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| Pictures of health: a thriving indie comics scene on display Comica Comiket at the ICA was buzzing with invention and ideasThe launch of a comics anthology that pitches itself as a British alternative to Dave Eggers' McSweeney's was one of the highlights of Sunday's Comica Comiket, a fair for independently published comics that took place at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts on Sunday. Five hundred copies of the biannual Solipsistic Pop, which includes art, short graphic stories, mini-comics stuck to the inside front and back covers, and a 16-page pull-out collection of "adventure stories", went on sale for the first time as part of the annual festival, which was bigger and more crowded than ever before. "British alternative comics are thriving," explained Solipsistic Pop editor Tom Huddlesworth from behind a pretty display of issue #1, "but there's not really a decent publishing infrastructure in place to support them. Solipsistic Pop is an attempt to create that."Solipsistic Pop wasn't the only organisation represented that's helping to champion new under-the-radar graphic work. Alex Spiro, co-founder of small press Nobrow was sitting behind a table covered with back issues of the biannual eponymous magazine, an anthology of illustrations, as well as comics Nobrow puts out in small runs. The most eye-catching of these was Tom Rowe's Said the Computer to the Specialist, with a black-on-black cover you could only make out when it caught the light, and pages of illustrations of old 60s supercomputers and analogue recording equipment inside.Last Hours, formerly a music magazine and now a small press itself, has been a mainstay of London's self-publishing scene for years, and creator Edd was dispensing tips on where to find vegan food as he manned the table opposite Nobrow's. Back copies of the mag (which covers punk and politics) sat next to two brand new anthologies: an anthology of Isy Morgenmuffel's brilliant autobiographical comic zine Morgenmuffel, called Diary of a Miscreant, which details Isy's adventures at protests, projects and parties; and an anthology of 17 graphic stories looking at modern policing and violence, called Excessive Force. On the slightly more hi-fi side of things, Marc Ellerby, whose acerbic Love The Way You Love was published by the American Oni Press, and Jamie McKelvie, whose indie high-school fantasy series Suburban Glamour is put out by Image Comics and has just (top secret!) been optioned for a movie, were sharing a table and mocking each other for getting excited about signing autographs. Jamie was also hawking copies of Phonogram, the series about pop music and magic he co-created with Kieron Gillen, and wearing a Scott Pilgrim t-shirt. For a free comics hit, check out Marc Ellerby's web comic Ellerbisms, a funny, fresh diary series that's (usually) updated twice a week. Of course, the whole point of indie publishing is that you don't have to sit around waiting for someone else to vet and put out your work, and there were more self-made comics around than there's room here to sing the praises of. A shout's got to go out to Dave "Lando" Lander's brilliant, dark, silent (and self-published) comic Untranslated, which involves bleak, delicately drawn warscapes and dialogue in an alien language. In Dave's words: "It's up to the viewer to decode what is happening rather then to be spoon-fed a moralistic story. This relates to the way the news has reported conflicts in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where we have to rely on translation and editing by new organisations. It often provides us with an oversimplified view of conflicts, rather then helping us to find a more balanced independent viewpoint."Another silent comic that's a huge success is Eekeemoo, written and drawn by Will Morris-Julien and coloured by his wife Liz, which started life as a web series about a ninja eskimo, gained around 350,000 readers in places like Japan, the Philippines and Poland, and has now become a paper-and-ink comic series too, put out by Butternut. On the web, it's drawn in long, vertical strips that you read by scrolling down, and it's full of bold, meditative white-on-black art.There was a lot more ace work on display – Laura Oldfield Ford's "psychogeographical exploration of London" Savage Messaiah, and Ushio's Japanofail deserve a mention - but you should take a look at this list of everyone who was at the Comiket and leave a comment if there's anything particularly awesome I haven't mentioned.ComicsJess Hollandguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A French excursion for classic nursery rhymes The actor and polyglot Luis d'Antin van Rooten turned classic nursery rhymes into 18th-century French poetry in Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames (hint: try saying it out aloud). Here we publish his version of Jack and Jill, with scholarly notes, as well as a reading of the text by the publisher Patrick Janson-SmithPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Christmas books stocking fillers | Books review It must be Christmas, because the bookshops are full. People who wouldn't usually venture inside Waterstone's even to escape the rain are now roaming the aisles, staring at the glossy covers, wondering what to give a taciturn niece or a dotty uncle. Slim, complicated novels have been banished to the basement, and the front tables are laden with pithy little books with frantic illustrations and droll titles.Among this annual tidal wave of festive stupidity and gutless commercialism, there are actually a few books which are worth keeping in the loo rather than sending straight to Oxfam. The nicest of them is The Country Diaries: A Year in the British Countryside (Canongate, £20), edited by Alan Taylor, a solid hardback, elegant enough to justify its rather high price, packed with rural snippets from diarists through the centuries. Quotation