pornokitsch

SFX Weekender 3: The Morning After

You guys! You guys! We went to Wales! For a convention! It was very cold! There were transportation foul-ups and weather-related foul-ups and frozen grass and authors everywhere and BRIAN BLESSED and pouring rain and icicles hanging off the tips of our noses and Craig Charles and NO LEEKS, like seriously, Wales; what the hell? And we had lunch in Oxford and breakfast at a Little Chef, which was described to this expat as being "the British Denny's" and EVERYTHING WAS AWESOME.

Are you ready?

Let's do this thing.

The SFX Weekender 3

The Weekender is drawing nigh, and Pornokitsch is here to help!

We've journeyed down to Rye the last two years, but the Weekender is being held at a new location this year - Prestatyn, in Wales! Here are some exciting Prestatyn facts you may wow your roommates with:

• Prestatyn has been inhabited since prehistoric times. The Romans liked it, too; there's evidence that a Roman fort stood on the road from Chester to Caernarfon.
• Prestatyn's name is a Welsh corruption of an English corruption of the Anglo-Saxon words preosta (priest) and tun (farm). Priestfarm! 
• Prestatyn was just a teeny fishing hamlet until the nineteenth century, when the Victorians got into sea-bathing and ran a railroad out to it. Apparently the Prestatyn beaches are very nice (in the summer)!
• Prestatyn was bombed during WWII - but not by the Germans! It was one of the few locations in the UK to be hit by the Italian Air Force!
• Philip Larkin once write a poem about Prestatyn! Gold star for anyone who memorizes at least a stanza before the Weekender.
• A bog mummy, known as "Prestatyn Child," was found in 1984, apparently nearby!

More tips, tricks, recaps & musings below...

Post-script: The Kitschies' Steampunk Evening

Thank you to everyone for taking part in last night's Steampunk shenanigans. We hope you all had as much fun as we did.

Below, we've put together a quick list of the featured guests from last night and some of their more overtly (or potentially or arguably) Steampunk work. 

This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list of Steampunk (or quasi-Steampunk or alt-Victoriana or dustpunk or not-so-much-punk) recommendations. However, these are the lovely people who gave a lot of their time and energy towards the goal of lively debate.

If you enjoyed their discussion at the event, please take the time to check out their work in more detail - both Steampunk and otherwise.

Post-Script: London MCM Expo, 28-29 May

"I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me."  - Bob Dylan

Every year, we spent 363 days forgetting the vastness that is MCM Expo. And then two days realizing it anew. MCM Expo is big. Very, very big. Elbow room was already at a premium by 11 am on Saturday morning - an hour before it officially even opened. And who could blame the fifty thousand or so impassioned geeks that crowded every square inch of real estate - the Expo promises something for everyone.

In fact, experience has shown that the key to maneuvering the Expo is to hit your comfort zone early (and not often). Go early and make a beeline for the stuff you really care about - be it the Steampunk corner, the Comics Village, the games demos, the sneak previews, etc. etc. etc. As the day wears on and the convention gets more crowded, it becomes harder to have a more in-depth experience with anything. So get your autographs and your sampling done before the sun's over the yardarm, then spend the afternoon doing some shameless gawking.

Post-Script: China Miéville at Foyles

The "kids' table" might be a purely American phenomenon, but I suspect that every culture has its version. The concept is simple. At any sort of massive event (Thanksgiving, wedding, grandma's birthday,...), there's the dining table for the adults that's laid out with the proper linen, the best crystal, the matching silverware and the immaculately carved roast beast.

Meanwhile, one room over, there's a rickety card table with six mismatched chairs, paper plates and hot dogs. That's for us kids.

In my family, this was supposedly a temporary exile. Once you were Bar or Bat Mitzvah'd, you were an adult (says GOD) and were therefore definitionally worthy of the dining room. Alas, that bar kept shifting higher and higher. The simple fact was, no matter how old I got, I was still the youngest in the family. Until the next generation came along, it would always be the six of us and our paper tablecloth.

At the time, I was boiling with the injustice of the situation. I had adult conversation! I knew big words and had a spelling bee trophy to prove it! Why did I go through the pain and trauma of wearing my best (only) collared shirt if I was only sitting with (gasp) other kids?

