As you may have noticed it is May. For you that might mean the promise of better weather (ha!) and taking days off around Bank Holidays so you get a whole week off work. For me it means comics comics comics! Here is a rundown of all the appearances I’ll be making this month:
First up is the Bristol Comic Expo, this very weekend, 12th and 13th May! The two day show is back in the grand warehouse next to Temple Meads Train Station and I will be sharing a table, as always, with my Great Beast partner in crime Marc Ellerby.
The following Friday 18th May I will be at Travelling Man Manchester from 5pm signing copies of Blood Blokes and Nelson in support of Anthony Johnston on his ‘All The Coldest Cities Tour‘ for his new graphic novel ‘The Coldest City’ which by all accounts in incredible slice of noir. We’ll be joined by 2000AD artist and cheeky chappy Leigh Gallagher all the way from Liverpool. It’s free so come along, have a chat and get some great comics signed.
After the signing I’ll be scooting to London for the Kapow! Comic Convention the next day, Saturday 19th and also Sunday 20th May in the Business Design Centre, Islington. I’ll be there with Marc again. I haven’t been to this show before so I’m hoping Blood Blokes can reach a new audience of Kick Ass fans and the many people there drawn in by the big name guests like Jonathan Ross and Nick Frost.
Then I’ll be back in London the week after in some capacity for the MCM Expo in Victoria Docks, 25th – 27th May. Blood Blokes #1 is nominated for the ‘Favourite British Comicbook: Black and White’ award at the Eagle Awards held on Saturday 26th, so I’ll find out then if it wins. I still need to confirm if I’ll have a new comic back from the printers (what could it be I wonder?). I’ll edit this post as soon as I have news.
I will no longer be attending MCM Expo this month. Due to the fact Blood Blokes #2 won’t be released in time and also to save money after a very expensive month of traveling. I’ll announce when BB2 will be released very soon. Apologies to anyone who may have been planning to see me at MCM but I will be in London the week before for Kapow. Someone will let me know who wins the Eagle Award, right? Right?
It’s on at the spacious Nation of Shopkeepers pub from 12-5pm. I will be selling the Great Beast editions of Blood Blokes #1, Paper Science and probably doing some sketches too. This a FREE event so come along and pick up some great comics and prints from the likes of John Allison, Kristyna Baczynski, Dan Berry and more as well as organisers Hugh Raine and Steve Tillotson.
I’ll be selling the same comics and maybe doing sketches again if my hand hasn’t fallen off. I’m most excited about selling Blood Blokes in the bar which features prominently in Blood Blokes, Night & Day Cafe! I’m joined again by Kristyna Baczynski and all the names above. It will be a more varied show than LACF, so if you’re into zines and screen-printing things, come on down too because again, it’s FREE!
I’m having a shave now, I’ll see you at the weekend.
Yesterday, Forbidden Planet International broke the news about a new UK publishing group for independent comics and graphic novels set up by myself and my comics wife Marc Ellerby, and thus the Great Beast was unleashed upon the world.
With this new imprint, Marc and I intend to get our self published comics into as many hands as possible, which means big print runs, wider distribution and fully embracing digital comics. We want to bring fun, poppy, heartfelt comics to anyone who may enjoy them. We also aim to publish more comics for children and teenagers too. There’s more about what Great Beast is all about in our first blog post which outlines a Great Beast manifesto, the Beast’s battle cry if you will.
Our first titles are Chloe Noonan: Monster Hunter by Marc and Blood Blokes by me. Both have been in print for a while but have been re-released as Great Beast editions and every new issue will be released digitally the same day. In fact, you can buy Blood Blokes #1 digitally for just 99p RIGHT NOW! 99p!
Later in the year we will both be releasing book collections of our previous web-comic work. Marc will release the Ellerbisms book (the beautiful cover has been revealed here) and I will finally collect all 200 comics strips from The Everyday into a nice, hardback book. Here’s the cover:
The response yesterday was overwhelmingly positive. Twitter went nuts and the Great Beast twitter account, @GreatBeastUK, got 100 followers in a matter of hours. Marc has also set up a nifty Facebook page where you can even buy items from our store directly! Check it out and click Like to follow us and keep up to date.
We’ve got a lot of plans for Great Beast which we will reveal in time. For now I can tell you we aim to add a few more creators to the roster before the end of the year and Blood Blokes #2 will be released in May, both in print and digitally of course.
To say it’s a relief that Great Beast is now up and running and out there in the world would be a huge understatement. Marc and I have been talking about this since the end of July last year. We could have had an actual human baby in that time (biology permitting)! It’s been a long road, and at times incredibly frustrating, mostly because we wanted to do everything right (choosing the name took months, oh god, the Google+ chats we had! *shudder*), but we got there and I couldn’t be more proud of our little Beast.
