Blank Slate Blog

Trains are...Mint in Comics Journal 294

2008-11-19T16:07:00.002Z

I suppose there is nothing unusual about getting one of your books reviewed, probably even less if that review is in a magazine about comics. All that aside Bill Randall reviewed Trains in the current Comics Journal and all I can say is - total thrill. It's a great review and it's a little ambition fulfilled for someone who has every issue of the Journal going back to 37 in boxes or still on my shelves at home. I hope it makes more people buy Oliver's book and you should all buy TCJ. Ok it can be pissy and a little nasty at times (although I kinda think that has been fading away of late), but no-one does better interviews, witness an excellent one by Matthias Wivel with Jason in the latest issue, and simply no magazine has supported and boostered comics for so long and as extensively as the Journal.

Spleenal - The Cover

2008-11-13T07:41:00.004Z

Nigel's book is all here in the office now - we may go to the printers a little earlier than we first thought. This isn't the final cover but it's close. Can't wait, can you?? Text needs lining up and fiddling etc but it gives you an idea of what to look out for early next year. Price here is provisional - with the Euro appreciating against the £ it may change a little - and this is for the hardcover version of which we will only print 300 and probably sell them directly through this site - at least at first. Paperback will be under a tenner.

Mawil's Counter Display

2008-10-27T05:07:00.003Z

The 2nd Mawil book goes off to the printer this week, his funny stories of a chaos making electrician bunny. It's quite a small book - in terms of physical size rather than page count and it could very easily get lost on most shelves. It's also the kind of book we think people will pick up, after flipping through a few cartoons, as a great little read or a present for friends. So Mawil was very keen to do a point of sale counter display to hold the book - here it is.

It holds 10 copies so you aren't going to see this everywhere but we hope it will make it to counter points in many of the better comic shops around the world. We love the detail on the bottom of the box - something of course no-one will see - a little extra for the store owner and all you readers. That Mawil, sure has an eye for detail.

As the world looks into the Abyss....

2008-10-01T22:51:00.005+01:00

All around seems doom and gloom. We are about to be plunged back to the Stone Age as a result of the unrestricted greed and downright fraud of the world's bankers - a great many of them at least. For once I can stand as a contrarian however and say that whilst the world burnt - it's been a great 3 weeks for Blank Slate.

Firstly the books began to sell, maybe all the good reviews they received finally started to generate customer requests. The order that went through Diamond for the US comics trade was quite a bit larger than I had imagined it would be, with Mawil's We can Still be Friends book selling a third more than Trains are...Mint. Pretty much the exact opposite of how the books have sold in the UK. I guess Trains has a hefty US price tag - due partly to at the time it was priced the £ was sitting at 2.05 - so that probably held it back a bit - and Oli is a complete unknown to most folk and the book is pretty 'british' to boot. Still I was really quite pleased at the numbers for both books.

Then Oli got nominated for an Ignatz award. That was a complete surprise to both of us and actually one of my best moments in comics even after some 22 years in the biz. He was nominated in the 'Promising new talent' category. I sent the books for consideration so long ago that I had pretty much forgotten about it when the nominees appeared on the comics blogs - what a delight. Now I know awards in comics can be ten a penny with nearly every convention of any size seeming to think they can produce one which carries some kudos. Mostly outside of the big SDCC award and Angouleme's I pretty much tend to ignore them. Things like the Eagles in the UK are so 'rigged' that they become pretty meaningless as a bellweather for what might or might not be good. The Ignatz seems like a different beast though - it's something you would want to win. If you look through the nominee list it's littered with many of comics most inventive and left field talents. Given that we think of ourselves as being something that would aspire to be a UK Fanta, Top Shelf or D&Q (long, long way away of course) it's a great list to be part of. The thing that tops it off is that it is a jury nominated prize - for me the only type of award that really has a chance of sidestepping the problems with mass votes - and what a jury it was this year. Gabrielle Bell, Farel Dalrymple, Eleanor Davis, John Hankiewicz and Andy Hartzell. A pretty stellar bunch of talent - so to be noticed by them was a terrific feeling. My heartfelt thanks goes to you all. We won't win of course - neither Oli or I can be there - and it's an award that is voted for by the attendees so those working the floor will, and probably should win. Still, just to be noticed and all.....