is the only way to explain the charm of this anthology, so here's Francis Kilvert writing on 7 October 1874: "For some time I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering glancing twinkling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. This afternoon I saw the word written in the poplar leaves. It was 'dazzle'. The dazzle of the poplars."If you're looking for something cheaper and frothier, Sam Leith's Sod's Law: Why Life Always Lands Butter Side Down (Atlantic, £7.99) is a compendium of funny stories which, unusually for such books, is actually very funny. The general theme is "the blind perversity of the inanimate", but that's really just an excuse to gather together a bunch of entertaining anecdotes. Or you could try Complete and Utter Zebu: The Shocking Lies We're Told Every Day (Old Street, £8.99) by Simon Rose and Steve Caplin, a splenetic unpicking of scams, statistics and frauds perpetrated by politicians, publicists, supermarkets and all the other people trying to ruin our lives. The title refers to a Brazilian beast which apparently provides much of the meat that restaurants describe as finest British steak.Bookish nerds could be pleasantly diverted by Once Again to Zelda: Fifty Great Dedications and Their Stories (Picador, £9.99) by Marlene Wagman-Geller, or mildly amused by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin's Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter (Penguin, £6.99). Hamlet, Moby-Dick, Frankenstein and about 50 other monumental works from the canon are retold in trite tweets of 140 characters or fewer. "My husband returned when he heard the news. I told him he was a father. His eyes lit up. Then I told him the truth. He started crying, lol." In case you haven't guessed, that was Anna Karenina.In the five years since its first publication, Schott's Almanac (Bloomsbury, £16.99) has become an institution, filled with eye-comforting typography and mind-numbing trivia. No loo should be without it. People with more particular tastes might enjoy The Archers Miscellany (BBC Books, £9.99), Joanna Toye's exhaustive exhumation of the Ambridge files, complete with maps, recipes and a detailed description of Eddie Grundy's gnomes. John Harris's Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, the Myths and the Madness (Sphere, £9.99) looks rather like one of those Reader's Digest guides to fossils or knitting or country walks, and is similarly stuffed with lovely retro drawings, but actually tells you all kinds of wonderfully silly and subversive details about rock and its stars: snippets of scurrilous interviews with the Gallaghers and Status Quo; an A-Z of notable Beatles women; the great rock hotels of Munich, Marrakech and Cleveland, Ohio; and how to teach yourself guitar in an hour.Of these trivia-packed tomes, my favourite is Kevin Jackson's Bite: A Vampire Handbook (Portobello, £9.99), a witty whirlwind tour of blood-sucking monsters from the Assyrian utukku to Edward Cullen, crammed with all kinds of intriguing and completely useless information: the contents of Bram Stoker's library; the various meetings of Dracula and Sherlock Holmes; and whether Jane Eyre actually saw a vampire. Ideal for any teenage Twilight fan – if only to convince them that they should be watching Buffy instead.Following her success with masculine love letters, Ursula Doyle has edited Love Letters of Great Women (Boxtree, £9.99). All are interesting, many are poignant, but none is more memorable than Katherine Mansfield's curt note to a rival: "Dear Princess Bibesco, I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world."In Dear Me: A Letter to my Sixteen-Year-Old Self (Simon & Schuster, £12.99), edited by Joseph Galliano and promising £1 from every copy sold to the Elton John Aids Foundation, a roll-call of luvvies – Baz Luhrmann, Stephen Fry, Patsy Kensit – scribble notes to their younger selves. The results are unexpectedly revealing and surprisingly moving, but none of them can quite compete with the excellent advice offered by Sue Perkins, attractively illustrated with a yellow glove: "Whatever you do, DON'T make that flippant remark to the customs official in Los Angeles in 1999. It will make you feel very differently about Marigolds."Finally, the prize for the year's best title goes to Roger Lewis's Seasonal Suicide Notes (Short Books, £12.99). It's the diary of a disgruntled literary gent, full of bile and bad jokes, and mostly very funny. "Missed the Faber party because (a) there'd be too many people there I'd cheerfully like to stab in the eye with a fork and (b) The Bill was on." The perfect present for any grumpy old man, especially if he has an unpublished novel in his bottom drawer.Josh Lacey's The One That Got Away is published by Marion Lloyd.Josh Laceyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Ten of the best bad lawyers in literature Bad lawyers in literatureVholes There are plenty of nasty lawyers in Dickens, including Tulkinghorn in Bleak House, but the novel also features the most thoroughly vampirish attorney in all literature. Vholes – "a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were cold" – is a chancery lawyer, "dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin".Mr Shepherd Sir Walter Elliot's "civil, cautious lawyer" in Jane Austen's Persuasion lives off the takings from his employer. Expert at saying whatever will flatter the spendthrift baronet into doing his wishes, Shepherd has a deep scheme. He is plotting with his young widowed daughter, Mrs Clay, to trap Sir Walter into marriage.Guillaumin Lawyers are predators in Madame Bovary. When Emma Bovary's debts catch up with her, she approaches the lawyer, Guillaumin, who appears to sympathise with her plight. His motives are naturally nastier than she first supposes. He agrees to advance the cash to her if she will grant him, in return, her sexual favours.Dr Azzecca-garbugli The name of the corrupt lawyer in Alessandro