I went to the Comica Comiket at the ICA on Sunday. Although a little cramped and warm, it was great to see so many good comics from the UK. Highlights included new books from We Are Words and Pictures, Jimi Gherkin’s Alternative Press, with their anthology, Publish You. Bryan Talbot was in attendance, and has been doing many talks at this year’s ComICA. This is the latest in a long line of great small press festivals in the UK this year – The UK Web and Mini Comics Thing, London Underground Comics, Caption… and that’s not counting the larger festivals with a small press presence. That’s quite a healthy small press scene!

As well as a lot of great UK-based comics, Danish comics were represented by Aben Maler, and their publisher Steffen P. Maarup, who was selling the fantastic anthology of Danish Comics – From Wonderland With Love: Danish Comics in the Third Millennium. The book is translated into English and co-published by Aben Maler and Fantagraphics. It’s a beautiful book, with some great comics in there.

Steffen also had some of the other books that Aben Maler put out, in their 676 range of comics. These are small, short but very professionally produced comics similar to the Patte De Mouche collection from L’Association (Date proved to be very popular). Those which aren’t wordless have a translation tucked inside the main cover.

As you’d expect, I got talking to Steffen about Comix Influx and what we do. Gratifyingly, he already knew of the site and said that he’d read the translation of Dominique Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir using the Comix Influx translation. Which was very nice.

Speaking of Angoulême I saw this great Flickr set of next year’s President, Blutch, drawing at the Cartier Foundation (found via Comics Reporter).

Also ComICA is coming up in London – still haven’t decided exactly what I’ll be going to, but there’s loads of good panels.

Olivier and Paul discussed the huge range of comics that Cinebook have put out over the last few years, and their plans for the future. Their extensive back catalogue (which you can see here) includes such classic books as Lucky Luke, Blake and Mortimer, Goscinny and Tabary’s Iznogoud and Thorgal, as well as new hit French books like Largo Winch, Alderbaran and IR$. They are shortly to start producing the complete run – 19 books! – of the hugely successful thriller XIII, on an impressive bimonthly schedule.

Paul then turned to me to ask about Comix Influx, how it came about and the philosophy behind it. I explained that it was really about people who love foreign-language comics, and want to share their efforts so that other interested readers may benefit from them. As such, the emphasis is on “just-good-enough” translations (although there have been many excellent translations appearing on the site). I also mentioned the Comix Influx iPhone app, which should be available very soon, Apple willing. (Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned technical difficulties I had to rely on screen-grabs rather than a live demo – ah, well next time). We only had time for the briefest overview, but it was good to introduce a new audience to Comix Influx.

Paul also mentioned several other exciting European books coming out in English. In particular Logicomix from Greece looks really ambitious and interesting (check out the New York Time’s review) and Lou! by Julien Neel, which Paul recommended very highly. Finally, I’m over the moon that Fantagraphics are publishing Tardi’s back catalogue, starting with West Coast Blues (Le petit bleu de la Côte Ouest) and You Are There (Ici même). There have a been a few efforts to publish Tardi in English before, but for inexplicable reasons they have never yet taken off in the way that I’d expect. Hopefully the time is now ripe for Tardi.

After the panel I had a chance to enjoy the rest of the show. I was fascinated by Bryan Talbot’s talk about the influences on and references in his new book Grandville, which I had earlier bought and had signed, and then enjoyed on the train home (more on Grandville in a future post). Talbot is an excellent presenter and really knows his subject extremely well; I urge you to catch his presentation at next month’s ComICA festival if you can.

Unfortunately I was not able to stay for the Sunday, so missed Sarah McIntyre’s interview of Manga artist and illustrator Michiru Morikawa, but I did see her on her table, launching her new children’s book, Morris The Mankiest Monster, surrounded by children gleefully creating disgusting monsters of their own.

One quick word about the venue, the Think Tank in Birmingham – part Science Museum, part exhibition centre – is a great place for a comics festival. It was airy enough to not suffer the claustrophobia that often attends comics festivals, and it was nice to walk between bits of the festival through the scientific exhibits. The auditorium in particular was terrific. And the festival itself drew a large and diverse crowd of happy and friendly people. Congratulations to Shane Chebsey for organising a great festival – The British International Comics Show was a fantastic and satisfying blend of high- and low-brows.

Phew! Nearly got the Comix Influx iPhone App complete. Apart from a few minor visual tweaks, it was pretty much done a week ago. Unfortunately, I found the process of building and submitting the application to Apple a little opaque. I finally managed to get it submitted this morning, and it is now in the queue for approval by Apple.

Apple are currently saying that 87% of applications are reviewed within 14 days, and so I’m hopeful that it will be ready to demo and launch at the Found In Translation panel at the British International Comics Show.

The functionality is deliberately limited, and particularly focused on allowing people to get to the translations as directly as possible, to allow them to read them on the iphone as easily as possible. (This may seem obvious, but I also try to promote the more community-building aspects on the web-site, as well as the translations themselves).

Here are a few screen grabs from the development version:

More news as I get it!

The actual frameworks that the iPhone applications are built on were one of the very first things I learnt as a developer nearly 10 years ago, but have barely used since – it was fun dredging up some of that deeply buried knowledge.

Anyway, I’m hopeful that I should be able to get it finished in days rather than weeks – watch this space.

Ollie East continues his pedestrian odyssey in Proper Go Well High, the second of his Trains Are… Mint series, published by Blank Slate Books. It treads a similar path to the first book (reviewed last year), with East detailing a walking journey, following train tracks (as far as practical), this time from Manchester to Liverpool. It would be understandable to worry that East is in a rut, repeating the same format of his debut, but that fear turns out to be unfounded. Proper Go Well High is a darker, more personal and more accomplished work than its predecessor.

Firstly, East is clearly gaining confidence in his art. While still rudimentary, it is bolder, more detailed and take more stylistic risks – and more successfully. At the end of one day’s tough walking, East depicts an oppressive sun dominating the landscape over several panels – it’s a swirling, radiant sun, with rays and complex patterns like a metallic sunflower. Partly through the primitive nature of East’s art, he conveys the sense of a giant, primeval sun, cruelly beating down on the poor walker.

