I’ve been putting together my presentation for Pen & Ink, the new comics/book art convention in Newton Abbot on the 24th and 25th of this month.
If you’re down Devon way, it looks like it’s going to be small – first year, after all – but worth a visit, with appearances from Sarah McIntyre, Phil Reeve, the LDComics crew (including Wallis Eates and Emma Burleigh), and A Wolfgang Crowe among others.
Tickets for sessions are either low in price or ‘pay as you can afford’. See everything on offer here.
I’ve got a luxurious 45 minutes to speak, which seemed like a long time until I realised I could break it down into 10 minutes about each of my last three projects – Draw the Line, Sorry for the Inconvenience and The Noisy Valley, and then have 15 mins for a Q&A.
And once I started getting my slides and notes together, I realised that as well as the theme advertised in the programme – “Changing the world with comics” – there’s a definite sub-theme emerging, which is around the idea that if you want to make comics, you don’t need to wait until someone asks you to.
In fact, each of my recent comics uses a different method to get around the fact that no-one has ever asked me to make one – from self-publishing to crowdfunding.
I hope to get across the idea that absolutely anyone can do the same. There’s no entry test for making comics!
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Myfanwy Tristram 