publish and be damned

package of my three most recent comics:
'cowards/carnivores', 'maggie' and 'pigeon'

it's a week till 'publish and be damned':

Publish and Be Damned Fair 2009

Oxford House, Derbyshire Street, Bethnal Green, E2 6HG

27 September 3pm-8pm

www.publishandbedamned.org

publish.damned@gmail.com

Publish and Be Damned are pleased to announce the 6th annual self-publishing fair which will take place at Oxford House in Bethnal Green on Sunday 27 September from 3pm-8pm. Surveying a wide range of independent local, national and international publishers of magazines, fanzines, journals, diaries and periodicals, Publish and Be Damned celebrates publishing as a creative and critical space for presenting artists' work. As with previous years, the fair celebrates experimental approaches to making and distributing the work of artists, writers and musicians outside of the commercial mainstream. In addition we will have room dedicated to performances and talks throughout the afternoon.

This year's fair also marks some new initiatives for Publish and Be Damned. Our recent participation in Subvision in Hamburg as well as the London fair are opportunities for us to collect content for the new publication 'The Damned' which will be distributed to all PABD members. The membership scheme, which has also been implemented this year, enables the creation of a forum or network between members that encourages the exchange of publications and participation in PABD's events throughout the year. The funds received from the membership fees has also allowed us to hire a larger space than in previous years, enabling us to invite more participants as well as help fund the attendance of more international publishers.

Publish and Be Damned is taking place in conjunction with the Whitechapel Artists Bookfair, which will be held from Fri 25 - Sun 27

i'll be selling my comics there. come along.

mmmmedieval

capital d with utrecht dragon

medieval manuscripts never appealed to me that much; they're hard to read, often religious in content, the artwork is repetitive and you're usually not allowed to touch them.

of course i could appreciate them for their craftsmanship, but i always found them less than aesthetically pleasing. to be more precise i always thought they were pretty ugly in the same way i always found olives unpalatable. and, however stupid, there is a certain comfort in dismissing things.
whether my taste has changed or whether i just didn't recognize their genius before, just as i've come round to olives, i have come round to medieval manuscripts. not in the least because of a recent trip to my hometown of utrecht, the netherlands. my sister, hilde, and i decided to take my gran out for the day and so we ended up at the 'museum catharijneconvent', a museum that chronicles the history of christianity in the netherlands and which had an exhibition on medieval manuscripts on.

priest elevating chalice and host to hand of god,
opening page of utrecht sacramentary

the exhibition made me a lot more aware of the craft and passion and playfulness invested in these documents.

the gem encrusted cover of one of the books at the beginning of the exhibition, a codex, reads in latin 'adorned with sparkling gems, i am a gift from bishop ansfridus to martin'. intentional or not there is a sense of humour and beauty in this big solemn book talking to its reader.
'the zwolle bible', a monumental sized bible ordered by the deacon of st mary's chapter in 1464, took 12 years to copy. and that was excluding the time it took to create the 1,700 parchment folios it was written on.
books had a life. because they were so time and labour intensive a book was too valuable to just replace if pages became worn. instead of replacing an entire book individual pages might be replaced with 'new' pages, which may themselves have come from another book which was past its prime. mistakes in a text were either scraped off, corrected in the margin or crossed out. larger pieces of wrongly copied text were removed from a manuscript by cutting out the page it was written on. occasionally however a page of incorrectly copied text was just left.
mistakes in the parchment, made of the skins of sheep, goats and calves, which often turned into oval holes after stretching, would be left in, circled with red pen if the scribe thought they could throw the reader. tears could be sewn and any damaged sheets of parchment or discarded manuscripts would be reused as covers, flyleaves and envelopes.

books would also fall prey to graffiti and vandalism. the aforementioned 'zwolle bible' is a good example; not only did hundreds of people write their names on it, 52 of its 125 initals, adorned with human and animal figures, and entire pages were cut out. only 5 of the historiated initials that went missing have reappeared.

some scribes would underline individual words and explain their meaning in the margin, pieces of text may also be underlined to aid legibility. scribes were also graphic designers and could have their own distinct style, some of them would even double as editor and corrector. several monks might collaborate using each others editing, correction and lay out skills. space would be left for coloured letters and initials, which would be added in at the end. illuminators specialized in the drawing and painting of initials, marginal decorations and miniatures.

cities where manuscripts were manufactured had their own symbols that would be used in the decoration of texts. for utrecht this was a little dragon (draakje) as in the capital letter d above and the r below.

capital r with utrecht dragon

the british library recently acquired the macclesfield alphabet book, which aided scribes in medieval britain, the guardian put up some of its contents here.

the creative cunning of the monks who spent their time manufacturing these books is fascinating and inspiring. and the liveliness of all these manuscripts reminds me of comics. it feels like the time, the passionate patience, the inventive way of working round or with mistakes, the eye for detail are all as much part of transcribing and illuminating a manuscript as they are part of writing and drawing a comic.