We learn that there is an 18 month gap roughly a third of the way through the book and that marks a change in East’s mood. He makes a passing reference to losing a best friend (a falling out, I infer), which he does not expand upon, and generally seems to feel the lack of human contact much more. To be fair, he also alludes to a difficult and distant relationship with his father in the first, cheerier third of the book but still he seems much more chipper in this part, instructing himself to “rein it in”. In the later sections he has apparently become more willing to open up. As a telling example, the title of Trains Are… Mint arose because of East’s stammer, the ellipsis evoking his difficulty in coming out with the final word. But that is never explained in the first book, nor mentioned elsewhere – it is hidden in plain sight to be sure, but is still only implicit. In Proper Go Well High he goes much further. “Out here, no stammer” he says at one point and later he devotes a whole section to the difficulty his stammer causes in buying a bottle of water. One page is given to his preparing the right phrase to say, a second for him waiting until other people have left the shop before going in to avoid embarrassment, and then a third to his depiction of CCTV footage of him making his way to the counter (over 8 panels). Finally, the fourth page consists of a single, domineering borderless image of a looming – though pleasant looking – shopkeeper, who casually preempts East’s carefully prepared sentence leaving East virtually wordless. Four pages devoted to one simple purchase. It’s a great little sequence, but more than that it illustrates how East has become much more revelatory in his story telling.

Okay, Ollie East is not always downbeat

In Trains Are… Mint, East was an ingenuous traveller, recording what he saw with a healthy cynicism but a great openness. He took a delight in the journey, not rushing, apparently unoncerned about his progress. This spirit is still evident is in the first section of Proper Go Well High, before his 18-month hiatus: East takes a wrong turn, but is pleased as it takes him further along the railway tracks. In the latter sections he shows no such delight in his journey. This time he seems much more focussed on getting to Liverpool. If Trains Are… Mint was about the journey, Proper Go Well High is about East finding his destination. This feeling of urgency to arrive – almost a dissatisfaction with where he is – pervades the book. Perhaps predictably, this eventually leads to East being dissatisfied when he does arrive. The narrative almost feels like it dissolves as he arrives in Liverpool; the gutters between the panels widen, as if in disorientation and panic as he experiences each individual moment. It feels like nothing so much as an existential crisis. Finally, the last two pages show East sitting on the steps of the station, repeated panels showing his inaction at the end of the journey. Eventually he gets up, leaves forgetting his bag on the steps, returns to pick it up, and then finally goes, leaving us just looking at the empty steps. I found it a bleak ending.

Spirals are a constant motif throughout the book – gusts of wind, rain falling from a roof, the hail surrounding him, even the stylised curl of a girl’s hair. In particular, the paths and train tracks are repeatedly shown coiling around buildings. They can be taken as a metaphor for East’s journey as whole – it is really a journey inwards, into himself. In a sense, all journeys are, but it is interesting to contrast this with the more straight-forward approach of Trains Are… Mint. Okay, okay – this may all seem like I’m reading way too much into an original but slight journal comic, with attractive but simplistic art. Maybe I am, but personally I am amazed at how much richness can be conjured up in such a scant premise.

Despite being a big fan of Trains Are… Mint, I had been worried that this book would simply be more of the same. But my fears were entirely unfounded – East has produced a great, affecting, thought-provoking book. A worthy successor to Trains Are… Mint. I don’t know how he manages it, but I’m looking forward to see where his next book takes him, and where it finds him.

Saturday night (20/6/9) saw another great ComICA event at the ICA, with Emmanuel Guibert and Émile Bravo in conversation with Paul Gravett.

ComICA normally comes up with some great talks and panels, but to get two such luminaries of French comics, right as they are both becoming superstars was a fantastic achievement.

Émile Bravo is the author of Ma Maman Est En Amerique, elle a rencontrait Buffalo Bill, as well as last year’s Spirou retcon, many people’s book of 2008. Ma Maman has been published in translation as My Mommy… by Fanfare (of course, Comix Influx was ahead of the curve with its own translation).

Émmanuel Guibert is principally known for his “serious” books – La Guerre d’Alan and Le Photographe, each published in English by First Second as Alan’s War and The Photograhper, respectively. However, he has also done lighter work, particularly collaborating with Joann Sfarr on the Sardine stories (over 1200 pages to date!), which Guibert wrote, and on The Professor’s Daughter, which he illustrated (apparently he and Sfar would draw roughs when writing for the other).

Émile Bravo is principally known as a creator of comics for children. But his books are almost the archetype of the “children’s books that will be loved by all ages” cliché. Part of this must be due to the ingenuousness that he brings to his work, which seems to derive from his desire to write for his younger self. Indeed, he still has something of the big kid about him – the unruly hair, bustling energy and enthusiasm and mischievous grin.

Even the act of creating comics he explicitly ties to childhood, saying that the first way a child learns to communicate is through drawing. This “drawing as communication” theme seems central to Bravo – he says that he doesn’t draw unless he has something to say; he has no sketchbooks. He also draws a big distinction between good drawing that is technically good and good drawing that is emotionally good. As a story-teller he is interested in the latter and is less concerned whether drawings are technically good.

For Bravo, you cannot separate the drawing and the writing. He describes the writing as the difficult part, and the drawing is just craft; but for Bravo drawing is part of to how he writes. He seemed to me a truly pure and instinctive cartoonist, seamlessly blending story and words in order to tell a story.

However, he doesn’t always do both. His biggest success before Spirou, le journal d’un ingénu was Ma Maman, which was written by his friend, Jean Regnaud. I had not realised that that book was an autobiographical story. Bravo said that he initially found it inhibiting, because he knew personally all the characters in the story, but for Regnaud that meant he was the ideal choice to do it.

Bravo’s work on Spirou has been a massive success in France, although the character is largely unknown in the Anglophone world (hopefully this is changing with Cinebook publishing several volumes in translation, which might lead to a translation of Spirou). Bravo deliberately chose to deal the period after the character was created in 1938, and before Franquin took over in 1946. Bravo said that he felt Franquin filled the character out a lot, and so Bravo’s goal was to explain how Spirou went from the initial character, with no background and no character (who literally jumps off an artist’s page in his first story, thanks to a spritz of “eau de vie”), to the complete character that Franquin wrote a few years later. For Bravo, it was the war that must have been the vehicle that gave Spirou a measure of self-awareness. He said that he was writing the story for his childhood self, who always wanted to know all those answers. At the same time did not seem to feel particularly precious about this being the one true origin (although it appears that members of the audience did feel a little more strongly about that).