Manzoni's historical novel The Betrothed means "Quibble-weaver". Renzo and Lucia try to recruit his help when they find their planned marriage thwarted by the local baron, Don Rodrigo. Azzecca-garbugli is full of fine sentiment, but is, naturally, in the pay of the don.Herr Huld In Kafka's The Trial, we are made to realise that the worst lawyer is the one who is supposed to be on your side. Josef K is represented by the verbose and ineffectual Huld, who is himself entirely complicit in the nightmarish proceedings in which K is enmeshed. Kafka was also a lawyer.Dowling In Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Dowling is the corrupt lawyer in the pay of our hero's hypocritical half-brother, Blifil. He offers bribes to anyone willing to bring a false prosecution against Tom, and in the dénouement is found to have kept from Squire Allworthy the information about Tom's true parenthood. Fielding was another lawyer.Soames Forsyte In The Man of Property, the first novel in John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, Soames is a rising London solicitor who heads the firm of Forsyte, Bustard and Forsyte. Though reserved and apparently cautious, he will do anything for worldly success, and becomes a sexual sadist when he realises that his beautiful wife, Irene, despises him.Voltore The eponymous villain of Ben Jonson's Volpone pretends that he is about to die to fool, among others, the lawyer Voltore ("vulture"), who preys on human carcasses. As Mosca tells Voltore: "You have a gift, sir, (thank your education,) / Will never let you want, while there are men, / And malice, to breed causes." He helps convict the innocent Bonario and Celia of debauchery, but is mysteriously struck by conscience in the final act.Torvald Helmer Nora's husband in Ibsen's A Doll's House is a provincial lawyer who has recently been promoted to director of the local bank. When he finds that his wife has been guilty of forgery to procure a loan, Helmer reveals himself to be a small-minded patriarch and hypocrite, and Nora leaves him (and their children).Sandor Himmelstein In Herzog, the protagonist foolishly goes to stay with the lawyer who is managing his divorce. Himmelstein, like other Bellow lawyers, is a clever bully. He pours contempt on Herzog's unworldliness ("effing eggheads! It takes an ignorant bastard like me to fight liberal causes"), vouchsafes him slivers of his philosophy ("We're all whores") and smashes the dishes in his bitter fury at the world.Charles DickensJane AustenGustave FlaubertFranz KafkaHenry FieldingBen JonsonHenrik IbsenSaul BellowJohn Mullanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Iona Singleton wins TS Eliot prize shadowing scheme Iona Singleton of South Wilts Grammar School is the winner of this year's TS Eliot prize for poetry shadowing scheme. The scheme gives students the chance to read poems by each of the poets shortlisted for the Eliot prize and to enter a writing competition putting the case for their choice of poet. Iona Singleton chose Philip Gross's collection The Water Table.I love the River Severn. I see it every time I cross the bridge into Wales, half water, half mud, half river, half sea. Philip Gross captures it perfectly in "The Severn Song", and takes its nebulousness even further. Because you cannot see where water changes to mud, or river to sea, he explores the concept that it can be all these things at the same time, "not this-then-that, not either-or". It is brown and blue, flowing and still. We are old and young, father and son, "we were no age at all". This beautifully illustrates the power of perception, "two things can be true". Through the most vivid of representations, "the kind of water that's thicker than blood" Gross captures his audience with the beauty of his written word. The fluidity of the piece naturally represents the water that is at the heart of his poetry, something that can be so still and yet so rough and powerful, "with waves that did not break or fall". And yet, the poem is, in part, of course, not about the river at all. It is about something just as indefinable as water : "self". Just as the river is "not this-then-that, not either-or", so too is the self, both particular and otherwise all at the same time. He is old and young, you and I, alluding to the concept that an individual can exhibit multiple characteristics. And just as the river becomes one with the sea, so we are one with the world: both a small part, and the whole thing, all at the same time.The same theme continues in "The Moveable Island" that is both there and not, "most there only when you look away…whichever shore you look from, it seems closer to the other" - perfectly unattainable. The island might be real or imagined. Maybe it represents dreams and ambitions, always just out of reach, "like a thought into sleep". In "Severn Song", Gross focuses largely on the languid river, whereas here he reminds us that the Severn has forty foot tides, and strong bore – "these grand tides like a lesson in bad governance, all power…" In a wonderful touch, he mocks their lack of a "fixed purpose", likening them to God dithering. And yet, despite all this, the poem is as much about absence as presence: an island that may be nothing more than an imagining of his ageing binoculars in a constantly shifting river – a river that is at the heart of both poems. For while the poems deal in the fluid nature of self, part of the joy is that they are firmly grounded by the solid physical geographical fact that is the River Severn. These poems truly stood out to me and it is for this reason that I believe the works of Philip Gross should be credited; they are inspiring to read and equally as thought-provoking. I have enjoyed them immensely.The TS Eliot Prize for Poetry Shadowing Scheme is run jointly by the Poetry Book Society and the English and Media Centre's emagazine.TS Eliot prize for poetryPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |