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.
At the welcome dinner, I fanboyed out meeting Manchester’s own Stanley Chow, whose portraits you’ve seen at the top of every online New Yorker article next to the writer’s name. (If you've ever seen my avatar, you’ll know exactly how big a fan I am of his style.) He somehow defies every convention of asymmetry in caricature and distils a person’s entire aura into a few perfect shapes. He’s a wizard. With a Manc accent.
I found my table with Graham Dury from VIZ (the UK’s answer to MAD), Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) and Sergio Aragones (Living God). After mains, there was a 26-question trivia quiz for each table, projected onto a giant screen directly behind my head. At one point there was a question about me.
Every other table got it wrong.
Because of course they did.
From there we spilled out into the night and down the streets of Kendal to terrorise Ruskins Bar, where we sang karaoke and drank locally brewed ales until the wee hours, because body clocks be damned. I sang Drops of Jupiter by Train.
I maintain they liked it.
Then back to the haunted lodgings in seemingly the only cab in town, for a nightcap and a few spooky hours of sporadic shut-eye.
The next morning, after a full English breakfast of baked beans on toast with sausages, we were whisked to the Mayor’s Parlour at the Town Hall to learn about Kendal’s history and its rare, priceless artifacts.
A tall gentleman named Simon hovered about in white cotton gloves, nervously cradling centuries-old relics, then offered us our own gloves so we could hold the various shiny things while he told us fun facts about them.
From there we walked through the rain to the local tap house for ales and ham sandwiches. They love their beer very much in this town. They’d brewed several specifically for the festival. For dessert, we had chocolate cake. Made from beer.
That night was the big live drawing event at the Festival Hub, the Brewery Arts Centre (I told you they liked their beer). Steve McGarry and I co-hosted, with two artists working on Cintiqs hooked up to giant screens while Sergio drew by hand under a live overhead camera. The theatre was completely full, and demand was so high they simulcast it to an adjoining venue.
Seeing Sergio draw live is like seeing all seven wonders of the world at once. He was 80 that year, which remains statistically impossible. That night we awarded the inaugural Sergio Aragones Award for Excellence in Comic Art to Dave McKean, and officially launched the UK chapter of the NCS, something that had been years in the making.
The rest of the weekend was a blur. I moderated a talk with the great Lynn Johnston about For Better or For Worse, demonstrated at the Wacom café, and taught a kids’ cartoon-a-room session immediately after Charlie Adlard, the artist of The Walking Dead. Lovely guy. Tough act to follow.
The highlight of the whole weekend was doing signings next to Sergio. I sold about five cartoons, mostly because I spent the entire time leaning over watching him draw and sign his way through towers of books and prints.
At one point he told me he liked my Wacom video, and I smiled like a goofball for the rest of the day. He is my favourite living cartoonist.
Saturday night was the Knockabout Cabaret, a variety show of music, comedy and humorous slides from all corners of the globe, at which I’d been booked to do a 15-minute stand-up set. I re-jigged my material for a UK audience. It was futile. They liked the bit about my dad’s friend lopping off his hand, but I lost them the moment I started ragging on the Queen. (She was alive at the time. I maintain the two events are unrelated.)
I was saved from being the night’s biggest bomb by the act that followed: an enormous gentleman in a skin-tight unitard, mask and goggles, who screamed mercilessly into the mic while strumming his Fender until the strings broke, then asked the audience to take a beer break while he re-tuned his fractured axe on stage.
It didn’t end well for him either.
The final night’s farewell at Ruskins gave us Bohemian Rhapsody, a Britney medley, and old English folk songs from actual old English folk, until we turned in around 3:30am. I got three 2 of sleep, discovered my airport ride had gone to the wrong hotel, crawled 2.5 hours to Manchester in peak-hour traffic, and spent one solid hour in security while a man insisted we put my laptop through the scanner another fifteen times.
By the time I reached the plane, I was a husk of a human. I collapsed into my seat and passed out before we left the tarmac. Not even the screams of the baby in the next row could keep me from my coma. (-and yes. I’m pretty sure it was the same baby.) I got home finally to sleep in my own bed and stared at the ceiling, jetlagged to buggery with my mind racing. That’s when I drew all of the cartoons you saw above.
So anyway, I’m coming back this year!
Seven years later, I’ll be on stage on opening night, Friday 2 October at Brewery Arts, defending the honour of a small, indomitable Gaul in front of a room full of people with strong opinions about ligne claire. I’m bringing the sketchbook. The full diary of the trip will land here first.
If you’re anywhere near Cumbria, come along and cheer for the correct side. If you’re not, subscribe, and I’ll bring the ghosts to you.
See you in the Lakes.
(There’s one lake.)
‘til next time!
Your pal,
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
Excellent! On my way to the Lakes now; see you there.
Sounds wonderful. Hope this trip is just as memorable! 😀👍
Love the photo of Morris!😍