The first half of the panel was almost all Bravo, but in the second half interviewer Paul Gravett turned to ask questions of Emmanuel Guibert. Bravo and Guibert were a good pairing, as despite having much in common (in fact, Bravo and Guibert (along with Sfarr and many other French comics artists) shared the same studio in the Place de Vosges in Paris), their distinctions were even more interesting.

Unlike Bravo, who seems to live on his instints for his creative decisions, Guibert comes across as a much more cerebral artist. His decisions are much more deliberate (although he admits to not always remembering what they are – “this book littered with decisions I don’t remember” he said of The Photographer).

The two works that, to date, define Guibert’s career – Allan’s War and The Photographer – have both recently been published in English by First Second. Unusually, both books are based on the reminiscences of acquaintances of Guibert, whose stories, he realised, he needed to tell.

For Alan’s War that seems particularly surprising – the eponymous Alan is a GI who entered mainland Europe only towards the end of the Second World War; he wasn’t involved in combat, and barely saw any enemy soldiers. For a war story, it sounds somewhat unpromising, but Guibert paid testament to Alan’s story-telling skills. Intriguingly, Guibert added that the most interesting part of the story was Alan’s childhood; of the 5 years he spent talking to Alan, the last 3 dwelt on his childhood. I understand that Guibert will return to Alan’s story in the future.

Guibert’s art is beautiful – First Second have publicised his particularly indiosyncratic method for the art in Alan’s War on youtube.com:

In contrast to that somewhat idiosynchratic approach, we saw a couple of initial, more traditional, pencil sketches, which were lovely – very precise, with dense, beautiful, curved cross-hatching. Unlike Bravo, Guibert clearly does consider the art a great deal, in isolation of the writing, though still in the service of the story. His art across his various books shows a fantastic range and versatility.

Apparently, when Japanese artists at Angoulême saw Guibert’s work on Brune (an early, painted comics album) they were amazed at how much time must have been spent on them. In contrast, Paul mentioned some of the artists published by L’Association, particularly Trondheim and Sfar, but also many others, had led to a looser, sparser style becoming more fashionable. He further wondered whether that had helped the publishing boom occurring in French comics at the moment. Guibert was reluctant to agree with that, simply saying that every book has its own pace.

Impressive as Alan’s War is, it was The Photographer that really took my breath away. Guibert wanted to tell the story of his neighbour and friend, the photographer, Didier Lefèvre, as he travelled through war-torn Afghanistan in the mid-80s with Médecins Sans Frontieres. Given his subject, it was obvious that to make the book work he would have to pull off the audacious trick of incorporating photographs directly into the book. This is notoriously difficult to do – as Guibert said “Drawing and photos they fight, both try to kill each other.” Nonetheless, Guibert pulls it off flawlessly (although he did throw out a month and a half’s work, in trying to make it work).

He always uses the photos as they were on the contact sheet – “no cropping, no anything”. But in order that he had the freedom he needed to make that work, he demanded from Lefèvre, and received, permission to use whichever photos he wanted. As Guibert said, this is a big request to grant: “For a photographer, choosing which photos to use is as important as taking the photos in the first place.”

To illustrate the how unusual this would be for a photographer, Guibert said that Lefèvre sold only 6 photographs from the trip described in the book (not an unusual rate of return for a professional photographer), whereas Guibert brought hundreds to a new audience in The Photographer. He commented on the “morphological resemblance” of a photographer’s contact sheet and a comics page which was immediately apparent to him.

Interestingly, in Alan’s War, every word came from Alan, through his conversations with Guibert; in The Photographer, Guibert wrote much of the dialogue, and even later heard Didier using Guibert’s words in retelling the anecdotes.

For its powerful subject, the clarity of its story telling, its experimental, almost formalist, use of photographs, and its bravura mixing of medium and message, The Photographer already stands out as a classic book.

So another great night of comics at the ICA – thanks and kudos once again to Paul Gravett for organising these events. ComICA normally comes up with some great talks and panels, but this was particularly memorable; it is rare to get the opportunity to see such a great paring of artists, both just receiving well deserved international recognition, and both in perfect control of their medium.

I was recently directed toward Ubunchu!, a manga about the Ubuntu Operating System (a flavour of Linux). The comic was originally in Japanese but has since become the centre of a whirlwind of translating activity.

DoctorMO got permission to translate the manga from its creator, Hiroshi Seo, and did an English, left-to-right version in PDF format, which he posted on his blog (which is generally more concerned with Ubuntu than comics). This is effectively a (legitimate) scanlation, although DoctorMO had the original PSDs to work with.

Since then many other people joined in and have produced 13 other editions, including an unflipped English version (not reading so much Manga, I much prefer the flipped version).

In another post, DoctoMO describes the process of creating PDFs, for those interested in the gory, technical details.

And, while on Manga, Katherine Farmar recently gave a talk at the “Academic Perspectives on Comics, Manga & Graphic Novels as Intercultural & Intermedial Phenomena” conference at Växjö University, Sweden. Katherine’s paper was called ‘Why “global manga” is an oxymoron’, and she was good enough to spread the word about Comix Influx while she was there. Katherine says that there are plans to publish all the papers from the conference, which is great. As well as Katherine’s, there were lots of others which also sounded really interesting.

In this episode Bryan and Matt discuss Le Scorpion, by Enrico Marini and Stephen Desberg, published originally by Dargaud, and in translation by Cinebook. Right at the end Bryan puts in a request for a translation of Le Grand Duc, a comic about the Luftwaffe in World War II by Yann and Romain Hugault, from Paquet. Anyone fancy giving that a try?

Anyway, give the podcast a listen, bookmark the site and subscribe to the RSS feed.

And here’s a transcription of the section where Matt mentions Comix Influx:

Matt Shepherd: Do you have anything on your to do pile?

MS: Well, you can even drop them a line and ask if anyone’s interested in doing it.

Ellen pleased with sales of Undertow!

Ellen and I went to the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing in East London yesterday. Ellen was there to debut Undertow, her graphic novel that she’s just self-published through Lulu. I was there to help her out, and to promote Comix Influx. I took along a little stand displaying the Comix Influx homepage, and a pile of quality European comics, loaded with Snip-Its.

It was a really great little festival – lots of invention, creativity and an enthusiasm which it can be all too easy to miss in the UK scene. It drew people from America, Ireland and Germany – and other places too I’m sure – impressive for a small-press fair in Mile End.

