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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! Here are fab comic artists Luke Pearson and Sally Kindberg in the Green Room.



And gosh, it's awfully nerve-wracking drawing a brand-new comic in front of a whole room full of people! I sort of had a think about what I was going to draw on the tube, on the way in, but I was surprised to find out just HOW BIG the screen was! I'd never drawn a comic about Captain Waffle before, he's from my picture book, You Can't Scare a Princess!, but I thought it would be funny to have him storm a comics fair and get arrested for buying pirated copies of Tintin.



I wish I'd taken a photo of the page at the end, but I was too flustered to remember. I mostly based myself out of the DFC Library table, and Matilda Johnson, the office manager at David Fickling Books, kindly let me sell my mini comic Please Be Moral Do Not Spit alongside Vern and Lettuce. I noticed James Turner's Super Animal Adventure Squad was selling very well, which was great to see. It's SUCH a funny book. Here's writer and illustrator El Ashfield with her copy of my mini comic.




It was great getting one of my comics heroes, Posy Simmonds, to sign my copy of our Nelson anthology. Nelson looks fabulous! Such a great coming-together of so many top British comic artists, it has to be seen to be believed.



Here's the stuff I hauled out of my handbag at the end of the day. They include four diffferent issues of We Are Words + Pictures, The Accidental Salad by Joe Decie. (Hey, did you know Joe recently proposed to his partner through this comic? And she said yes, whew!). Then there's A Taste of Chlorine by Bastien Vivès, Nelson, My Cardboard Life by Philippa Rice, the Solipsistic Pop anthology, The Green Bean by Katie Green, Candy Bag by Sally Jane Thompson, People I Know by Timothy Winchester and End of the Line by Woodrow Ph

Oh my, there are SO MANY upcoming exciting things, it's making my head spin. Let's start with the Saturday after next. If you can get to London, Comiket on Saturday, 12 November, 11am-6pm, will be a great time to come meet your favourite comic creators and make some new discoveries, too!



The new venue near Liverpool Street station is beautiful, at Bishopsgate Institute. The DFC Library will be well represented, with this signing schedule:

1.30-2pm: I'm signing! If it's a bit quiet, and you have your sketchbook along, I might also do a little comics jam story with you. Good times.
2.30-3pm: Adam Brockbank, the artist behind Mezolith and many of the monsters in the Harry Potter films
3.30-4pm: Neill Cameron, writer and artist of Mo-bot High and drawer of kick-ass robots

Thanks to everyone who's congratulated me for getting long-listed for next year's Kate Greenaway illustration award for my book with Anne Cottringer, When Titus Took the Train. Fingers crossed!



Here's the animation Anne and I made for Titus (apologies if you've seen it already):



It's quite an exciting list because I can count quite a few friends and good acquaintances on it, so I want lots of people to win, including Viviane Schwarz, Mini Grey, Chris Riddell (all three double long-listed!), my Monsterville colleagues Neal Layton and Ed Vere, Mei Matsuoka, David Roberts, Axel Scheffler, Chris Wormell, Tim Hopgood, Leigh Hodgkinson, Oliver Jeffers, Louise Yates, David Lucas... all of whom have appeared on this blog at one time or other. And quite a few on the Carnegie Medal long list, too! Hello, everyone! *waves in congratulatory way*

And lots of Nelson anthology events coming up, get read for NELSON WEEK! I'm taking part in three of the - Thought Bubble Festival, The Cartoon Museum launch, and the Gosh! comics shop signing, but I have so many friends involved that I'm sure I'll be at all four events. Do come along, this anthology's going to be amazing!!



Here's a single panel peek at my entry, about the main character in 1973, when she's five years old. The guy on the left is her dad, the lady is, well, I'm not telling.



Okay, a few more photos I've taken in the past few days with my new camera. Gary and I just went to the art shop near Brick Lane and there's a huge stork painted on the wall:



Here's the sweet shop that tempts us most horribly to pick up biscuits on our way to the studio. I kind of like how the photo ca

Hey, guess what, it's time for COMICS PEOPLE TO STORM THE SOCIETY OF AUTHORS!!! And you authors and illustrators, STORM THE COMICS WORLD! Oh, YES.



There have always been people in comics who've been part of the Society of Authors;
Patrice Aggs and Ros Asquith, just to name two, have been members for ages. But there's a real disconnect between British writers and British comic creators that's just begging to be bridged so more creativity can flourish. A few months ago, I went to a SoA event about poetry, where people were saying how hard it is to get poetry published and to get young people reading it, and I suggested they approach manga artists about collaboration, since I thought the pace of certain poems and manga layouts might complement each other. The poets were suddenly electrified and immediately wanted to know more about manga and the comics scene, and how they might be able to connect. So since I'd just joined the CWIG committee, the children's book branch of the SoA, I said I'd organise a comics event, hopefully the first of many comics events hosted by the SoA. And I asked Paul Gravett, head of Comica Festival and generally the person who knows most about comics, if he'd help out, so we're making it a joint SoA and Comica evening.

