Our comic adaptation of Edwin Morgan’s First Men on Mercury poem was featured in The Scotsman on Friday, as part of an interesting article on science fiction and Scotland, by Pat Kane.
Read the online version of the article here: http://www.scotsman.com/news/pat-kane-beam-us-scotties-up-alex-1-2353626
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| The Scotman – Friday 15 June 2012 |
The preparatory sketches Sandra did for The First Men on Mercury comic adaptation of the Edwin Morgan poem.
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
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.
We are honoured to announce that the Association for Scottish Literary Studies has commissioned us to produce an adaptation of the poem The First Men on Mercury by the great Edwin Morgan. It will come in the form of a four page, full colour comic, and will be published as a pamphlet given out free in Scotland in autumn 2009.
We’re thrilled to be working on this. Adapting poetry into comics is proving to be a really interesting project, and the poem being largely dialogue based, is ideally suited to this. You can read the poem itself here.
We’ll be posting more on this as the project develops.
