Belfast Comics Fayre (Updated)

The “family fun day” event is run by Avalon Arts, a collective organising workshops, alternative and craft fairs and music performances. The site is a good one: Haymarket Arcade is located at the bottom of the central Royal Avenue, about five minutes walk from City Hall. The recently converted arcade has some resonance for comics readers. It was once the route taken through to the original site of The Talisman (now FPI Belfast), one of Northern Ireland’s first comics shops, as well as Impulse Comics in the late nineties. Impulse, currently known as The Stack, (Little Victoria Street), will be selling comics at the event, which features the opening of a week long comics art exhibition, signings, sketches, face-paintings, comics-related art stuffs, such as redecorated furniture, woollies and badges.

The Belfast Comics Fayre takes place on December 9th from 12-6pm, and is supported by The Black Panel. Set-up by Paddy Brown in 2010, The Black Panel presented sixty Irish comics to the public over sixty dates through local art market stalls. With city licensing laws clamping down on markets, The Panel is looking to work with retail outlets to establish multiple new venues. After the official re-launch at the Fayre, selections from the range will enjoy homes at both Haymarket Arcade, and The Stack in the months following.

 

Confirmed Guests are:

PADDY BROWN

In a hundred years, I reckon Paddy Brown will be remembered as one of Ireland's finest cartoonists. His Cattle Raid of Cooley (right) calls to the reader to glide around the pages and take in the detail, but to go when he says. The division of art/lettering to two different spectrums is going to take me some getting used to, but it's different. And Cattle Raid is a psuedo-sensory experience. He’ll be launching Issue 7 of his acclaimed adaptation of the Irish myth at the event.

ANDY LUKE

Hi, that’s me, so it is. I’ll be launching Kick!, a series of cheaply priced pocket humour strips  as well as selling my new Christmas card range, which includes Xmas Panto comic, The Last Noel. I’ll also be selling The Moods of Prime, a twenty-page colour mini-comic made during a fit of depression, about depression, empowerment, and imaginary Transformer friend,Optimus Prime. I’ll also be running The Magnificent Comic Book Factory, a workshop aimed at creating and publishing a new anthology on that day!

LIGHTNING STRIKE COMICS

Superheroes, crime drama, fantasy noir and steam-punk time travel. Straight outta Dublin, Lightning Strike published their first anthology in September, featuring over twenty creators. Largely a collection of new faces, it also features better known Irishmen like Richmond Clements, Rob Carey and Cormac Hughes. For more details including some really good art previews, check out their Facebook page.


Eoin McAuley (Editor-Publisher) 

Eoin McAuley is the producer of a genre-spanning beautifully coloured comics anthology. "Lightning Strike Presents" compiles some of Ireland's freshest yet fully realised comics talents. Eoin will be travelling from Dublin with two contributors with copies of Issue 1 for autographing and sketching, some exclusive sneak peak material from their upcoming issue #2, and the video game project they're working on with CRG.

Ciaran Marcantonio (Writer)

Ciaran Marcantonio is the writer of A Clockwork Universe for Lightning Strike, and an un-produced Highlander book with Dynamite Comics and the late Bill Panzer. Ciaran was noted as one of the most promising new faces on the Irish scene, during his recent interview with the 2d podcast.

Daryl Cox (Artist)

Joining Eoin and Ciaran on their trip to the North is Daryl Cox, artist on Monkey of Oz, a strip about a flying monkey set in L. Frank Baum's Oz mythology. Eoin will be present on the day to talk about his experiences with Lightning Strike, and comics in general.


Darrin O' Toole (Writer)

Darrin O'Toole is a writer from Dublin, Ireland. He has written "Tales from the Void" for DOT Comics, which was showcased to great acclaim at both D.I.C.E.  and Thoughtbubble in Leeds. Darrin was runner up for the Dundee Comics Prize and his most recent published work is 'The Amazing Mr. X" for DC Thomson, which also launched at Thoughtbubble. Upcoming releases include "Singularity" & "Bodyjocks" which are both in the Markosia published "British Showcase Anthology" ,"Earthruler", "Lady Babylon: An Occult Romance" as well as the science fiction novel "The Pantheon Bell".

There are also unconfirmed guests. Will they include 2000AD legend and Game of Thrones story-boarder Will Simpson, or neo-2000AD legend PJ Holden? Also rumoured are Atomic Diner authors Rob Curley and Stephen Downey (Jennifer Wilde) Their fellow creator on the forthcoming Noe the Savage Boy, Mal Coney, is local and may well make an appearance.

There’s also a great bar, The Hudson, on site. I rest my case.