I hope you can come along! Here are the details:

Thinking Outside the Box: new publishing opportunities in comics and graphic novels aimed at children and young adults

London: Tuesday 13 September 2011: Doors open 6.15 for 6.30 start, tickets £10



HOSTS

Paul Gravett is a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing and promotion since 1981. Be sure to keep an eye on all the latest Comica Festival events.

Sarah McIntyre is a member of the Society of Authors and writes and illustrates comics and children's books, including Vern and Lettuce, Morris the Mankiest Monster, You Can't Eat a Princess! and When Titus Took the Train. She's currently launching You Can't Scare a Princess! and blogs almost every day.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Lizzie Spratt is a commissioning editor of children’s books and graphic novels at Walker Books. She left Bloomsbury in 2008 to help Walker develop a list of graphic novels and has gone on to publish a range of titles for all ages, including adaptations of Anthony Horowitz’s multi-selling Alex Rider spy novels, Joann Sfar’s version of The Little Prince translated by Sarah Ardizzone, stories from British cartoonist Andi Watson, as well as noir fantasy Salem Brownstone: All Along the Watchtowers by John Harris Dunning and Nikhil Singh, which was nominated for the 2011 Kate Greenaway Medal.

Ben Sharpe is commissioning editor of The Phoenix Comic, a weekly 32-page, full colour comic magazine, set to rise early in 2012, with offices based in Oxford. He led The DFC weeky comic magazine as commissioning editor until recession and the parent company pulled the plug, but the vision has never died, and support by an anonymous investor means the new-and-improved project h

Not only does Battersea in south London boast the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, but it also hosted a comics festival today in a perfect summery setting. Here's my glam studio mate Ellen Lindner at the bus stop.



I posted about the HyperComics exhibition last week here, but I caught a lot of things this time that I missed on my first visit. Barnaby Richards had trouble looking through the masks to see Dave McKean's installations - our specs kept catching the edge of it - but if we took them off, we couldn't see anything. Eventually we sorted it out.



Some fab people from the day: Woodrow Phoenix, Warwick Johnson Cadwell (I got a copy of his new minicomic sketchbook and The No.1 Car Spotter, yay!), Lou Naniiebim Ho and Nikki Shakino Stuart with our Birdsong anthology.


Back to fab Ellen and her amazing printed shirt:


And the tucked-away part of the exhibition that I totally missed last time.


Between Dave McKean's fascinating talk about his work, the lovely outdoor marquee setting and the good company, I think this is the best comics festival I've been to, just for pure comfort and ease. Oh, and I was just a punter - no table - that may have had something to do with it. The organiser and exhibition curator Paul Gravett was saying there was a chance this festival could become an annual thing, and I'm all for that! If you haven't seen the exhibition, be sure to pop along, and bring your kids to the HyperComics family workshop I'm leading on Sun, 19 Sept.

Oh, and one more thing, the yeti meister Alex Milway just sent me a link to this amazing historic Russian photos.

On to Edinburgh! Packing copies of Warwick's book and Geraldine McCaughrean's Pull Out all the Stops! in case I get any time to read on the train. I've already started reading Geraldine's book, it's so well written it makes me rather giddy.

Here's Sean Azzopardi and me taking in the wonder of the new comics exhibition at the Pumphouse Gallery. (Sean's posted a bunch of photos here.)



A whole bunch of comic artists got together to put on this fab show in a gorgeous location in a beautifully restored pumphouse overlooking a pond, curated by Paul Gravett. Here's the floor featuring Dave McKean's very site-specific work. He arranged it so there were lots of places you could see something cool just if you looked at it from an exact perspective. One view was through this mask:



Here's the dude wot made it:




And one of the window views where, if I bend my knees quite a lot and pretend I'm Dave's height, the trees in the picture exactly line up with the trees I see through the window.



Speaking of site specific, I've been invited to lead a HyperComics family workshop right there in the gallery space! It's on Sunday, 19 Aug from 1:30-3:30, and booking details are here.

Masked Adventures in Comics!
Draw inspiration from the Hypercomic exhibition and Dave McKean's masked characters to design your own story's masked heroes and villains. Get behind their masks to discover your characters' unique personalities, then use the Pumphouse setting to bring them to life in a gripping story. At the end, you'll come away with your own self-published comic book!
Suitable for both children and adults.

I told Dave McKean we'd be very careful while we run around his artwork and stab pencils into the air.
This comic panel reads, He seemed nervous.



Multi-directional comics by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey:



The ever-marvelous John Miers and Megan Donnolley:



A red-lined mask really begs to be looked through.





