The all-consuming MCM expo appears to be getting bigger and more claustrophobia-inducing with each iteration, but a greater focus on movies and games doesn’t necessarily mean that the organisers have forgotten their roots.

The MCM Expo London Comic Con is apparently expanding its Comic Village by 50% area after tables for the October show sold out in record time. It’s encouraging news for the UK’s comic community, creators, and that ever-diminishing demographic who actually visit comic conventions for the comics.

“When all of the Comic Village tables were snapped up only a week after going on sale, we decided to expand the area so that some of those comic artists and writers who missed out can still come to MCM Expo London Comic Con,” commented show co-organiser Bryan Cooney.

“Attracting over a 100 top comic creators and 60,000 fans, London Comic Con is now one the most important weekends in the UK’s comics calendar, and the unprecedented demand for tables only goes to underline this.”

For further details and tickets visit www.mcmexpogroup.com/store

Nelson is no mere anthology, either, but something far more ambitious; a 250 page story of one woman’s life from her birth in 1968 to the present day. Presumably the range of artists, which includes such mainstream names as Duncan Fegredo and Sean Philips (see below for the full list of contributors), will each take on a stage in the protagonist’s life.

“When [editors] Rob [Davis] and Woodrow [Phoenix] came to me with their idea for Nelson, straight away it seemed to me that it should be a charity project” states Kenny Penman, Publisher at Blank Slate, “The British comic scene is more vibrant than ever before, and the opportunity to unite this diverse group of creators to aid the greatly important work that Shelter does in these difficult economic times seemed too good to miss.”

Here’s the full list of contributors:

Paul Grist, Rob Davis, Woodrow Phoenix, Ellen Lindner, Jamie Smart, Gary Northfield, Sarah McIntyre, Suzy Varty, Sean Longcroft, Warwick Johnson–Cadwell, Luke Pearson, Paul Harrison–Davies, Katie Green, Paul Peart–Smith, Glyn Dillon, I.N.J.Culbard, John Allison, Philip Bond,D’Israeli, Simone Lia, Darryl Cunningham, Jonathan Edwards, Ade Salmon, Kate Charlesworth,Warren Pleece, Kristyna Baczynski, HarveyJames, Rian Hughes, Sean Phillips & Pete Doree, Kate Brown, Simon Gane, Jon McNaught, Adam Cadwell, Faz Choudhury, JAKe, Jeremy Day, Dan McDaid, Roger Langridge, Will Morris, Dave Shelton, Carol Swain, Hunt Emerson, Duncan Fegredo, Philippa Rice, Josceline Fenton, Garen Ewing, Tom Humberstone , Dan Berry, Alice Duke, Posy Simmonds, Laura Howell, Andi Watson, Dave Taylor

ISBN 978-1-906653-23-1
252 pages
236 x 178mm softcover with flaps, full colour
£18.99 / $22.99
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/NelsonGraphicNovel

Nelson’s official launch event will take place on the 22nd November 2011 at The Cartoon Museum in London, with readers able to buy a special advance copy of the book at Leeds’ Thought Bubble Festival on the 19th and 20th November, where the majority of its artists will be signing copies for the public.

Bit of an eleventh hour news post, this one, but I thought it work mentioning that the Hong Kong Film Week kicks off in London this week. While hardly a film festival – it’s more a case of 5 movies showing in several different cinemas – the week is a great opportunity to see some of the Hong Kong film industry’s most celebrated recent output on the big screen.

As part of the ‘Think Asia, Think Hong Kong’ campaign, organised by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, Overheard 2 will receive an International Premiere at The May Fair Hotel on 12^th September, 7.45pm, introduced by writer/director Alan Mak.

The Prince Charles Cinema will also be showing the following:

IP Man (13^th September, 6.30pm)

Echoes of the Rainbow - followed by post screening Q&A session with director Alex Law and producer Mabel Cheung (14^th September, 6.15pm)

Love in a Puff (15^th September, 6.30pm)

The Beast Stalker (16^th September, 6.30pm)

The selection presents a movie for everyone, really, and while Ip Man has been available on DVD for some time, Donnie Yen’s kung fu gem begs to be seen on the big screen.

For more details visit www.thinkasiathinkhk.com/en/filmweek.htm

If the term “fotonovela” has you thinking of teen magazines, 70s football albums and tabloid cartoon strips, think again; Stavit looks to bring an attention to detail to the technique that might just change your mind about photographic comics. For Isness, which chronicles the last 24 hours in the lives of mankind’s sole surviving family, she’d already comprised over 40,000 images to work from before the project was fully funded.

Stavit was attempting to raise funds for the book via Kickstarter, and successfully attracted 102 backers and over $7,000 to make the project a reality. Not bad at all.

Images and progress reports on the project can be followed over at www.countercomics.com. There’s a hell of a lot of work going into this unique and macabre title, as you can see from the preview (or, if you will, “trailer”) below.

The site is currently taking pitches for a 2 minute film, under the criteria that it is based on the bible – though how you use the good book as your inspiration is entirely up to you. Entrants have until 14 October 2011 to pitch their film, which will be judged by actors David Oyelowo and David Suchet, animator Nick Park, editor of Empire magazine Nev Pierce and BBC producer Anna Cox.

