Sign Post (See what I did there?)

I'm very lucky. Over the course of my (nearly) 52 years on this fabulous planet I've got to meet hundreds of extraordinary people; not just celebrities but scientists, authors, philosophers, artists and many so-called 'ordinary people' who do extraordinary work in the medical, military, business and charity sectors. I like meeting people. And I like books. And when I meet people who've written books, I often get a copy signed by them as a reminder of that meeting.

I've been collecting signed books for some 30 years now and, sadly, many of the people who's scribbles I've collected are no longer with us. On my shelves here I have signed tomes from Douglas Adams, Eric Sykes, Willie Rushton, Kenneth Williams, Ray Harryhausen, Ronnie Barker, Norman Wisdom, Patrick Moore, Tom Sharpe and many others. They're all pretty worthless to a collector as most of them are personally dedicated to me but I didn't get them as an investment; they're little moments from my live forever preserved in paper and ink and they're much more personal than a photograph.

I have some personal favourites of course. When I was invited to the 30th birthday party of Viz magazine, I took along my copy of Co-creator Chris Donald's biography, Rude Kids, and asked the contributors for their signatures. They all went one step further and did cartoons of some of their creations:

Cleo Rocos planted a kiss alongside her signature in my copy of Bananas Forever: Kenny Everett and Me:

 

Stephen Fry had some comments to make on spelling:

 

 

Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth and soon-to-be-released Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro did a self-portrait in my copy of Joel Meadows' and Gary Marshall's Studio Space:

 

 

I'm a big fan of graphic novels and have many signed copies. Among the stars are a copy of Watchmen signed by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a copy of Batman: The Scottish Connection by Pat Mills and Frank Quitely (who also drew me an amazing picture of Batman doing something we wouldn't normally see ...), Simon Bisley's Slaine and Mike Mignola's Hellboy. But the star is Alan Moore's and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, signed by both and featuring this sketch. Fantastic!

 

 

If you enjoyed seeing these I'll post some more at a later date.

 

 



The Thursday Guest Blogpost - Joel Meadows

This Thursday's guest blogger is Joel Meadows, creator and editor of TRIPWIRE magazine which, for 20 years, has been at the forefront of the indie comics, TV and film review market. The magazine has gathered a number of awards and has some heavyweight fans including Ian Rankin, Michael Moorcock and Christopher Fowler. He's also found his way inside such places as Henson's Creature Workshop and Industrial Light and Magic. To mark the 20th anniversary of the magazine, Joel is publishing TRIPWIRE 20; a lavishly illustrated celebration with classic features, all-new content and new artwork by Mike Mignola, Frank Quitely, Howard Chaykin and many others. Do have a look at his pitch and pledge if you want to see the book become a reality. I know I do.

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When we started, we really didn’t have a clue.

I was nineteen years old, at sixth form college, and I had been chatting with an ex-neighbour of mine. In 1991, we had put out one issue of a magazine we called The Review, which we had printed at a very dodgy printers down in Tottenham. My neighbour was bemoaning the lack of decent magazines that covered comics and music. And so in February 1992, TRIPWIRE was born. Looking back at twenty years of producing the magazine (with only a short break while I went off to freelance), the younger me certainly didn’t imagine that two decades later, it would still be part of my life.

With each issue, we learnt a lot. When we began, we took a rather adversarial attitude to everything we covered whether it was features or reviews and we got a bit of a reputation as a very irreverent publication. But before long, we were getting columns from future comic superstars like Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Mark Millar and more. I suppose they liked the fact that we were a British magazine and they could pretty much say whatever they liked with no editorial interference.

We spent a few years distributing it ourselves to comic shops in London and then in 1995, we went with Diamond, so it was circulated to comic shops in the UK and most importantly it also went to the US and Canada. By the time we had hit our fifth anniversary issue in 1997, crowned by an exclusive Frank Quitely 2020 Visions cover and packed with an introduction from Grant Morrison, interviews with Jamie Delano, James Robinson and the aforementioned Mr Quitely, we had a designer onboard, Michael Grover, who designed a logo for us. So we were fairly established.

We built on what we had achieved from 1997 to 2003, publishing bi-monthly and getting a series of exclusive interviews with key figures in comics like Mike Mignola, Alan Moore and Frank Miller. We were building up a rapport with people like them and it was staggering to think that only a few years earlier, we were just a ragtag fanzine with handpasted pages. We dropped the music in 1999 because of a difference of opinion between myself and my ex-neighbour but we brought in film and TV thanks to another friend, Gary Marshall. This was a much better fit than the music and Marshall also brought a much needed extra sheen of professionalism to proceedings. We made the leap to a brief monthly in 2003 (we had attempted this before in 2000) but that was a disaster: we got royally shafted by our news-trade distributor and we only got three issues. I thought that was it for TRIPWIRE, and went off to freelance full-time.

Flash forward to 2007 and my friend, Andy Grossberg in the US, started trying to encourage me to bring TRIPWIRE back. After a little bit of coaxing, I relented and TRIPWIRE Annual 2007, in a new format, came out in July 2007. It did pretty well and so we decided to do one of them every year, usually in time for the massive San Diego Comicon. We were lucky enough to have a brand new Doctor Who cover from film and comic artist Tommy Lee Edwards for 2008’s Annual and that issue also did well for us. So we put out two issues in 2009: a Superhero Special in Feb and an Annual in July.

We published two more summer issues, in 2010 and 2011 but print was becoming very difficult to sustain as a model. But we wanted to commemorate the 20 year anniversary of the magazine in 2012 and my friend, Stevyn Colgan, of this here blog, had been talking to Unbound about doing one of his books.It seemed a good fit for us, which is why we decided to try and get it crowdfunded through them. Looking back at the old and more recent issues of TRIPWIRE, I realised what marked us out from other publications covering similar subjects. We always tried to punch above our weight and we also always tried to make them as professional as we could, both in design and content. The interesting thing is that I never started this as a career but as the years have progressed, I have become a professional journalist, writer and photographer and this is thanks in great part to working on TRIPWIRE. It has also made me appreciate persistence, where you realise that the only way to get anywhere, especially in the creative industries, is to keep on plugging away.

Stevyn Colgan is a great example of that: I have known him since 1997 and he has never given up. With his departure from the police force, he has been able to devote all of his time to his creative pursuits and I hope that he is able to enjoy the fruits of his long labours. He certainly deserves to. I’d like to thank Stevyn for this guest spot on his blog…

TRIPWIRE 20 is available to pledge at Unbound here. If you have enjoyed this blog post, or it has piqued your interest, please feel free to check it out.

I have a blog of my own, Walls and Bridges, if you wanted to check that out too, plus my flickr stream for my photography. Thanks for reading…

Happy Birthday Tharg

I can remember buying the first edition of 2000AD, which is currently celebrating its 35th birthday. It was such a revelation. Not many US comics got to us in rural Cornwall and, until 1977, all I bought regularly were the Marvel UK reprint comics like Planet of the Apes and Savage Sword of Conan. I can't moan about those publications; they were larger format than US comics and printed in black and white which meant that it was easier to see (and copy) the wonderfully clean lines and dramatic pen work of my comicbook heroes: Gil Kane, Alfredo Alcala, Neal Adams, Barry Windsor-Smith, Jack Kirby et al. (click to see larger pictures)

The solid pencils of John Buscema and the beautiful inking of Alfredo Alcala for Conan.

From the very start, I realised that 2000AD was something special. The format of just 5-6 pages of story per issue kept us all in a permanent state of cliff-hanging. The artwork was staggeringly original and unlike anything being produced in the USA. Just look at this page from Peter Milligan's The Dead strip illustrated by the late Massimo Belardinelli to see what I mean:

A re-born and re-energised Dan Dare was the main character featured in the early issues but he was very quickly overtaken in popularity by Judge Dredd who appeared for the first time in issue (prog) two. And, as time went on, other wonderful characters appeared: Strontium Dog, Robo Hunter, Halo Jones, the ABC Warriors, Slaine, Hewligan, Rogue Trooper, DR and Quinch, Harry Twenty ... the list goes on and on. I won't bore you with any more 2000AD history as other sites will do it bigger and better than I can. What I will say is that 2000AD added hugely to my pantheon of art gods, among them Brian Bolland, Mick McMahon, Simon Bisley, Ian Gibson, Carlos Ezquerra, Dave Gibbons, Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon, Bryan Talbot, Frank Quitely and so many more.

Brian Bolland's outstanding work on Judge Dredd

But, more importantly, 2000AD taught me that comics could be brilliantly written. When I'd bought comics in the past, the words had almost gone unnoticed; they were merely the vehicles that brought great artwork into my home. Now I was exposed to the wit, charm, drama, passion, melancholy and sheer brilliance of John Wagner, Alan Grant, Pat Mills, Garth Ennis, Pete Milligan and Alan Moore. Comics were now art on every level.

Mick McMahon's inspired work on Slaine

Of course, I tried out for the comic and one of my greatest treasures is a rejection letter from the editor telling me that 'extreme violence and half-naked women are not suitable material for a children's comic' just months before Simon Bisley's extraordinary interpretation of Slaine burst onto the scene with its visceral gouts of blood, savage muscle-bound Celtic barbarians and huge breasted semi-naked Amazons!

Simon Bisley doing what he does best - Slaine

The rejection spurred me on to start my own comics imprint (see the full story here and here) and, within a year, I found myself working alongside many of my 2000AD heroes in the comics industry.

Paul 'Captain Britain' and 'Doctor Who' Cornell looking like he's detected a bad smell.

Sean Hughes, Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons wondering where the tea is.

Simon Bisley playing with my moobs

Steve Dillon (seated) and comics dealer Andy Colman making that same face Paul Cornell made. Perhaps it's me?

Frank Quitely signing Issue 1 of our new comic. Murphy looking ginger. Me looking like a panda.

I kind of lost interest in 2000AD when it started to introduce Photoshop colouring. Suddenly every strip seemed to look the same and the work of one artist seemed to blend into another. It felt like being colourful and funky was more important than the stories and the underlying drawing. But that's okay - I'm happy to pass it on to a new generation of fans. I'll sit here and read and re-read my volumes of reprints from the comic; glorious fun, endlessly inventive, wonderfully funny.

Happy Birthday 2000AD and thank you. You've been a huge influence on my life.

And reprint The Dead as a book will you? Like most foolish blokes, I sold my collection a few years back and wrongly assumed that there would be more reprints than there have been. I so want to read it all again!