Then I got to feel like I was a 'real' publisher when a box of recent Top Shelf books arrived through the mail from the lovely Brett Warnock. We sent him copies of the books to have a look at partly as I knew he was a big Mawil fan. That he sent us some of his books and generously gave a load of his time to Isobel our editor at SDCC - giving pointers and tips on how we might sell more books - goes to prove that comics is still one of the friendliest of businesses. A little thrill - I'll try to review the books soon.

Finally today Waterstones - the UK's largest book shop chain - put in an order for Trains are... Mint (we are working on them taking the Mawil also). Not quite sure why, it came a little out of the blue but now Oli's book will be in bookshops up and down the land. Of course they may all come back unsold but for the moment it feels like a little but significant triumph.

A big thank you to anyone, anywhere, who asked a book or comics store to order in our books. In the end, word of mouth for a small outfit like us, who can't throw money at marketing but hope to produce good work, means that we could have a future which will see some great new cartoonists find an audience.

Spleenal

2008-08-21T17:27:00.010+01:00

So, here's the thing, what do you do when someone sends you a comic which is both beautifully drawn and very funny but at the same time about as lacking in political correctness as you can get. That's Spleenal, Nigel Auchterlounie's fantastic, totally misanthropic comics creation. At first I wondered about it, too many years of reading the Guardian obviously oversensitising me to some of Spleenal's more endearing moments - like the constant use of bitch when referring to womenfolk, general obsession with sex or rampant obnoxiousness. More I thought about it though I realised how much I enjoyed the cartooning and manic energy of it all. Then Isobel, our translator and editor, read it and laughed her socks off. Right, deal done then, we'll publish that. So in February the first Spleenal book will roll into stores - just in time to be a Valentine's Day present like no other. It's going to be quite a big book - I'd guess around 140 pages - and will feature two previous stories that Nigel has shown in episodic form on his blog plus a 40 to 50 page, all new, story which sub divides into Young Spleenal, Teenage Spleenal and Student Spleenal and acts as a sort of commentary and link for the other stories. In which you see baby Spleenal, very Old Spleenal and more. A whole lot of Spleenal. It's going to be colour and I'm currently trying to convince Nigel to expand this cover rough so it will turn into an all bells and whistles wraparound.

Nigel has been around the UK comics scene for a good few years now and I reckon that Spleenal sees him finding his true voice. He already has an established fan base for his work via his blog and we hope this first book will find many more readers and this will be just the first of many Spleenal books to come. Every company needs a cartoonist who pushes the boundaries a bit, a Johnny Ryan or an Ivan Brunetti for instance. We think Nigel is that man for BSB. Look for more info on Spleenal nearer to release or via Nigel's blog.

Translating Slaapkoppen

2008-08-01T16:18:00.003+01:00

Randall C's mesmerising Slaapkoppen - which will be called Sleepyheads - is making it's way through the translation stage. I thought you might like to see the low-tech and probably completely wrong way I go about this. First we have the translation, which has been done by Wim Lockfeer of Ephemerist fame. Wim luckily also writes for the Forbidden Planet blog regularly - so we know him and he knows us - which is handy as it allows an interaction between us that I don't think we would necessarily get with an unknown translator. He works on translations for a living so he was always the man for the job.

Once I have Wim's words I need to be able to read them with a visual context as I find it almost impossible to get a true feel for how the words and pictures work together unless they are being read as a real comic. Given that we aren't doing the actual lettering on the book - because author Randall C. is doing it himself - we don't have digital files where we can make continual running changes, I've had to make my own 'comic' version in true Blue Peter fashion. It entails many bottles of Tipex and a copy of the original language book. I've gone through the book removing all the non english text and handwriting the translated text in its place. Now I've got something close to what the finished book would be like if there were no more changes to the text, which I then scan to see if some of the wording should perhaps have a different way of saying things, perhaps a more casual english. Once I've stopped fiddling with it with Wim then Randall will have the final say on how the words are presented. It's all actually quite fun, except when you get up still holding a Tipex bottle you've forgotten to put the lid back on and splash it all over yourself, and having the book reveal itself as you write the words into blank bubbles is a fascinating thing. No doubt at some point someone will give me a clip round the ear and show me the proper way to do something like this but, for now, back to the whiteout.

