Blog Archive: March 2024

A Sophisticated Soiree
On Thursday night myself and The Pages In My Chapter were back at The King & Queen, not for a Totally Acoustic, but rather for a BOOK LAUNCH!

For LO! when one does a BOOK, like what I have done (have I mentioned that I've got a book out?) it is DE RIGEUR to have some kind of launch event. The few such affairs that I have been to before have involved decadent things like free drinks and CANAPES and even sometimes free BOOKS, but I decided to ESCHEW all of these bourgeoise elements. Also, there was a budget of precisely zero quid for the whole thing, so I thought I'd just have A Bit Of A Do instead.

THUS I sent out invites to various people, including not only Glittering ROCK Chums but also people from the world of Comics Studies AND from my work at UAL. In the weeks leading up to it this decision came to the forefront of my BRANE, as I have never really mixed up these aspects of my LIFE before. Some comics people ALSO work at UAL and interact with my department, but I don't think any of them have ever been to an actual GIG by me before either, so it was all going to be a bit of an EYE OPENER for all concerned!

Also, the fact that it was an INVITES affair, rather than a usual gig, seemed sensible when I set it up that way but then came to PREY upon my mind, as ONLY the people who I'd specifically asked would know it was happening, and as I started to receive the Apologies In Advance that always come before these sort of events I began to wonder if anyone was actually coming. PANIC!

Happily, people DID come and the room upstairs gradually swelled to a very comfortable plumpness, with pretty much every seat filled and a DELIGHTFUL atmosphere ensuing. I spent the pre-gig half hour wandering round like an SOCIETY HOSTESS, introducing people from my different WORLDS to each other. I must say, I can see why these SOCIETY HOSTESSES get such a kick out of it, it was really good fun, although still a bit weird seeing someone from ROCK engaged in in-depth conversation with people I see on TEAMS nearly every day.

Eventually it was time for me to get up and do the LAUNCHING, which consisted of a twenty minute talk in which I tried to explain the "An Empirical Approach To Transmedia Studies" part of the book's title. I was a bit all over the place to start with, as I kept getting freaked out by seeing combinations of people that I'd never seen together before, but got into it fairly quickly and, I think, managed NOT to waffle on too much.

The BEST bit was after that when I opened the floor to questions. I had not expected people to ENGAGE here, but BY GOLLY did they ever and some ASTONISHING questions were asked which frankly BLEW MY MIND. It turns out I know some RIGHT BRAINBOXES and DEEP THINKERS who asked things I'd never even thought of before. It was amazing!

I finished off by doing a few songs - The House On The Borderland (making its live DEBUT), My Boss Was In An Indie Band Once (seemed appropriate for the occasion!), It Only Works Because You're here and Boom Shake The Room. It all seemed to go all right, although again it was STRANGE bellowing these out to people I variously work with!

With that all out of the way it was back to the SOIREE, with further conversations breaking out all over the place and more IDEAS being lobbed around. It is a lovely thing to talk about all this firstly AT people and then WITH people - I am really really hoping to be able to do more of this sort of thing in future, with or without Arts Council CA$H!

It was a flipping BRILLIANT evening I must say, and ruddy wonderful to see everybody there. I'm doing an ONLINE version on Tuesday evening next week which is open to ONE AND ALL, so if you'd like to come along to that please register for it on Teams, otherwise I hope to be getting out and about to do this some more later in the year, as it was GRATE!

posted 15/3/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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The Voucher of DOOM
Regular newsletter subscribers will doubtless have been ASTONISHED - and hopefully also DELIGHTED - today to have recieved a special MID-MONTH edition of the newsletter. It's called "The Last Working Day Of The Month" so does tend to come out on that particular day, but I felt it worth UNLEASHING a counter-intuitively-dated version this time because it contains a VOUCHER CODE, valid from today until 11 April, which gives a DISCOUNT on the price of my oft-mentioned book Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach To Transmedia Characters.

