Girl Genius web comic creators Phil and Kaja Foglio head for Cambridge

Phil and Kaja Foglio, creators of the steampunk web comic Girl Genius (www.girlgeniusonline.com), are to be Guests of Hounour at the Congenial convention in Cambridge next month.

Taking place over 10-12th August 2012, Congenial is an SF and role-playng convention offering a programme of talks and panel discussions,  role-playing games, and socialising.

The event is one in a series of UK Unicons - small science fiction conventions held in universities and colleges, which started with Unicon 80 held at Keele University in 1980. Congenial is Unicon 24.

The orgnaisers hope the event will put web comics firmly in the spotlight.

"Web comics are different from print," they argue. "You have to commit yourself to another installment of the storyline frequently and incrementally, and you can't retcon stuff half a book ago without losing the respect of your readers. You have to work constantly, without any breaks except those you create by working harder - and if it's topical, you can't do that very much.

"What makes this worthwhile? We'll ask Phil and Kaja, but one thing is obvious: you're never forgotten. Your readers think about you every week, at least. That makes a difference. It also saves the capital costs of print runs and stock holding, and makes you immune to the whims of distributors. It's a very raw and direct form of storytelling.

"Steampunk is more than just an SF trope now. The appeal of the beginnings of the modern age, with its visions of empire and view of the world as knowable and tamable, is strong in an period when uncertainty seems to increase day on day. Steampunk is fun because it inverts so many current ideas, while being more real than fantasy. The stiff upper lip appeals to an age that has seen the tragedies of the twentieth century, and treats emoting as socially desirable. Discovering places was fun, but it's all been done now. Assumed membership of the elite appeals in an age when the internet is making us face up to the sheer number of idiots that are around. Different social absurdities have a great appeal.
In the Foglios' hands, steampunk (or gaslamp fantasy as they prefer to call it) is more straightforwardly mad-science alternate history.

"In Girl Genius, we have a universe where science and engineering works really well for the talented, but people are more recalcitrant. And that's just naturally funny."

• Membership is £30 for the weekend, bought in advance; membership by the day is available at the door. For full details, visit www.congenial.org.uk

Lancaster Game Designers win top award

Lancaster-based game designers Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton have won the award for Best Role-Playing Game at this year’s UK Games Expo in Birmingham, for their table-top steampunk role-playing game, Abney Park’s Airship Pirates.

Based on the songs of Seattle-based steampunk band Abney Park, the game book – lavishly illustrated by some of the top steampunk artists in the business – plunges the players into an alternate steam-powered future of strange cultures and weird gadgets. Players take on the roles of the crew of a time-travelling pirate airship in a game of storytelling and imagination.

“When we first contacted Robert Brown, lead singer of Abney Park, about the possibility of creating an RPG based on his songs, we didn’t realise how popular it was going to be,” said Ken Walton. “Steampunk is a much bigger phenomenon in the Unoted States than it is in Britain, so all the interest came as a bit of a surprise! It’s a great honour to win this award and we couldn’t have done it without all the contributions made by Robert, the artists, our publishers, and all the people who voted for us on the day.”

The game has already won the Diehard GameFANS Award for Best RPG Rule Book of 2011 and the Steampunk Chronicle Readers’ Award for Best Steampunk Game, and was shortlisted for an Origins Award too, which is given at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio.

Cakebread & Walton: Purveyors of Fine Imaginings, was set up in Lancaster in 2010. Airship Pirates RPG isn’t the only role-playing game they’ve written; the team have also produced the critically-acclaimed Clockwork & Chivalry, game set in an a fantasy version of the English Civil War, fought with magick and clockwork war machines. Both game lines are supported by an increasing number of supplements, and new games are in the pipeline.

Their games are distributed worldwide by Cubicle 7 Entertainment, who also market the Starblazer game based on DC Thomsons 1980s SF comic.

• For more information visit www.cakebreadandwalton.com

Moore and Reppion announce steampunk motion comic "The Thrill Electric"

"We are very pleased to say we are now officially allowed to talk about a very exciting new project we have coming up in 2011," the writing team announced on their blog.

"This project came about from a writing cliché, in that it is the very first idea I have had which was so good and so obviously needing writing, that I had to sit up in bed, grab a pen and start making notes," says John. "This has never happened to me before or since, and in fact I never actually believed it did happen to writers. But now it has, and a bloody good job too. Hattrick Productions liked it, and 4education liked it enough to commission it!"

The team are now writing a ten part motion comic series set in the fast paced world of the Victorian Internet.

"We have the lovely and talented Emma Vieceli on board, giving the whole series her drop dead gorgeous signature style, and making sure it all has a smooth cohesive look and feel and then we have the combined force of Windflower Studio on art chores for the series. We managed to get these girls before the ink was even dry on their animation degree certificates, so we have the pleasure of saying 'you saw them here first kids!'"

The Thrill Electric revolves around the office of the International and Electric Telegraph Company in Manchester in 1871 and follows the fortunes of a gang of young adults who connect with wires. They have the day to day data of the city, of the world even, flowing through their telegraph keys and millions of people relying on the telegraph for news of wars, the prices of their stocks, the news of a loved one’s birth, or marriage or death. All of this responsibility heaped on those young shoulders and they still manage to find time to slack off, play games, bitch about each other and fall madly passionately in love, all at the lightning  speed of the telegraph.

• For more more about The Thrill Electric, check out this post on John and Leah's official blog

Bryan's Badger Detective Trailed

The official trailer for award-winning comic creator Bryan Talbot's next graphic novel, Grandville, has just been released.

Bryan, probably best known as the author of Britain's first ever graphic novel, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright but also creator of The Tale of One Bad Rat and Alice in Sunderland, has now completed work on this brand new steampunk graphic novel.

The story is is set in a retro sci-fi world populated by anthropomorphic animals and stars Detective Inspector LeBrock, who the writer artist describes as a "large working class badger”.

"He has the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes but, being a badger, he’s also a bruiser and is quite happy to beat the crap out of a suspect to get information," Bryan recently told Steampunk magazine. "His adjunct and close confidant is the diminutive and elegant Roderick Ratzi, who talks like Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey.

"I wanted to do one of those sorts of adventure stories that starts very small and parochial but gets bigger and more exciting as it goes along until it finishes in an epic climax," he continues. "The story begins with LeBrock investigating a murder in a small English village (in actuality Rupert Bear’s Nutwood). The trail leads him to Grandville, where he discovers a shocking and far-reaching conspiracy. It’s basically fin-de-siecle Paris, populated by animals and furnished with speaking tubes, automatons and steam-driven hansom cabs."

Grandville is set for release in October 2009 and will be published by Dark Horse in the USA and Jonathan Cape worldwide.

• View The Trailer...

• For more information about the book visit www.bryan-talbot.com/grandville

• Check out full the interview Bryan gave to SteamPunk Magazine