If you haven’t already, please take a look at the website and have a browse around the sexy lookin’ store and we hope you find something you like.
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In related news, Marc and I will both be exhibiting at Comiket in London’s Bishopsgate Institute this Saturday (tomorrow!).
It’s going be a great show, it’s FREE entry for a start, there’s a ton of great cartoonists there like John Allison, Kristyna Baczynski , Tom Gauld, Joe Decie, Warwick Johnson-Cadwell and more, live drawing (that’s going to be fun), reading rooms, a bar, a coffee shop and most importantly an after party. ALL FOR FREE! Get down there!
Marc’s written a blog post about what he’ll be selling including original art (Muppets! He-Man! Turtles!) and a new Chloe Noonan tote bag. I’ll be fully stocked up with the Great Beast editions of Blood Blokes #1. I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. I hope to see some of you there.
This month’s MOJO magazine (the May 2012 issue with Steve Marriott on the cover) is out today and contains a full page illustration of mine of Jack White to accompany the featured review of ‘Blunderbuss’. I was chuffed to see it used on the Contents page too.
Big thanks to Jamie McKelvie for passing my name onto the reviewer Andrew Male and thanks to Art Editor Mark Wagstaff for being a pleasure to work with on a tight deadline.
As a fan of the White Stripes this was a dream assignment and having a full page of a magazine to play with is a rare treat. I hope to grace the pages of MOJO again soon.
This Sunday I will be holding a short talk and Q&A about my comic and illustration work at an event called HotchPotch in Manchester. I will have a small exhibition of work on the walls and I’ll be selling comics during the rest of the event too.
HotchPotch is held at The Thirsty Scholar & The Attic on Oxford Road from 4pm to 1am. My talk will be between 6:00 and 6:30pm. There’s a lot of other stuff going on too, a talk from street/graffiti artist ‘Irek Tankpetrol’, a sewing workshop, short films, 3 bands and a DJ. And it’s all FREE!
It is finally here, Paper Science 7! It contains the fourth and final part of my children’s comic The King of Things & The Shrunken Giant Penny. Part 1 was published way back in April 2011 so if you’ve been wondering how it all ends you can buy it right now and find out. I’m really pleased with how this story turned out and it was a lot of fun to write and draw. A thank you is owed to Mr. Matthew Sheret for allowing The King and I to run rampant within the pages of his publication. There will be more King of Things stories on the way, don’t you worry about that.
Editor Sheret has put together another wonderful issue, there’s some gems in there from new faces and familiar names alike. This is also the last in the current run of Paper Science so if you haven’t read any of the previous issues now is an excellent time to buy issues 4-7 containing the complete The King of Things story and 50 pages of full colour, oversize comic goodness for a mere £8.
I also drew the cover for this issue and am honoured to be in the fine company of Luke Pearson, Kristyna Baczynski and Joe List. Here’s the artwork without all those pesky words on it.
This morning I was browsing through my Twitter feed when I saw this tweet from Mystery Joy Attack:
As I have been designing a type based logo recently (for a secret project soon to be revealed) I followed the link to an article about a new book revealing work from the sketchbooks of renowned typographers.
For some reason the linked name Milton Glaser stood out to me. Perhaps it was a niggling idea that I’d seen his name before. I clicked it and started reading about this man, an 82 year old New Yorker who happened to have designed the ‘I heart NY’ logo which he never made any money from. You’ll have seen that already of course so here’s Glaser’s original sketch:
I read on, found his website and discovered some short films which I proceeded to watch and I found them most inspiring. It wasn’t so much his art that struck me but rather what he was saying about art and creativity and drawing. I’ve embedded a couple from Vimeo below. Watch them. If you have a creative spark in your body, you’ll enjoy them.
“Curiously people think that the difficultly of drawing is making things look accurate. Accuracy is the least significant part of drawing. BUT you have to learn how to draw accurately before you can do anything else, then you can begin to think about drawing expressively. That’s another game entirely.”
“I always quote a guy called Lewis Hyde who wrote about primitive cultures where there’s an exchange of gifts that cannot be kept but have to be passed on. And the passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing one another, because they all become part of a single experience. And [Hyde’s] leap of imagination occurs when he says this is what artists do. Artists provide that gift to the culture, so that people have something in common. And I think that all of us who identify with the role of artists in history want our work to serve that purpose. Certainly as much as we want to work to sell product. (Although not everybody feels the same way.)”
In this second film, I spotted this quote in Glaser’s studio which I quite liked too.
I tweeted a few quotes as I watched the films and left a few tabs open so I could archive it all later when I had returned from a client briefing. A few hours later I came home and saved the above to my Pinterest, in the Inspiration section.
After dinner, I’m perusing my Twitter again and there’s more talk of the new DC Comics (Detective Comics Comics) logo which has been baffling people for about a week or so now.
