events

We received this via email on Friday:
“Metaphrog visited Cardiff’s new library in May 2009 and enthralled children from Year 7 at Fitzalan High School with a lively demonstration creating comic book characters and effects. All the children created their own cartoons and enthusiastically shared their drawings which showed an impressive range of humour and skills.
We’d love Metaphrog to come back and visit again. And good luck with the new Louis book!”

Heather Noble Children’s Library Services Manager

Thanks Heather!

We’ve been on a roll doing graphic novel workshops this month! Friday May 15th we were at the Booked! Festival of Words in West Dunbartonshire, working with classes of Primary 7 children. These sessions were really fun! The kids were keen to flick through Sandra’s sketchbook and also asked some very interesting questions, such as “What’s the most difficult part of making a book?” or “How long does it take to make a book?” And of course they did fantastic drawings too.
Terry Lanagan, the Director of Education was present during our first session, and he mingled with the children while they were busy creating monsters, the feedback was that he was really pleased, as were the kids. We ended up sandwiched between the wall and a crowd of children, after the workshop, all wanting their posters and postcards (goodies we brought for them) signed, as well as the festival bookmarks. At one point one asked for his hand to be signed, starting a trend, and next thing we knew they all wanted their hands signed too!
The festival itself had an interesting line up, including Louise Welsh, Ian Banks, Julia Donaldson and many more, as well as a Dave McKean Retrospective exhibition in the Dalmuir Library (on until May 30th).

The day after our session we got a really nice comment on our Louis animation on YouTube from one of the kids: “I’ve met Metaprog, I got their autograph 🙂 And they showed us this, it took Sandra 5 months to make.” It put a smile on our faces for the rest of the weekend.

More pictures from these events can be seen on our Picasa photo album here.

We’ll be doing a series of summer workshops. Stay tuned for more info on this soon!

Our visits to Cardiff and Bristol were great! Really rejuvenating. We did two workshops on Friday 8th of May in the brand new Cardiff Central Library, a really attractive building, and the kids were great. A big thank you to Heather and Rob who invited us down and were perfect hosts, we managed to catch up with them over a few beers and Japanese food! Thanks too to all the chilren who as always had amazing ideas and who left some positive comments and thank you notes.

Slideshow below. Photo album here.

After the workshops we went on to Bristol for the rest of the weekend and had a fantastic time too, catching up with people like Chris Staros of Top Shelf and Gary Millidge on a quiet Friday evening. We were in the SPExpo part of the Comic Festival on the Saturday all day, the first SPExpo in fact, situated in a spacious, well-lit hall (complete with actual windows and panoramic views over Bristol, a welcome variation on many comic conventions). The whole event was fairly low key, as the Expo had to downsize this year. The two shows might have benefited from being in one large space rather than split between venues (we heard from many people that they didn’t know the SPExpo was there until much later, for instance) but it all still managed to be highly enjoyable. On the Saturday evening, drinking beer and wine and eating tapas al fresco with Paul Gravett, Ilya (Best New Manga, King Lear), and Doug and Emma from Self Made Hero, was highly enjoyable as was the convention bar/party, were we shared conversational notes on dizziness with Tony Bennett. Sunday was spent trailing the Expo and checking out stalls and books, then absorbing sunshine for several hours, watching people finish a half-marathon, generally being very relaxed without passing out, before heading back to Glasgow. The funny thing about conventions is that you can completely miss people: we only met up with Gary Erskine at the baggage pick up in Glasgow!

We’re preparing for a few events coming up next month.
First, a couple of workshops at Cardiff Central Library on the 8th of May. We did a workshop there in 2003, and have been asked back, now that their brand new library is open.
Then we’re travelling to Bristol for the Comic Expo and SPExpo on the 9th and 10th of May, where we’ll be signing books and original art (on the Saturday only). Note that the Comic Expo itself will be at the Ramada Hotel, while the SPExpo will be a couple of blocks away at the Mercure Hotel (that’s where we’ll be).
Then on May 15th, we’re looking forward to another couple of workshops as part of the West Dunbartonshire Festival of Words.

