Jordan Crane, editor of the rightly aclaimed anthology Non, has written, along with Brian Ralph and Ron Rege, an excellent
Comic Artist's Guide to Reproduction covering Xerography, Silkscreening and Offset Printing. The PDF file (you'll need Acrobat) runs to 16 pages and forms a neat little booklet. I may well run some off for the Bristol convention at Easter. A valuable resource!
GALAXY2000 appears to be an abandoned bilingual (Japanese/English) online anthology taking comics from the old Top Shelf stable, Scenes from the Inside anthology and a few other bits and bobs. I was looking for online example of Luke Walsh's work to impress you with and hit gold here with The Asbestos Stiletto of Time!
Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville website is now up and running. Dylan was part of the UK small press scene in the early 90s before emigrating to New Zealand where he produced the excellent Hicksville comic which is one of the best "comics about comics" around and comes highly recommended.
SHIRTLIFTER
A film by Anthony Carpendale, Starring Seth Hardwick (and various freaked-out C&A customers), Music by Trancenden, An epic budget (the price of a packet shirt), Based on the underground comic strip of the same name by Ralph 'Sad Animal'
Kidson.
Download the full 8MB DivX DV spectacular, 90 seconds of pure 100percent
cotton FILTH here!
You've probably noticed a slowing down of BugPowder's respective weblogs (this and my personal blog). I had a feeling this would happen (foreseen circumstances being my career in retail and that Xmas thing) so I'm going to give up trying to keep this site hot 'n' fresh for a week or so. In the meanwhile, might I suggest scanning down the left and right columns and checking out the archives: December, November, October and September all link to fun stuff which should still be there.
BugPowder's still here though. I'll be checking email and fulfilling orders. I expect posts to resume between Dec 27th - 30th and then onwards from Jan 2nd.
Paul Schroeder has done an amazing job putting the long running and seminal small press reviews zine online with this site. It's very much work in progress at the moment but of special note is the archive section with listings of all the titles ever reviewed by Zum!, stretching back to 1991. A real history!
This'll give you an idea of where we're thinking of taking BugPowder.com...
Lee Kennedy writes about Alan Moore on the Telly:
I just can't believe I forgot to tape that programme...i had a big red ring around the listing in RT, and all. I'm a soul in torment, now-
If you found someone to tape it, any chance of my borrowing it,if I pay for postage?and return it quickly?
BTW, if anyone should be interested, there's a little interview Sasa Rakezic did with me gonna be on thecomicstore.com from thursdayish, and i suppose everyone knows about sitto.org where you can join in various interactive strips & stuff AND set up your own lil' homepage to show samples of yourself. it's free, and it's a nice-looking site. [with work by Lee on it - Pete]
cheers, Lee (:o})
And Andy Luke (of TRS2) wrote about the Comics 2001 festival in Bristol next spring:
Bristol Housecon 2001 (or Bath Housecon 2001, as it may come to be) is my chance to get a proper holiday and not have everything centering around a comics festival. I want to put the feet up, soak up some of the Bristol surroundings and have plenty of homespace to do it in.Then I thought, well I'd like to spend more than two days with these people who I spend most of my time writing to. No have-to-be-there appointments, there's enough of that at the festival. Just come and go as I please. Anybody else feel the same way, I wonder. So, I'll be renting out a self-catering holiday house in the Bristol or Bath area for a week, with Comics 2001 set firmly in the middle. The house will home 5-6 people, and rent will work out about £60-£70 for the week. First preference will be given to those paying the full whack, and I'm considering doing rates per night for the weekend. Not so keen on that although I have consented this to first co-occupants Shane Chebsey and his woman. I suppose £60 is still pretty good for three nights. Applicants need to contact me on this email address. The sooner I get the house
filled, the better I'll feel. If I get a big demand I'll look into getting a bigger house. I even came across a row of large cottages, heh: Small Press
Street! Anybody who fancies organising a similar event, I encourage you. Payment, for those concerned, I won't need until the end of March. Those cottages are looking more and more attractive a venture.This is
a non-profit making venture to the max organised by a creative fan who wants to hang out with creative fans.