Whilst I may be a cartoonist I only rarely buy a DC comic, and the whole matter has no emotional relevance to me. It’s curious to me as an example of branding comics as I do that myself with my own and, as mentioned, I’ve been designing a logo recently. However this re-brand is by a large corporation (DC Entertainment/Warner Bros.) that makes a lot more money off pretty much everything to do with DC and it’s characters other than the comics themselves. The above logo is clearly designed to be flashy, work in motion for films and digital devices and to be adaptable to any character, which it does well. What is doesn’t do well is read clearly as the letters D and C, look like what I assume is supposed to be a comic page turning (I thought it was a sticker or ring-pull for a while) or have any legibility in silhouette.
And I’m being generous with that second example.
But whatever, right? What do I care? So I’m reading the comments on this article on The Beat to see what others think of this new design because I don’t care so much and I read that the previous previous design was by Milton Glaser. The classic DC bullet logo! Cosmic coincidence or what!?! So instead of reading articles about the new redesign I have peek around for articles on the old redesign. And here is what I learned.
- Milton Glaser’s DC logo was commissioned in 1976 and lasted almost 30 years until it was replaced by the “DC spin” design in 2005 which of course lasted 7 years.
- Comic fans on the internet love complaining (but I knew that already).
- Graphic designers on the internet eerily had the same things to say about the last update as they do about the new one. For example:
“It is obvious that DC’s new logo was created specifically for cinema. It reflects the industry’s new priority, of motion pictures over static. Still, the new logo is troublesome…” – Joe Sparano
And then there’s this great comment from an advertising perspective:
And while I’m sure we’ll all get used to the new logo and never think about it again, my very recent admiration for Glaser makes me wonder what if DC had stuck with his design and brought it into the 21st Century. While some of you may think that’s naivety and nostalgia talking, may I remind you of this:
As far as I know the Marvel logo has stayed relatively the same since 1961. Kyle Cooper intelligently uses this static, valuable logo in motion, and a pre-cinematic, flip book motion too. The whole 10 seconds imbues history, esteem and mythos.
As one commenter on this article about the 2005 redesign says, “If I had a Milton Glaser logo I wouldn’t change it for love nor money.” I agree but what do I know? Maybe in 30 years this illegible wet sticker will be hailed as a design classic. Not that I care of course.
In my pre-Thought Bubble blog post I mentioned that I would be holding a Lego Hunt where people had to search the show for 10 Lego versions of comic creators. The hunt went down really well with over 20 people claiming the prize pack of comics, a print and badges. Seeing groups of kids running toward my table waving their camera phones aloft brought me many a smile throughout the weekend.
I didn’t get chance to photograph them all before the show so I’ve collected photos from the day by eager Lego hunters to present all 10 comic creators in their Lego minifigure incarnations:
It’s time once again for the best comic convention in the UK, it’s Thought Bubble, this coming weekend in Leeds! This year’s show is a 2 day event across 2 huge halls on Saturday and Sunday and I will be there selling my comics for the full two days. No panels, no workshops, no commissions, just me at a table talking to you guys all weekend.
I’ll be selling Blood Blokes #1, The Everyday Collections and Paper Science 4-6 featuring The King of Things. Stocks of Paper Science 4 are very low so if you’d like all 3 come early! We Are Words + Pictures (publishers of Paper Science) have a table too, so they may have some if I run out. Blank Slate Books will be there as well with their huge UK anthology Nelson (which I blogged about here) so if you a pick up a copy from them I’d be happy to sign it for you.
I’m also doing this:
The comics you can win are The Everyday Collection 3, Glastonbury: A Postcard Book and either Paper Science 5 or 6 (while stocks last). PLUS you’ll win a print of my Graphic Short Story Prize entry ‘Spilt Soda’ (included in the Best Of eBook) AND a Blood Blokes badge AND an Everyday badge! That’s 3 comics, a print and 2 badges for free!
I haven’t even told the creators I’m making Lego versions of about this yet. They’ll know if they are 1 of the chosen 10 on Saturday morning.
Thought Bubble attracts the definitive who’s who of British comics talent and legendary creators from overseas. Have a good look around the Thought Bubble website for all the info and you can see the full exhibitor list for the hall I’m in here.
Just check out out the talent in my aisle, dubbed “Troublemaker Row” by convention organiser Clark. I’m next to Marc Ellerby (I wouldn’t show up otherwise) and Andrew Tunney who are both amazing and I’ll be sharing with the lovely Kayla Marie Hillier. Here’s where you can find me:
Subtle, eh?
I look forward to this show every year, I can’t wait to see you there!
Adam Cadwell is a Cartoonist, Illustrator and Storyboard Artist based in Manchester, UK. It's rainy there but don't worry, he has an umbrella. He loves Vimto and Lego. More Adam facts, rates and contact details can be found on the Info page.