rough draft page 1

i am working on a short comic for graffiti 76% magazine at the moment. piero bagnariol its editor sent me some issues of the magazine and it features some interesting work by guazzelli, guga schultze, luciano irrthum and maja veselinovic among others. i am going on art work alone, because i sadly don't speak spanish.
the story i am working on is fiction i suppose, although for some reason it feels quite truthful to me if that makes sense. the theme of the issue is 'woman', not necessarily my favourite subject, but a challenge. and after finishing my mini-comic and two micro-comics for the alternative press festival it is a welcome way of keeping momentum going.

rough draft page 2

apart from working to a theme my main concern was language. rather than rely on someone else's translation skills i used song lyrics featuring the names of girls and women as the base (or soundtrack) of the comic.

alternative press festival 2009

jimi gherkin putting up banner

it's almost a week ago now that london was filled with small press joy thanks to the organizational efforts of jimi gherkin, peter lally, gareth brookes, saban kazim and many others.

printing always takes up more time and effort than you can possibly imagine and so it was that i had to miss 'are you zine friendly?' on thursday and 'spoken night out!' on friday. saturday and sunday however were great days.

saturday brought us 'collaborama'. visitors and exhibitors were invited to contribute drawings, collages, writings and ramblings to a zine printed on the day by the footprint workers co-operative. there was also a screenprinting workshop, live music and a draw-along to a specially composed piece by resonance fm's radio orchestra.
sunday at st aloysius social club was a more traditional small press fair afair, but no less good.

aside from a feeling of elation what did i take away from the festival?

i remembered browsing through some of gareth brookes and steven tillotson's work as a visitor at previous fairs and dismissing them on account of their density. it wasn't that the work didn't look good, it was the fact that as a visitor you try to take in as much as you can in order to decide what to invest in and what not. it is near impossible to give every thing you see the time and attention it deserves so a comic or zine that takes more than a superficial glance to appreciate is easily dismissed. the same goes for work that on first glance does not esthetically please. hopefully this just illustrates my own shallow way of looking at things.

sharing a table with gareth b, steven t and julia homersham i had the luxury of being able to look at their work more closely and to realize what i had missed on previous perusals. and it made me resolve that in future rather than to try to take in everything at a fair to limit myself to a selection of comics and zines and to give those the time they need.
of course all of the above probably applies to my own work too and it made me think that if other visitors do look at things the way i did, then i should be more aware of how i present my work myself. if i exhibit at fairs in the future i will have to consider more carefully what i need to do to make my work as accessible as possible without compromising the integrity of the work itself.

musetopia, julia homersham

it was my first proper experience as an exhibitor at a fair, so i wasn't quite sure what to expect. i came armed with any- and everything i could imagine needing, including two pairs of scissors (in case of multi-tasking) and a pack of crackers. as a visitor i always feel uncomfortable when people push their work too hard and in the end it seemed that having something to do was the best way to both distract myself and to give visitors the space they needed to look at my wares without feeling pressurized to buy anything.

rabbit love*5, melody lee (really grass green)

on the sunday i found myself next to chris bateson and melody lee. melody's work is very deceptive, soft and dreamy on the outside but deliciously dark and funny on the inside. one of my favourites was rabbit love story*5, which doesn't only contain black humour but also truth.

last but not least thanks very much to all of you who came along!

alternative press fair

time's flown by and it is almost time for the alternative press festival 2009!
i will be attending most of the events and will be peddling not only my own, but also anna bas backer's, ulla loge's, lilli loge's, sam longworth's and lucie galand's wares at the collaborama and the fair.

the events take place at various different venues in london including the foundry, the miller, the griffin and st aloysius social club. more information can be found here.

ernst and not alan

max ernst 'une semaine de bonte': water (1933)

it's been a some time but for easter i visited my friend sara pape garcia in madrid. whilst there we undertook a trip to the fundacion mapfre for an exhibition of max ernst's series of collages 'une semaine de bonte' ('a week of kindness'). the attention to detail in these collages is amazing, often it is almost impossible to see where one image ends and the next begins. we left the exhibition in awe.

studies for 'tube shelter scene' and 'figure in a shelter' 1940-1941

maybe because of moore's relation to the surrealist movement ernst's collages reminded me of an exhibition i visited at the imperial war museum in 2007 of henry moore's drawings of people taking shelter in london underground stations and tunnels during the second world war and of coalminers. although the image above is the most representative i could find, there was a beautiful series of smaller drawings which worked as a sequential narrative. (as i recall the catalogue was so badly printed i decided not to buy it, maybe i should have.) if i unearth any images of these smaller drawings i'll put them up.

pining for the fjords

so my little piece of pigeon non-fiction is more or less done (real size approx. 20 x 82 cm). and i have just sent it off as an entry for an anthology jimi gherkin is putting together. let's hope it'll make it.

jimi is organizing some crazy shit by the way: a 5-day alternative press festival of comic, zine and small press goodness. it will be on at various locations from 29th july - 2nd august. i'll keep you posted.