An attendee reading
Chute De Vélo, with Comix
Influx Snip-Its in place

I managed to talk to quite a few people about Comix Influx, mostly using my copy of Chute De Vélo stuffed full of Katherine Farmar’s translation in Snip-It form, to demonstrate what the site’s about. I got a lot of interest, and hope that will, ahem, translate into some new subscribers and some more translations. Two herren from German publisher ?Zwerchfell Verlag? also left a couple of German comics which they thought might be of interest to Comix Influx. Unfortunately I was dashing back home at the time to fetch more copies of Undertow, which did a roaring trade all day, so I didn’t get to meet them. But it was very nice of them. The books in question are ?Daniel & Oleg?, by Olli Ferreira and René Roggmann, and ?Disco Amore? by Piwi.

I also picked up some cool comics. Patrick Lynch and Katie Blackwood, who are Cardboard Press of Dublin, had some great comics and handmade books on sale. John Aggs introduced me to Willie Hewes who was there with her own comics, and an anthology of comics that had been entered in a competition run by the Japanese Embassy in London. The excellent and irrepressible Jimi Gherkin had his new comic for sale, with a great silk-screened day-glo cover – available in multiple colour variants! I also picked up a short anthology of robot stories published by We Are Words And Pictures, with an absolutely outstanding cover by Sarah Gordon.

David O’Connell, Sarah
MacIntyre and Woodrow Phoenix

Unsurprisingly, the talk of the day was the recent demise of the DFC. A massive shame – but I’ve personally been very impressed by the positivity shown since the announcement that Random House were halting publication. Hopefully that will turn into a new buyer at some point, but even if not I still expect to see much good rise from its ashes.

Certainly in its brief existence the DFC already had a considerable impact on the UK scene – providing an injection of new blood and talent, and giving people the faith and belief that comics can work out here. On the very weekend that the DFC shut up shop, you would have expected to see that belief dented – thankfully, there was little sign of that.

See my photos from The Thing on Flickr

The process of creating a translated version of a game is very interesting. First a “hacker” opens the original game program (referred to as “a ROM” – for Read-Only Memory – due to the way they are normally stored). They then look through the program to locate the font used to display the original text. With that, they can find in-game text, by recognising where the font is used. They extract that text into a regular file which a translator then takes and translates. Finally the new text has to be inserted back into the program (which may require new font characters to be embedded in the program as well), and the new, translated game program game can be saved.

The original programs are typically stored on cartridges which are inserted into consoles, but for these translated games the programs are normally made available on the web for people to download and play using software which emulates the original consoles.

Mandelin does the translation bit of the process, and, as well as working on these fan translations for the love of it, is a professional game translation too. I won’t rehash the article here, but there’s lots of interesting stuff about the pros and cons of doing fan translations as opposed to professional ones (mistakes can be more easily fixed in the ROM-hacked versions for one thing).

But still, apart from the “fan translation” aspect this may all seem of little relevance to Comix Influx. There is an obvious connection with the scanlation scene, both in the material and also in the way the translations are produced. There, people scan the pages pages and then add translations using a graphics program like Photoshop or Gimp.

Comix Influx, on the other hand, deals almost exclusively with hard copies of printed books, so there is no direct analogue to opening up the program and locating and replacing the original text. However, the emergence of electronic comics in various forms seems to raise some interesting possibilities, with more in common with Mandelin’s approach. Comics are now becoming available on the Kindle (despite the quality really not being there yet), and the web-comics scenes is burgeoning, as Wim wrote about recently. Indeed, Katherine Farmar has already translated one of Aurélia Aurita’s web-comics.

However, one essential difference between the text within a game and within an electronic comic is that in the game the text is stored as genuine text – i.e., as characters corresponding to individual letters; in electronic comics they are normally just part of the image. Most of the them would not have used a computer font in the first place – instead being hand-lettered and scanned – and those that do still tend to have have the text flattened into the image. In fact, most web-comics are presented as JPGs which don’t even support embedded text.

A notable exception to this is the public information comic, No Ordinary Flu, which I wrote about last Summer. In this case, the publisher wanted to get the comic out to a wide readership in 12 different languages (actually, 16 languages now now) as efficiently, effectively – and legibly – as possible, so using regular computer fonts was clearly the best option. Additionally, due to the way the agency actually produced the various translations, the comic was distributed in PDF, and most translated versions had proper text which supported search and cut’n’paste (try the search functionality on the French version – it’s really nice!).

In time, high-quality, personalised fonts will be more affordable, and will probably become the norm for creating comics. But even then, unless there are good reasons to do otherwise creators will continue to distribute their comics as JPEGs, with the text flattened into the image. And although, as people start to read comics on their eReaders, iPhones and computers they might expect standard functionality such as text-search and cut’n’paste, they aren’t the killer-apps which would make a difference to the standard production practice.

I actually expect it will probably go the other way – with things like search being added to electronic comics using OCR techniques to identify the embedded text, rather than changing the distribution format. Until something like that happens, though, in this medium of words and picture, the words will remain second-class citizens.

Thanks to Mike Rhode for the initial link.

In general Joanna’s translation is more idiomatic than mine – while not wanting to do an absolutely literal translation I generally try to maintain a flavour of the underlying original. This is partly a confidence thing, as I don’t feel I have the remit to interpret the creator’s intentions (although I have no problem with others plunping for a more idiomatic approach).

Anyway, this is exactly how I had hoped Comix Influx would work, with people adding their insight and expertise to help improve the translations, making them a collaborative effort.

Bart also seems very happy with the comics that won prizes this year, although he does a good job of hiding his glee in his annoyance at the ceremony having been moved to Sunday.

Wim has also done an invaluable round-up of the emergent comics blogs
in the Francophone world on the Forbidden Planet Interational blog. There’s loads of great stuff in there – it’s going to take a while to get through it all. Seemed to piss off a couple of James Kochalka fans though.

Matt Madden, of 99 Ways To Tell A Story has sent me a translation of Fabio Zimbre’s mini-comic O Apocalipse segundo Dr. Zeug. As Matt says “I love this comic. Just reading the script again, its absurdity cracks me up”.

Unfortunately, at the moment we can only show a cover image if the book is available on amazon.fr, which is a bit of a limitation. In the meantime, you can see it on this page. We are hoping to get more of Zimbre’s art from the comic on the site as well, in which case I will add to this blogpost.

Thanks to Matt for the translation! On Matt’s blog, he’s just posted an English translation of a one-page comic he originally did in French for a magazine called Polystyrène. Check that out too!

You can just hear Rian Hughes in the background.

