From: Paul Braidford <[paul braidford] at [unn.ac.uk]>
Subject: Newcastle Comics Festival - the verdict (longish)
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 96 17:02:00 PDT

The Newcastle International Comic Art Festival (herafter NICAF) was held 
during the week of June 10-16....which means this should have been posted 
weeks ago, and would have been if I hadn't gone on extended vacation more or 
less the minute the festival ended. Instead Comics International manages to 
beat me to a review. <sigh>

The festival itself was, well, small, but really was a festival, not a 
convention - proper exhibitions, talks, workshops. Full marks to Suzy Varty 
for effort, but there's only so much you can do on a shoestring budget. We 
ended up with most of what was planned, but fairly disjointed; mostly small 
exhibitions scattered all over the city, in some bizarre locations. So the 
exhibition of Hunt Emerson's Phenomonomix art, accompanied by some great 
"Fortean artifacts" (a pitta bread with the face of Elvis, a horned 
turnip...) ended up at the Museum of Antiquities at Newcastle University, 
looking rather lost amongst the Greek statues and Ancient British weapons.

The cartoon exhibit at the Castle Keep was better-organised - some 
well-chosen cartoons from Heath Robinson, Giles, Ronald Searle, Donald 
McGill, all the usual suspects from Punch :), a bit of cartooning history, 
and a nice setting. The other Emerson exhibition ended up at a Quayside 
theatre, with a great statue of Max Zillion, sterling design work - dayglo 
swirls covering the walls - and live jazz, while the Breakfast Project 
exhibit  - famous women eating breakfast, by female artists - was squeezed 
into way too small a space, but was enjoyable enough.

[A question: how well-known is The Breakfast Project? I'd never heard of it 
until NICAF, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything...]

The most impressive exhibit was, surprisingly, Viz Magazine's, with two 
giant Fat Slags statues, set in a mock-up of a Ladies Toilet, complete with 
dispensers for "cherry-flavoured tampons". If you've never read Viz before, 
it doesn't get much more subtle than that : )   The Carol Swain installation 
(UV lighting, gravel, paving slabs) right next to it (the sort of odd 
juxtaposition we should have had more of) looked weak by comparison.

The guests: momentarily disarmed on realising Hunt Emerson exactly resembles 
his dirty old man caricature, but he's a very nice bloke. Met the Stakhano 
people briefly, while they were teaching some rapt ten-year-olds how to draw 
(a highlight, that). Missed Paul Gravett and Tony Bennett's talks (hungover, 
early start), but reports were fairly good.

[Stakhano allegedly took 15 days to make it from France to Newcastle...]

Bad point: nobody came. Most of the exhibits were deserted. I know they had 
to schedule the thing to coincide with Euro '96 to get the Eurofest funding, 
but when the main Saturday of the festival coincides with the biggest 
England-Scotland match for yonks....

OTOH, press coverage was great. The local papers ran two accurate, 
non-patronising articles, in which the words Biff! Bang! and Pow! didn't 
appear once (to put it another way, they basically let Suzy write 'em 
herself). Somebody said Hunt made it onto ITN News - anyone see it?

And that's it. Not bad for a first one, hopefully it'll be better next year, 
but God knows where the money's coming from.  Cash donations, bequests, body 
parts readily accepted...

     Paul B.