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| Photo pinched from @Creative_Dundee |
I
took part in Creative Dundee’s monthly event Make/Share last Wednesday. It's an open call to anyone making things to come and talk about what
they’re doing.
It’s
held at the MakerSpace in the Vision building at Dundee’s
waterfront. I knew I was one of three speakers, and as it runs
7-8.30pm, I had about half an hour.
There
was a limit on how many images you could take along – 4 or 5 in
total, which was perhaps a more problematic number to someone doing
comics rather than other creative endeavours, what with the emphasis being
on sequential storytelling. But no matter, I decided to show a page
each from the 4 most recent comics I’ve put out: “No Greater
Love” at the Guardian #opencomics page, “Tiddlywinks” in Dirty
Rotten Comics #5, “Silently Falling” in Jack Sprat #1; and “A
Book with Death in the Title” from the forthcoming Treehouse #7.
What
was interesting was not knowing the extent to which the audience was
familiar with comics. In one respect, I can talk about comics
minutiae forever, but how to structure a half hour talk to people who
maybe have no prior interest? A brief intro about how I came to
start doing comics and then the background to each of the 4 stories
was the way I went.
It’s
always great to hear people’s interpretations of my stories. An
intriguing one for "No Greater Love" came on this night, in which the mother had
died after giving birth and the father was now left alone. Because the story is told in images, there is a lot of
room for interpretation, and I found this take fascinating.
The
MakerSpace studio is filled with creative people with an interest
in technology. Another of last night’s speakers was Grant Richmond, who had taken
an old radio, gutted it like a fish and refilled it with modern
electronics, replacing the speakers and enabling it with wi-fi. Impressive, and he
still hasn’t finished tinkering with it. The other speaker Andrew Kieran, has an
enormous weaving machine onsite that he has transported around
Britain. It too had a technological aspect – one of his woven
articles has a mobile code as part of the pattern.
I enjoyed shoehorning self-published comics into
the creative arts arena last night. A
really fun evening.
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