The Edinburgh Outlook newspaper ran this article about our comic workshop at Kirkliston library on October 23rd. Online version here.
We’re looking forward to participating in the Booxfactor! Festival for the second year round. Monday December 7th we’ll be delivering two comic workshops in schools in West Dunbartonshire for their annual book festival.
The 2010 calendar is already filling up with more events, starting with an afternoon session at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow at the end of January. Keep your eye on these pages in the New Year for more information.
This autumn was also busy with events, in and around the Wigtown Book Festival, and several libraries in Scotland, and most recently at St Thomas of Aquins High School in Edinburgh (pictured).
http://metaphrog.com/author-visits
Great evening last night at The Goethe-Institut and Alliance Francaise in Glasgow: Marc Baines was in conversation with Lewis Trondheim and Mawil, for an entertaining and genuinely interesting talk. We always enjoy hearing other cartoonists talk about their work, and this kind of thing rarely happen on our doorstep, so that was a real bonus. We also got a chance to catch up with Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet globetrotter blogger, and Dr. Billy Grove, who was there to help out as a translator. Follow this link to read Joe’s report of the evening on the Forbidden Planet blog (with some photos too).
STV’s The Hour, featuring Liz Lochhead talking about our comic adaptation of Edwin Morgan’s poem The First Men on Mercury.
For the full National Poetry Day feature version please follow this link.
STV’s The Hour featured our comic adaptation of THE FIRST MEN ON MERCURY on National Poetry Day, as a way of interesting children in poetry visually. Liz Lochhead, Glasgow’s Poet Lauteate, made an appearance on the show reading and talking about poetry.
Today, 32 500+ copies of our Edwin Morgan comic adaptation, THE FIRST MEN ON MERCURY, are being distributed to all pupils in Glasgow Secondary schools, to celebrate National Poetry Day.
For those of you who have left school long ago or don’t live in Glasgow, you can read the comic online at www.metaphrog.com/mercury. We wanted to make this site a little bit special, and so have added some behind the scenes information on the making of the comic. Educators will also find teaching notes for the classroom.
The project was originally commissioned and is published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
THE FIRST MEN ON MERCURY COMIC
Association for Scottish Literary Studies
Edwin Morgan website
National Poetry Day
This week, we’ll be at the Wigtown Book Festival, doing eight events (three talks and five workshops) all packed into three days! We’ll be visiting schools in the area as well as talking to over 300 pupils in the festival marquee. For more details: http://metaphrog.com/events.html
A while back we mentioned on this blog that we were working on a comic adaptation of Edwin Morgan‘s poem The First Men on Mercury for release on National Poetry Day.
Today, the Metro newspaper is running a full page feature on the project.
To mark National Poetry Day – 8 October 2009 – the Association for Scottish Literary Studies will be distributing over 30,000 copies of the comic-strip adaptation to every secondary school pupil in the poet’s home city of Glasgow. The comic will also be available to read online at http://metaphrog.com/mercury
“The First Men on Mercury is one of Edwin Morgan’s science fiction poems – fizzing with ideas and bubbling with invention. It’s simultaneously fascinating, funny and just a little bit disconcerting, as we witness first contact between the brave explorers from Earth and the native inhabitants of the planet Mercury.” Duncan Jones, ASLS.
The form of the poem, largely dialogue based, makes it ideal for adaptation into comic-strip. It was a privilige to be asked to work on this and also highly enjoyable. We realised that by adding visuals you are also taking away from the inner images the poem in its pure text form might generate for a reader so we tried to treat it sensitively.
A few weeks ago, our friend hey from Berlin, who wrote the song for Louis – Dreams Never Die, sent us a really nice parcel with the latest hey-o-hansen cd release. It was wrapped in a cd mailing box which had originally been used five years ago by Kristin, then singer with múm, to send their remix version of hey’s song for the Louis – Dreams Never Die release.
The package came complete with a sketch drawn by Kristin (image below), and receiving it as we breakfasted one Saturday morning was most unexpected. We’d never seen it before and didn’t know this part of the story. The box had travelled all around the world to reach hey in Berlin: múm had recorded their version then left to go on tour, forgeting completely to post it to him. A while later, while in Australia, they finally mailed it. Five years on, it reached these Scottish shores. It reminded us of the fantastic people we met and the friends we made through the collective work we all put into this project.
hey-o-hansen’s new release is a complilation of rare and unreleased austrodub tracks from 1995 to 2009, and makes for an excellent introduction to their wonderful music. Although broadly speaking sounds from the dub universe it is filled with hey-o-hansen’s amazingly unique sense of melody and also contains the song dreams never die (to fc). You can listen to a sample on their website: http://heyrec.org
The good people at The Guardian newspaper have kindly informed us that they will be giving away a classic comic every day next week from Saturday 12th of September. Details below!
Remember how you were with seven classic comics for grown up boys and girls. We are printing an original issue of Jackie, The Beano, Roy of the Rovers, Bunty, The Dandy, Tammy and Whizzer And Chips every day in the Guardian and the Observer from Saturday 12 September.
It all starts on Saturday with the 1975 Valentine’s Day special of Jackie, featuring David Essex, Slade, the Cathy and Claire problem page and a Donny Osmond strip story!
The Beano’s back on Sunday with the 2000th issue from 1980, featuring a Dennis the Menace front cover and all your favourites: Lord Snooty, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids.
On Monday it’s the one where Roy Race is shot in Roy of the Rovers from 1981, followed by the Bunty 1972 Summer Special on Tuesday. The Dandy, with the last Korky the Cat cover from 1984 is your comic for Wednesday, while Thursday sees the return of the very first Tammy from 1971. And finally, on Friday, catch up with Sid, Slippy and Shiner in Whizzer and Chips, two comics in one!
They don’t make them like this anymore….
Full running order for comics giveaway:
Sat 12 September – Jackie
Sun – Beano
Mon – Roy of the Rovers
Tues – Bunty
Wed – The Dandy
Thu – Tammy
Fri – Whizzer and Chips
