Reflections on the UK Web and Mini Comics Thing

This Saturday I went to the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing event in London. It was a new event run by Patrick Findlay who had never done anything like this before. While there was a reasonable chance that it could have been a flop it most certainly wasn’t and everyone I spoke to came away impressed. It certainly got me invigorated about comics again, which was my main reason for going, and sparked off a lot of thoughts and ideas I hope to develop over the next few months.

On the long journey home I jotted down some reflections on the day. Here they are in no particular order:

Comics is a self contained world. I had plans, many plans, but none of them came to anything as the warm fuzzy envelope of comics consumed me. Go to the demo? Meet up with a (non-comics) mate? Pop into Tate Modern? It just ain’t gonna happen. The weekend was for comics and comics alone. It’s funny how this happens. I’ve visited many cities repeatedly for comics events but never really seen them outside of the venues and pubs occupied by “my lot”. This event was happening five minutes down the road from my old flat in Mile End but other than knowing how to get there it might as well have been in Glasgow.

As Saturday progressed I chatted with people I knew on the scene and caught up with news. As I repeated the short version of my rather interesting year it occurred to me that I seemed to be describing myself as a writer. This was very odd. For over a decade I’ve surrounded myself with cartoonists and other people who can define their art with ease but the nearest I ever got to a “what do you do” answer was “networking facilitator”, meaning I introduce people to other people in the hope they can help each other in some way. But in the last year I’ve been writing to such a degree that I appear to be a writer. Hmm.

Spring has arrived in the creative community as dreams and ideas, having floated aimlessly through the winter months, finally settle into fertile patterns and viable shapes. People were happy, positive and keen. Comics were being produced, bands touring, work happening. A great atmosphere.

Does Patrick Findlay, the organiser, fully comprehend what he has done? It was his first go at organising this sort of event and he looked shattered by the end. But whatever the results on paper the ramifications will be subtle and unclear. These things create echos beyond their significance. People meet, ideas merge, stuff develops. At an event 18 months ago that seemed a wash-out at the time an anthology was born, and this was no wash-out. The potentials of an event like this boggle the mind.

The scene survives on serendipity and surprises. Those of us in the centre of it all can do nothing but map what has happened. To preserve the future we merely nudge in the knowledge that while we have no idea as to the outcome it will be interesting.

Patterns that emerge have a touch of the surreal. I’m talking to a guy who has teamed up with a carrier of the flame I once carried. He turns out to be an old customer of mine from to 90s. Later a drunk man tells me how the day after he discovered BugPowder he met a theremin player who asked him if anything interesting had happened to him. He told her about this site run by this guy Pete Ashdown, or something, about small press comics. She proceeded to tell him all about me, what with her being an old friend and all.

And as if the vibes couldn’t be good enough, I won a prize. In an up-turned fish tank were a pile of small press comics and we were invited to guess how many pages there were. I imagined the pile was squashed down and guessed it to be 6.5cm tall. With a sheet of A4 paper being 0.1mm thick I put down 649 as my guess. The correct answer was 620. Re-fucking-sult. Of course 649 isn’t divisible by four and I should have known that. The next closest was Andy KK with 777. Who rules? I rule. Thanks to Gosh for supplying my prize, a copy of Blankets which I’d been wanting all year but couldn’t afford, and to Roger Langridge for the Modern Tales subscriptions for each winner.