The last Monday in the month (give or take a bit of manoeuvring) is always reserved for Cartoon County – the monthly meetings of the Sussex Association of Cartoonists and Comic Strip Artists. And it’s been going since 1993…If you measure out those Mondays, that’s 884 meetings, or two and a half years worth of my evenings taken up with Cartoon County, or buying 884 pints of Guinness for my co-coordinator, David Lloyd. Well, perhaps I’m not that generous all the time, but that works out as a pretty big black lake, however you measure it. Commitment or madness, or just a dogged devotion to the cause of promoting comics and cartoons in Sussex, because the fact is that Brighton, at the epicentre of cartoon creativity on the south coast, is just buzzing with a new input of creators every week. A constantly rejuvenating stream of cartoonists finds their way into (currently) The Cricketers on Black Lion Street in Brighton’s Lanes, and while a certain leverage to London takes its toll, there are always new faces who join our informal gatherings from 6 till late…
Author Archives: Comics Forum
Snapshots by Dan Berry
Interviews
At the end of 2010, I took it upon myself to interview as many comic artists, publishers, retailers and writers working in the UK as possible. There was a sense at the time that something was changing in comics. This change, however, was difficult to define. I asked a relatively standard set of questions that explored working process, influences and ambitions. I also asked the question ‘What do you think of the health of the UK comics scene at the moment, and what do you think it can do better?’
However hard it is to define change or progression, it is made all the harder to define without a benchmark against which to measure it. What I hoped for with these interviews was the beginnings of a record of popular opinion amongst the comics industry.
Scholar Directory
Today sees the launch of a new resource on the Comics Forum website. The scholar directory provides information on the biographies, research interests, conference papers and publications of scholars from around the world. The hope is this will be useful in helping scholars to make connections, see where people are studying and what they’re interested in, and increase the accessibility of comics scholarship for everyone.
Until today the directory has been running in a limited pilot phase, with invited parties submitting their data for inclusion so we could work out how to build the pages and structure the system. Many thanks to all those who agreed to take part in this trial run. Now, I’m delighted to invite all comics scholars to fill in our data form and submit it to comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk for inclusion in the listings. Any queries about getting listed can also be directed to this email address.
Click here to be taken to the scholar directory.
Click here to download the data form.
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Digital Comics: New Mutations & Innovations by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
We are pleased to be able to offer Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s presentation ‘Digital Comics: New Mutations & Innovations’ for download in PDF format. This paper was presented on the 18th of November 2011 as part of Comics Forum 2011. Many thanks to Daniel for making this available!
Click here to download the presentation.
Abstract: The medium of comics sits on the cusp of the digital future promised to comic creators at the turn of the century. Explorations of the infinite canvas and the many strange mutations of the hypercomic have been given a new relevance and audience by the recent advances in portable display and mobile media. Now, with a decade of experimental digital work behind us, the wider world is at last beginning to catch up to these odd outliers of the form.
As the comics industry moves to catch up with the frontier, newer and stranger ideas must be entertained. The hunt for weirder, more wonderful mutations must be renewed with new vigour and new purpose. This talk considers the different directions potential explorers of the medium might next pursue. It examines the possibilities of new forms such as locative, sonic, game, spatial and AR comics. In doing so it aims to map some of the many trails leading out into the new decade of experimental comics that lies before us.
Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is a senior lecturer in Interaction Design at The University of Hertfordshire in England. A prolific and innovative comic creator, Goodbrey has gained international recognition as a leading expert in the field of experimental digital comics. His hypercomic work received the International Clickburg Webcomic Award in Holland in 2006 while his work in print was awarded with the Isotope Award for Excellence In Comics in San Francisco in 2005. An archive of his work can be found here.
Comics Forum 2011 was supported by Thought Bubble, the University of Chichester, the Henry Moore Institute, Dr Mel Gibson, Routledge, Arts Council England, Intellect and Molakoe Graphic Design.
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