Last week saw the release of the line up for this years Lakes Comic Art Festival. We’re happy to report that among the many exhibitions and presentations will be a talk by TEAW co-editors Jonathan Clode and John Stuart Clark. Rather than tackling the subject of WWI itself, their talk will be geared around the editing process of such a large book, with some of the contributing writers and artists taking part as well.

2013’s inaugural Lakes Festival was by all accounts a resounding success and a change to the usual conventions, and we’re delighted to be involved. There’ll also be a talk on the Great War in Comics involving John Freeman, Ivan Petrus (Ghosts of Passchendaele) and Charlie Adlard and Robbie Morrison (White Death).

The festival takes place in Kendal from 17-19 October. Tickets are on sale now from the website below.

http://www.comicartfestival.com/end-wars-art-editing/

http://www.comicartfestival.com/

As ever, here are some previews from the many stories we’ll be discussing at the festival.

Truth Be Told
Story by Pippa Hennessey. Art by Danos Philopoulos with letters by Brick

The Orderly
Story and Art by Rebecca Burgess

 

 

 

 

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One of the joy’s that comes from working on a project like TEAW is collaborating with such a wide range of artists and writers. Our contributors work in a variety of creative mediums and the manner in which they choose to express that creativity is fascinating to behold. With that in mind we thought we’d share with you some of the upcoming projects a few of them are working on.

We tip our hats to Jessica Martin, co-artist on Only Remember. She has made it onto the long list for Myriad’s First Graphic Novel Competition with her recent and as you might have guessed, first graphic novel,  Elsie Harris Picture Palace.

http://www.brokenfrontier.com/myriad-editions-announce-longlist-for-the-2014-first-graphic-novel-competition/

Elsie Harris Picture Palace

Brick’s latest offering is for the East Midlands’ Dawn of the Unread on-line and app initiative to encourage library use and reading among young people. Essentially a handful of deceased regional literary figures (authors, fictional characters, real personalities etc) are brought back from the dead to strut their stuff in comic form. Brick’s contribution is a personal story about The Long Walk, a book he came across when he was nine and busting to escape his boarding school, and its author, Slavomir Rawicz, who Brick bumped into when Slav was a technician at Nottingham Polytechnic in the Seventies. The comic is interactive and there is a short vid of our contributor talking about his working method, using his roughs for The Iron Dice. Hunt Emerson and Eddie Campbell are slated to contribute stories later in the year.

Links – Dawn of the Unread – http://dawnoftheunread.wordpress.com/

– the comic is interactive – http://www.dawnoftheunread.com/issue02-00.html

– a short vid – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQuz9B0asKg

And just in case you thought it was just comics these fine folk excelled at, Stuart Richards, writer and artist of IL Gatto this week made his stand up comedy debut supporting Frankie Boyle.

We shall keep you updated regarding the many other exciting projects our contributors are involved with over the coming weeks.

 

 

 

Following on from our feature in The Independent, TEAW has seen an upsurge in interest over the last couple of weeks. Under the wing of Soaring Penguin, the book made a debut of sorts at the London Book Fair where it caught the eye of foreign publishers and even managed to get a galley copy stolen. Not to advocate theft but in a way that’s actually a rather lovely compliment.
It’s also been great to see one of our contributor’s featured in the local press. Between The Darkness artist Neil McClements was interviewed as part of a feature on TEAW in The Rugby Advertiser. This not only gives the book and the centenary some great coverage, but it also serves to put comics in the spotlight at a local level and expose people to the incredible talent that dwells right under their noses.

For most of our contributors, this is their first foray into creating comics about the First World War, but S.Martin (sometimes Steve, sometimes Stan) produced a series of WWI comics some years back. We discovered these thanks to one of our writers and were lucky enough to recruit Mr. Martin, the result of which is the fantastic Allies of Reason. The beauty of working with Steve/Stan is that he has no computer and no internet, instead writing letters by hand and sending his art in the post! You can see some examples of his work at the link below and you may even still be able to buy a few copies…provided you don’t expect to pay for them via internet banking!

http://www.zumcomics.info/betsyheavens/main.html

To End All Wars is available for pre-order at various online book sellers and Soaring Penguin are offering the book at a limited pre-publication price of £13.99.

http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/graphic-novels/to-end-all-wars-pre-publication-special/

There should be more news on the book in the coming weeks as we get closer to the centenary commemorations, but in the mean time here are a few more preview pages.

IL Gatto
Story and Art by Stuart Richards

Die and Become
Story by John Stuart Clark. Art by Sarah Jones

 

 

This week saw a press preview for To End All Wars – in The Independent no less. We were fortunate enough to have almost a whole news page devoted to the book in the paper itself, and were placed on the front page of the Independent website. You can read the article at the web link, though of equal interest is the amount of debate it’s encouraged in the comments section that follows it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/acclaimed-comics-artists-publish-powerful-anthology-of-stories-to-combat-michael-goves-jingoistic-interpretation-of-ww1-9228582.html

As you might expect, opinion is as varied as it is divided, and there is also the odd voice suggesting that comics are ill equipped to depict historical events. The fact that a comic has been given a page in a major newspaper, while rare, certainly suggests otherwise. Sean Michael Wilson, one of our contributors, has argued the point, saying  that writers and artists “are not barred from making useful contributions to history or sociology…because they express them with text AND visuals.”

Thanks to Adam Sherwin of The Independent for the feature and to everyone who’s taken an interest in the book as a result. As ever, we are delighted to share some previews of our own with you from the incredible pool of stories our writers and artists have created.

Live and Let Live
Story by Sean Michael Wilson. Art by Chris Martinez with letters by April Brown

The Final Confession of Madame Macleod
Story by Susan Wallis. Art by Ezequiel Rosingana with letters by Kel Nuttall