A short comic that totally makes sense, and you didn’t just have to be there for.
Last weekend was Phoenix Comic Fest 2023! And, honestly, I am just starting to recover. It was a wild old time, and completely exhausting, but just so great to get to spend the weekend being just absolutely blasted on all sides by the love and enthusiasm kids have for comics. And, specifically, yeah, I’m going to say it: for OUR comics.
I was a bit worried going in because technically I was ‘headlining’ one of the days and I felt like a bit of a fraud because, honestly, I just haven’t been in the comic that much lately. Mega Robo Bros has been gone for, in Phoenix reader terms, SEVERAL GENERATIONS, and Donut Squad is still just this new little weird thing, and basically I was kind of braced for the response of ‘who is this old guy, who are these characters he’s talking about, and why should we care?’
I am happy to report this was not the case.
I was trying something new for the occasion, a kind of Mega Robo Bros VS Donut Squad mashup event, stepping the kids through drawing some of my characters and getting them to create their own. It was kind of my first time doing Donut Stuff with a crowd, and BOY OH BOY the response. Kids like donuts, it turns out? So many amazing and bizarre and occasionally genuinely terrifying characters were created over the course of the day - here are a few of my favourites / ones I managed to actually take a picture of:
A DONUT MADE OF DONUTS
THE FREDDY DONUT
NEILL CAMERON DONUT
Now that is a merchandise item we should be prioritising, right there.
SPEAKING OF merchandise: You have pretty much a week left to get this sweet sweet limited edition DONUT SQUAD X LOOSHKIN t-shirt by the living legend of UK comics Jamie Smart! And me!
Available now from the Phoenix shop, but only until April 30th!
SPEAKING OF things that are available now: the new Mega Robo Bros, NEXT LEVEL, is now up for pre-order!
It’s out on May 4th (be with you), but you can pre-order it right now direct from the Phoenix, or from Amazon, or from bookshop.org, or I dare say from a bunch of other places - OR, best of all, you can walk right into your local cool independent bookshop, if you are lucky enough to have such a thing, and ask them to order a copy in for you. I’m really excited for this one - but don’t take my work for it, take the word of the first review I’ve seen, which just appeared today on Richard Ruddick’s excellent Comics In The Classroom blog:
…which is all rather humbling and flattering and such, to the point where I feel like I must immediately DEFLECT AND LEAVE. And on that note: I have to go draw an absolute mountain of comics now. Back soon with more things!