More details on all this, and other forthcoming events, can be found on our regularly updated events page.

Well, the end of the year has proven really busy with workshops! As well as the events mentioned previously in this blog, we did a whole series of highly enjoyable workshops: two during the Booxfactor Festival in Clydebank and also double workshops (one then a follow-up a week later) at the Howdenhall and St Katharines Centres as well as the Wellington School, in and around Edinburgh, in November and early December. And we still have more booked for next year (see our website’s events page). Please visit our ever expanding photoalbum for sample work – there was a lot of vivid imagination on show and the groups and organisers were great to work with. http://picasaweb.google.com/metaphrog1
A big thank you to Anne Louise Anglim and to Colm Linnane for their kind support.

And, in between events, we are getting on with our new Louis graphic novel, Louis – Night Salad. We’ll post more about this soon.

This week, we conducted a comics workshop at the Imprint festival in Kilmarnock. We always enjoy showing people how we go about making our own comics, but also like to see what kids can come up with themselves. This link will take you to a gallery of monsters and some jam comics that they created during this session. We want to thank the organisers at the East Ayrshire libraries who run this festival so efficiently and made us feel so welcome. We even had time to visit the excellent Wallace and Gromit exhibition!

Imprint: East Ayrshire Book Festival runs from 10th – 15th November 2008.

The workshop we did last week in Milngavie was great fun: the image below is one of the character designs the teenagers came up with, and this link here has some more of them, as well as comics and comic jams they did.

We will be doing a few more workshops in November, with more details coming soon on our website’s events page.

We are preparing ourselves for a few autumn events: first we’ll be exhibiting at BICS, the Birmingham International Comics Show (Oct 4th –5th). For this, we wish to thank the Scottish Arts Council, as they are partly funding the trip.

Then, a couple of comics workshops, at the Storytelling Festival, in Milngavie, on Oct 14th, and at the Imprint Book Festival, in Kilmarnock, on Nov 12th. Further details can be found on the events page of our website.

Summer was spent hard at work on the new Louis book, but we did manage to attend several highly enjoyable events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, including: a three part talk with Paul Gravett, and Emma Hayley and Robert Deas of Self Made Hero and a panel discussion comprising Hannah Berry, Alan Grant and Bryan Talbot. We also had the pleasure of being invited to the British Council Bookcase party.

Graphic novels were well featured at the Edinburgh festival this year, and Paul Gravett has an interesting article about this on his website. We were reminded that back in 1999 our own Strange Weather Lately Volume One had been the very first graphic novel ever to feature in the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

We’re just back from Comics Day at the Dundee Literary Festival: another fine event organised by Dr Christopher Murray, with really varied talks, all extremely interesting in their own ways. Here are a few photos documenting the event.
Our own talk was about making the Louis graphic novels, and, in order of appearance, Chris Murray himself revealing his secret identity :-), Roger Sabin (on reading comics), Jim Glen from DC Thomson, with some live drawing action, Ilya (editor of the recent Mammoth Book of Best New Manga), Paul Gravett talking about his own new Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics (edited by himself and designed by Peter Stanbury), and Bryan Talbot, the main speaker, on his recent Alice in Sunderland book project.
More full size photos can be found here.

A quick reminder of our talk at the Dundee Literary Festival on Comics Day, Sunday 22nd June at 3.45pm: The Making of the Louis Graphic Novels.
In addition there is a talk by Bryan Talbot, and also by Paul Gravett, Roger Sabin, Ilya, Jim Glen, and Chris Murray. It promises to be a great event!

Official website:
http://www.dundeeliteraryfest.org/comics.htm
Location – New Teaching Block, Hawkhill, University of Dundee, UK.
Comics Day cost – £10 for the full day or £5 per half day.