Nelson launches

If you've been keeping an eye on the UK comics scene this year, you might be aware of this daring project. I'll let the publisher, Blank Slate, explain it in the words of their official press release:

Nelson is a 250-page collaboration between 54 of the UK’s most exciting comic creators. It is an unprecedented experiment to create one complete story – a collective graphic novel.

London, 1968. A daughter is born to Jim and Rita Baker. Her name is Nel. This is her story, told in yearly snapshots. Each chapter records the events of a single day, weaving one continuous ribbon of pictures and text that takes us on a 43- year journey from Nel Baker’s birth to 2011.

Based on an original idea by Rob Davis and co-edited by Davis and Woodrow Phoenix, Nelson celebrates the incredible diversity of talent in British comics today. Creators known for their editorial and national newspaper strips unite with those from humour comics such as the Beano, The Dandy, and MAD Magazine joining a wealth of talent from children’s books, indie publishing and webcomics, with the science fiction and superhero worlds of 2000AD, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse.

Part exquisite corpse and part relay race, Nelson spans decades of British history and a myriad of stylistic approaches in telling the story of one woman’s life by 54 creators, in 54 episodes, detailing 54 days. The result is a surprising and compellingly readable book that is sad, funny, moving, poignant, ridiculous, heartfelt, and real. This is a story like none you have seen before.

I was delighted to be asked if I wanted to be on board earlier this year and now, several months after completing my five pages, the whole thing is about to hit the bookshelves. The standard of art and writing in this book is frankly off the scale, which made contributing to it quite an intimidating experience in the end - but, I'm honoured to be sharing page space with some of my very favourite UK comics creators. Here's a teeny tiny peek-ette of my bit, which comes near the end of the book and wraps up the threads of a few established characters' lives...



There's more about Nelson on the ever-reliable Forbidden Planet blog here. I won't be attending the grand launch at the Thought Bubble festival, but I'll hopefully be at the Gosh! comics signing event on Friday November 25th. Come along, buy the book - it's going to be amazing.

Bro Vs Bro

Just in case you need something more light-hearted to take your collective minds off all the Crazy that's happening at the moment, how about picking up TOXIC issue 189 and checking out my new comic strip, Bro Vs Bro? It features twin brothers with a larger-than-average case of sibling rivaly. Hmm, thinking about it, a scenario about belligerent youths isn't much of a departure from BBC News 24 at all, is it? Ahem, let's move on...

There are lots of other strips for you to enjoy in TOXIC, including classic reprints of Lew Stringer's Team Toxic, and two new ones: "Luke's Spooks" and "Captain Gross". Plus there's, y'know, other stuff in there too, but COMICS - that's the important bit.

Bristol Comics Expo

I'll be roaming around at the Bristol Comics Expo on May 14th and 15th, carrying limited numbers of my Gilbert & Sullivan and Tales from the Crust comics in case anyone fancies one. I'll also draw you a picture if you ask me nicely (or ask me extremely rudely but also offer me a cup of tea or alcoholic beverage). See you there maybe?

Your local library needs YOU

Assuming "you" are a comic fan, of course (not an unreasonable assumption for this blog's readership, I think). I was recently called upon by a local librarian to give a talk to many other librarians on the merits of reading graphic novels, which I then wrote an article about. Richard Bruton from the Forbidden Planet International blog added pictures and some intro and outro text and turned it into this blog entry, which you might like to read. What's your local library's stock of graphic novels like? Feel like volunteering some advice to improve it?

Website - now with fewer green and pink bits

Dear Lord I went and did it - I got my website up and running. Thanks, Dreamweaver! Thanks, interwebs! Thanks for nothing, old, dead site! So you can follow the link on the right and look at it, if you like. Almost all of the art in the Gallery is stuff that's not been online before, so that's got to be worth five minutes.

New year (ish), new blog, new socks

April is still classed as New Year, yeah? Anyway, hello again to anyone who thought I'd dropped out of the blogosphere completely and wandered off - it was a fair assumption, because I pretty much had. Even worse, since my webhost had a massive server brain-belch last year and wiped all trace of my website off the face of the earth, I have been both siteless and unblogged for the last 12 months or so. Not good. But not anymore! I'm halfway through building a new site and, having decided I don't want to have to frequently update the frontpage as I did with the old one, I'm going to use this here blog as my news feed for site updates, information and general chitchat. That means, yes, I *am* going to keep it reasonably up to date. Honest. I've imported most of the old posts from Panel Beat (my old blog), and will be shutting it down in the near future. So if you're one of the four or so people who had a link to it, change it to victorianclam.blogspot.com. Ta.

I hope - really hope - that the next post will be telling you that www.laurahowell.co.uk is back up and running, but I'd hate to make rash promises. Watch this space...