Filed under: comic artists, paroxysm | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration
Hot on the heels of the Steve Bell exhibition, I spent the weekend at the International Alternative Press Festival 2011, a zines, comics, and small press fair. I forgot to take photos, but it was a really packed out and pretty well-sized event, with tonnes of creators of every stripe selling their work. It was refreshing to see so much enthusiasm, like Hamish MacDonald who writes, prints, binds, and sells his own novels and has a podcast about making books, and Steve Tillotson who is hilarious as well as being a skilled draughtsman Also picked up a surreal wordless graphic-novel by Nicolas Presl, the kind of thing I wouldn’t have come across if I hadn’t been to the festival
Woodrow Phoenix (author of Rumble Strip) was there, along with Paul Gravett (head of the Comica festival), both whom I’d had the fortune to meet in 2009 at the London Print Studio in a discussion/presentation with several other comics people, as the culmination of a comics exhibition. I also shifted quite a lot of old copies of Paroxysm #1 and #2, and received a lot of self-published zines and comics in return. This is the first real convention I’ve been to, but it turned out to be a great experience and I’ll definitely be on the look-out for more in London as they come.
Filed under: a plague of lighthouse-keepers, my comics, paroxysm | Tags: art, cartoons, graphic novels, illustration
Ahoy-hoy. My name’s Corban Wilkin and I thought I’d use my very first post here to do a quick recap what I’ve been doing with my life recently.
I decided a few years ago and for no good reason that I wanted to make ‘graphic novels’ (also known as ‘big comics’) and, not being one to dream of ‘one-day-maybe-I’ll’ I just up and did it, drawing and publishing my first go at a novel-length story when I was 17.
Well we all have to start somewhere, and I started with 200-pages of scribbles called Wasp and Bee. Nevertheless, being a proud young scribbler I went on to work with writers, producing a fair few comics issues, and working with indy comics publisher Popcorn Peacock.
Last year I published the first two issues of my Paroxysm series, collections of short-story comics written and drawn by me and discovered that comics are hard to do. But I decided to forgo making the third issue in favor of a graphic novel I was planning, which eventually ballooned into a 300-page project. Ever the optimist, I decided to plough into it and try to complete the whole thing before dinner-time.
All-together the book took about four months of work, which anyone who’s ever made comics and isn’t Osamu Tezuka will tell you is really too fast for a graphic novel. Honestly, I’m trying to slow down my drawing now so that my work will begin to be of better quality, rather than just rushing out long stories like I have been doing. Still, I’m proud of what I achieved with A Plague of Lighthouse-Keepers.
I will update soon about my recent projects and what’s coming up. I have too much planned to put it in this retrospective post, but check back as I’ll have loads of sketches and comics to bandy about, and I’m sure I’ll end up writing a bunch of nonsense about comics theory and creators I admire, as well.
Corban Wilkin: Illustrator 