This probably explains why the only photos I took were this:

And this:

It’s a peculiar con for me, where I don’t have anything to sell, or even in the works mini-comic wise, but where everybody I know there does. As such, it becomes more of a social event then anything else – the main hall is small, and after one circuit I was pretty much ready to go to the bar.

And sadly the bar was a bit un-bar-like, with beer in cans and bottles, and pop in big Tesco’s bottles, so flat and warm before it had made it into your glass.

All that said, I had a lot of fun, and thanks to the organisapeeps (of whom I only actually know Jay and Selina) for doing such good work with the raw materials available to them – after all, one of the main strengths of mini-comics in the first place.

Things of note, and key moments:

There are no attractive women in Eastleigh on a Saturday morning.

Oxford has shitty areas too! And they’re actually a little more depressing than their equivalent here in Southampton!

David Baillie is still about the nicest man I have ever met, and Dan Lester isn’t as unnerving as my initial exposure to him might have suggested he would be. Talked sick and recent dreams with the former – he now knows more about my subconscious mind than any one man should.

I have now used a self-service till. It was weird, and easy. How do they stop people just stealing loads of stuff, though?

It’s always good to see Peet Clack and Paul Rainey.

I apparently know a lot more about apes in comics than I thought. Which is to say, I guessed right enough in the Apes In Comics quiz to win.

I haven’t won anything in years, so this was a peculiar experience, made all the odder for my by this point delirious tiredness. I found myself wondering aloud, alongside the presentation that made up part of the quiz, whether comics had always been this retarded, and I just hadn’t realised it before.

Mr Cheverton and I psychologically tortured a heavily pregnant woman – It was lovely meeting you, Elaine and Steve!

I was psychologically tortured by a heavily pregnant woman – although she did lead me to the perhaps obvious conclusion that the male orgasm is more important to the future of the human race then the female one, and for that I am thankful to her.

Dave! Dave! Dave! Dave! No … He can’t hear me… DAVE!

(Though of course, I later discovered his name was Dan)

Quizmaster and ape fanatic Tony Hitchman, along with the other two chaps that I shared a conversation with in the bar while my fellows were in the auction room, are damn nice people. That I’ve forgotten their names is solely down to a lack of memory aids here with me – the bananas were enough to remind me of Tony.

I failed once again to talk to Mr Matt Brooker, a wonderful comics professional who I always managed to have a chat with in years gone by, but who for some reason I’ve been nervous about approaching since returning to comic life this year. Maybe I’m shyer in my old age, or maybe I’m even more in awe of his work now then I was before.

Still, lovely to see his gorgeous work on the new Timulo strip.

Would have liked to catch the Deadline talk, but just felt like my attention-span wouldn’t be good enough.

Almost fell asleep in the bar area while the West boys and everybody else was in the State Of The Nation talk.

Ate KFC chicken for the first time in ages… it was disgustayummy!

Felt quite happy and comfortable to be in a place where most of the people I talked to had some idea of Elephant Words, or at least didn’t look at me blankly when the subject came up.

Had a brief chat with Daniel Merlin Goodbrey again, but didn’t see him after reading the second Necessary Monsters book, so couldn’t tell him how much I was enjoying it.

Oh, and spoke briefly to Karrie Fransman, who has recently seen some success with her weekly comics in the G2 Guardian supplement. I met her for the first time at Bristol, the same year that I ended up crashing out of comic fandom. I vaguely remember the mini-comic thing being quite new for her at the time, and also her whole family being present for moral support, although I may be misremembering this. And I doubt she remembered me. But it was nice talking to her briefly.

Talked computer games with Oliver Lambden, and once again find myself wanting to pick up Portal on the recommendation of an enthusiastic fan. It’s cheap at the moment, so may well do that thing.

Plus, uh, as if there were any doubt that the surreality of the ape quiz was just in my head, did you know that Wonder Woman once trained an ape to win the World Series? Mr Hitchman followed this revelation with the comment “So if you’ve ever wondered what the Amazonians do on that island, it’s play sports.” To which my only response is, I never wondered – I just always assumed that they had loads of girl-on-girl sex to pass the time.

Also, the weirdest thing about this Jimmy Olsen comic isn’t actually the cover:

Just over a week ago, Elephant Words went through it’s biggest changes to date. As well as everything else, this means that it was my first week away from the site.

As it turns out, the new roster did the site proud, and some of the pieces even made it straight to the top of my all time favourite Elephants.

They were based on this image, posted by Andy Cheverton, taken by Princess Bala Vera:

Long-time supporter, first-time contributor Chris Beckett kicked off the week with a tasty bit of satirical spy adventure, called “Captain Scorpio“:

Peering through the tangle of branches beneath the covering of green, Jack Scorpio pushed his shoulder into the hedge and tried to shove his way through. He’d gotten most of his arm into the thicket when an electrical shock ran up his arm and shuddered through his body. The voltage seized his muscles, causing the V.I.R.T.U.E. agent to collapse in the dirt, wheezing as his heart pounded in his chest.

Tuesday saw a brand-new contributor, in the shape of Dan Lester, mini-comicker and film-maker extraordinaire, who delivered sharp and snippy film industry commentary in “The Pitch“:

He clears his throat and says, “well, it’s about a serial killer.”

“I start letting out a sigh of despair, but manage to disguise it with a cough. This will be the fifth pitch about a serial killer since lunch.”

After a brief scheduling hiccup, Monk Eastman, show-runner over at the awesome “50 Years From Now” flash-fiction site, brought the dark and crooked criminal noir with “Magnetic Letters“:

Even when they were kids, Artie played grown-up. Foraging for their food, protecting little Allie from mother’s drunken spells, teaching how to throw a punch, how to make a buck. He’d always been the leader, the warlord, the master crook. Now? Allie makes a low moaning sound, his eyes watering, sinuses burning. He tracks the fresh purple scars crossing his brother’s head, pretends they’re undiscovered country–like he doesn’t already know their contours so intimately.

