This weekend I’m heading back to Kendal in the UK for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, my first time back in 7 years.
I’m very excited to be back.
The festival has asked me to captain Team Asterix in the opening night debate at Brewery Arts on Friday night. Fellow ex-NCS President Bill Morrison is captaining Team Tintin. He’s a lovely man, and he is wrong, and I intend to prove it with slides.
And props.
In October 2017, instead of recuperating from the four most sleep-deprived days of my life at New York Comic Con, I decided to immediately fly to the UK for four even more intense days at an international comic art festival.
Because of course I did.
I kept a sketchbook diary of the whole trip…
July 1st, 2017
I popped across the pond to help plan bits of the festival, a 24-hour Manchester trip during which I slept a grand total of 0 hours. That flight was with the infamous Thomas Cook Airlines, a company that provided only a seat and a fart-filled fuselage (and an airline that has since ceased to exist) I’d like to think I contributed. I sat next to a screaming baby the entire way.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Wednesday. I got a haircut, pulled on my crappy suit jacket, over-packed my bag, and boarded another Thomas Cook flight to the motherland, where I sat next to the smelliest human on earth, who decided my lap was a perfectly reasonable place to rest his foot, and directly in front of (you guessed it) another inconsolable baby. I swear it was the same one. This baby was following me around the world. The baby’s father slept like a log, as it wailed for five straight hours and I attempted to sleep… and failed at it professionally.
Friday, October 13, 2017.
(Yes, Friday the 13th.)
I landed with a thud in Manchester at 9:55am, was met by Karen, a lovely gardener from Kendal. I ingested a year’s worth of caffeine and was driven two hours directly from the plane to Kendal College to teach a full theatre of students how to make art on a Wacom tablet. I could barely assemble two consecutive sentences, but I managed to cover the most important advice.
Karen patiently drove me through the centuries-old town of Kendal, educating me on the local wool industry and the many lakes* of the Lake District.
*There is one lake.
By now I’d been awake for 24 hours straight and was hoping to count imaginary sheep instead of real ones, so she dropped me at my lodgings for the weekend: Stonecross Manor Inn. Or, as the locals call it, “Fawlty Towers.” Or “Flowery Twats.” Or something.
The place was built in the Jurassic period. The walls burbled with boilers and snoring septuagenarians. The power sockets crackled ominously whenever anything was plugged in, and the wifi only worked if you sat at the bottom of the staircase holding your laptop at exactly waist height. Also, it was haunted. It used to be an orphanage.
Because of course it was.
We weren’t even meant to be there. The nice hotel in town was hosting a wedding that weekend, so the festival guests got relegated to the haunted boiler-factory on the edge of town. I checked the guestbook to see who’d stayed before us.
After a nap (interrupted by a screaming baby in the next room, yes, actually the same baby) and a full hour negotiating with a showerhead that required me to solve a riddle and answer three questions to a troll before dispensing a slow drizzle of lukewarm, off-brown water, I ambled downstairs to find my National Cartoonists Society compatriots: Steve, Luke, Joe and Deb McGarry, Tom and Anna Richmond, and the inimitable, legendary Sergio Aragones, all swapping horror stories about their own first encounters with the plumbing.
Then we were shuttled off to be received by the Mayor. A man of few words.