For LO! by entering the discount code YTY9B7afrAJKRp when you buy it from Springer Nature you can get 20% off! BARGAIN! Well, sort of a bargain - it's still about SEVENTY QUID with the discount, but I think the idea is that the voucher is a way of persuading library purchasers or University finance departments that it's good value (WHICH IT IS). So, as ever, if anyone knows of any such people who could be persuaded thus, please persuade away - in theory, the more copies that get out into the world THIS way the more likely it is that they'll do a more reasonably priced version next year.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in finding out (EVEN) more about what's IN the book, I'm doing a (FREE!) online launch event on TEAMS on Tuesday 19 March at 7pm UK time. This will take the form of a CHAT with International Comics Studies Legend Professor Roger Sabin, who knows a thing or two about it as he was one of my PhD supervisors. It is, as mentioned, FREE, but you do need to register in advance. Do come along if you can, it'll be dead interesting honest!

posted 14/3/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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By The Arts Council Denied!
You find me today slightly DEFEATED but also almost entirely UNBOWED, for LO! A Thing What I Was Hoping To Do has been REFUSED!

The Thing What I Was Hoping To Do was an Arts Council "Developing Your Creative Practice" grant which I wanted to use to pay for MENTORSHIP and some TIME to allow me to Develop My Creative Practice in a new and exciting way, but ALAS the Arts Council said "No". Usuaully I would say that this was not entirely unexpected as I have NEVER had any success whatsoever with this sort of thing, but this time around I thought I was in with a chance, as the IDEA was dead exciting and, I thought, right up their alley.

The aforesaid IDEA was to try and bring together two different aspects of my PORTFOLIO CAREER (hem hem) into one NEW thing, those being my decades of experience of ROCKING OUT and my more recent experience of Talking About Comics. With the latter I have been very conscious of the fact that putting together a conference presentation takes AGES but then you only do it once to a room containing about 20 (delightful) people. In many ways it's like putting together a FRINGE show except a) it's a bit shorter and b) you only actually do it ONCE, rather than taking it around the country to SEVERAL rooms containing about 20 (delightful) people EACH.

"AHA!" I thought to myself, "but what if I could somehow find a way to do a presentation about comics that was a little bit longer and that I could then take around the country for the aforementioned ROOMS?" I thought this thought quite a lot, but kept running into PROBLEMS. For one thing, where are the people who would come and SEE this sort of thing? I am highly concious that my usual lovely audiences who have flocked (YES FLOCKED) to see me have come to hear Bellowed Songs With Humorous Insight and not necessarily to hear about how transmedia characters function across time and different media types. Also, people who DID want to hear someone talk about that sort of thing would not necessarily be AWARE of my previous OUVRE so wouldn't know about it to come.

Now, I know there are NETWORKS of places that put on gigs by those Science Comedians you have nowadays, and there are blogs and podcasts and even radio shows that deal with them, but I have absolutely no idea how to get INTO them, nor what sort of thing they would want to be presenting (i.e. do you do ten minute BITS, or full shows, or what?). Again, my experience is all in ROCK with a tiny sliver of FRINGE, so I wouldn't know where to start.

THUS the grant bid was to get me some time with a couple of people who DO know about That Sort Of Thing, to help me get some INSIGHT into how these other worlds work and, to paraphrase a grant application process title, Develop My Creative Practice. As I say, it seemed to me that this was PRECISELY what the scheme was set up to do, and despite ALL my experience of This Sort Of Thing I had managed to get quite HOPEFUL, so when the email came yesterday I must admit I experience THE GLUMS for a couple of hours.

However, supportive emails from some of the people who'd help me write the bid PLUS some extremely supportive THORTS from The Figures In My Spreadsheet back home cheered me up CONSIDERABLY and I'm now ready to go again with the NEXT round of bids. I'm also looking at ways I might be able to do SOME of it off my own back, but either way I will not be DAUNTED by this setback (well, not too much anyway) and you can rest assured that, at some point, the world will THRILL to tales of how random stratified sampling can be used in the digital humanites, twenty (delightful) people at a time!

posted 12/3/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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Late Late (Comics) Reviews
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about buying some more Graphic Novels (i.e. COMICS) and then remembered that I have the facilities of the entire UAL LIBRARY at my fingertips. The University Of The Arts London is - hem hem - the foremost Comics Studies institution in Europe IF NOT THE WORLD (though we like to keep this to ourselves) and so it is PACKED with comics!

