Friday, September 15, 2006

It's coming...

The release of the Midlands Comics Collective's ( which I'm a part of) anthology book MC2 is getting ever nearer. Because it is being published through Knockabout Press and distributed through Diamond, you can now pre-order it at lots of comics websites. Please do. It has my magnum opus Never Strikes Twice within its luxury glossy pages, as well as many other great tales (not so good! Only kidding![You don't know who's reading this shit!]) from other Brum-based artists and writers including seasoned pros Hunt Emerson, John McCrea and IMAF award winers Asia Alfasi and Michiru Morikawa. Plus plenty of other non-award winning artists!

You can order it at Forbidden Planet for the weird price of £5.03!
If you're American, you can order it at Wizard Universe .
I first saw the book onTFAW , and if you're of a Teutonic origin you can get it atKauft Comics .

With the book at the printers now, and all artistic work complete, we're trying to publicise the thing. Now I've told you five about it on this blog, my work is done!
Not really. We're launching it with an exhibition and a boozy do at the Custard factory here in Birmingham in November. We will subsequently re-launch it at the Birmingham International Comics Show in December and at the Expo in Bristol next May. We're also trying to get some kind of signing event at the legendary 'Nostalgia And Comics' store, also here in Brum, and we will soon be on BBC 2, shamelessly plugging the thing.
Now that was weird. Once a month, the members of MC2 meet, usually at the aforementioned Custard factory, as one of us works there and it costs us nothing. One of our group, Asia Alfasi, is attracting quite a bit of attention. Her stuff is manga-influenced, I suppose, which is popular in itself, but the fact that she is a woman cartoonist, which is rare enough, and a Muslim woman cartoonist to boot, which probably puts her in a field of about one. Anyway, as I said, her work is getting her a lot of attention. She has big publishers vying for her work. She has BBC2 filming her.
The director thought it would be a good idea to film Asia at our meeting, but BBC lady turns up late, so we had to pretend to have the meeting again and keep saying the same shit over and over, because the light wasn't right. Hunt Emerson must have told us the book was out in November about twenty times in a row.I don't know when it's on, but I'll let you five know when I do, so you can watch me rub my beard and nod sagely in the background, trying to pinch some of Asia's limelight!

3 comments:

Mimey said...

I wish you could've heard the awful laugh I did at that 'out in November' part. A new, and truly awful barking laugh. When will I stop with the terrible laughter.

Anyway, this is all very impressive indeed. Do you have an ISBN number? That's the height of validation if you ask me. Can you buy an ISBN number to attach to a webpage?

Madeley said...

Man, I love Nostalgia & Comics. When I say "love", I mean "gave all my loan money whilst at university to".

Mick said...

JvS: The book indeed has an ISBN number. It means something I've done will be kept in the British Library forever. Which is nice.

Hunter: Nostalgia is my favourite shop, but it was much better when I was younger, before it became affiliated with Forbidden Planet, and now it's turning into a toyshop and selling fashion accessories to emos. I used to like the frieze they had, which was made up from old film and comic posters and went all around the shop, but is now, sadly gone.