• Avalon Arts Comics Fayre, Haymarket Arcade, off Royal Avenue, Belfast is on Sunday December 9th, and open to the public between 12-6pm, with comics art exhibition open for the following week. Admission is free and the Facebook event page is here.

So how did Comics Barcamp go?

(cross-posted with permission from Andy Luke's LiveJournal): Comics Barcamp, an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment,  happened on 3rd September 2011 at Blick Studios, Malone Road, Belfast.

Sponsored by Blick, DriveThruComics.com, Paper Tiger Comix, Don't Panic! and Roger Sabin, it proved an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

The first comics barcamp in the UK and Ireland, it pooled knowledge and shared it amongst comics creators and other people with an interest in the industry North and South of Ireland and a follow-up event in the South will take place next year.

Here, organiser Andy Luke offers his own take on the Belfast event...

Lots to tell about one of the first ever Comics Barcamps. So I may as well start here.

Followingthenerd.com (FTN) professionally shot a few interviews with folk in the morning but had to leave for midday. (They're working on a TV pilot). Posters were still being assembled around them and breakfast being consumed, brought along by myself and Jennifer Hanley on a reduced-to-clear croissant hunt.

The first session kicked off at 11:30 with Ciara Brennan, my new Absence liason at UnLtd, a charity which supports social entrepreneurs. She and I spoke about the group: its funding potential and the Southern equivalent. We gelled, and the piece gelled, clearing away my misgivings about UnLtd's case being treated as pie-in-the-sky.

Andy Luke and the Principles of Open Space

I folllowed this up with a piece on Writer Pitching with visuals of huge spiderplans and mind maps I made. There were jokes made about my bachelor status but more importantly I got people thinking, and Gar mentioned he'd like to try a proper personal project and raise the bar on his own work. There's an MP3 of this which I'm going to try to match with visuals of the pitch.

The presentation led to an intense discussion of work patterns and passions (kind of the point), and we ran well over the allotted time.

Lunch next, and everyone who tried it enjoyed Richard and Aofie's spicy noodle soup and the Mediterranean bread I sourced. We'd plenty of food and drink to keep going and Marc (of FTN) brought a few bags of crisps.

Attendance numbers were low, fluctuating between 7-10 (with 14 overall), so much that we felt best to restrict ourselves to one conference room. We didn't regroup to around 3.00pm. I didn't pick up much lunchtime chatter as I was helping with the food and trying to set up uStream.


Gareth Watson's session about portfolios on Wordpress was a bit tired I felt, as I knew half the group already used Wordpress. He knew his work though, so the best parts were when people asked questions. He would move to an unseen slide and explain exactly what we wanted to know. He also offered us some free consultation. The session ran to nearly an hour, tighter time control next time.

Paddy Brown's piece, "Getting it out", was a carefully scripted manifesto rallying against my own proposal of comics and business, stating that it was the love of the art that could only be achieved by an amateur approach to give the finished work better results. He used historical examples, and examined modern routes such as FPI, co-ops and speciality bookshops. He did it so well I almost gave him a standing ovation. The version on the web is poor sound quality, but he may be up for reprinting it at some point.

Adam Lively and the Law of Two Feet. Photo: Andy Luke

Gar and Deirdre had to catch their train to Dublin, so the session broke into informal discussion about the Black Panel and a Dublin co-op. In short, the former needs a serious re-tooling (I said) if it is to survive the year. Gar has a site in mind for the Dublin venture, and I made a point of saying they'd have to properly man-up before he undertook it. I mentioned he and Dee may like to perform a proper case study on London Underground Comics as an example of how to do it well.

The final piece was my own on digital distribution. I had 15 minutes to deliver it but it's the sort of thing that could really benefit from knowledge pooling, so I may wheel it out again. Then to clearing up the venue and balancing an enormous vat of soup on my lap in the car home. Lazy takeaway at Paddys and the best Doctor Who I'd ever seen.

Richard said afterwards, "I really feel that I learned a lot today", and I think this summed up everyone's experiences. As the person with the least involvement in the comics business, he said, "The industry seems like a really terrible place to work. Particularly in Belfast."

Richard probably knows me best and has been the closest to all the work I put into this event. The people who participated appreciated the sponsors and supporters, who were notable in facilitating hope for improvement.

We learned plenty about how to run a barcamp and I'm quite certain we'll see a comics camp in London, Dublin and somewhere else in the next nine months.


Web Links


• Original wiki for Comics Barcamp

• Andy's  Comics Barcamp 2011 Set on Flickr

• Comics Camp afternoon recordings on uStream (poor sound and slow loading)