A mural in the Dupuy-Berberian Exhibition

Angoulême 2009 started off with a national strike on the railways, and concluded with an act of political protest. How appropriate for the presidency of Dupuy-Berberian, arch chroniclers of the vicissitudess and hypocricies of modern French life.

I attended the Angoulême Festival this year with high anticipation. Obviously expectations were high for the presidency of Dupuy-Berberian – the first time the festival has had joint presidents, a recognition of the indivisibilty of their contributions to the Dupuy-Berberian ouevre. However I was also very excited to meet and chat with publishers about Comix Influx and to show them our recently launched Snip-Its!

I talked to many of the more-independent artists and publishers, such as Cambourakis, Ego Comme X, La Cinquième Couche, Atrabile, La Pastèque, and the responses were uniformly positive. I decided to approach that sort of publisher partly because they tend to be closer to my sensibilities (although translations of any comics, from and to any languages, are equally welcome on Comix Influx), but mostly because I thought that they would be more sympathetic to the cause.

Choi Juhyun and Joanna Hellgren
dédicacing at the Cambourakis table

I find that the new Comix Influx Snip-Its! make it much easier to communicate the aim of Comix Influx. As well as showing the necessity of owning the original comic – thus avoiding anyone thinking that we are doing scanlations, and could diminish sales – Snip-Its particularly highlight the opportunities for publishers, such as making copies available to foreign publishers, to help foreign publishing deals, and also passing out review copies, as well as the more obvious opportunity to sell copies at international comics festivals such as Angoulême. I hope that this will lead to greater interaction with publishers over the next few months, so we can really try to take Comix Influx in directions that will benefit them, as well as the comics readers, hungry for international comics.

Thursday, the first day of the festival, was slower than normal this year, as many people struggled to get to Angoulême due to a national rail strike. But despite this, most publishers I spoke to seemed to have done a very good trade this year. For the people who did make it in for the Thursday, the tents (where the publishers sell their wares, and creators inscribe elaborate dédicace) and the exhibitions were unusually empty, giving a great opportunity to see as much as possible before the crowds descended.

Dupuy-Berberian model in the CIBDI

Possibly the highlight of the festival was the Presidents’ exhibition at the newly renamed CIBDI (Cité Internationale pour La Bande Dessinée et de l’Image). It was a huge exhibition, showing a massive range of Dupuy-Berberian’s work over nearly 20 years. It also displayed a great variety of content: sketches, original art, prints, models, and ephemera. Great ephemera.

Dupuy and Dupuy

The centre-piece of the exhibition was an enormous – at least 12 foot tall – mechanical model, showing crude but recognisable charicatures of Dupuy and Berberian jointly operating a machine which moved a gynormous pencil across a piece of paper, illustrating the collaborative nature of their work. Smaller versions, a few inches tall, of these have been shown before (and were included here, although they were not operational) but this was the first time one of this scale has been shown.

A nice touch, the exhibition also included items from their personal collections, including pages of original art from various other creators. Another treasure was the complete original art from a batman comic given to Charles Berberian for his 40th birthday. While the story was a very straight Batman story, each page was drawn by a different giant of the French comics scene – Avril, Stanislas, Killoffer, Trondheim, and several others.

As one would hope, the exhibition included a large number of originals. The quality of work, control and expressiveness of their line is breath-taking, I could have stayed there for hours, but with so much to see I reluctantly had to move on.

Dupuy-Berberian and Ruppert-Mulot draw each other

Within their exhibition, Dupuy-Berberian had invited Ruppert & Mulot to devise a mini-exhibition of their own. Typically inventive and challenging, they devised the Maison Close, a representation of a brothel, where invited cartoonists contributed drawings – female cartoonists were asked to draw the ladies of the bordello and the males as their clients. Unsurprisingly this created the controversy that Ruppert-Mulot had no-doubt intended, but the exhibition itself was a bit of a let-down. To see the art one had to look through tiny peep-holes, which were embedded in the walls of a small room with pink, quilted walls. Although great fun to watch people crouching down, faces pressed against the pink fabric squinting to see the tiny pictures, it wasn’t a terribly satisfying – nor shocking – experience. All the comics are on the web, where they are much easier to see and be offended by. There’s a lot there, and it’s well worth checking out.

Staying with controversy at the CIBDI, the South African exhibition was more impressive and far more shocking than La Maison Close. The exhibition showed the work of the two artists from Bitterkomix (a magazine that is no stranger to censorship) – Joe Dog and Conrad Botes – as well as two other South African cartoonists. The exhibition was small, but packed in a lot, including giant posters showing highly graphic sexual content as political satire. For those with the stomach for it, this was a controversial and uncompromising, but rewarding, exhibition.

A Korean comics artist
at the Sai Comics exhibit

Across the river from the hotbed of controversy that was the CIBDI, the South Korean independent publishers Sai Comics had an exhibition at the Paper Museum. South Korea were the official invited country back in 2003, and every festival since has seen a strong contingent of enthusiastic South Korean cartoonists. It was a great exhibition, showing the huge range of styles that Sai put out, and with two or three artists contributing to huge comics installations throughout the festival.

And then, a little further down the road at the Centre Margelis, there was the Winshluss exhibit. Winshluss’ last exhibit at Angoulême – a sprawling, free-wheeling fictional history of their Monsieur Feraille character, and really a satirical history of 20th century pop culture – was loved by just about everyone who saw it. Expectations for his exhibition this year were high to say the least. Fortunately, Winshluss managed to subvert and meet those expectations. The actual installation itself was undewhelming – a few pieces of original art on the walls of a room containing several large graves of Winshluss, his frequent collaborator Cizo and of his publishers. Nothing to compare with the M. Ferraille-land scale model, complete with mechanized death-trap rides. However, I understand that this was because they had spent most of their budget on making a film called Villemolle ‘81, shown at one end of the room in the Crematorium Cinematorium.

Villemolle ‘81 was universally hailed as a triumph. It started as a spoof travelogue, showing the highly eccentric charms of the small provincial French town of Villemolle, before abruptly morphing into a zombie film. The travelogue presenter was played by Blutch, and the mayor was Frankie Baloney, publisher of Les Requins Marteaux. Overall, it was a bit like a mix of Waiting For Guffman and Shaun of the Dead. It was interspersed with pieces of really wonderful animation, and packed with film references. Anyone who didn’t see it inevitably had to endure conversations with people who had rehashing their favourite moments. Hopefully it will get a DVD release – it has all the makings of a cult classic.

Ellen Lindner at the
Flemish comics exhibit

Belgian comics obviously have a huge role in the history of Bande Dessinée, and this year celebrated the latest clutch of Flemish cartoonists. There was a large stand, decorated like a Belgian Brown Bar, selling a huge range of books from Belgium as well as an exhibition of the latest hot artists. This latter divided opinion somewhat – while everyone appreciated the imaginative presentation of the works, others felt the exhibition too light on detail about the artists and how they created their work, and also of the cultural context. In most other years this would have met with universal acclaim, but this year we were spoilt for high-quality, lively exhibitions.

This year, the annual prizes were announced on the Sunday afternoon of the Festival. This was an unpopular decision with some festival-goers, particularly the large numbers who leave on the Sunday morning; it was apparently arranged in order to capitalise on the media coverage in the Sunday evening tv news, and Monday’s papers. Anyway, despite the somewhat sub-optimal timing (as perceived in some quarters) the prizes themselves were very well received (in the quarters I hang around in, anyway).

The Grand Prize, and hence the President for next year’s festival, was presented to Blutch. He also won a Prix D’Angoulême for Le Petit Christian 2, so an outstanding festival for him. This was an unexpected decision. Although recently prolific, with books published by Dupuis and Futuropolis, Blutch is generally seen as a non-commercial artist, and something of a cartoonist’s cartoonist (his earlier work in particular, such as Peplum and Mitchum, were particular favourites of many American alternative cartoonists).

Winshluss won the prestigious Best Album award for his beautifully packaged, blackly comic retelling of Pinnochio. A very good year for him too. Another notable winner was Posy Simmonds for Tamara Drew, her re-telling of Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd. And also nice to see that two creators with books available on Comix Influx, Étienne Davodeau and Émile Bravo, were in the prizes – we clearly have our finger on the pulse! The complete list of winners is as follows:

    Grand Prix winner (next year’s President): Blutch

    Best Album: Pinnocchio by Winshluss
    Heritage Prize: Opération Mort by Shigeru Mizuki
    Best Newcomer: Le Goût du chlore by Bastien Vivès

    Prize-Winners:
    Lulu femme nue by Étienne Davodeau
    Martha Jane Cannary by Blanchin et Perrissin
    Le Petit Christian by Blutch
    Spirou et Fantasio, Le Journal d’un ingénu by Émile Bravo
    Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds

Apart from all that, the familiar delights of Angoulême were there as ever. Many late nights, catching up with old friends, and meeting new people. Lots drunk in the Chat Noir and the Mercure.

Dupuy-Berberian in shadow

The last night of Angoulême 2009 saw a party in the Town Hall. The freely flowing cognac was enough to get the large number of comics creators in attendance rocking the Hôtel de Ville until the early morning. Eventually spirits turned to treasonous thoughts, and a small group started attempting to dislodge a framed photograph of Nicolas Sarkozy from its pride of place on the wall. The cheers from the cognaced party-goers inspired the revolutionaries to keep going until the portrait was knocked clean off. The revelry quickly crescendoed until the frame was broken and the two ripped halves of the photograph were tossed in the air. As quickly as the mood had peaked, it was again subdued: the Town Hall security rushed in, the lights came on and the party was over. As was, for me at least, Angoulême 2009.

And so we left Angoulême’s unseasonally balmy climes the next morning, and return to the unusally thick snow falling in London. Lots of leads to follow up on, lots of work to do!

After many months of development, one or two false starts and a soft launch in late 2007, Comix Influx – the collaborative comics translation website launched at the 2008 Angoulême Festival. Through a few good notices on the comics blogoshpere interest in the site gradually grew, and we accrued a bunch of interested users, who have contributed full translations, advice and general discussion (on the Comix Influx Discussion list – go to http://comixinflux.com/influx/discuss join in and discuss any aspect of Comix Influx and international comics in general).

Over the last year, Comix Influx has published 23 complete translations (with several others started but not yet complete – a few of those by me), contributed by a community of 40 people.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the site. Obviously, all those who have added translations, but also everyone who has contributed to the discussion list, or sent me a link or an idea, or just simple encouragement.

Here are all the completed translations on the site:

Frances

Chute de Vélo

Djinn 7: Pipiktu

Djinn 6: La Perle Noir

Djinn 5: Africa

Djinn 4: Le Trésor

Djinn 3: Le Tatouage

Djinn 2: Les 30 Clochettes

Djinn 1: La Favorite

bouture

Jonathan Cartland

Le Sursis Tome 2

Le Sursis Tome 1

Le Long Voyage de Léna

Gus 1: Nathalie

Les formidables aventures de Lapinot: Vacances de printemps

Ma Maman est en Amérique…

faire semblant c’est mentir

L’éléphant

L’Autoroute du soleil

Nègres Jaunes

La Meilleure du Monde

Unpopular Culture

Mutterkuchen

This first year has largely been about trying to get a little publicity, and building up a healthy collection of translations. In short it was about getting people translating. However, it was apparent that people were not really then using those translations. My next goal is to get people actually making the most of the effort that everyone’s put into them.

To that end, I want to announce Comix Influx Snipp-Its. These are versions of the translated text, formatted so that they can be folded over, cut-out and then inserted into the pages of the original comic so that the translation is immediately readable directly adjacent to the art. See the help page to see how this works.

A single sheet of A4 can hold about 16 translated pages (depending on the verbosity of the comic), so a typical French album can easily be accommodated in 4 pages.

The great thing about this way of presenting the translations is that they can be presented right next to the comic pages. And they are obviously easy to produce. The most obvious way of using them will be for readers to buy a comic and then download and print out the translations. However they might actually be more useful at the point of sale – obviously they could be given away at comic shops, but I think they would be particularly useful where publishers are selling comics at festivals. In addition they could be included in promotional copies sent out to, for example, foreign publishers.

The main purpose of Comix Influx is to make international comics available to a wider audience – and the launch of Comix Influx Snip-Its are just the next step toward that.

There are some great books in the wide-ranging, eclectic list, of which I’m going to mention just a few. Top of the list is Slaapkokken, very shortly to be published by Blank Slate Books translated by Wim Lockefeer (Wim’s own Best of 2008 is available on the Forbidden Planet International Blog at ). In addition there is Het graf van de keizer [The Emperor’s Tomb] by Gerolf van de Perre (published by Bries). I mention this book in particular firstly as I hadn’t heard of it at all, secondly as it is published by the ever-excellent Bries, and lastly because – as is often the case with Bries books – it was simultaneously published in English.

