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Minutes from the Parish Council Meeting

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Weekly roundup of the latest news and PR to hit the CV mailbox.

Mechtechs World annouces new comic.

Date of Meeting: 29/07/2008 18:57:00

Minute taker: Glenn Carter


ImageMechtechs World are currently developing a new manga mini-series and virtual world called Mechtechs.

The series is set in a mecha garage run by a dysfunctional cast of characters that are passionate about fabricating giant pilot driven robots, or mechas. While the comedic dysfunction of the relationships and the daily drama in the garage is the primary focus of the series, the garage is but a microcosm of a much larger mecha universe. The mechas being built in the garage are being used to fight in the inter-galactic mecha-fought tournament, which is taking place right outside.

Mechtechs promise a great deal of interaction with the fans, during the development phase, manga fans can visit the MechTechs blogs and see the characters as they are being drawn via  their live 24-hour webcast. Additionally, fans can contribute and make suggestions to the artists as they draw the characters.Image

The first print issue of the series will be released in November 2008 along with the launch of the 3-D virtual mecha world.


The Caption Comics Collective

Date of Meeting: 29/07/2008 18:42:00

Minute taker: Glenn Carter


Comics Collective
The Caption Comics Collective will be running an exhibition at the Oxford Jam Factory with a launch party this Thursday July 31st from around 6:30pm and another the evening before Caption (August 8th)

In attendance this Thursday David Baillie, Matt Brooker, Andrew Luke, Jeremy Dennis, Dierdre Ruane, Sally Anne-Hickman, Daniel Merlin-Goodbrey, and hopefully Mr. Terry Wiley, along with other stars of the Oxford comics and music scene.

The months showing will also include the works of Ellen Lindner and Jess Bradley, with exclusive mini-exhibits and workshops to be announced.

http://www.thejamfactoryoxford.com/upcoming.html
http://www.thejamfactoryoxford.com/
http://www.thejamfactoryoxford.com/location.html


Eddie Campbell Day @ Page 45, Sunday 3rd August 2008

Date of Meeting: 17/07/2008 00:00:00

Minute taker: Craig Johnson


It Just Got Bigger!
 
"Bigger than Eddie Campbell flying in to sign and sketch exclusively at Page 45?!"
 
"With 100 pre-publication copies of The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard exclusively available there on the very day?!"
 
"How can it possibly get any bigger?!"
 
 
Page 45 is frankly gob-smacked to present Paul Gravett!
 
Paul Gravett, comics' greatest historian, and the medium's most evangelical and eloquent campaigner, is joining his dear friend Eddie Campbell on Sunday 3rd August 2008 to sign alongside him at Page 45.
 
And he too will be down the pub with you later on to show off his latest discovery, answer all your questions about comics which I've been too stupid to cope with, and beguile you with his charm and enthusiasm. There honestly isn't a lovelier man in comics.
 
The Man At The Crossroads and Eddie Campbell together again: it's like a Beatles reunion, only without the animosity and the slight whiff of carcass.
 
The day: Sunday 3rd August 2008
The time: 1.30pm to 3.30pm
The Place: Page 45
 
I wonder what Paul's sketching is like?
 
 
Eddie Campbell wrote:
 
"He will be the purest, most fresh-faced fellow you have ever met. His ingenious enthusiasm will beam from his cheery countenance. The Man At The Crossroads will open the next door. "You see, I run a table at the bi-monthly comic marts in Westminster. I invite anybody to put their homemade comic on it, all takings to the producer." You will undoubtedly ask what he gets out of it. Such cynicism should be considered a lapse of faith in the bargain you made with FATE. You will only be permitted three such lapses."
 
- Alec: How To Be An Artist by Eddie Campbell
 
 
Paul Gravett said:
 
"I'm certain that we're on the verge of something important."
 
- Alec: How To Be An Artist by Eddie Campbell
 
 
Page 45 wrote:

"I've never known Paul to be in anything other than the most ebullient of moods.  I bet you he never needed sugar on his cereal, and that as a child corn flakes and cup cakes miraculously frosted themselves in his presence. There's this constant aura of beatific glee about the man - he's always clutching new discoveries and breathlessly extolling their wonders.  Down in London at the Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie gig, it was a 1970s comicbook annual for girls; in Bristol it was the catalogue which had the most superb production values for this Hayward Gallery exhibition touring the UK." 
 
Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Stories (£12-99, Running Press) edited by Paul Gravett. Just in! Given Gravett's presence I think you can safely assume that these will be the most judicious selections possible, copyright agreements providing.  448 pages from across the ages including pieces by Moore & Gaiman.
 
Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life (£18-99, Aurum Press) by Paul Gravett.  Attractively accessible, lavishly illustrated and perfectly composed, there are  whole pages of sequential art here for each graphic novel so you can see how the individual creators actually tell their stories, with notes in the margin helping to give a little history or context to each piece. As an enhanced companion to our free 10th Anniversary Booklist, it serves not only as the ideal introduction to comics for complete novices, but also for those wishing to broaden their comicbook horizons towards many of the genuinely best graphic novels out there.  It is, I'm pleased to say, going to make any reader want to buy a whole slab of trade paperbacks.  It'll also be the perfect book for students to plagiarise for their dissertations, so that we don't have to write them for them.  ;)
Books include:
BLACK HOLE, IT'S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN, GHOST WORLD, PALESTINE, GEMMA BOVERY, CEREBUS, BAREFOOT GEN, SIN CITY, JIMMY CORRIGAN, SANDMAN, LOCAS, LOST GIRLS, WATCHMEN, SCENE OF THE CRIME, A CONTRACT WITH GOD, FROM HELL, WHEN THE WIND BLOWS, AIRTIGHT GARAGE, DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, MAUS, PALOMAR, AMERICAN SPLENDOR, THE NIKOPOL TRILOGY, COMPLETE FRANK, MY TROUBLES WITH WOMEN, STRANGE EMBRACE, BUDDHA, EPILEPTIC, CORTO MALTESE, with lots more in the introductions to each chapter.
And spinning out from them:
LOST GIRL, SUMMER OF LOVE, BLUE, MOTHER COME HOME, TALE OF ONE BAD RAT, SPIRAL CAGE, ALEC, JULIUS KNIPL, PAUL HAS A SUMMER JOB, MY NEW YORK DIARY, HICKSVILLE, THE WALKING MAN, NAUSICAA, PROMETHEA, PLANETARY, IT'S A BIRD, FINDER, AKIRA, PREACHER, STRANGEHAVEN, THROUGH THE HABITRAILS, PEDRO & ME, ETHEL & ERNEST, LOUIS RIEL, UNLIKELY, RIPPLE, BERLIN, PERSEPOLIS, LA PERDIDA...
Basically everything that Mark, myself and Tom have been recommending to various customers for years. 
 
Great British Comics (£18-99, Aurum) by Paul Gravett & Peter Stanbury.  The great man's done it again.
"Comic swapping was a recognised street activity like marbles and French cricket... it doubled the enjoyment you got out of your comic." 
Swapping became vital during the bleakest years of the Second World War, when those titles that managed to keep going were published in limited quantities due to paper rationing and DANDY and BEANO were forced to alternate as fortnightlies.  There was even a shortage of red ink...
Aside from a few exceptions most artists and writers worked anonymously.  The publishers' excuse for this was that credits would confuse their little readers and stop them believing the characters were "real".  Keeping creators' names secret also prevented rival publishers from poaching them.  Artist Kevin O'Neill's first office junior job in comics in the late 1960s was to white out artists' signatures, often cunningly disguised in the rocks or shrubbery....  To divide and rule, editors kept writers and artists apart; many had never met until the first British Convention, Comics 101, was set up by historian Denis Gilford in 1975...
Each chapter of this book shows how these creators have responded to and influenced the previous century's turbulent decades and still do so today.  Far from being "dead in the water" or "down the tubes", British comics are still being made today, albeit in more diverse forms and formats...
"How can the newsstand become an outlet for a vibrant variety of comics again, when it is dominated by one wholesaler-retailer that can dictate terms, reject a title or charge for merely testing it and rent out prime space only to the biggest payers?
"A richer future may lie away from the cut-throat newsstands.
You betcha.  Lots here for the student of comics, be they in search of enlightenment or an actual degree.  After the fascinating introduction, rich in social context, Mssrs. Gravett and Stanbury embark on a treasure hunt of lost gold and current currency, then showcase it with all the clarity and style Gravett displayed in GRAPHIC NOVELS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE, with pages reprinted whole.  Separated into genres or markets, it's a far more engaging affair than last year's less colourful effort by someone else, and just to be clear, Paul isn't bound by the rule of where something's published.  As Paul and I discussed during his initial sweep for material, it'd be stupid to ignore the likes of Andi Watson, the most British of British comicbook creators because he's published in America owing purely to the logistics involved (i.e. the population of America dwarfs that of Britain so it sustains a healthier publishing base; it therefore makes more financial sense to print/publish there and ship the smaller fraction over here, rather than print/publisher here and incur the costs of shipping the majority of a print run there).  I tried to get MILKKITTEN in here, but in truth this isn't the proper venue for the more recent, experimental stuff that hardly anyone's ever heard of.  It does, however, include Simone Lia, who was always going to be a British Great, and comes in as a strong, engaging retrospective with a fine sense of perspective, and a great deal of eye candy.
 
