Three reasons we're going to Thought Bubble

My tickets for Thought Bubble arrived today. It's five months away, but I'm already childishly excited. Heck, I booked tickets as soon as I saw they'd been released. Why?

The short answer: because it kicks enough arse to win a mid-to-heavyweight, quantitatively-measured arse kicking contest. Really: a lot of arse is getting kicked here. Non-trivial amounts.

To be just a little less fatuous, it kicks arse in three very particular ways:

The atmosphere

Thought Bubble is exactly how we like a comics con to feel, and we pretty much said that on the TCAF podcast. It's open and friendly, and feels like an inclusive space. Ok, so I'm a 31 year old middle class white male, so most places are going to. But I'm also a socially awkward neurotic nerd poof, and it's still pretty comfortable.

There's a mix of people. Next to the (frequently great) cosplayers, you've got folks who're just starting to get into comics. It doesn't feel like the sticky-carpeted inner sanctum of the bad comic store archetype. You don't need to authorise yourself; it's just kind of welcoming and friendly. This also means it's incredibly low stress. You mill around, you buy some stuff - there's an insane amount of exhibition space - you meet creators and fans, you go to some of the panels.

The panels

ConSequential started at Thought Bubble 2012. It actually started as the content marketing for a comics event that Thought Bubble got us inspired to run. We've parked that for a bit, and in part because Thought Bubble is kind of scratching the itch.

The quality of discussion (and of the brilliant nonsense that derails it) is pretty damn high. In particular, the (we hope regular) "Best Thing I've Read All Year" panels, the Young Avengers retrospective last year, some of the critical discussions, and the general quality of the line-up are a massive draw. It's fun, it's lively, and it's incisive.

The Safe Space Disco

Ok, so, it's actually called the Mid-Con Party, and it might be the main reason I love Thought Bubble.

My @ThoughtBubbleUK tickets arrived. Team @con_sequential is go for NERD PROM and all the stupid dancing.

— Roger Hart (@RMH40) June 25, 2014

Without the party night, Thought Bubble would still be a really good example of a standard comics show. But there's just something about dancing like an idiot, in a converted shopping centre, while your favourite comics creators DJ, playing some of your favourite records, that feels surreal in all the good ways. That atmosphere becomes quite something when you fill Thought Bubble with booze and blast it with Blondie. It still feels welcoming and fun. In fact, it's probably my favourite club night.

We're going to Thought Bubble, and we think you should too. Last year, we did a quick podcast while we were there, and got a bit breathless about the cool shit we'd found. It's a bloody delightful way to discover comics.

Leeds is pretty cool, too. Go to Friends of Ham

My Thought Bubble tickets arrived today, in a Leeds City Council envelope. My immediate thought was “Oh shit, what did I do to Leeds?”

— Clarrie Maguire (@problem_chimp) June 25, 2014

Bonus fourth reason: Thought Bubble often coincides with the Beaujolais Nouveau. We're fairly sure this is a coincidence, but we're not letting comics with a natural wine pairing go to waste. Drink up.

Shameless plug: we might be blundering about with a microphone, trying to do short interviews for the podcast. Do say hi.

The Lengths

 “I guess every coming of age story winds up reading like the emo Tumblr suicide note of the child you’d thought you’d always be”

Howard Hardiman’s The Lengths was picked up in the New Statesman this week. They've had a lot of good comics writing lately, and this was no exception. After picking up The Lengths myself at Thought Bubble this year, I’d say it definitely deserves the attention.

It's the story of Eddie, an art school drop-out struggling to hold his relationships together, and Ford, a fledgling rent boy with a broadening callous streak. They are the same person, and The Lengths is about tangling and untangling those identities.

In a few fairly superficial ways it’s not unlike Not My Bag – it’s an identity story, text heavy, in heavily stylized monochrome. It’s about how a couple of impulsive decisions and a cloud of temptations lead a rather naïve protagonist down a trail of forking identity, and the quiet little revelation that eventually leads him back. Only, the protagonist in The Lengths sells his arse rather than designer sweaters, and he has the head of a dog.

Actually, let’s get the dog thing out of the way now. This is not Disney. It is not Redwall. In places the style is scratchy and brutal and it certainly isn’t cute. Some of the dog breeds are used to quickly telegraph traits, others just to give characterful faces. They’re aggressively physical, and the human/canine disconnect emphasises that. There's two types of incongruity at work here, and they both help grab attention. One is just having dog heads on the bodies of what often look like underwear models, the other is that this isn't your kids' section talking animal story. When these dog-people play video games, or have coffee, or nosh each-other off, it can just spark a bit more attention that it otherwise might. It's a little flourish, and it's not overplayed.

It may not be overly saucy and explicit, but The Lengths is not shy about its sexuality. In places it almost has a swagger. The seasoned-escort Nelson in particular is like some kind of improbably-buff BDSM Anubis with a torso from the wrong end of a Rob Liefeld sex fantasy. Seriously. I’d love to believe he’s a joke about that Captain America cover. And again, his bull terrier head just foregrounds the aggressive physique.