From Finland, Kajaani by Villa Ranta (Asema Publishing) looks really interesting – any Finns fancy giving it the Comix Influx treatment? Le Petit Christian by Blutch (L’Association) gets another plaudit (as it did in Bart Beaty’s review).

Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis (script) & Alecos Papadatos (art) is probably the first comic featuring Bertrand Russell as a protagonist. Published in Greek by Ikaros, I look forward to the English version from Bloomsbury in Autumn 2009.

Canicola issue 6 is amongst the Italian nominations. I’ve picked up a few issues of the excellent and visually innovative Canicola at Angoulême over the last years, and so was surprised to see but I was surprised to see that Andrea Bruno was not in this current issue. I had thought he was one of the main driving forces behind Canicola.

And does anyone know anything about Joan Marín? Her Olimpita (story by Hernán Migoya) is the single Spanish book mentioned, and apparently concerns itself issues of immigration in Barcelona, as seen through a Spanish fish seller.

I also like the sound of the story of Jesus Christ and Buddha sharing a modern-day Tokyo flat together in Saint Young Men, a Manga published by Kodansha.

And finally, as an ex-physicist, I am intrigued by Einstein’s Fru (Einstein’s Wife) from Liv Strömqvist of Sweden. The title is taken from one of items in this book, about how Einstein’s wife’s poor treatment by her husband, and indeed history. The book is described as a book of essays, which I assume are in comics form. Either way, I was sold on the gorgeous kitsch cover featuring a female Christ figure and penguins.

The Swedish Comics site Komika Magasin has recently published an interview with multiple-award nominee Joanna Hellgren conducted by Mikke Schirén (a member of the Comix Influx Discussion List). The interview is very interesting, and through the slightly stilted magic of Google Translate, I learned a lot about Hellgren.

She spent quite some time in France – firstly as a student and then after living in Paris. While there she did some self-published art books and also started Mon Frère Nocturne. Once that book was completed, Hellgren was determined to get a publisher for it, and so printed up 30 copies, half in French and half in Swedish. While she didn’t get any takers from the publishers she sent it to, she soon heard from Frédéric Cambourakis, who had only been publishing comics for 3 years at that point.

Hellgren has now been nominated for (at least) two awards – the Angoulême Essentials for Mon Frère Nocturne and L’Association Artemisia (an award for women comics artists) for Frances. Cambourakis was expecting Hellgren’s comics to sell slowly at first, joking that he would lose money on her books, but, partly thanks to the publicity from the awards, her books are already selling healthily.

Somewhat surprisingly, she is better known as an illustrator in her home country, and doesn’t yet have a Swedish publisher!

Hellgren also briefly discusses the artists whose work she has enjoyed, mentioning Anke Feuchtenberger (a favourite of mine), Seth, Julie Doucet and Amanda Vähämäki. Vähämäki’s work has featured in many anthologies, including Glömp, Canicola and Drawn & Quarterly Showcase; I know her work from the French edition of “Campo di Baba: Un Champ des Beignets which I enjoyed a lot.

Staying on the Cambourakis theme, Wim Lockefeer draws attention to an interview with their best-selling artist, Zeina Abirached, on BoDoï. There are also several pages from her second book with Cambourakis, Je Me Souviens: Beyrouth

Finally, essentially a year (or two) too late, but check out the Cambourakis calendars for 2007, on the theme of kitchens and 2008, on libraries. Both are a mix of comics and illustration, and published using subtle, two-colour printing. The artists they showcase include those some with books published by Cambourakis and some without, including such alternative-comics luminaries as Anke Feuchtenberger, Ludovic Debeurme and Nylso: Alice Lorenzi, Anja Tchepets, Anke Feuchtenberger, Anne Beauchard, Atsuko Ishii, Aurélie William Levaux, Barbara Malleville, Benoit Guillaume, Carl Roosens, Choi Juhyun, Géraldine Alibeu, Isabelle Boinot, Joanna Hellgren, Ludovic Debeurme, Matt Broersma, Nylso, Rodrigo Fresan and Zeina Abirached. It’s a great, eclectic list – I hope they have another calendar for 2009.

Beaty also discusses how the Angoulême presidency works, and why Posy Simmonds, alas, won’t be awarded it in 2009.

First off, I bought Le Tricheur) (The Card Sharp) by Ruppert and Mulot, nominated for a prize at Angoulême (I’m hoping to get a nominee or two on the site before the festival). On first glance this looks fairly reminiscent of their Gogo Club, which is somewhere in my to-translate pile.

Similarly on the hunt for nominees, I’d hoped to pick up Mon Frère Nocturne by Joanna Hellgren (Cambourakis,) but they didn’t have it in stock. Instead I bought her next book, Frances. It looks really nice – somewhat reminiscent of Faire Semblant Est Mentir by Dominique Goblet, but more literal, if you get what I mean. You can see some artwork from the Cambourakis website: here, here and here.

And we also picked up Trésor, another nominee, by Lucie Durbiano (Gallimard) which Ellen hopefully will get to translate.

I had hoped to take a look at Séquelles by Hugues Micol from Cornélius; Brössels had it, but it was shrink-wrapped. Another time – but we did get Ludologie by Ludovic Debeurme, published by Cornélius back in 2003.

I got a chance to look at Le Roi des mouches, tome 2, “L’Origine du monde”, by Mezzo et Pirus (Drugstore). This looked like a lot of fun, but a bit of a Charles Burns, er, tribute. And I peeked at Lulu Femme Nue by Étienne Davodeau, which looked beautiful.

Ellen bought a couple of books by Miyaco Anno, some of who’s work has been translated into English.

Brüsel is a great little store – in a street which has loads of stores selling BD, some new, loads second-hand. Hopefully I’ll get to start a translation or two soon.

Unlike Trondheim in 2007, Dupuy & Berberian will be having a retrospective exhibition, hosted at the National Centre for International Comics (CNBDI). For fans of their work, such as me, this is very exciting. If it comes close to matching last year’s Munõz exhibition for quality it will be pretty amazing.

