BIRMINGHAM COMIC SHOW YEAR TWO PART TWO
Since this was two weeks' ago now, I'm going to keep this second part quite brief as I should have posted something about two weeks' back. The Saturday at the show was pretty good as business was brisk: I was selling some trades as well as copies of the TRIPWIRE Annual. I had excused myself from the Hellboy panel because Peter Doherty wanted to do it instead and so I was at the table pretty much all the time. Got a few people coming up, saying nice things about TRIPWIRE and the Annual. On the Saturday night, I went to have Chinese but got horribly lost, this time on foot in Birmingham and took forty minutes to find the restaurant. Dave Morris, his friend Pat, Andy and Kirsty (who may be colouring Hidden City when we pull our finger out) came along to that and I managed to forget to text my friend Andy Winter to tell him where we were going, so we didn't see each other that night. On the Sunday, I interviewed Kevin Nowlan for a panel which was a last minute thing but seemed to go well. We went for a really nice Indian in a place called Shimla Pinks on Broad Street with about nine of us including Dave Baillie, Dan Fish, Dave Morris, Pat and some others. Dave Baillie grabbed a train back down to London while I drove another member of the group, Anna, to Kings Heath where she was staying with Pete Ashton. I found Kings Heath alright but got horribly lost again (surprise surprise) trying to find Edgbaston again and ended up driving around in circles, wondering whether I was being filmed for some sort of Candid Camera style programme. On Monday I drove back to London using a very circuitous route that took me through Stratford-Upon-Avon to Banbury, where I stopped and then onto Bicester, where I picked up the main road back to North London. So all in all this year's Birmingham show was an improvement on last year, in a better venue but Brum still isn't as visitor-friendly a city as Bristol and it seems very easy to get lost. Congratulations to James and Shane though for pulling it off. Highlights were seeing people like Dave Baillie, Duncan Fegredo, Mike Mignola (albeit very briefly but he did tell me that the Annual has pride of place in Barnes & Noble in Union Square, New York, which is very cool indeed), Dave Gibbons, Mike Conroy (weird that my relationship with CI is so different now to what it was a year ago)and loads of other people too numerous to mention. It was also great tosee my friends Steve and Murphy, who haven't been to a comic show together in about a decade, get motivated about drawing again and see them at a comic event. I really enjoyed the drive home too because the trees were changing colour and I got to see some spectacular parts of Warwickshire and the Cotswolds. Here are a couple of photos from the show and some photos from Banbury including the Banbury Cross which is mentioned in the rhyme.

LONDON'S DOCKLANDS
I know I said I'd post the second part of my Brum report and I will (on Saturday). But this week I've been working at the Independent, which is in South Quay, about a 10 minute walk from Canary Wharf. Docklands is a strange place: they're still developing it and so here are some shots, of them building two massive towers, called Pan Peninsula, a boat in the quay during the day and at night and a couple of random shots. The bright weather has gone for the moment and it feels properly like Winter now…

BIRMINGHAM COMIC SHOW YEAR TWO PART ONE
Last weekend I made the trek up to Birmingham to set up at the second BICS. Last year, the show was in December, in a less than salubrious area in the city and the weather was awful. This year, the organisers moved it up two months and to a modern venue, the Thinktank at Millennium Point. So I got up to Brum early evening on Friday 12th of October, taking a circuitous route through the Cotswolds, stopping at Chipping Norton. We were even lucky with the weather. But we got horribly lost on the myriad roundabouts and underpasses in Birmingham so it took quite some time to get from the venue to Edgbaston, where myself and Andy were staying in the flat of our friend Peter and his wife Crow…
Here are some photos of Chipping Norton. In the next post, I'll talk about the show proper…

RADIO SILENCE
The last two weeks have been very hectic which is why there hasn't been a post here since the end of September. I have been finishing off some work for Death Ray, including a Dave Gibbons interview, subbing some of the pages for Comics International and getting ready for the Birmingham International Comic Show, which was last weekend.I went to visit British sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss who lives in Oxford a couple of weeks back, to interview him for a Death Ray piece which should see print sometime in January. I had interviewed him years ago for a piece that never saw the light of day and, even though we managed to get there a little later than we had planned, he was very hospitable and a very intelligent, erudite and eloquent figure. It was fantastic to meet a man who is in his early eighties but is as passionate as he probably ever was. Here is a photo of the man himself. I'll be putting up my thoughts about the Birmingham Comic Show in my next post…