Baatsheep Begins at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival

Today the second Lakes International Comic Art Festival launches. There lies before us a weekend of top flight talent from around the globe - internationally acclaimed writers, artists and publishers - all descending on the Cumbrian town of Kendal.

It's a place more renowned for mint cake and Wainwright, so seeing the Bat symbol fly over Kendal Town Hall may come as a shock to some local residents.

But if they keep there eyes open, there's even more disruptive behavious to see.

The Comic Windows Art Trail is colonising 38 shop windows around the town, to display work by a number of creative individuals and organisations, tied into the general theme of the Comic Art Festival. It's not all superheroes but they do tend to dominate.

When I was asked to join in, back in May, I airily said "yes" and decided to worry about it later. As the deadline approached, it occurred to me that I hadn't got a clear idea what to do. I was going to occupy the Westmorland Gazette window. Something on a Gazette theme? Maybe boasting about having celebrated 30 years as their cartoonist? That seemed a little self-referential.

Then I happened across one of my old postcards and a theme began to emerge.

The first sketch was a little rough

But it soon developed into something more promising

The addition of a spoof Gazette front page was fun and I added an iconic image for the Dark Knight fans. Finally, it was due to finish with the original postcard. Time and a trip to Brussels got in the way of that plan so I ended up redrawing it, firing it off to MTP-Media and relying on them to instal it for me whilst I was away!

The final display is now in the Westmorland Gazette window. 

There's a competition. You can vote for it, if you wish, and I may win a lavish prize. (You don't have to do this but I will ask the NSA where you live.)

But whatever you do … don't miss the rest of the Comic Art Festival weekend.

PS You may find me tweeting about the festival here. I'll be armed with a sketchbook so will post some sketches on the blog. And meanwhile, here's that front page …

The Lakes International Comic Art Festival

I have some news for you. You may want to sit down for this:

Kendal is going to have a Comic Art Festival.

I’ll say that again in case you missed it. In fact, I’ll say it in bold with a bigger font and exclamation marks:

Kendal is going to have a Comics Art Festival!!!

The first Lakes International Comic Art Festival takes place on October 18-20, 2013 and will be centred on Kendal. The aim is to make the auld grey town an international comic book venue to rival the likes of Angoulême and Comiket.

Given that these two festivals receive 200,000 and half a million visitors respectively, this may seem a tall order. But everyone has to start somewhere and, judging from the launch at The Brewery last night, this one is off to a flying start.

The driving force behind it is Julie Tait, who also works with Lakes Alive. Festival founding patrons are ace comic artist Sean Phillips 

and Bryan and Mary Talbot, whose graphic novel, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, won the biography category in this year’s Costa Awards.

Comic books (or graphic novels if you live in Hampstead) are coming of age in the UK. The broadsheets have been telling us this every two years for the last decade, so it must be true. Across the Channel, bande dessinée has been a strong force on the French cultural scene for many decades, where one in three books sold is a comic book. No one looks down at a comic book fan, let alone someone who does squiggly drawings for a living.

Comic books today are more than Dan Dare or The Beano writ large. They can deal with any subject under the sun, up to and including current conflicts abroad. They are imaginative, enthralling, exciting and inspirational. So it’s surprising that the UK - the spiritual originator of cartoons and comic art with the likes of Hogarth and Rowlandson - has never had a comic book festival. Good grief, we’ve only had a cartoon museum for ten years and we invented the cartoon!

Julie and her team hope to set that straight. It sounds like the event is going to be awash with big names, from the UK and abroad, both in the graphic novel and cartoon fields. There are going to be family events, trading stalls, talks and drawing. Lots and lots of drawing.

As you can tell, I am in no small measure quite excited by this. So much so, I’m going to have to go and have a lie down.

To find out more, see today’s national media or zap across to their website at www.comicartfestival.com

You can also follow them on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest and if all that fails, ace comic book blogger John Freeman will have all the info at www.downthetubes.net.

And I’ll be posting regular updates here and on my Twitter feed. 'Natch.

Flood warning

The north of England and Scotland had a spot of weather this week. 

In the Lake District, 29mm of rain fell in one hour. As a result, Kendal high street was flooded and the drains backed up. The situation was made worse by cars driving through the flood and sending miniature tsunamis into adjacent shops.

Unsurprisingly, the topic dominates the front of this week's Westmorland Gazette and is the target for my editorial cartoon. Below are the five ideas I submitted to my steamed editor.

This week, I've also included the cartoon which made it to the front page - at least, in its first artwork form. It was one of those weeks when the drawing fought back and refused to go as planned. All illustrators have these (I hope). The final art changed somewhat from the original sketch. I'm not sure if it was for the better or not and I've included a couple of intermediate sketches.

Click here to see the finished, Photoshopped cartoon on my website. 

Do you prefer the final version or the rough sketch? Let me know in the comments box.

