Back From Brum

I'm still feeling a bit car-lagged from all the driving atm but will endeavour to write about the Comics Show.

Well, the Think Tank venue was the beez kneez. Very close to the Burlington Hotel (which was very nice indeed) and close to the town centre. My first time in Birmingham was a great experience. Watching the rugby on a 600" screen at a pub in the Mail Box complex at the end of day # 1 was just one of the many highlights. Stewart, my good buddy and long time comics-fan really enjoyed his first convention.

As for the show itself, it was the usual dizzying choice of stalls, and loads of talented types all showing their wares. I did a tour of the publishing house's stalls, showing them LOTCH and JITB. Yet again they were well received, with some very positive comments and extremely constructive criticism. I was heartened to hear from a variety of people that LOTCH showed huge improvement, from its first few pages compared to the much more accomplished latter half of the book, and that this improvement carried through into my latest JITB pages, which alot of people liked. It's gratifying to know that my hard work is paying off, slowly but surely. Even 2000ad, who had rejected my first Dredd submissions because of dodgy anatomy and bad inking praised the inking of JITB in particular, saying that perhaps I should just work on making the page layouts a little more dynamic and then submit 2000ad related samples again...cool :)

I was given a bollocking for not having a stall (with LOTCH already printed and ready for sale) by one of the publishers, and he basically said that with it so obviously ready to go, that I shouldn't be looking for a publisher as much as distribution...which he'd be willing to help with. I began to feel that my walking around with the book trying to get a publisher was perhaps time better spent promoting a finished product. For example, I'd printed out 50 of the postcard illustration seen above, and left 20 of them on the freebies table on day 1 of the show. By the end they were all gone, even though some of the other stuff there hadn't shifted. Now, possible toilet-paper shortage aside, that's actually some of my art out in the wild, with my contact details all over it, and so people who come to my website could potentially go about buying the LOTCH graphic novel online...but (d'oh) I haven't got it printed at this time of writing.

So, I'm going to be printing either an A5 or A4 b&w run of 100-200 copies, probably this week, and will finally be (self) published...which is the route the majority of the exhibitors at the show took on their journey to greatness :)

The second day I left my folder in the car and basically went shopping. I bought Spiderman 3 on Blu-Ray, the Neverwhere graphic novel (Glenn Fabry art...awesome), and The Ice Wanderer...a Manga by Jiro Taniguchi.

I even got to talk to one of my heroes, Hunt Emerson. Thoroughly nice chap, and what a talent. Firkin the Cat rules. :)

Next time (Bristol in May 2008) I plan on having a stall ready, covered in my comics and various promo junk, and hopefully my m8 Martin Buxton the script writer will be there too with all his goodies, helping me to put Essex on the map as a Mecca of comics creation. :)