In addition, Ruppert & Mulot, are creating an exhibition called “La Maison Close” (“The Closed House”, we think), at the invitation of Dupuy & Berberian. This looks like it will be typically experimental effort from the duo. They are collaborating with 20 authors, and then editing their stories and creating the art. This has the potential to be a highlight of the festival. Ruppert & Mulot won an Angoulême award in 2007 for best newcomers, and are nominated again this time round for their new book Le Tricheur, from L’Association.

Shigeru Mizuki was the surprise winner of the best album in 2007 with NonNonBâ, Cornelius’s republishing of his work from the 60s. Following on from that, Angoulême 2009 will see the first exhibition of his work in France.

Korean comics creators have been enthusiastic atendees at Angoulême for the last several years. 2009 sees an exhibition dedicated to an independent Korean publisher, Sai Comics. While Manga, Manhwa and Manhua have been increasing in prominence over the last few years, it has been difficult to see the more fine-grained facets, such as the independent publishers. I’ll be fascinated to see what this exhibition shows us about Sai Comics and the wider publishing scene in Korea.

Another potential highlight of the festival, Winshluss will have an exhibition at the Magelis Workshops. There aren’t too many details of this one, but the last exhibition that Winshluss was involved in, dedicated to Monsieur Feraille, was commonly regarded as one of the most creative, enjoyable and flat-out funny that anyone had ever seen. Essentially a tribute to the fake character Monsieur Ferraille – a spoof on all corporate avatars – it involved biographic films, fake music videos, huge models of fake theme parks, fake film posters (a print of one of these has pride of place on my kitchen wall). I don’t want to unduly raise expectations, but this one could be good.

The Theatre of Wonders seems a little less promising. “Based on the theme of wonder” and promising an “insight into the world of comic strip creation”, this sounds somewhat reminiscent of the (far too) long-lived … exhibiton. My expectations are low here, so there’s plenty of room to be pleasantly surprised (although I do recognise that I’m almost certainly not the intended audience).

South African comics have an interesting place in recent history through the uncompromising work of the oft-banned comics magazine Bittercomix. A million miles from the liberal hand-wringing one might expect, Bittercomix always challenge the reader. This will be a long overdue exhibition of their work, with four of the Bittercomix creators present.

In addition to all these there is a post-modern and interactive display using images from the cartoonist Willem, demonstrating the “Larsen Effect”. I don’t know what that is and can’t quite follow the description on the site, but hopefully will have it figure out by the end of January. And apparently Boule et Bill are 50, and will have an anniversary exhibition at…

Dupuy & Berberian have done a great job on this line-up. Even the things I’m not actively excited by I’m not cringing at.

Expectation was always going to be high for 2009 with Dupuy & Berberian as joint President, and this line-up ups the ante a lot. I’ve got a lot of expectation I wanna see exceeded!

While at the Comiket, one of the stand-out comics I saw was called Daisy and Violet, which is a story of siamese twins – the eponymous heroes – who fall in love with a yeti. There’s a romantic entanglement of a squid and an octopus too. It was written and drawn by Takayo Akiyama, and is marvellously inventive. For example, look at how she uses angled piano keyboards as panel borders in the second image below. This is typical of her experimental layouts through the comic (she particularly likes angled, geometric panels).

You can see her website at http://www.takayon.com, and the various pictures below are mostly taken from the comics section. Takayo had self-published the English version of the comic (selling for an extremely reasonable £3), but she also showed me the French version which was published by Cambourakis and is beautiful. Our Francophone friends can luxuriate in Daisy and Violet’s adventures both square-bound and full-colour, whereas in the English version everything except the two inside covers are black and white. You can get an idea of the difference in the second two images below.

Cambourakis was discussed on the Comix Influx Discussion list, as they have been nominated for the Angoulême 2009 awards, for the second year running (for Mon Frère Nocturne by Joanna Hellgren). They have only been publishing comics for a couple of years now, but they’re publishing some really interesting material. I’m looking forward to investigating some of their books soon.

Paul Gravett’s ComICA – London’s premier comics festival – returns to the ICA and associated venues this weekend. This is the 7th year of the festival and Paul’s lined up a really interesting, er, line-up.

It kicks off on 14th November, with a comics symposium at the V&A, devised by Gravett and Ian Rakoff. This synposium is a first for ComICA, and comes about through Ian Rakoff’s association with the V&A. Unfortunately, as it’s a Friday, I’ll be at work and unable to attend, but I hope it gets a good audience. Highlights include a talk on “Racial Stereotypes in Comics”, representations of women in 50s comics, depictions of minorities in US and UK comics, and women creators and characters today. There are speakers from the Comics Museum in Brussels, the Courtald Institute and of course the V&A, as well as comics professionals such as Posy Simmonds (talking about class), Pat Mills, and Lise Myhre (creator of Nemi). After the symposium there’s a talk with Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. All in all, a strong start to the Festival!

Over the next week or so of the festival there are several other great events. Representing Francophone creators, Ted Benoit and Emmanuel Guibert, recently nominated for the Angoulême 2009 awards will be talking at L’institut Français on the 19th November.

There are three talks on the 16th, starting with Dave McKean talking with illustrator Andrzej Klimowski at 2pm. Oli East (of Trains Are… Mint) will be on a panel with Hannah Berry, Paul Duffield and Marcia Williams. And finally a discussion panel about adapting the classics of plays and prose into comics.

Ian Rankin, who has recently turned his hand to comics from his normal agraphic novels, talks on the evening of Monday 17th, and Daredevil artist Alex Maleev on the 18th.

The fine folks of London Underground Comics are holding a sale on Saturday 22nd, including too many luminaries of the UK minicomix scene to name here.

On Sunday 23rd there’s a discussion panel on Great British Comics, comparing the greats of previous eras with the newly launched DFC. The DFC will be represented by Comix Influx participant Sarah McIntyre, the excellent Gary Northfield, Adam Brockbank, and John and Patrice Aggs. This will be followed by talks on Erotic Comics and on Jack Kirby. Finally on Sunday there will be a panel of 60s Underground Comix greats Gilbert Shelton, Spain and Art Spiegelman.

And Spiegelman will be back on Monday evening in conversation with the ever-entrancing Posy Simmonds.

All this and screenings of two Anime films, Naruto and Twentieth Century Boy and also the exhibitions at the ICA. ComICA continues its tradition of showing experimental comics with an exhibition from 14th to the 26th November entitled Potential Comics. There will also be Incredibly Strange Comics, an exhibition of images culled from The Leather Nun by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury. As the ICA has now been able to lift its entry free, these exhibitions will be free for the first time in ComICA’s history.