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Selling Comics At Thought Bubble 2013 Part One – Saturday

UK comic creator and journalist P M Buchan gives Bleeding Cool the lowdown on what it was like exhibiting at Thought Bubble in Leeds, covering the breadth of exhibitors, the highs of the parties and the lows of the morning afters. This is the first of two reports:

Thought Bubble has come a long way since I volunteered at the very first convention, beneath Leeds Town Hall, back in 2007. It's now an internationally recognised highlight of the convention circuit, ran by a team or organisers that are becoming as well known as the con itself, but in the beginning it was the vision of one Lisa Wood, who goes by the artistic alias of Tula Lotay and recently illustrated a strip for the American Vampire Anthology.

Thought Bubble is the kind of comic festival where there are far too many things going on to experience them all, but every one is a delight, and there are events and activities for all ages. My Thought Bubble this year began at the Marriott hotel launch party, where we arrived late and found comic creators spilling out onto the streets from the crowded bar. The first person I met as I entered the bar was Rich Hardiman, one of the best comic printers in the UK. Last year he printed the British Comic Award-nominated Girl and Boy, by Andrew Tunney, who recommended Rich as one of the best in the business. This year, when a printer rejected my new horror-comedy anthology, BLACKOUT II: YOLO, because of the extreme contents, I knew that Rich Hardiman was the man for the job, and he didn't disappoint.

BLACKOUT II and LBDSM 2 ready to sell at Thought Bubble

The rest of the night in the Marriott went much as you would expect, meting up with new friends and old. There were free drinks vouchers for the crafty, and no division between fans and creators, just a lot of people that loved comics together in one room. David Aja and Ramón Pérez were among the last of the drinkers at the bar, long after I'd been abandoned by everybody that I was exhibiting with the next morning.

Me (pentagram) and Jack Fallows in New Dock Hall

2013 was the first year that the Thought Bubble convention itself had been split across three halls, after tables sold out in record time for the usual two halls. I was exhibiting with Jack Fallows in New Dock Hall, alongside Owen Michael Johnson's Raygun Roads table. Raygun Roads was a prime contender for best buzz of the con, comprising a psychedelic flip-book adventure written by Johnson and illustrated by tattoo artist Indio! in a unique style that evoked the best of Jack Kirby and Shaky Kane, but with a mischievousness and exuberance that is all his own. Jam packed with themes of individualism versus society and the oppressive forces of normality, this was a manic, day-glo adventure that everybody at the con seemed to want to get hold of. I also heard of a couple of prominent UK comic stores that wouldn't touch Raygun Roads with a bargepole last month when they hadn't heard of Johnson or Indio!, that are now clamouring to stock copies because of the rave reviews that it has been getting.

Louise Richardson and Max Deacon sell Raygun Roads

Directly across from me were Disconnected Press, established by the brilliantly talented Lizzie and Conor Boyle to bring together emerging writers and artists and offer a professional platform for them to show off their work. I contributed a Satanic strip called All Roads Lead To Hell, with artist Martin Simmonds, to their Disconnected volume 2 last year, and have a lot to thank them for, as we've been working together ever since. Disconnected volume 3, however, might be even better, and of course writer Owen Johnson and artist Verity Glass contributed one of the standout tales. The best strip in Disconnected 3 is written by the up-and-coming Max Deacon and illustrated by Aaron Moran. Their strip, The Serpent's Egg, reads like a Cumbrian Dario Argento film, combining themes of feminism and motherhood with surreal horror and Satanism. Brilliant.

Disconnected Press

To my left were Lydia Wysocki and Paul Thompson, two of the leading creators of Asteroid Belter: The Newcastle Science Comic, a newspaper-sized free all-ages anthology that brought together scientists and comic creators in a fantastically accessible combination of sci-art. Every family that passed their table was thrilled to be given such an accomplished free comic, and it was great to see how interested people were in learning about the creative process.

Lydia Wysocki (with the rare and beautiful BLACKOUT anthology in the foreground) –

Also on our row was Newcastle comic creator Terry Wiley, a favourite of Bleeding Cool and creator of the real mainstream British comic, VerityFair. For anybody that hasn't read it, VerityFair reads like a very British, over-the-hill Love and Rockets, like a soap opera about an actress that never really achieved anything with her life, like a warm-hearted exploration of a cast of characters you might meet in real life. It's absolutely the kind of comic that you could give to somebody that had never read a comic before. Terry Wiley has often been overlooked as one of the British greats in the past, but more recently he's been enjoying a lot of success on the literary graphic novel app, SEQUENTIAL, for iPad, so it could be that he's enjoying a new readership of fans.