Manga: 60 Years Of Japanese Comics (£19-99) by Paul Gravett. Anyone who's read one of his pieces either there on in the Comics Journal will already know that The Man At The Crossroads is eloquent, erudite and fully informed about the social and cultural background from which his subjects spring.  So, as well as being an authorative and lavishly illustrated account of the development of Japanese comics from the 1940s to the present, themes include: "the specific attributes of manga in relation to American and European comics; the life and career of Osamu Tezuka, creator of ASTRO BOY and originator of story manga; boys comics from the 1960s to the present; the genre of girls' and women's comics; the darker, more realistic themes of gekiga - violent samurai, disturbing horror, and apocalyptic science fiction; issues of censorship and protest; and manga's role as a major Japanese expert and global influence."
 
Alec: How To Be An Artist (£9-99) by Eddie Campbell and guest-starring Paul Gravett!  Eddie Campbell, one of the most affable men in comics, writes a letter to himself as a younger man, telling him what to expect from his journey through life, and I don't know whether to file this under autobiography, comedy or history, for Eddie manages all three as he charts the course not only of his own career, but of the US/UK comicbook medium during the eighties and nineties.  We meet the characters working on the UK scene - Ilya, Alan Moore, Elliot, Savage Pencil et al - as Eddie watches himself photocopying, stapling, then working for the music press, before the 'graphic novel' finally takes off to a media frenzy, then a crash-boom-bang at Tundra.  It's the most entertaining work of Campbell's career, effortlessly switching in and out of the personal, using his chosen literary device to make winking observations on life as a series crossroads:
"It is essential that in the middle of all this you meet your future wife.  FATE will land her from Australia in the middle of the London tube strike.  You can impress her by jumping on and off buses in a system that no visitor can ever comprehend.  Wind up at the WORLDS END in Chelsea and play the jukebox. Whatever's on there will have to be "our song" forever.  So choose quickly, but wisely."
There are diversions while Eddie muses on the creators who've paved the way in the medium, and considers the whole debate of 'Art versus Craft' in this and other disciplines  ("You'll be on a London radio program, stuck in behind playwright Alan Ayckborn.  They'll ask him about his themes: they'll ask you what made you want to draw a comic"); in fact, he'll entertainingly rabbit on about anything that takes his fancy:
"The map of the history of Art is like any other map. There are main roads and side streets; old masters and lesser masters.  But there are also back yards, middens, coal bunkers and rhubarb patches; artisans so minor that their names will never be retrieved from the debris in the vacant lot.....  The pleasantly naive among us may think that the measure of art is that it "has passed the test of time."  No map remains for long an accurate representation of the locale.  Favour ebbs and flows.  The crossroads is turned into a flyover, an underpass.  The disused road was once a thoroughfare.  The Via Roman underneath it all is nowhere indicated."
Eventually the work winds itself gently to the present, culminating with a consideration of where the comicbook medium stands in the year 2001, of what has been achieved so far: a list of other graphic novels, a Recommended Reading List if you like, which bears a remarkable (though perhaps not so remarkable) similarity to our own.  
 
We've also found a few copies of the ltd. edition Bacchus Birthday Bash jam print by Eddie Campbell, Pete Mullins &  Dave Sim - signed by all three. £9-99 on the day.
 
Oh, and errm. Eddie's spending every other hour in the UK with his parents, so you know that pub thing afterwards? There'll be more of his colleagues there alongside you. Bryan Talbot for a start.
 
Original Eddie Campbell signing announcement here.
 
 
Page 45

9 Market Street

Nottingham

NG1 6HY
Tel: (0115) 9508045

 

www.myspace.com/page_45

page45@page45.com

 

Monday to Saturday 9am to 6pm. Sunday August 3rd from 1.30pm to 3.30pm
 
 
"Everyone in the comicbook industry gets a thank-you in the back except me, which wounds my egomaniacal pride to the core. What's rubbish old Paul Gravett done for this series that I haven't? Who even is this Paul Gravett he speaks of?"
 
- Stephen on Trains Are Mint volume 1. Two months ago.

myebook.com: 'Perfect comic-timing as historic new chapter in book publishing opens.'

Date of Meeting: 07/07/2008 00:00:00

Minute taker: Craig Johnson


myebook.com (beta), a newly launched, web-based, ebook community site gives everyone the tools to create book content and get it out there for free. And straight away it's proving to be a hit with comic book publishers.
 
Every aspect of publishing your content is covered, from creating, to sharing, to reading, in by far the slickest and simplest way seen so far.
 