And then it was Xander Bennett‘s turn to amuse and bewilder, as he has been doing since the beginning of the site, with the disturbing and brilliantly realised Kafkaesque “Incohere“:

I’m losing all my words. All my best words are falling away, drying up in my brain. There’s a thief in my homicile, stealing away my words. Comparing me over and over to forget. So I make up new words.

At which point, on Friday, David Baillie, a regular contributor since the beginning of the year, totally brought the “shock and awe” with a pictorial that you really need to see, called “Once Upon A Time“. Really, this is the sort of thing I was hoping people would get up to when I started the site, and alongside all of the awesome work that’s been done over the last year and a bit, it gives another little vindication to the work I put in.

And finally, on Saturday, old buddy and co-conspirator, on a welcome return to the site that he helped launch, Andy Cheverton, broke my heart and then made it all better again with the very human tale of heartbreak and loss, “Trixie’s Last Kiss“:

Sometimes I dream that I’m about to get that kiss, that Trixie runs and jumps up at me, confident that I’m there to catch her, and then I wake into a dark room where the only warmth in the bed is my own, there’s a cold breeze coming from somewhere else and the slight tingle of her hair brushing my cheek fades into nothing as it goes.

As if you didn’t already realise, I think you should go over there now, and read, read, read… it is one hundred and ten percent awesome, and that isn’t even possible…!

It was my turn to post today, and I did, but only just, ten or so minutes ago.

My piece is called “The Imaginary”:

CAPTION:
THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR
ALL AUDIENCES

[Music: "Hoppipolla" by Sigur Ros]

[Studio Titlecards]

[CUT TO: Tracking shot of leafy suburb, colour saturated to look like the 80s.]

[The same suburb - we're now closer in on one garden. Two young boys, around ten years old, are running around, chasing each other.]

NARRATOR (V.O.):
When Nathan Ray was a boy, he had the best friend in the world…

[Close on the boys. One is pale skinned, blond and scrawny, stripped to the waist, the other darker, with Oriental features - his outfit more traditional or rustic, a small knife attached by thong to his waist. One catches the other, and they wrestle.]

[Close up on the boys faces, as they laugh and jostle.]

[CUT TO: The boys, a couple years older, walking through the darkened woods, sunlight shafting through the trees.]

NATHAN (O.S.):
It isn’t fair. How come you don’t get to go to school? I’ll miss you.

PAZU (O.S.):
I’ll still be here.

[Long shot of the woods, the sky darkening.]

PAZU (V.O.):
I’ll always be here.

I should say now, on the record, that I think what I’ve achieved this time is a fine validation of the hard and excellent work that the decent movie or TV trailer makers do, because basically, I make it look as hard as anything.

There’s a thread of deliberate parody in the piece, along with what I think is a really nice story, but I think they may get overwhelmed with the clunkiness and uncertainty of my dabbling with the format, which I tend to believe never gets scripted out normally anyway – falling instead to the skills of really quite talented editors instead.

Douglas and Xander do this stuff much better than I do, is what I’m saying.

But all that aside, it may divert you for a few minutes! I’d like to know what you think. You can read the whole piece here: http://elephantwords.co.uk/2008/07/15/the-imaginary/

Please comment either here, there, or in the forum thread attached to the piece.

It’s inspired by this picture by Mr David Baillie:

… and Lego.

It’s called Meat-Free, and it goes a little something like this:

“… Sometimes all it takes is just being too – maybe dumb, maybe naive – to get something done. Because if it doesn’t occur to you that an idea is something that no-one has ever made happen before, you don’t really have the chance to consider failure…”

The photos are of the earth’s skies, taken from above, and are awesome. They are too big for me to resize here, but trust me, you’ll want to see these. Click here to go there.

I suppose this is one of the benefits of the majority of current space missions being earth orbit ones, rather then actual space exploration. The other one is that they finally got round to taking bagels up with them. Bagels! In space! See, this is what I’m talking about – this is the fucking future…!

It’s very good. So you should go read it.

http://www.freakangels.com/

Coco Wang is a cartoonist from China, who has drawn some comic strips of smaller stories of the earthquake hit country that we haven’t really heard so much in the west.

I’m not saying that comics are the only way of doing this sort of reportage, but in this case they are certainly pretty effective, especially when news media have become difficult to trust or respond to without cynicism.

Without some pretty brutal resizing, I can’t get an image to show, so you should probably go visit instead…

There was even going to be a bit of a review of each movie, although this would be massively disjointed, as “30 Days” was our second viewing, clearly based on our positive first watch of it, whereas “10,000bc” was quite fun while it was on, but left very little impression on me the second the credits rolled. Apart from the rather ginchy moment where it alludes to being connected to both Stargate (and by extension Stargate: SG1) and Stargate: Atlantis, all of which share a creator with the movie.

But then I saw the Google maps of Barrow, Alaska, where “30 Days” is set, and my brain kind of squee’ed, and I couldn’t think of much more to say beyond “ooh, lookit!”.

So, oooh, lookit!

Barrow via satellite. It is much closer to the water then in the movie. I particularly like the way that the airstrip is longer then the town proper.

This is really what caught my eye. I’m not sure what causes that golden colour to be quite so vivid, but it just reminds me some of the beautiful work on many of Gustav Klimt’s paintings.

Image by quirkybird at flickr.

Quirkybird has posted an amazing set of photos, from the Lone Fir Pioneer cemetery.

Well worth a look.

http://flickr.com/groups/songchart/

One of my favourites:

Then another: