Do you like reading but also think that literature is totally outmoded and uncool?
THEN YOU MIGHT WANT TO TRY A COMIC BOOK.
Comic books look like Instagram feeds but they’re 3D. That’s right: THREE DIMENSIONAL.
Not only that, but you can also own them, and in this brave new world of Netflix and Amazon Prime and other rental subscription services, as well as increased global awareness of the environmental impact and obvious wastefulness of murdering trees for party invitations, job applications and tabloid newspapers, we may reach a point where both the concept of physical ownership and paper objects are but distant memories. Therefore, as the very notion of owning your very own collection of brightly coloured and carefully stapled sheaths of paper is soon to be extinguished, I IMPLORE YOU TO GET ONE OF THESE COMIC BOOKS WHILE THEY STILL EXIST.
In fact, I have a couple that you might be interested in:
‘VOTE LEAVES’, July 2018
A 40 page comic about East Anglia, gypsies and Walt Whitman.
I made this comic in 2018 after meeting and spending time with the inhabitants of the Mile Cross site in Norwich, and it details the lives of one particular family that I ended up spending a lot of time with. Oh yeah, and the whole thing is riffed to Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’.
Does that sound strange? Well, people are strange.
So if you love American poetry, the East of England and the gypsy community, this might just be the purchase for you!
‘HOT POTATEAUS, ISSUE 1: LIKE A BLOCK OF FLATS MAN HAS MANY FLAWS’, Sept 2020
A comic composed of recycled material and flawed characters.
The title of the collection, ‘Hot Potateaus’, is a play on the term ‘portmanteau’, the blending together of multiple words to create a new one, as all of the comics featured could be described as loose reworkings of classical texts, spliced up and re-framed to create entirely new narratives. Hence why I like to refer to it as recycling old material.
It’s kind of hard for me to describe what it’s about; I’d like to say human weakness, but that seems too general. Either way, I hope you feel compelled to buy it and, subsequently, that you like it.