Andrew Waugh was also on our row, fresh from his acclaimed contribution to one of the most recent Nobrow anthologies. Waugh was one of the main contributors to our first obscene satire comics, BLACKOUT, last year, but we got sick of everybody raving about how wonderful he was and kicked him out for the sequel. I thought that would teach him, but instead he went off and co-founded the BOO! children's horror anthology with creators Jamie Smart, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Paul Harrison-Davies, Jonathan Edwards, James Howard and Gary Northfield. The BOO! comic launched at Thought Bubble this year, which is kind of heart-breaking, because I forgot to pick up a copy and have since read everybody that I know raving online about how wonderful it is.

Not far from us the deranged Steve Tillotson, who was a runner-up for the Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica graphic short story in 2012, shared a table with Gareth Brookes, who won Myriad Edition's first First Graphic Novel competition with his troubling tale of humid childhood desire, The Black Project. Between Tillotson's blisteringly funny and offensive Banal Pig comics and Brooke's cross-stitched sex dolls, the duo lowered the tone of the whole aisle, which made me very happy. They're two of the UK's most talented comic creators and deserve every bit of success that they have coming to them. Also Brookes told me that years ago he bought one of my terrible self-published strips, What's Inside A Girl?, back from a time when I was still trying to draw. I didn't think that ANYBODY in the country would remember that one!

Steve Tillotson

Speaking of Myriad Editions, publisher Corinne Pearlman was stalking the halls, telling creators about the launch of their 2014 First Graphic Novel Competition, which has a deadline of 3 March 2014. Any British comic creators that have not yet had a graphic novel published should look into this immediately. My Gothic-horror series, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, illustrated by Karen Yumi Lusted, was born from our entry to the first competition, and we might not be releasing an ongoing series today if Myriad hadn't given us the impetus to get started.

By Saturday night it was time for the second of the annual British Comic Awards, organised in large part by Blood Blokes creator and Great Beast co-founder, Adam Cadwell. This year Cadwell wisely engaged Geek Syndicate's David Monteith as the main host of the event, meaning that the awards were read out with warmth and enthusiasm. The list of committee members and judges this year read like a who's who of British comic creators and enthusiasts, boasting a diversity that put to rest any accusations of nepotism or sexism from last year's awards. The real highlight of the British Comic Awards is the opportunity to watch a group of introspective, awkward comic creators stumbling onto the stage to accept applause from their peers. Robert M Ball's acceptance speech for the award he won for Winter's Knight: Day One was particularly touching. Nowhere else in the world will you find such a group of hard working, tireless artists, that put more effort into their work and expect less in return. Glynn Dillon's win for The Nao of Brown was also well deserved, being possibly the greatest British graphic novel of all time, never mind last year, and it felt great to be part of a community where such timeless work is being created. As a sidenote, when Will Morris's The Silver Darlings was first released, Blank Slate publicist Martin Steenton warned me that it was an incredibly accomplished work – Morris' win at the British Comic Awards certainly confirmed that.

The party at the Corn Exchange feels like a bit of a blur now, which probably shouldn't come as a surprise from the creator of a comic like BLACKOUT. Everything started off innocently enough, speaking to UK comics journalist Matt Badham and persuading him to buy me a drink. There was definitely a period where I queued for a looong time with John Reppion, who felt that if we were at a London convention then our northern accents would have got us served faster. I accosted the always-amiable Kieron Gillen at one point. A couple of years ago he wore an all-white suite to a convention, which didn't sit well with me, and for some reason I take it upon myself to harangue him about it every time I've had a drink. He took it in his stride though, and from what little I can remember it sounded like he has big plans for the future. The night gathered momentum, until the point that I somehow persuaded my tablemate and BLACKOUT co-creator, Jack Fallows, to hand me his debit card and pin number for the bar. It turned out that the bar didn't take cards, so I went off into the Leeds night to find a cash point. When I returned it seemed that half of the nightclub had been looking for me, convinced that I would max out his card buying drinks for everybody around me. Which had certainly crossed my mind. The night ended with Jack and I trying to navigate our way back to the hotel, through a massive open car park, only to get to the far end and find that all of the gates were locked. Climbing a relatively modest 6ft wall, the drop on the other side was far, far deeper. No problem for Jack, a giant of a man, who climbed down with ease, but I had to take a leap of faith onto his shoulders and hope for the best. And that was just the Saturday.

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