Post-Script: Bestselling Genre Fiction in Russia (LBF2011)

The London Book Fair had a focus on the Russian market for 2011, which meant that best-selling authors like Boris Akunin and Sergei Lukyanenko were roaming its hallowed halls. 

One seminar, "Bestselling Genre Fiction in Russia", had Mr. Lukyanenko, Tatiana Ustinova and Dmitry Glukhovsky as panelists. Although I believe it was probably intended to be more of an optimistic, promotional conversation about the successful state of genre fiction in the Russian market, it quickly evolved into a well-considered debate about the relationship between science fiction and politics.

What follows is a rough summary of the conversation and those quotes that I managed to capture.*

Guest Post: The Goddamn Plane Has Crashed Into The Mountain! by Den Patrick

[Editor's note: We're very pleased to have another guest post from Den Patrick, whose writing, lettering and editorial work can be found in Weaponizer, the upcoming DECONSTRUCTED and every issue of the Transformers Comic.]

The Goddamn Plane Has Crashed Into The Mountain!
(Or Thoughts On My First Panel at the SFX Weekender 2)

I found myself under the blazing lights of the screening room, sat alongside Pat Mills, Tony Lee and Bryan Talbot. Bryan Talbot has been making comics longer than I’ve been alive, and Pat Mills launched 2000AD. 

Paul Gravett I am not. A quick look at my shelves confirms most of my purchases as Hellboy orIron Man. That said, I do have some non-US titles and had dutifully packed them to take with me as talking points. Plus there’s the small consideration that I edited (at the time of the Con) two children’s titles for the UK newsstand.

With hindsight, I now realise the panel went sour very quickly. Instead of talking with enthusiasm about the wealth of comics being originated in Europe, Japan and the new wave of Indian creators, the tone quickly settled into ‘Why Comics Don’t Work In The UK’.

PAT MILLS' EPIC FAIL; or, why don't the wimminfolk read funnybooks?

Disturbing news for the comics industry from Newsarama: "comics and graphic novel sales are down 22.91% compared [with] January 2010."  Although the SFX Weekender's Saturday panel "Beyond the US: the wider world of comics" was ostensibly devoted to a discussion about "what's going on outside of the big US comics publishers," the conversation inevitably turned internal.  Why are US and UK audiences so devoted to US superhero franchises?  What's wrong with the comics industry in the UK that readers don't seem interested in the higher-concept stuff? 

We're fortunate to have our guest editor Den Patrick on tap for the inside scoop.  Den confronted these issues and more alongside the other panel members - Tony Lee, Bryan Talbot and Pat Mills - so I'm going to leave the afterword to him.

Mostly.

The issue of female readers reared its ugly head a number of times during the discussion. Why aren't there more comics written by women, drawn by women and read by women? What is the deal with girls, yo?

Well, Pat Mills has a thought.  Publishers won't publish stuff women want to read!  You see, he knows a woman who wrote a comic for women, "kind of a British Sex and the City," which hasn't been able to find a publisher.  But it's awesome!  It's all about these "women who are a couple of steps down from a hooker.  Not hookers, but close." 

Post-Script: Five Unsung Heroes of SFX

I suspect the SFX team will be juggling kudos and criticism (both well-deserved) for the next year - any event this size will have its ups and down. The main thing? We had a brilliant time and look forward to next year.

Here are a few people that we encountered who helped make our convention a great experience: 

1) The bar staff in the Queen Victoria Pub. Of course we would start with the bar staff. Chatting with the nice folks behind the counter, we learned that most of them had just come back from a week's holiday. Their return the day of SFX was a HALO drop into Armageddon, and they did amazingly well. Prompt & polite service and plenty of staff helped juggle 2,000 thirsty convention-goers. I overheard one patron complaining of a "flat pint", and the manager had it efficiently whisked away and replaced before he could utter a second word. Great service under rough conditions. Well done.

Four more heroes after the jump.

Post-Script: SFX Weekender Year 2

Although we blogged extensively about our experience at the inauguaral SFX Weekender last year, we used our first blog post not to talk about teh awesums (and there were many) but rather the other, more intangible side of the experience:  things like shell-hunting on the beach at dawn, deciphering the grafitti of a miserable kid and rustling up stacks of bacon sandwiches.  You can read last year's post here.

We'd like to begin this year's write ups of the Weekender the same way.