The Pitch previously ran in 2009; winner Simeon Lumgair got to meet X-Men producer Ralph Winter and see his effort in numerous international film festivals.

Project Director Luke Walton apparently wants “… people from all over the UK to enter The Pitch. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just turned 18 or 65 – all you need is imagination and drive.” Imagination and drive, eh? Dammit, I’m currently high on the former yet running empty on the latter… Shame.

Turns out Jonathan couldn’t agree more; over at John Scalzi’s Whatever he argues the strengths of such a format in an insightful piece on the thought process behind his and Dan Hallett’s illustrated tome:

Bastardry has its advantages too … In an illustrated novel, the pictures are not part of the narrative continuity in the way that successive frames in a comic book are. They do not have to carry the burden of explaining what is happening, since that information is provided in the text; and because they are freed from this obligation, it’s possible to use them to do other things.

In couldn’t recommend Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel more. An accomplished, multifaceted work that follows the twisted fates of five sympathetic freaks in what is essentially an alternate-history Venice, its synthesis of words and images is effective enough to change anyone’s preconceptions about them thar picture books.

Five Wounds - Jonathan Walker, Dan Hallett

A chapter from the novel can be downloaded here.

Interestingly, whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 editions feature a computer-generated Ryan Reynolds on the cover, the Wii edition is adorned with what appears to be Hal Jordan on vacation in the same universe as The Incredibles. Which, admittedly, sounds like a lot of fun; far more than the conventionally “realistic” art direction that movie-to-game adaptations are constrained by.

Can’t wait to see Hal clobber things with a comically oversized green mallet? There’s also a Facebook page over at www.facebook.com/GreenLanternVideoGame, which features an intriguingly titled ’3-D Energy Viewer’ and a ‘Power Ring Battle’ game.

From the press release:

Inspired by the upcoming Warner Bros. Pictures’ superhero feature film Green Lantern, Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters soars onto game consoles this summer, extending the theatrical experience of one of DC Entertainment’s most popular superheroes.  Players will use the most powerful weapon in the universe, the Green Lantern Power Ring, to build an array of weapons from green energy to defeat the Manhunters – an evil android race bent on destroying the Green Lantern Corps.

Packed with intergalactic missions, alien androids and out-of-this-world combat, Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters is an action-adventure videogame that delivers the Green Lantern experience right into the hands of gamers.

Comic artists, animators and cartoonists have anthropomorphised everything from dinosaurs to wabbits, but outside of Humpty Dumpty I’d be hard pressed to name another tale committed to sentient eggs. A dark comedy on the fragility of life, Marc Schmidt’s Egg Story chronicles the beginnings, ends and omelettes of a half dozen doomed foodstuffs.

Egg Story by J. Marc Schmidt

The eggs’ journey through farm and supermarket ends with a Death Row stint inside the fridge of one Julie, who thinks nothing of cracking open the condemned and feasting on their warm gooey innards. The heartless bitch. Feather, Five Spots and Cloud soon find themselves the sole survivors, and vow to enjoy the remainder of their shelf life before they hit the frying pan.

Egg Story‘s finest moments, such as Connor’s mental deterioration following damage to his shell, have a beautifully surreal indie sensibility to them, and while the book occasionally  suffers a bit of an identity crisis – Feather’s quest to become a ninja feels like the uninspired concept for a Dreamworks animation – there’s a sense of melancholic acceptance throughout that carries this otherwise bleak existential comic.

SLG has priced Egg Story at a stupidly low $3.95, and I’d recommend this pint-sized graphic novel to any reader who hasn’t already scoffed at the premise. Schmidt hasn’t strived for as great a degree of subtext as was found in SLG’s recent translation of Elmer, and the result is a book that revels in its own oddness. A scene in which Five Spots tells a chick that has recently hatched from her lover’s shell that a relationship between egg and poultry would never work has to be one of the strangest things I’ve ever read…

7/10

This Sunday, Kim Newman will be introducing the 1974 cult classic The Beast Must Die, and celebrating the new edition of Nightmare Movies, his comprehensive guide to everything gruesome, ghastly and gory.

The epitome of cult cinema, The Beast Must Die will include the original theatrical release’s ‘Werewolf Break,’ in which the audience were encouraged to guess the lupine murderer from a suspect list that includes Charles Gray, Michael Gambon and genre stalwart Peter Cushing.

The Beast Must Die - poster

The show/event will include ’70s tunes, drinks and canapés from 10pm, as well as another Short in the Dark entry courtesy of the London Short Film Festival. Attendees are advised to ‘dress for dinner’.

Tickets are £7.00 (plus booking fee) and available here.