Tweeting the twaffic

Let me take you by the hand to the Auld Grey Town - the little market metropolis of Kendal which nestles (as all rural towns do, according to the media) on the edge of the Lake District.

It is a place of castles (it had two), traditional architecture and quaint, gated yards (built to keep out the naughty Scots in times gone by). It is the home of Catherine Parr, The Blessed Wainwright, Kendal Mint Cake and a variety of exciting festivals throughout the year.

It is also the home to far too many cars. So much so that some streets - including Lowther Street - are a veritable porridge of pollution.

Much has been done to try and alleviate this problem. A few years ago, Kendal Department of Pointless Fiddling rearranged the traffic system, hoping to confuse motorists to such a degree they would all go somewhere else instead.

That didn't work so now they have come up with another plan. One which is bold, innovative and, above all, fearlessly trendy. They are going to use social media.

Yes, coming to a smartphone near you, messages on Twitter and Facebook, urging motorists to leave their cars at home and visit Kendal by foot or public transport.

I imagine it will go brilliantly and can see nothing wrong with the plan whatsoever.

Here are my cartoon sketches about it for last week's Westmorland Gazette. To find out which one made its way - by foot - onto the front page of the newspaper, cycle to my website now.

An Englishman's Home is His Ashtray

The seven days between Christmas and New Year is always tricky for a weekly newspaper. Reporters are on holiday, everyone’s had too much sherry and no one is out there creating news.

This also presents a problem for the front page cartoon. There’s usually a broad sweep of smaller stories, with nothing specific to focus on.

It started out like that this week. A story about Britain’s Got Talent star Steve Hall giving up the day job, another about a hospital radio station trying to beat Chris Moyle’s 52 hour continuos broadcast … And then, just as I was losing the will to draw, gold dust.

A pro-smoking campaigner has decided to open a smoking shop.

This is not your usual tobacconists (do those still exist?) but one selling pro-smoking t-shirts. Sales of these will, apparently, raise funds so that he can lobby parliament to overthrow the ban on smoking in public places. According to the campaigner, “Smoking is one of the last remaining pleasures for the working man … “ 

Possibly the working man should get out more.

As smoking is one of the topics which brings out the Jeremy Clarkson in me, I enjoyed working on this one. In fact, only the looming presence of my deadline prevented me from pitching more ideas than the seven shown below.

To see which the editor voted for, rush out and buy The Westmorland Gazette, or blow across to my website.

"Must be the comedian I get whenever I ring up to complain about my broadband."

"That must be for the number of sexist remarks made in a 2-hour broadcast."

"That must be the new pro-smoking shop."

"It's from the pro-smoking shop - now I can smoke in public places."

"I work in the new pro-smoking shop. Ironically I have to come outside to smoke."

"That should make the auld grey town a little greyer."

Going to Pot

Drug farm in car park toilets!

Not a headline one usually encounters in The Westmorland Gazette but this week we went all urban and edgy.

New Road in Kendal is an area of some controversy, having been used as a parking place alongside the river for many years. Apparently this isn’t strictly legal and the council would like to landscape it and make it nice. (I’m not sure where all the cars would go, somewhere not nice I assume.) It also has a quiet, unassuming toilet block which, in line with general South Lakeland District Council policy, is permanently closed.

But some enterprising scamps have been putting it to use by wiring up heaters to the light fittings and planting £500 worth of cannabis in the ladies’ loo. If harvested, the cannabis would have had a street value of £10,000. Perhaps not quite what our beloved PM has in mind in calling for a more entrepreneurial Britain.

I only get three hours to do the cartoon, otherwise this story could have generated dozens of ideas. Here is the half-dozen I fired at the editor. You can see which landed on the front page by visiting my website.

Street Cred

An interesting mix of stories for the cartoon in this week’s Westmorland Gazette.

And regular blog readers may have spotted that I’m not enamoured of interesting mixes. If the cartoonist’s eye roves over too many stories, it usually means there isn’t enough in one of them to work up a good head of cartoon steam. (Unlike last week’s smoking story, for instance.)

However, I settled on two this week and pitched ideas for them. The first was a report about a Passion Play coming to Kendal next Easter. Not sure why I used capitals there but apparently a Passion Play is a Thing and not just a random play with a religious theme. Frankly I would (and will) rather go and see Mintfest, which strikes me as more diverse and interesting. Besides, it’s always disappointing if someone has already given away how the play ends.

The other story concerned Grange-over-Sands venerable Lido. This was built in the 1930s and has had mixed fortunes over the decades. It currently sits empty whilst developers circle overhead. In a bid to thwart their plans, someone has set up a Facebook page of objectors and is trying to get the Lido listed by English Heritage.

Below you can see my three plus one cartoons on these subjects. To see which graces the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper, stroll casually over to my website on Thursday morning.