By the way, the book is wonderful, it has a lovely, lazy, dreamlike feel which draws you into the majesty of the art. I'm sure a good number of english speakers are going to adore this when we publish it, well, I hope so.

Sparky O'Hare - Teaser

2008-07-25T16:44:00.002+01:00

The translation of the next Mawil book is well underway and we are putting the finish to getting 30 or so of the strips ready to run, three a week, on the Forbidden Planet blog probably starting in 3 weeks time. The more I've read the book, now in English rather than my dodgy German, the more I have been enjoying it. It just seems so full of a kind of non-cynical, enthusiasm that you would have to be a scrooge not to enjoy. Of course to top it off Mawil is a brilliant natural cartoonist and the energy of his line really adds to the gags. I really hope that people will adore this strip and tell all their pals when it goes online, it deserves to introduce him to a wide and mixed market. Just as a little teaser here is the back cover, which acts as an introduction to Sparky and his lineage - when your new electrician comes with ancestry like that - you know it is going to be a bumpy ride. Enjoy, more strips on the FPI blog VERY soon. Then go out and buy the book to see over 50 more strips when it's out in September - you won't regret it.

Here's what's coming

2008-07-08T22:16:00.005+01:00

We have 4 new books lined up and so far they are going to stick to our, hoped for, model of a mixture of new, young, UK talent and translated cartoonists.

First up we will have Oliver's second Trains are...Mint book called 'Proper go well high', yeah I know, what the hell does that mean? Oli assures me it is some Manchester speak so all you coolies out there will know and the rest of us will have to wait to find out. He's approaching the home stretch on it, just before he retreats to some self-enlightenment trip to India (could there be a Trains book in there?). We talked paper today, the paper looks like it will be a little less white than in the first book - but we are going to go with the 'feel' test to decide which is best, seemed as good a way as any. If it's in the can before Oli's sojurn we should have it in print sometime in October we hope. It will be the first Trains book to have all new narrative content in it that hasn't appeared in comic form. Put it on your Christmas gift list now. Here's a sneak peek at the probably massively significant page 100.

We've pretty much completed the translation of our second Mawil book. In Germany it was called 'Meister Lampe' but here it will be called ' Sparky O'Hare - Master Electrician', as the German title is a pun on Bunnies and lights that just has no equivelant in English. We're hoping to start lettering next week and in about 6 to 8 weeks time a number of the translated strips will be appearing on the Forbidden Planet International blog and website. There are about 80 cartoons in total and essentially they are mostly one page gag cartoons about an electrician Bunny and the chaos that swirls around his every move. We hope they will build an online following on the FPI sites as we think they are charming, super-cute and very funny. Watch out for them. It's a little book in terms of its physical size so to try and keep a feeling of high production values that we are very much trying for with our books, we are probably going to pack it with a die-cut newly designed bookmark by Mawil - we hope people will think it's worth the extra effort. We are also working on the idea of packing it in a point of sale (POS) counter display box which Mawil is again going to design. Not every shop will want 10 copies of course, but for those who do we think the counter display might really help it to sell. We think if you see it, pick it up and read a few cartoons you are going to just say "damn the recession" buy one and spend the rest of the day smiling. Look for it to be released around the same time as 'Proper'.

We're going to be doing the award winning book 'Slaapkoppen' by Belgian artist Randall C. The book title means 'Sleepy Heads' and it's a multilayered exploration of dreams and reality. It's an amazingly beautifully drawn book and has won two major awards on the continent in the last 12 months. Most recently it won the best debut comic award at the highly prestigious Stripdagen Haarlem comix festival. Here's a short description from Randall's website "Suppose you are dreaming that you are falling asleep. And then you dream. That you are falling asleep and then yet again you are dreaming. This ad infinitum fantasy is the basis of ‘Slaapkoppen’, Randall Casaer’s debut comix. ‘Slaapkoppen’ is a highly original and funny juggling comix game of clouds and words, dream and reality, poetry and humour, philosophy and absurdity. With the compliments of Carlos Castaneda, Patricia Garfield and Lewis Carroll, Randall C. takes his readers on a dazzling adventure in a dreamed landscape." Check out Randall's website and you can see a good number of the original pages, of course still in their native Flemish. We've only just finalised the deal on this one, and we are very excitied to be doing it. Randall will be entirely re-lettering the book for its English debut so we may not get this one out this year. Keep your fingers crossed though, we think it will find a lot of eager readers, here's a look at the final page - beautiful is it not?