Simon Whitehall, head of myebook communications, commented: "Forget web 2.0, we've just turned the page to chapter 3.0. With myebook.com, we've made it possible for anyone to upload, or create from scratch, beautifully simple or adventurously complex page designs and covers online, in no time. What's more, you can publish your book with a single button and release it to the world before the (virtual) ink's dry! You can create as many publications as you want. And it's all free."


"Comic book creators love it. The system is a great environment to create and publish comics and graphic novels. The power and richness of the design features are out of this world, certainly by web standards." 


Readers may well feel it all sounds a bit too good to be true. So where's the small print?
 
"There isn't any. The only limitation is your imagination. An over-used cliché but never more appropriate than here. Create, publish and share. We simply want you to 'get it out there." he exclaimed, reiterating the strap line given to the project.
 
But does that mean you need to have the intellect of The Dark Knight Detective to figure it all out?
 
"On the contrary, the whole service has been designed so that any mere mortal can use it. No superhuman programming skills required! That's the cool part about it."
 
The team behind it all feels that the service has undoubtedly stolen a march on the rest of the publishing industry. Whilst judging a book by it's cover is never advised, spending a few minutes at the site will convince even the most hardened bookworm.
 
"Like the digital music revolution, myebook aims to give back total control to the content creator and the reader. It provides a way to publish what they want and connect with their audience directly. It's incredible."
 
He added. "We're years ahead of the market for sure. You simply can't draw-up such a rich, yet simple set of services like this and get it out in a week. It takes years. Reading between the lines, we think we've got it right."
 
And before the traditionalists take to the altar, fear not. The company is not trumpeting the death of print. No, they're quick to point out that whilst print itself is great, it's the advantages of the traditional publishing and distribution model that are fading fast. Currently the myebook team is exploring options for letting users order hard copy editions of its content.


To read more, and to 'get it out there' today, simply visit  <http://www.myebook.com/> http://www.myebook.com 

BRITISH INDIE PUBLISHER LAUNCHES “BLEAK AND BRUTAL” SPY THRILLER

Date of Meeting: 02/07/2008 16:33:00

Minute taker: Craig Johnson


Septic Isle graphic novel solicited in August’s Previews

[July 2, 2008] UK independent comic publisher MOONFACE PRESS today announces details of its new SEPTIC ISLE graphic novel.

SEPTIC ISLE – solicited in August’s issue of Previews and shipping in October – is written by Andy Winter (Hero Killers, Blood Psi), drawn by Mick Trimble (MC², The Many Worlds Of Jonas Moore) and boasts a wraparound cover by Declan Shalvey (Hero Killers, Freak Show). Andy and Declan were the creative team on Hero Killers which won last year’s Eagle Award for Best Black and White Comicbook – British.

Septic Isle comes perfect-bound with a full-color cover and black and white interior art. The 52-page title has a 42-page main story and a sketchbook section. It retails for $5.95 (£3.95).

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The story: In the ’70s and ’80s, Jacob Marley was MI5’s most revered and feared agent. But he turned his back on Queen and country to pursue a more peaceful existence. Now, 15 years later and with his life collapsing around him, Marley has returned to find that the world of British espionage is more dangerous than ever before.

Ageing, heartbroken and off his game, Marley must face off against Jerome Quinn. A former MI5 man himself, Quinn leads Odin’s Sword, a neo-Nazi terror organization that has declared war on Britain’s Muslim community. He’s every bit as ruthless as Marley, only younger, stronger and smarter.

To beat him, Marley will need every shred of courage and cunning at his disposal – and it still might not be enough...

"Septic Isle is a spy thriller set in post 7/7 London," explains writer and publisher, Andy Winter. "It is bleak, brutal and will probably be viewed as quite controversial too. At its core, it’s about the dirty, nasty stuff secret service agents do to defend the state. They go up against some astonishingly nasty bastards and are astonishingly nasty bastards themselves. That said I hope readers find the central character, Jacob Marley, sympathetic as he knows a thing or two about suffering and loss."

For more information, contact Andy Winter. Email: andywinter1@gmail.com

Website: britainisbroken.com and moonfacepress.com

What the critics say about Septic Isle…
"Andrew Winter’s masterful espionage thriller weaves deftly between your expectations to stick the knife in when you least expect it. Taut, topical and terrifying." – Mike Carey, writer: Faker

"A dark-edged, modern-day spy story for War On Terror-era Britain."
– Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet Blog

"[Septic Isle’s] right up there with Oni’s Queen & Country and TV’s The Sandbaggers, which in this genre is about the highest praise I could give." – Regie Rigby, Comics Bulletin

"Stylish writing and believable dialogue… Andy Winter is now amongst the finest British writers. 9 out of 10." – Glenn Carter, Comics Village


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