Stylistically, The Lengths is an odd one. It uses actual panels very sparingly, more commonly layering images around each-other and using a lot of whole page layouts. Text floats, and images associate spatially, often radiating around the point of the page’s focus. That focus is typically Eddie, and often his memories. The book is told through his experiences, and the world often flows around him, surrounding him with images and collapsing into panels or expanding to a page spread when it brings him up short. Visually, it’s fantastically structured.

In fact, that's largely why I bought it. The first page kind of suckered me. The amount of character creation and tone setting it gets done with almost no words and very few lines is impressive. The world feels real, too. Chatting very briefly to Howard at Thought Bubble (he’s utterly lovely, incidentally) he spent a lot of time researching it. The story is not documentary, it’s not a broad exploration of the sex trade, for instance. But it rests on top of a series of interviews and conversations that help make it feel concrete, plausible. Likewise the relationships – the group of friends and boyfriends and casual encounters it’s spun around, they have defined, neatly-crafted tones of voice. The geeky milieu makes me think of people I know, or certainly people I've met.

It's sweet in places - it's built around a gentle, tentative love story. Getting together with Dan forces Eddie to try and reconcile his two lives. Through that stress he explores previous relationships, wrong turns, and how he ended up here at all. The ending (again, similar to Not My Bag) is self-awareness and the start of something rather than big denouement fireworks.

I picked up The Lengths for the first page, for being a bit striking and visibly well-constructed. That stays true throughout, and I'd recommend others picking it up not just for that style, but for the character work that carries through it.

Not My Bag

Appropriately for a book that is at least in part about the lure of luxury aesthetics, Not My Bag is a gorgeous piece of publishing deign. The endpapers are a grey marl like polished concrete, the print stock is thick, the type is clear and stylish - it's beautiful  and it should probably have been a hardback.

In it, Sina Grace (Books with Pictures,  Lil' Depressed Boy, and Cedric Hollows) recounts his days working in a department store, being sucked into its high-competition, high-fashion world, and going just slightly mad at the edges. It's not quite Sad Comics, but it's definitely black and white, slice of life, nodding to Blankets comics. That may not be a genre, but it's certainly a recognizable package of styles.

Not My Bag is personal and confessional, with Grace unafraid in places of showing us his less flattering sides. The young artist takes the job to pay the bills, and, haunted by lingering neuroses and failed relationships, slides into superficiality, occasional bitterness, and crass materialism. It ends in the only way it could end - a quiet catastrophe of imposture with Grace storming out of the store, forced to choose an identity and realizing he has chosen correctly.

But there are some gorgeous panels and page compositions taking us through that ending. The day to day of it, the body of the story, is a joy of little observations. The haggard and fading sales shark; the new manager, masked, and sinister verging on occult; the sudden breaks in the visual flow - replacing realism with something emotionally mimetic and decomposing the arrangement of panels to pull out a little detail or foreground a powerful moment; it's good stuff. The book excels when it takes something - most often fashion - and anatomizes it, often dedicating  a full page to details, annotating, and exploring.

The retail days that make up the story are a thread of these moments and details. Character interactions will suddenly pull into meticulously sketched touchstones, amplifying the feeling of an identity built out of objects. There's a porcelain pony that represents an old love's heart in ways we are never told. There are memories rendered as photographs or letters, an office full of snow globes, tie pins, cuff links and shoes. People and places are often far less detailed than things, and the big emotional moments - panic, especially - see a vastly simplified visual style, with fewer and softer lines, more curves, more blocks of colour.

Grace's protagonist-self shows us little or nothing of him as an artist. He draws largely off stage. His love of comics is assumed rather than introduced. It's almost a shock to hear comics mentioned at all, much less see him hand one of his books to his boss. His trip to Comic Con is abstracted to a conversation on the stairs. It's sparse, gentle, and slight, where the retail conference before it is a riot of a page. Comics, art, to an extent relationships are not part of this world, and the trip precipitates his final crisis at the department store.

The effect is an incredibly tight focus - there is little outside retail, and little of the retail world outside fashion. Our gaze is tightly controlled, and we're left watching Grace reconstruct his identity around objects, and narrow his relationships to something equally transactional, commercial, and superficial. It's rough going in the middle, and you want to shake him by the shoulders a little. 

The revelation then, that "none of these faces matter", can only seem a little small after all of this. He's snapping out of making some dumb mistakes, and realizing he's been chasing something profoundly artificial. It's not that deep or original, and it doesn't pretend to be. Again, the details are the powerful part. So it stops. There's a disconnect between the narrating and narrated selves, and we don't see quite how Grace gets from there to here. We see him realize he was screwing up in time to stop, and we see him learn that stopping is possible. That's pretty cool.

Not My Bag is well worth picking up. It's a fascinating exploration of the balance of show and tell, and of storytelling through objects and details. It's uncomfortable in places - there are some cringing moments of lack of self-awareness - but it is itself a beautiful little object.