Dave Shelton's comic book Good Dog, Bad Dog. (Lettuce the rabbit still has a crush on those boys.)

You can listen online for about five more days to a BBC Scotland interview with manga artist Asia Alfasi and Darryl Cunningham (tallguywrites), whose book Psychiatric Tales launches in a few weeks with Blank Slate and in the USA with Bloomsbury.

My friend Alice Brewer pointed me to some fab photos by Malick Sidibé that I didn't see in this weekend's Guardian because the shop had run out. (Great stripey backgrounds and one woman has round glasses that look like something I'd draw.)

And Jamie Smart has written a remarkable tribute to his dad and created an amazing comic about their relationship. Totally unmissable.

Hey, I learned loads this weekend, and took so many notes that I'm basically just going to do a list of links and go back and explore them all when I get a moment! I didn't get many photos of the talks, but that's okay, Natalie D'Arbeloff was busy with her sketchpad, so we were well documented! Here's Asia Alfasi and Natalie with her drawing of the talk Asia, Sarah Zaidan and I gave. Here's Asia giving her talk:


sketches by Natalie D'Arbeloff

We also got to hear great talks by political activist Kate Evans and Lost Girls illustrator Melinda Gebbie:



Kate was really inspiring and I'm half-way through reading her book about climate change, Funny Weather (which has an intro by George Monbiot). Melinda bought my Morris book to add to her big picture book collection and said she was excited by what all us young people are getting up to, that comics creators are the barometers for the rest of humanity and 'the ones who make gold out of s***' (which, with my Morris book, isn't that far off, although Giles calls it 'dung'.)

Woodrow Phoenix and his Rumble Strip editor Corinne Pearlman from Myriad Editions were the ones who gave me the big list of people to look up in their talk about autobiographical comics. I know of some of the names, and I even mentioned a couple in my own talk, but many of them are new to me.


Woodrow Phoenix, Bridget Hannigan and Corinne Pearlman

Woodrow and Corinne's list included: Ludovic Debeurme and his book Lucille, Debbie Drechsler, Sarah Glidden, Phoebe Glockner, Hannah Berry, Jeremy Dennis (cleanskies), Miss Lasko-Gross, Lee Kennedy, Vanessa Davis, Bastien Vives, Nicole Hollander, Kate Charlesworth, Claire Bretecher, Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin, Lynda Barry and M.K. Brown.

Dominique Goblet gave the last talk, and I was hugely impressed both by her artwork and by the project she did with her daughter, Changements. When her daughter was seven years old, they decided to draw portraits of each other every week, and they continued doing it until the daughter was 17 and needed her own space. They were experimental with the different ways they painted and drew, and it was fascinating to watch their artistic progression along with the clear aging of the girl and the less obvious aging of the mother. And what a cool idea of something to do with your kid. Click on the link to see some of the images from the project.

Thanks to Sarah Lightman and Amanda Rigler at Murray Edwards College for organising such an informative and fun day!


Melinda Gebbie and Danish PhD student of comics Rikke Platz Cortsen