The fourth book is just a promise really - I don't yet have a date for it and we are allowing it to develop at its own pace. It will be by Stuart Kolakovic who some of you will already know. Paul Gravett has said Stuart is the future of british comics and I think once you see his work you will be astonished. Stuart is not only a remarkably talented artist but he's also a scholar of comics and after spending a day with him last week talking comics and looking through his work I think people are going to be totally blown away when they see his first books. The book will be based on eastern european folk tales and fairy stories and I think the outline for the book is a story which will touch people deeply. If you have a romantic soul this is going to be a book for you. Here's a look at a much earlier piece of Stu's - from his mini comic 'The Gosling'.

We are genuinely thrilled to have a book coming from Stu, along with Oliver's 'Trains' we think we've made a great start in finding some brilliant and unique british talent. Hopefully it will just be the start of many more uncoverings.

The beauty of Papercraft

2008-06-30T21:40:00.004+01:00

Now this isn't really comics, some would say it isn't even really illustration, more like a mixture of both and toy making thrown in, but it is something that always fascinated me. When I was growing up I loved to get creatures or character masks from the back of cereal packets - to the extent that we'd stomach some things we didn't really care for - give up the Ricicles for Rice Crispies just to get the Rhino to make from the back. Ah, the sacrifices of childhood. So, I'm mentioning this as we are thinking about doing a point of sale display bin for the next Mawil book we will be doing - which is a translation of 'Meister Lampe' which will be called 'Sparky O'Hare Master Electrician' in the UK(more on this soon). It's a little book and we thought it might be cool to have a box that could sit on the counter (well actually Mawil's encouraging us) so we need to imagine and make a box which will look attractive and interesting - it's all Papercraft of course, probably today's most usual use of the art of paper and card folding.

But it wasn't always so. In my little bit of research on the web I came upon this article on Papercraft on the great Irish illustration site Scamp. It's got a bundle of links to some great examples of modern and much older Papercraft - it makes me want to print them get them stuck to card and go ahead and build them. Some of these are brilliant - the Bert Simmons ones a little mind boggling in their complexity - make them for yourself or have some fantastic fun with your kids (oh and it's cheap so you will have money left over for the brilliant 'Sparky O'Hare' when it hits the shops).

4 from the Weekend

2008-06-17T14:24:00.014+01:00

You work around comics all day, you speak to people about comics all day but when exactly do you sit down and read them - all too rarely. Still I do try to relax with a few over the weekend so I'll try and do some short reviews weekly of the stuff I read, what I thought of it which might give you some idea of the stuff we like and don't like so much at Blank Slate. Here's the 4 books I read this weekend.

The Programme - Pete Milligan/C.P. Smith - DC/Wildstorm

I kinda quite liked this. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Pete Milligan, after producing some of the ground breaking comics of the 80's and 90's he still seems to be a font of decent ideas and continues to show a deft craft as a comics scriptwriter, perhaps only being slightly overshadowed by Grant Morrison's rising star stopped him being seen as one of comics most significant writers (or maybe he is). Or perhaps it was his at times wilfully non commercial, experimental material - anyone remember Paradox or Rogan Josh? Without revealing too much of the plot, this is basically a Bourne movie but with super Bourne's on each side, as a Soviet sleeper cell of super-beings emerge from mothballing at the hands of a soviet scientist for whom the war with the west can never end. In turn the US brings their super-beings back into service. Lots of super-antics ensue, plus some heavy politics and psychology for good measure. C.P. Smith's art is so clearly photo-referenced that it's a little hard to critique in any way. Not my bag, but it does the job with a certain elegance. Just a mention for Jonny Rench's colouring job: I normally find the muted Vertigo type palette used on many DC books pretty much a soul destroying experience to work through, but here Rench works pretty much within that range, given that the art would probably look better uncoloured in the first place, and produces something which almost tends towards psychedelic in the way he uses it - I liked it quite a bit. I'll be buying the next volume of this.

