Behind The Scenes At The Museum
Adventures in Comics Exhibition Design, INCLUDING: The Most Amazing Crossover In British Comics History, That You May Not Have Previously Been Aware Of
While I was at the Story Museum for Phoenix Fest the other week, I took the opportunity to sneak up to KABOOM! The Art Of Creating Comics - the exhibition that I helped design and curate, with the brilliant Lisa Mitchell - basically to see if there were any bits I wanted to nick. It was all being pulled down and put into storage basically the minute Phoenix Fest was over - after a longer-than-planned and I believe very successful run, I hasten to add - and I’d been told I was welcome to salvage any of the component parts that I might fancy hanging on to.
I slipped into the exhibition on this mission of reconnaissance and thievery while a group of young festival goers were in there. Because of the way the room is laid out, at first I was basically invisible, hidden from view behind a giant 3D comics-making octopus. Which meant I got to experience the space in use but without my presence there being a distraction, and just eavesdrop for a minute. One of the Museum’s story guides - I believe it was (the magnificent) James - was talking the kids through the exhibition, engaging them with the interactive elements, drawing out their own ideas and giving them the tools to create their own stories. And it was just such a wonderful moment to unexpectedly happen upon. To see everything we’d built, working exactly as I could have hoped. To just linger for a second at the end of it, listening to the sounds of laughter and excitement and absolutely ridiculous stories, forming out of the air.
So that was nice. Anyway, now that the exhibition has wrapped up, and in case you are somehow not amongst the TENS OF THOUSANDS of people who got to experience it in person apparently(!), I thought I might share a few peeks at the whole thing here.
The idea for the comic that formed the spine of the exhibition was to step young readers through all the different key parts of making a comic, to give them an idea of the stages involved and fill them with excitement to head out and start making their own. It was basically a condensed 8-page version of How To Make Awesome Comics. Except, in that book when I wanted to use examples or stories or characters to illustrate an idea, they had to all be examples I had made up, out of thin air. Whereas for KABOOM we had, incredibly to me, the full support and cooperation of not only the Phoenix but also the Beano and Rebellion - publishers of 2000AD, Monster Fun, the Treasury of British Comics archive, et al. So basically, between them, the entire back catalogue of British Comics.
(Okay, not the entire back catalogue. No Marvel UK, which meant I was unable to find a way to work Death’s Head or the Sleeze Brothers into the exhibition. Believe me, no one is more disappointed about this fact than me.)
What this meant in practice was that I could sketch out an idea for each part of the comic - giving ideas about character design, or plot structure, or lettering or colouring - and then to illustrate it, use some of the most iconic characters in the history of the comics medium. Just to pick one example, there’s a section in the exhibition about panel layouts - essentially trying to encourage kids to think about how to tell a story visually, and to give them some tools to start moving beyond the ‘full figure, on the horizontal, every time’ mode that we all start with when drawing and telling stories.
So I thought the best way to do this would be to show a quick, easy to follow comic strip demonstrating some different panel layouts and camera angles, and then helpfully annotate it.
When it was just at the ideas stage I sketched in some placeholder characters to give an idea of how it could work - Dennis the Menace and Judge Dredd, for example. Obviously we wouldn’t actually be able to use those guys, but just for the sake of argument, something like that.
And then we ran it past all the stakeholders involved, and everyone was far more engaged and supportive and generous than honestly I could have imagined. I had to do a few test pieces, to show that I could draw a basically on-model version of these iconic characters…
…and we got the okay to use them! The actual Dennis and Dredd. Icons, actual bona fide comics legends, meeting - for the first time? - in the service of teaching kids about comics and getting them fired up to make their own.
I just think that is a very cool thing, and I will forever be glad that I got to be apart of it. Huge thanks to everyone at the Beano and Rebellion for their generosity and trust in letting us use these characters, and to everyone at the Story Museum for giving me the opportunity to do it!
Also, it made me think: has there ever in fact been a genuine crossover between these characters? And if not, why on Earth not? Wouldn’t that be amazing? DENNIS / DREDD: MENACE CITY ONE. Okay I just want to draw this now.
IN OTHER NEWS
We are new MERE DAYS away from the release of NEXT LEVEL, the first all-new-to-book-form Mega Robo Bros in years! You can pre-order it now from the Phoenix, Amazon, from Bookshop, from Waterstones, or from your local independent bookseller. And I will go so far as to say: please do so!
ALSO
I believe there’s still just time for you or your class (if you are a teacher) to take part in the Scholastic Laugh Out Loud Book Awards 2023, for which FREDDY VS SCHOOL is shortlisted. Again, please do so! THANK YOU.