Tuesday 26 July 2011

Drawing the Cinema - proposal

The Big Draw takes place throughout the month of October. It aims to get people drawing. I like drawing. So I have a plan that is as follows.

Venue: the Star and Shadow Cinema

Date: Saturday 15th October, noon till 6.

Before the event: cinema and storytelling and gig-goers are all encouraged to doodle and draw things at the venue's events in October leading up to the 15th. These are collected to add to the ultimate fanzine.

Cinema Room: using the projector to cast doodles and live drawing onto the screen.

3pm Drawing the Cinema game: clips from a well-known film are projected. The audience races to scratch out what they see. We then compare notes and the collective output is 'anthologised' into the fanzine.

Bar Room: if they are game, the Paper Jam Collective co-ordinate a drop-in comics workshop on the theme of cinema.

2pm Going to the Movies game: sitting in a big circle round the table, we all begin with a blank strip of paper. To a strict deadline, we draw a page. The bell goes and we pass our page to the left. The next person continues the story and we see what comic tales result.

Dark Room: If they are game, FilmBee (or maybe Blank Sam) run a drawing and developing activity where negatives are scratched or messed with or doodled on to create interestingly textual doodles.

Toilet Room: (prospectively) Toilet Graffiti Wall - a canvas is created inside one of the toilet cubicles, and those naughty permanent markers are brought into play to create filth, angst and mistaken beauty onto the wall. To be kept up for only a limited period.

Office Room: the selected results of all these activities are photocopied to create a collaborative fanzine. Due to the slow speed of our photocopier, this will not be ready during the 'public' part of the day, but participants can leave a stamped envelope to get their copy posted out to them.

Friday 22 July 2011

Plan for an Irresponsible Use of Alcohol

Hi, especially to the paperjimjams,

There are plans afoot for a new local comics anthology on the theme of 'alcohol'.

After careful consideration, and overruling the objections of my liver (seconded by the kidneys), I have decided my contribution to this will combine the drinking of drambuie with the write&drawing about it.

I have had some marvellous adventures with drambuie (stonehenge! elderly ladies!) and this will make up the first part of the piece. The second part will probably have gone downhill a bit and it will be a bit experimental to see what comes out on paper.

If you would like to somehow, to some degree, combine your drinking experience with mine, let me know. I shall probably choose an evening of this coming week for the experiment, and the last panel won't be drawn till the whole bottle of juice has gone through my system and out by one of the exits. I'd choose an earlier stage in the evening if I were you.

love Mike


The call-out for 'Alcohol ... and that':

The Paper Jam Comics Collective hasn’t done an anthology in a while.
People have all kinds of exciting projects of their own going on, but we all forgot to keep it real and bust out some team awesomeness in a new ...And That. So, to remedy that, we’re going to ruddy do one!

Having done: miscellaneous, Halloween, ‘You will have to wait’, Robots, children’s comics, Art and History, what’s next? Well, after some discussion, the consensus has fallen on ‘Alcohol’. The fact that the decision was made in a pub had nothing to do with this.

So submissions are open! Usual criteria apply: it’s open to anyone who’s a Paper Jammer (i.e. been to a few meetings at some point), you can do one or two pages, and team ups are allowed and encouraged (in which case you can combine page allocations if you want to do
something a bit longer).

We’re looking to go a bit old-school on this one after the large format extravaganzas we’ve had recently, so it’ll be A5 black and white (well, greyscale), with the cover either b&w too or maybe colour depending on how the Collective finances are looking.

Content: it would be quite a nice linking factor if everyone’s stories could be based on a particular type of alcoholic beverage, so aim for that (but don’t worry too much about it, or what anyone else is doing, we could easily have ‘Gin’ and ‘More Gin’ for example!) Interpret the
theme however you like, keep it vaguely clean (usual Paper Jam tone: a bit of rudeness is permissible but nothing too extreme), and come up with something great.

Wednesday 20 July 2011

Reviews from Spring

I've got a few mentions here and there over the last 6 months. It's interesting to think of yourself in the terms only of people summarising you.

1. Here's from the peg powler exhibition zine back in february:

"Avid supporter of 'paper culture'" ay, yeah I'll go with that.

2. And the footprint zine had me down as producing something 'gorgeous' : I go weak at the knees.


3. Matthew at the 365 zines a year blog reviewed another one of mine, which I won't link to cos it's the personal one that I wasn't publicising around Newcastle. But I will, ahem, quote:
"it could be that with the new year Mike has attempted to concentrate more on the positive things in his life instead of dwelling on the negative. " Not so sure my housemates would agree about that ...

4. And Giz of 'Cheap Toys' wrote up about our chats at this year's London Zine Symposium: [image to be found and stuck in here, guv'nor]

5. Found another, from Autumn, a zine that partly I inspired, which is perhaps the best feeling:

Wednesday 13 July 2011

Ah, festival time!

Finishing some work, I've just rejigged my plans back to 'fuck it why not' and so tomorrow I hope to arrive at Inverness a bit before midnight, and then to Lewis for the Hebcelt festival. It got me looking through my photos for one I really remember & love & cringe at for my full-on pantomime 'alternative youth' look.

I couldn't find that photo, but I did find these, from the glorious hairy days of the nineties. It's still how I think I look from the inside ...



So here's hoping for a bit more of the old me this summer: fluoro beads & sweat, the Levellers, army boots left untied, Devonshire dogs, carnivals and drunkenness.