The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 - Thomas Ott - Fantagraphics

If you have followed Thomas Ott through previous books there won't be anything here that really surprises - apart from the fact that this is one long story rather than a number of short ones as in most/all? his previous books. It's always a little difficult to judge the art as by how I understand the craft of 'scratchboard' art - lines scratched through an ink layer to reveal the white clay lines beneath (if you want to be overpowered by the work that must go into Ott's work take a look at this brief explanation of the technique) - you will just be amazed by the sheer technical profficency of the whole thing. Ott's art has always, for me, had a certain understated beauty and here I think he has reached a peak, each panel looking like a photograph manipulated through a photoshop filter, composed as something which should and does exist on its own terms as a minature work of art. That they then also combine to tell a story just adds to your admiration for the artist. The story itself is reasonably simplistic - if neatly composed - following the concept of something like Luke Reinhardt's 'The Dice Man' - the numbers leading the protaganist to decisions already, in effect, made for him by fate, just as the throw of the dice decides decisions in Reinhardt's book. It has a lovely circular motif which means somewhere the events of this book are always being made - maybe one day starring you. The book itself has the usual understated stylings of an Edition Moderne Ott book (EM are Ott's Swiss publisher and the books originator), classic black and white interiors and covers, heavy hardback cover stock and heavy internal page paperweight with an unusual semi-gloss finsh. All in all a beautiful book. If you like Ott already you will enjoy this latest wordless outing if you don't, or don't know his work, take a look - the longer storylength might just convince you even if the mastery of the art doesn't.

Burnout - Rebecca Donner/Inaki Miranada - DC Minx

Ok, straight off i'm obviously not the target market for a line of books aimed primarily at teenage girls but from the start I've found the Minx line pretty enjoyable, this one was no exception. Rebecca Donner's script has all the elements for a decent story put together by a kind of shorthand, teenage girl lead character, troubled home live, out-there best friend, eco conservation worries and a hot lead boy/boyfriend. Of course most of the characters are ciphers - perhaps most noticeably the young male lead is painted in overly broad strokes - but the story holds together pretty well, and a number of complex issues like conservation over commerce are dealt with in an understandable and even-handed manner. The art is functional rather than inspired, but if you are making the jump to this from Manga there is nothing to scare you here. The book isn't an object in and off itself, so the print and finish aren't a big deal but I did feel sometimes that some folios of the book saw the printers setting the black levels a little inconsistently, sometimes they were vibrant at others overly muted - maybe it was an art decision rather than a slightly sloppy print job. The ending is a bit pat, but overall given the 'packaged' format the Minx books have to comply to this, as for most of the line so far, is better than you might expect.

Sky Doll - Barbara Canepa/Alessandro Babucci - Marvel

This is the first comic released as part of a new collaboration between Marvel and french publisher Soleil to try and bring some of their more popular works to english readers in translated form. The story concerns a 'doll' (think something like Pris from Bladerunner crossed with Leeloo from Fifth Element and you wont go far wrong) who runs away from her life of enforced slavery/drudgery. Somehow she seems linked to a previous religious war where one of two godesses was exiled and banned, could she be a reincarnation of that more benign lost spirit? I wish I could say I cared enough to keep reading and find out but for the most part I just didn't. The art has an amazing skill to it and many panels are packed with background detail - mostly lost here in what I presume is a size around 25 - 40% smaller than it originally would have appeard in France - but at times I found the storytelling more than a little confusing. The word baloons I presume could not be resized and often the 'new' English words simply don't fill them, leaving huge areas of dead space in some panels. The colour scheme again may suffer from the reduced size, its obvious subtelty at times more confusing than enlightening, but I found it hard to like much. The story seems crammed with elements from Silverberg SF novels and parts Bladerunner, Fifth Element and many other SF movies, it seems laboured at best - this is 44 pages long and Soleil apparantly pride themselves on the 'depth' in their storytelling - I was bored about 15 pages in and 44 pages seemed like forever by the end. The worst part of the whole thing though is the inside front cover where we are given a 'Welcome to the world of Soleil'. I know if you are doing the marketing on a project like this you need to talk the reasons for the project up, but the mutual backslapping here had me cringing. Seemingly Sky Doll is award winning - despite it's obvious craft in the artwork - I found it a soulless and close to totally uninteresting read. Maybe the other Soleil titles to come will be better - not holding my breath though.

