'The Gods Must Be Bastards' is now on sale at my website with paypal. Its 56 black and white pages with colour covers and is the same size as 'Goblin Hall' (half way between A4 and A5). It's £4 with free postage in the UK and Europe. Please add £1 for the rest of the world.
This is 'Spill' by Derik Badman which was great.
John Porcellino had sent some photos of his new home.
Some more of the photos. I really liked these.
A xerox of one of John Porcellino's pages.
'Walking Distance' by Frank Santoro was great.
Some of Frank Santoro's pages where he draws all his shapes and lines to show where you look on a page. I wish I understood these properly. They are all of two-page spreads.
Frank Santoro's drawings of kind of greek myths and mythological creatures.
I bought this little book from FRMK just for the drawing. It's very hard to see on the scan below but the pages are very beautiful.
They are all scenes of streets and children's parties. Very dark, and covered with bulls blood splatters. They really are great drawings. The story seems to be about a children's party, it also seems quite sad. I would have liked more story to go with the great art. I also really like the lettering which seems to have been done with the bulls blood. I think it might have been better to see the original drawings in an exhibition at their full size than as a little book.
'Hardcomics 7 - First Sexual Experience' is a great big book of porn comics from Romania sponsered by Playboy Romania. Some nice stuff in here. I was reading it on the train home and thinking 'how cool am I'.
'The Book of George' is a great big book from Romania that they were giving out for free! They had been paid for by their Romanian Arts council equivalent. There's some really good comics in here. Loads of different artists and different styles. This should be orange not pink but my scanner doesn't think so.
I also bought 'Feraille Illustre no. 27' from the Requins Marteaux stall. It's very good with stories by Sara Varon, Trondheim, Blex Bolex, Killofer, Blutch, Winschluss and many more.
I did this big drawing yesterday of Timmy from 'Great Deeds Against the Dead' on some brown paper. It's another practice thing to try some different ways of drawing. It was very enjoyable to draw big and messy for a change.
It's hard to learn how to use colour. (actual colours better than this due to scanning)
I had seen this manga artist in The Comics Journal so I thought I'd buy his book. It's in French but it doesn't matter as there are hardly any words. There's one of the great full page scenes he draws above. These are the adventures of the cat / water spirit character on the cover. There not really adventures though as they are very surreal and he just wanders about looking at all the weird stuff. They are full of decaying organic machinery, giant factories, people buying rotten meat and fish and monsters. I like them a lot. There are also some stories I wouldn't have expected, like a weird giant monster story and 'TikiRod', about tiki statues and American cars. He draws a lovely decaying urban scene, all damp and filthy with loads of black ink.
View down our tent when the exhibition hadn't opened yet. Once it opened it was busy all the time. The Saturday was insanely busy, even the streets of the town were totally rammed with comics people, it was very difficult to walk anywhere.
L'Association were on strike and so had all these leaflets out in their booth instead of selling anything.
People when the tent was open. Our tent was bigger than any of the UK conventions, and was only one of six or seven tents...
Picture from the AX Manga exhibition in the big publishers tent. Shame there were no originals in it, only blown up pictures.
The Comics Museum at the bottom of the hill. They had loads of original art and an exhibition of Parody Comics, with lots of Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman and Gotlib art. And also some porn smurf parodies in a fenced off room. Tiny children were running in and out of the room and laughing at the blue cocks while their teachers tried to stop them.
Here's some pictures from the awesomne Dominique Goblet exhibition at Angouleme.
The Baru exhibition at Angouleme was really great. Here's a bunch of pictures of it. These were covers of classic rock and roll singles re-done by famous comics artists.
This was a massive wall of original pages from one of Baru's black and white comics. It was huge.
Close up of the wall of originals.
Big hanging prints of some of Baru's characters.
Here is everyone behind our stall at Angouleme. There's me, Dan Lester, Francesca Cassavetti, Sean Azzopardi, Sally-Anne Hickman and Oliver Lambden.
This is a photo of part of the table list for our tent, the Espace BD Alternative. You can see BASTARDS on the list. It was the most interesting tent with all the alternative, independent publishers.
The entrance to a tent with the big cat picture that was the symbol of the festival.
Yay, fancy badge. Auteur! Auteur!