Exhibitions Of Original Comic Art At Dundee University

This year the comic art exhibition at Dundee University, in conjunction with the Dundee Comics Day, will be Commando Battlelines which celebrates the 50th anniversary of Britain's last war comic.

Since the event that is now called the Dundee Comics Day began at Dundee University in 2007, the university's Museums Department has put on tie-in exhibitions of original comic artwork. The university's website has maintained its web pages about each of these exhibitions and often added extra pages after the exhibitions closed, as well as adding links to the various reviews of the events that have appeared here on downthetubes. Follow the links below to the official pages for each exhibition.

The first exhibition in 2007, like that year's event, was entitled Biff! Bam!! Crikey!! and included modern artwork from Hunt Emerson and Metaphrog's Louis series plus, impressively, original colour cover artwork by Ron Simmons from The Champion storypaper dating back at least fifty years.

2008 saw the start of the relationship that the University has developed with Dundee's publishing giant DC Thomson. To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the first issue of the Beano, the DC Thomson archive was opened and a large and impressive array of artwork was on display from the Beano as well as some from the various other DCT humour titles including some from the all but forgotten Magic, the third of the original 1930s humour titles that was lost to paper rationing in 1941.

2009 brought an exhibition on a title that is close to our hearts here on downthetubes - Starblazer. The exhibition included many original painted covers by Ian Kennedy and Keith Robson amongst others as well as scripts, internal art and some of the various Starblazer tie-ins. Also on display was original Starblazer artwork for Algol The Terrible by Grant Morrison showing, if truth be told, that there is a good reason that Morrison is not known as a comics artist.

2010 took the theme away from specific titles and instead focused on a single artist, Willie Richie, who had then only recently passed away. The artwork on display showed off the range of his art from black and white work on Sparky and Topper to painted colour on Bimbo. It also covered the "pony stories" work that he had done for the modern European girls comic Wendy.

The 2011 Dundee Comics Day takes place at Dundee University on Sunday 30 October. Tickets are priced at £10 per adult and £5 for under 13s for the complete day and will be available from the Dundee Literary Festival website in due course.