I Wish I'd published this

2008-06-13T15:56:00.008+01:00

It's perhaps less and less likely to stumble on some great, undiscovered comics artist of the past than it was a few years ago - Dan Nadel has unearthed most of them :-). But Jack Daniel was new to me. I spent some of last weekend wandering around a massive boot sale with my girlfriend and her parents who were visiting from Germany and were keen to fill their car for the trip home with loads of old British tat. Well I suppose at least to them it was different tat. Surprisingly I actually found something I wanted to buy - 4 volumes of Hawk Books reprints of excerpts of what they call 'Eagle Classics' which I imagine they released off the back of their success with Dan Dare books in the late 80's. For the most part they are what you expect from Eagle, highly detailed art in the style of Bellamy or Lawrence or humour work, but one of the books 'Riders of the Range' includes artist Jack Daniel's (yeah I know - believe me it doesn't help when looking for info via Google) take on the cowboy strip, and it's something of a revelation.

Unfortunately the reproduction in the book is pretty poor, a lot of the fine line is gone, and the colour even if it was a singular interpretation (and it looks very much like it was) is badly skew-whiff, so bad in fact that some of the best pages aren't even worth scanning. What comes through however is how 'modern' the line is for someone working in one of the more traditional British comics. I think you can see in the panels scanned here the almost impressionistic style of the soldiers on the fort ramparts, the pared down, angular cut of the faces, the use of heavy cropping in the panel where the indians are leaving. Look at it enough and you would think that Daniel spent some time looking at Harvey Kurtzman or early Bernie Krigstein. I'm not sure a quality reprinting of Daniel's work would find a market - I personally doubt it - but he does seem, even from this small glimpse, an artist very much worth reclaiming as a UK great. I'm sure Steve Holland knows much more about him and what else he worked on, as this book only mentions 3 'Riders' stories and a 'Kit Conquest' newspaper strip. Look for more 'I wish I published' as I try to make sure I update this blog regularly. If you have one send me your info and perhaps I'll feature it.

THE NEXT BOOKS

2008-06-12T12:34:00.004+01:00

So we got the first two books out and we got them into some stores and more will follow as we get on top of distribution. So it's time to agree with some artists to release a few more. This is the hard part - we always knew what our first two books would be - we knew they would be all risk and that we were simply happy to be starting and publishing them. Now, however, I have to think about doing more, taking more financial risk, looking for work I really want to publish, making deals. I suppose I could sit back 6 months and see how the books sell, see if it's something that has a long term future but i've decided to go the opposite route and just get more stuff out there.

I think that there is no way a company can even be really seen to exist until they have 4, 5, 10,even 15 books out there - you just simply aren't big enough for most distributors to care about, and by big I don't mean the number of sales you are generating, more the illusion of size having a number of books in print creates. I've always felt that once you have a list you actually have something to sell people on trying to sell. You have taken a level of risk that at least shows that you are serious about trying to make a company that might work. Am I deluded about this? Many seem to be able to plough a separate furrow releasing small numbers of books over time and growing slowly and organically - Fanfare in the UK might be a very good example of that, a sedate schedule of releases of material which is universally of a high quality of art or craftmanship.

So I won't wait for sales figures, or the lack thereof and proceed to stick a little more of my money where my mouth is. We have agreed with Oliver to do the next volume of Trains are...Mint, which will be called 'Proper Go Well High'. Oli has big plans for the series and he intends to expand his storytelling horizons a bit with this new book. It will in effect be what would have been issues 5-8 of Trains are...Mint but now as a book. I'm expecting we will do it in a nice hardcover as we did the first. The artwork for the teaser Oli has on the preview site shows his artwork continuing to improve - I think it looks like it will be excellent again. I've also just had the Manchester Evening News on wanting to do a piece on Oliver for the paper - I just sent them a review copy. If it comes of that will be great for the book I'm sure and I'll repost it here. I'll try and let you know a bit more about what we have planned with other authors in the next couple of weeks or so.