Slightly tenuous but actually quite apt news. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean director and sometime writer of the old comic books (The Incal with Moebius being his most famous work) is looking to make a sequel to his mysterious (because it's impossible to see it) 1970 movie El Topo which I first heard about in the seminal horror comics anthology Taboo issue 4. He wants Marylin Manson to star in it. The rest you can read for yourself in the Chilean newapaper La Tercera, although you might need Babelfish to understand it..
New and Noted - small press comics received at BugPowder HQ.
Pulp Kitchen #3 (A4, 60 pages) anthology comic featuring work by Loura, Halquin, Joe Alderslade, Arthur Goodman, Angela Vale, David Goodman, Jim McGee, Laura Watton, Xyzandra, Bear, Ugonna Nwosu, D Willacy, Stuart McCarthy, Ash.
Send £2.50 (payable to Arthur Goodman) to Pulp Kitchen, 4 Wellington Fields, Wavertree, Liverpool, L15 0LE. Email pulp_kitchen@comicmail.com
4LATER: COMIC TALES WITH ALAN MOORE
02:55 9 December
The Other Side continues with writer and magician Alan Moore who revolutionised the comic book. The creator of the Watchmen, Swamp Thing and V For Vendetta, Moore is the man behind the first graphic novels. Now he invites us in to the inner workings of his creativity. Through a tour of his hometown Northampton, which he calls the running sore of middle England, Moore shows us the magic in everyday life.
Re Grauniad's piece on the Rwanda book: Front Row on Radio 4 had a piece on
it tonight too with exactly the same tone. "A comic book, with serious
subject matter? But why? Oh those crazy French!" It's like Maus and Barefoot
Gen and Palestine (and I won't start on Bovery again) etc, etc never
happened.
One day our grandchildren's grandchildren may look back upon these dark
times and shudder in disbelief...
As does Stephen Prestage...
And the fact that when there was coverage of comics week four or five years
ago it centred on BD, Angleoum (sic) and the cartoon arts trust was the only
British entry. The photo was also of an 8 year old reading an old Superman.
The whole article rather than implied virtually explicitly stated that the
only Brit comics were a historical fact.
Which wouldn't have annoyed me, but there were still regular Sleaze Castles
back then, Nabiel Kanan was still serialising Exit and Strangehaven was into
issue 4. Fuck it, Page 45 were gearing up for their second Independance Day, with
Dave Sim on the top table. And futher to that matter, I thought the Bande
Destinee collective were actually most Brits. Which ok would never match the hey day, but has still been a cottage
industry.
I sort of ranted this out in a letter to the editor, and even offered to do
a better job than the obviously semi literate hack they had the misfortune
to use. But they never got back to me. Odd really.
The Dutch alternative-comics-zine is finally online and the site sports a
comic by yours truly, with a cute sliding mechanism where each new panel
arrives with an over the target bounciness. Another strip by Erik Kriek
alternates new panels with stuff happening within the existing panel. (Both
strips without words).
Loads of news on the Top Shelf site about their upcoming releases, the most relevant to this site being a long awaited collection of Glenn Dakin's Abe strips (see right) next July. Around here Glenn is up there with Mr Campbell when it comes to UK small press Gods. Here's a sample from this site.
Other highlights from a very long list include a new 500 page book from Craig "Chunky Rice" Thompson called Blankets (Sping 2002), James Kochalka's daily diary strips in March, the collected Box Office Poison (April), Cicada
by Josué Menjivar who we rate rather highly (May), the complete Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie in November and loads more. Full details here and they'll all be stocked in the BugPowder shop.
And interesting article in the Grauniad with the following quote: "Such comic books, known in France as bandes
dessinées , or BDs, are regularly used to
explore serious themes." implying that outside France this doesn't happen. I might be reading too much into it, but it gives the impression that the French are a little odd for taking a comic book so seriously and comparing it to Shakespeare, which would be understandable if the Guardian hadn't serialised Posy Simmonds' Gemma Bovery last year. But that wasn't a comic, was it. That was an illustrated story using a unique style. Not a comic.
Guido Weisshahn runs the Eddie Campbell Comicography a site covering all aspects of Eddie's career including an up to date Alec chronology and "lost works". He's missing some cover scans of the early stuff, specifically small press works, so any completists out there with a scanner...