Totally Merlin confuses some fans - and us!

(Updated again - with thanks to our readers): A quick reminder that there is an official Merlin

magazine on sale in the UK in selected supermarkets and newsagents, published by Titan Magazines.

The magazine is being published as Issue 19 of Titan's 'Totally' title, which explains the cover numbering - but contrary to our earlier version of this report, it's being billed as the second issue of the official Merlin magazine launched by Attic Media, just before that company went into administration.

The whole situation has left some fans - and us! - a bit confused, as Titan have told us this 'continuation' is a one-off for now.

Titan published another Merlin tie in like this back in 2010.

The magazine comes with a free sticky Serket, a Merlin keyring and four special badges. There's also a chance to win Arthur's gloves, a trip to the set as well as loads of other special prizes, and the magazine also features a Merlin comic strip.

We'll keep you posted if there is further news on a new ongoing Merlin title.

- More info at: http://titanmagazines.com/t/totally/uk/19/

Breaking into Comics - some quick tips

The first unassuming cover by Matt Bingham
for the comics zine that helped me
get into comics publishing. Subscribers
included Alan Moore.
Download a cbr of the issue

Regular readers will be aware, we hope, that our main downthetubes site features some guides to Breaking Into Comics, espcially on the writing side.

I recently had a few more requests than usual for tips on how to find work in the comics industry. It isn't easy, especially with the industry being quite small these days, at least in the UK, but here are some thoughts and suggestions...

• Post your strips online on a blog (which can be done for free) and see if they attract interest in your work

• Create and publish your own fanzine with your own strips (and perhaps some from other people you know) and sell it locally and via the above-mentioned blog (use Paypal), or get to nearby Comic Marts or events and try sell them there (all of which I did to get myself known several years ago). Your magazine doesn't have to be in colour (although a colour cover wil help) and you don't have to print many (because you won't sell many - it's about getting yourself known!)

• Get along to a comic convention - there are several across the UK through the year and we list them on DTT. Meet fellow creators and pick their brains. Show editors your work.

• Make sure that the portfolio you show editors includes only a small selection of your best work (and I do mean best work - if you feel you wouldn't pay to read it, it doesn't qualify!); make sure that if you want to show it to 2000AD, for example, you include a page of art featuring a 2000AD character; include samples of pencils and inks; and make sure the samples are comic strip, not full page illustrations (with editors it's more about seeing you can tell a story rather than 'can you draw'?)

• Listen to the feedback; learn from it. If an editor likes the work, get their details and then send copies of what they were shown once you get home, plus a couple of new pages, saying how much you enjoyed meeting that editor and that you hope the new samples have taken on board the advice you were given

• If you don't hear anything within six weeks, send a follow up, polite email asking if the editor has had a chance to look at the samples and that you're still keen to get the chance to draw

• Build your relationships with any audience you have built up through your blog and fanzine, develop your own audience. (Think about using Facebook and Twitter to maintain your personal marketing)

Quality will out in any industry but as with most things, breaking into comics is 10 per cent inspiration, 90 per cent perspiration...

• Check out downthetubes.net for other practical and hopefully useful advice. Our Writers Guide is here

• Advice to artists submitting work 

•  Live Pitching at Conventions

Ronald Searle's art collected - in Germany

Ronald Searle. Image: German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

Fans of Ronald Searle, the doyen of the cartoon, who died recently, might want to check out the German Museum of Caricature and Drawing (Deutsches Museum fürKarikatur und Zeichenkunst), where much of his work is held.

Searle died on 30 December 2011 in Draguignan, Provence, aged 91, leaving an incredible legacy of amazing art that spanned seven decades, including cartoons, illustrations, reportage drawings, commercial graphics and animation - a unique life's work of established international reputation.

His distinctive, masterful stroke, combined with British humour, rich knowledge, an unflagging curiosity and imagination and a deep humanity made him one of the most influential cartoonists of his time.

Searle's work has been on permanent loan to the German Museum of Caricature and Drawing from the Foundation of Lower Saxony, Museum Wilhelm Busch for some time and staff there are mourning the loss of a great artist and a good friend.

Born in Cambridge, England in 1920, Ronald Searle had already published his first cartoons in the Cambridge Daily News by the age of 15. In  1938 he began a scholarship to study at the Cambridge School of Art, but a year later he was drafted into the British Army and in 1942 sent to the war effort in the Far East. His experiences as a young soldier in Japanese captivity during World War Searle influenced not only him: drawing the Thai jungle was, for him, a survival strategy. His experiences gave him a deep understanding of human nature, which shows in all his work.

After his return from captivity Ronald Searle's cartoons were soon gracing the pages of satirical magazine Punch - especially his stories about the schoolgirls of St. Trinian's, one of Britain's best-known cartoon creations outside of The Beano. His reportage drawings of travels through Europe, the Middle East or the Americas in the 1960s made him internationally known and his animation work opened doors in Hollywood. In his great cycles of paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, animals, especially cats, played a central role, offering an enjoyable bestiary with human behaviour.

Image: German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

At the age of 75, Searle took the offer of the French daily newspaper Le Monde, who published his work for for 13 years, drawing regular political cartoons, with the issues of war and power often providing the subject matter.

Ronald Searle was first married to journalist and editor Kaye Webb and had two children, twins Kate and John.

In 1961 he moved to Paris and married his second wife, the artist and stage designer Monica Koenig Stirling, in 1967. From 1977 to Monica and Ronald lived in Tour in Southern France. Monica died in July 2011.

Contact between the German Museum of Caricature and Drawing and Ronald Searle go back to the year 1963, when the artist's drawings were first presented in an exhibition on the satirical British magazine Punch. Following solo exhibitions in 1965 and 1976 - as well as various acquisitions of some drawings by the artist - the Museum hosted a major exhibition in 1996, which also covered the biography and personal life: his time of the Japanese prisoner of war as well as traveling with his wife Monica and their friendship with artists from different countries. In addition, Searle provided this exhibition with a selection of works from his own collection of historical cartoons as an expert on the history of his own art.

In 1996 and 1998, with the support of Rudolf Ensmann, a longtime patron of the museum, and Depfa Bank (now Aarealbank) Wiesbaden the Museum acquired, in two stages, Searle's entire collection of vintage cartoon - and his library on the history and theory of the cartoon. At the same time gave Searle already a large part of his archive at the Hanover Museum.

Prior to the preparation of a exhibition on the ninetieth birthday of Ronald Searle in 2010, the possibility of taking over the whole of archive of more than 2000 drawings arose: and with that, the work of an English artist, living in France now looked toward the Hanover Museum as being his spiritual home.

In December 2010, the Foundation of Lower Saxony backed the purchase, with the support of the Cultural Foundation of the countries of Lower Saxony and other backers, and Searle's work became a permanent part of the Museum's collections.

• Visit the German Museum of Caricature and Drawing online at: www.karikatur-museum.de

• Images via German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

In Review: The Phoenix Issue 1

It feels like a long time since the last issue of The DFC appeared - although The DFC Library books have been reminding us what that title was like and, with the Etherington Brother's Baggage, what it might have continued to be given the chance.

So when The Phoenix was first mooted last year, there was some discussion about how this second title from David Fickling Comics Ltd was going to have to change to survive longer than its predecessor. The biggest change that was considered to be needed was it being available over the counter rather than just by subscription and, with their Waitrose deal, The Phoenix has managed that.

As for the comic itself, £2.99 gets the reader 32 pages of semi-gloss colour, which is a big improvement on the matt colour of The DFC. The dinosaur on the front cover leads into Daniel Hartwell and Neill Cameron's The Pirates Of Pangaea. When the first Phoenix image of this was released I e-mailed it around the rest of the downthetubes team saying that if it was available as a book on Amazon I would have bought it there and then based on that one image. Eight pages in, four in issue Zero and another four here, and I stand by that initial assessment - I like both the idea and the execution and I can completely understand why editor Ben Sharpe ran it as the cover and first story in this issue.

Next up are two pages of Jamie Smart's Bunny Vs Monkey which sets up the humorous strip's basic concept and, like Pangaea, continues directly on from the pages in Issue Zero. As the two protagonists didn't meet in Issue Zero this is one strip that seemed a little strange there, but the fateful meeting has now occurred and I can now see how it is going to play out. With Jamie's delightful chibi-style animal characters, this is one strip that I expect will grow on me.

Via two pages of text from the Ash Mistry book due to be published by Harper Collins in March, the next comic strip is the Etherington Brothers' Long Gone Don. The brothers' love of the manic is in full flow here with the main character dying on the first page before being transported to what could only be described as an Etherington version of Alice's Wonderland. Issue Zero didn't give much away about Long Gone Don and it has to be said that you aren't going to be much the wiser after these three pages but, with a hat wearing talking crow and Lorenzo's trademark detailed art, I fully expect this one to become a firm favourite.

Neill Cameron gets another page and a bit to get the readers to interact with the comic in How To Make Awesome Comics before the first two pages of Kate Brown's The Lost Boy. There isn't much to the story in these two pages, an apparently ship-wrecked boy wakes up on a sun bleached beach, finds a piece of a map and follows footprints up the shore. Yet Kate's style is so distinctive in the way she plays with the elements that make up her pages, as it was in The Spider Moon, that it makes these two pages interesting to look at despite the initial lack of action.

Garen Ewing's ligne claire style is much more traditional in the four page complete story by Ben Haggarty of The Golden Feather in which a middle-eastern boy and his grandfather, appropriately, watch the death and rebirth of a real Phoenix.

This is followed by Adam Murphy's Corpse Talk in which Adam talks to the reanimated corpses of famous people, in this instance scientist Nikola Tesla. Corpse Talk really sounds like a bad idea, zombies for kids mixed with history, however when I asked my 10 year old nephew which was his favourite strip in Issue Zero, it was Corpse Talk - and I have to agree with him. It may sound like a strange idea but, remarkably, it works really well.

The final strip in Issue 1 is James Turner's 2 page Star Cat, the beginning of a longer adventure, which does its job of raising a smile. If James' DFC strip Super Animal Adventure Squad was The Avengers for the Fineas and Ferb generation, then Star Cat is their Star Trek.

The whole comic is packaged up with editorial characters, a couple of humorous shorts, Patrice Aggs' centrespread of a school open day that is just about to go wrong, Lorenzo Etherington's tortuous Von Doogan prize puzzle and a superb Chris Riddel image of a cat restaurant.

So is there a drawback? As with The DFC, getting children and their parents to realise The Phoenix is available is going to be the issue. While the Waitrose deal is heartening to hear, there are only eight Waitrose stores between Yorkshire and John O'Groats, which at least is eight more than Northern Ireland has. For a vast swathe of the United Kingdom, "available at Waitrose" equates to "subscription only". If you have a local Waitrose then consider yourself lucky that you can simply walk in and buy a copy.

The Phoenix Issue 1 is an impressive start for the new title and, based on the contents of this week's issue, it deserves to do well. Time, and hopefully a wider distribution deal, will tell.

• There are more details about The Phoenix comic at their official website where a digital version of Issue Zero is available to read. The various Phoenix subscription options are also available here.


• The Phoenix is available at Waitrose supermarkets. Your nearest Waitrose can be found using the Waitrose Branch Finder.

• The Oxford Mail ran a short article on the release of Issue 1 which includes a picture of The Phoenix team.