I actually missed a lot of the exhibition because it does demand a bit of concentration and quiet contemplation. I was riding a weird wave of being buzzed and knackered by a full day in Birmingham at the the Peters Bookselling Services. Basically it's this massive storeroom full of children's and young adult books that sell to libraries in vast quantities. All three of my publishers were there, but I was officially with Oxford University Press and doing my shpeil for my upcoming adventure picture book When Titus Took the Train. It was such a funny format... Librarian Speed Dating! The two OUP publicists and I had five minutes at our booth to say our bit to a group of about five librarians. At the end of the time, The Archers theme tune would play and the next group of librarians would pile in and we'd do it all over again. Fortunately we also got a nice lunch and I got to meet Facebo

Last night I met up with Viviane Schwarz and Alexis Deacon to go see a panel discussion organised by Paul Gravett and chaired by Audrey Niffenegger of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.

Of the three of them, I'm actually the biggest fan of Niffenegger's novels, I really loved The Time Traveller's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry. I love getting into her world, she creates such fascinating characters with such strange, twisted personal issues they have to deal with, all within a setting that's laced heavily with her appreciation of arts and crafts. I like her graphic novels, but I prefer her text novels, where she really digs in and revels in pitting her characters against each other. Here's some fan art I started early this morning; I hope I get time to take it beyond a rough sketch. I lent someone the book (and I've forgotten who) so I couldn't check up on a few things. If I'd had even more time, I would have liked to have researched the furniture and made it a bit more William Morris or Robin & Lucienne Day or something. (Agh, so many things I want to do!)



This is the scene in Her Fearful Symmetry where the ghost Elspeth realises she has some effect over electrical appliances, and accidentally kills the twins' television.

I made some very rough sketches at the talk, but it was quite dark and I couldn't really see my paper. I was interested that none of them keep sketchbooks, just make notes, although they recommended that people just starting out, or younger people, keep sketchbooks. Clowes said that if he put his efforts into his sketchbook, then it felt like anticlimax when he went to do his actual work, and he needed to save himself up for that, so the work was his main outlet of creativity. Ware said he'd got to the stage where he could just draw and be happy with it, he didn't need to practice. It reminded me of a talk I heard by Dave McKean, where he'd launched some published sketchbooks of cities, and he said that they were the first time he really felt confident in his drawing, that he could just draw.



I think I still have a very long way to go before I get to that stage. I like my drawings, but I always feel they could be better, and I love trying out different techniques. I don't keep organised, beautiful sketchbooks (unlike Dave Shelton). I'm always picking up one, using a few pages, then going back to another book with some empty pages, and then doing other sketches on random bits of paper. But I do try to keep them all, it's interesting to go back and look at what things got me going at different stages. I suppose this LiveJournal is sort of my sketchbook, if I didn't keep track of things here, I might forget them entirely. When a rumour went around that the blog was being deleted (totally untrue), I must confess to panicking a bit. Losing this blog would have felt like getting a partial lobotomy.


Someone in the audience asked Clowes if he gets sent lots of minis. He said he used to get nearly a hundred a week through the post. But when people switched to e-mail, his flow of minis pretty much dried up. But he encouraged people to make mini comics as a way of showing off their work. If he sees someone who wants them to look at their comics, and has to write down a website, he pretty much knows he'll never get the time to go look it up. But if someone hands him a mini, he can get an idea about their work almost instantly.

Ware encouraged people to pus

Yesterday a bunch of us from The DFC gang met up in David Fickling's Oxford office to find out what's happening with some of the amazing comics that appeared during the DFC's 43-week appearance. And the news is good! While The DFC as a weekly magazine has been shelved for the time being, readers are going to be able to read whole collections of their favourite strips, in individual books. The first three to appear will be Dave Shelton's Good Dog, Bad Dog (which ran in The Guardian), Kate Brown's Spider Moon (which ran as a play by Playbox Theatre company, photos here), and artist Adam Brockbank (who designed many of the beasts in the Harry Potter films) and storyteller Ben Haggarty's Mezolith.



David Fickling was hugely excited at the meeting, saying he was gearing up to become the lead comic book publisher in the UK, and wants David Fickling Books to take on the huge comics industry in France and elsewhere. So here's the deal: He says it's going to be a struggle, because as of yet with the top retailers, no real comics market yet exists in the UK, so we're really going to have to push to create one. He's going to print 5,000 hardback copies of each of the three books, and we really need to sell all of them so we can afford to go on and bring out more books. So if you want a Vern and Lettuce book in the second round (and boy, oh boy, do I!), please get ready to support these three books and convince everyone you know to buy them, and get everywhere you can think of to stock them! We'll have an overarching DFC Library launch, and then fab events at the launch of each, with Good Dog, Bad Dog being the first to come out in March, then Mezolith and Spider Moon in April and May. (You can even pre-order them on Amazon here!)

Just as we were all meeting, Tilda the office manager, came in with a letter than had just arrived in the post, from a DFC reader named Samira who, even after all these months, was still dead set on seeing her favourite comics in print, whatever it took (Thanks, Samira!):




Here's a few photos from the DFB headquarters yesterday:


David and Will Fickling; editor Hannah Featherstone, Adam Brockbank and Will



Lauren Bennett (the fab publicist I've been working with on Morris the Mankiest Monster) and me; Ben Haggarty


Clare Hall-Craggs, publicity director at Random House Children's Books, and the very messy table at th