THUS I decided to have a go at finally reading some of The Best Graphic Novels Of All Time. Obviously I know which are widely accepted as The Best SUPERHERO Graphic Novels Of All Time (Watchmen, Dark Knight etc etc) but I am not quite so well informed about OTHER types (apart from Maus and Perseopolis which you would be pretty hard pressed NOT to be aware of everyone banging on about). THUS I did myself a bit of reading and checked a bunch of alleged CLASSICS, and my THORTS upon them are recorded below.

Blankets by Craig Thompson. This was QUITE NICE and ALL RIGHT but to be honest I didn't see what was so special about it that it got into so many lists of GRATE graphic novels. It's a memoir of a romance that takes place in American High School and a Christian Camp and some SNOW.

Black Hole by Charles Burns. I did not like this AT ALL, partly because it is BORING and partly because it was hard to work out who was meant to be who, as everyone looks IDENTICAL and talks THE SAME and is A BIT DULL. It was, in fact, very like a HP Lovecraft novel i.e. mysterious and unpleasant things happen to some characters you don't care about, except here set in and around an American High School (again).

Nimona by ND Stevenson. I flipping LOVED this one, it is GRATE. I had never even heard of it before looking at Best Of lists but I'm glad I did as it is FAB. A young girl (OR IS SHE?!?) teams up with a supervillain (OR IS HE?!?) and end up saving a city (OR DO THEY?!? Yes, they do). It looks a bit like Kate Beaton, who I also LOVE. No high schools at all in this one!

Moon Cop by Tom Gauld. This wasn't on any lists but I saw it in the library and liked the look of it. NB I had completely forgotten that libraries are just like bookshops EXCEPT FREE and that you can just wander aimlessly along the shelves picking up stuff you fancy (I also got a book of Ronald Searle Cartoons using the same method). "Moon Cop" was BRILLIANT - when I mentioned my article Why Aren't We Talking About The Beano? on twitter a while ago (the one with the POSH COMICS cartoon in it) someone MISTAKENLY said that Tom Gauld was POSH COMICS, but this is NOT SO - his stuff, including this book, is full of WIT and ACTION and DELIGHT. All right, his usual cartoons MAY appear in The Guardian and be LIKED by people who otherwise go on about Posh Comics, but it is actually dead good. Unlike...

Rusty Brown by Chris Ware. To be honest I went into the library to get "Jimmy Corrigan" and unwittingly picked this one up because it looked the same. Either way I thought it was long past time for me to try and ENGAGE with Chris Ware as loads of people go on and on about him but I must confess that I did not get very far. It was all right for a bit, although GOODNESS ME it would be nice if Americans would GET OVER HIGH SCHOOL as yet again that's what it's all about, but after reading it for about 18,000,000 years I found I was only about a quarter of the way through and SOD ALL had happened, and that sod all had happened to NOBODY INTERESTING. I did like the GRAPHIC DESIGN, but what really tore it for me was how difficult it was to read. By "difficult" I don't mean it was CHALLENGING MENTALLY or that the Narrative Bit Deep To My Very Core, I mean "difficult" as in the lettering was SO VERY TINY in places that it was almost impossible to read, and once you'd got together a MICROSCOPE and HIGH WATTAGE LAMP in order to do so it turned out to not be worth the bother. I did not enjoy it, so stopped!

Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman and George Perez. Yes yes I know, this is NOT a non-superhero book, but I had got it for REFERENCE for a PAPER wot I am writing. Still, it was a blessed relief after Rusty Brown, even if it does feel more and more HOKEY every decade when I read it again.

This then is my EXTREMELY LATE comics review. If anyone knows of any ACTUALLY GOOD non-superhero graphic novels published more recently please do let me know, ESPECIALLY if they do not feature American High Schools!

posted 5/3/2024 by MJ Hibbett
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