From the press release:

‘The Beast Must Die’ comes from the legendary Amicus, the studio that dripped blood and stars Calvin Lockhart, Peter Cushing and Michael Gambon. A wealthy businessman and skilled huntsman summons a handful of guests to his home for the weekend, one of whom has a taste for blood. It’s up to the others to seek out the monster before the full moon fades…

“super sweet dose of 70’s werewolf camp with a top-notch cast and music” – Eat My Brains

“The Beast Must Die is a horror classic in every sense of the word. It has it all: horn heavy bow-chica-bow-wow Seventies theme music, a badass soul brother as the lead character, some surprising gore… and one of the true masters of our genre; Peter Cushing” – Dread Central

Midnight Movies

Curated by event programmers MMX Associates, Midnight Movies have taken place across London every month since February 2008 at venues such as Curzon Soho, Rio Cinema in Dalston and Ritzy Cinema in Brixton plus The End of the Road and Green Man music festivals. Offering London film-goers an array of cult films in a late night setting, the screenings include a pre-party with live music, themed cocktails, fancy dress and decor.  Featured recently on BBC’s Film 2011, Midnight Movies has welcomed cult legends John Landis, Edgar Wright, Dario Argento, Roger Corman and Bruce Campbell to present their work, held the English premiere of Lars Von Trier’s controversial Antichrist and partnered with the BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Sci-Fi London and the London International Animation Festival. For more information, visit: www.midnight-movies.co.uk or www.facebook.com/midmov.

Nightmare Movies by Kim Newman, published by Bloomsbury

Now over twenty years old, the original edition of Nightmare Movies has retained its place as a true classic of cult film criticism. In this new edition, Kim Newman brings his seminal work completely up to date, both reassessing his earlier evaluations and adding a second part that analyses the last two decades of horror films with all the wit, intelligence and insight for which he is known. Since the publication of the first edition, horror has been on a gradual upswing and has gained a new and stronger hold over the film industry. Newman negotiates his way through a vast back catalogue of horror and charts the on-screen progress of our collective fears and bogeymen, from the low-budget slasher movies of the 1960s, through to the slick releases of the 2000s. Nightmare Movies is an invaluable companion that not only provides a newly updated history of the darker side of film but also acts as a truly entertaining guide with which to explore the less well-trodden paths of horror and rediscover the classics with a newly instructed eye.

I’ve always felt the contemporary illustrated novel to be a bit of a bastardised mongrel; often lacking the substance and/or convenient format of a regular novel, while seldom delivering the immediacy of sequential art. Five Wounds has perhaps put an end to my ignorance. Rather than compensate for a deficiency of storytelling finesse, the images in this “illuminated novel” are an essential part of an intriguing, multifaceted package.

Jonathan Walkers’s dense narrative weaves between the tangled lives and machinations of five “freaks”. Tormented savage Car was abducted as a child and raised by dogs to be an assassin. Gabrielle is an angel, whose messages from God have arrived under a layer of static ever since her father had her wings surgically removed. Expert card sharp Cuckoo, born with a malleable, wax-like face, plans to replace another gentleman’s identity. Magpie, a disfigured thief and photographer, obsesses over corpses while carrying out thefts that he believes beneficial to the victims. Perhaps the vilest of these creatures, Crow is an alchemist willing to resort to the most sickening methods to cure his degenerative disease.

Five Wounds - Jonathan Walker, Dan Hallett

These five torn souls inhabit no time or place from our history, but an alternate world ruled by absurdly barbaric politics and sentient dogs. Magpie’s obsessive use of daguerreotypes and the presence of a canal system suggests a landscape reminiscent of 19^th Century Venice; a subject Walker has written about for over a decade. His first illustrated novel Pistols! Treason! Murder! (also illustrated by Hallett) was the biography of a Venetian spy.

Walker’s tale effectively hops about in a non-linear fashion, detailing the initial encounters between his principal characters from multiple perspectives, and by the second act each of these wretched creatures has revealed a back-story terrible enough to earn our sympathy. There’s also a touch of black humour sewn throughout, particularly during a dinner scene in which the table acquires a fresh corpse with each of a series of brief blackouts.

Five Wounds‘ story would stand proud in any format, but the combination of Walker’s rich cityscape and Hallett’s spidery imagery results in something beyond a conventional book with superfluous pictures. Text and imagery feed off one another like Siamese twins, to the extent that it’s difficult to imagine either element surviving if separated. Adding a level of metafictional authenticity, this hardback tome has been defaced, as if to give the impression that someone else discovered your edition long before you. Lines of text are crossed out (though still barely legible), while hastily scrawled messages contradict Walker’s prose, which is itself presented via a page layout similar to that seen in the standard Bible.

Rife with Christian allegory, literary allusions and hidden codes, Five Wounds is an elaborate enigma, but one that I am content to leave unsolved. Usually, such apathy on my part is the result of a less than involving read, but Walker’s tale is so expertly set up and executed that by the book’s final pages I cared for his tragic protagonists enough to leave these underlying depths unexplored. Whether or not the book delivers on the illuminations promised in its title, I therefore couldn’t possibly say without reading it a second time and, quite likely, indulging in extensive research.

But that’s beyond the point; whether you find greater meanings bellow its soiled surface or reach Walker’s dual endings scratching your head, Five Wounds: An illuminated Novel remains immersive, satisfying and consistently inventive.

9/10

Five Wounds is available now. A chapter from the novel can be downloaded here. Find out more about the book at www.jonathanwalkersblog.com