A few years back I was thinking of going to the Thought Bubble comics festival in Leeds, but I was a bit wary to take the jump. Honestly, I’ve never particularly enjoyed tabling, as it is called, at comics conventions. There’s all the faff of it, having to drag big heavy boxes of books up and down the country on a train, hoping to god that you sell enough that you won’t have to experience the uniquely soul-destroying labour of schlepping them all back home again. But worse, it’s the selling, itself. Having to give the in-person hard-sell pitch for my comics to poor innocent punters as they walk past the table desperately trying not to make eye contact is kind of a unique combination of all the things I am worst at and enjoy the least. I’m very lucky to have kind of ended up in a place in comics where I often get invited to children’s books festivals and things like that, which have several advantages over comics conventions for me, specifically:
they’re paying you to be there, rather than vice versa
they have bookshops, and people who work for those bookshops, whose job is selling books, so you don’t have to
you’re there for an audience of readers who may actually know who you are, and indeed be excited about that, rather than an audience of middle-aged men in Batman T-shirts who quite definitively aren’t.
So anyway, I’d always been a bit wary of these things. I wanted to give Thought Bubble another try but I couldn’t quite face it on my own, so I asked around on Facebook if there was anyone who fancied helping me out at the table. Assuming that if anyone wanted to do it, it would be another comics creator, someone who’d be up for sharing the table and helping sell each others’ comics. And so I was surprised and delighted when my friend Emma Ritch responded almost instantly, asking if she could come and do it.
I should give you a bit of context about Emma. Emma was not a comics creator. Or even a comics fan, particularly. Emma was a whole other thing. She was the executive director of Engender, Scotland’s feminist policy and advocacy organisation. She was the chair of both Rape Crisis Scotland and Human Rights Consortium. She was on the boards of numerous organisations focussed on campaigning and organising for women’s rights, equality and safety. Honestly, so many boards. I cannot even begin to remember all the boards. Emma was, in short, a serious and deeply impressive person. Or, to put it another way, not a person who had any sensible reason to want to spend their entire weekend helping some idiot sell his funny comics about robots in a poorly-ventilated convention centre.
Fortunately for me - and I mean that like I have meant very few sentences in my entire life - Emma was also my friend. And I imagine she thought it would be fun to hang out for a couple of days and see me, at my job, and get to experience the whole strange and objectively fascinating world of comics as a casually-interested observer. And I absolutely, instantly, snapped her up on the offer.
And so she came along, and it was an absolute blast, and for a few years that became our thing. Once or twice a year we would meet up and spend a weekend sitting behind a table together. I would draw sketches of robots and dinosaurs for people, and she would engage with customers and passersby and human beings generally, on my behalf. And during the inevitable slow periods, when minutes and hours would pass where no-one seemed particularly to want any funny robot comics, we would just chat.
It’s hard to make new friends when you’re a grown-up. Or at least, to make new friends with the intensity and level of connection that’s possible when you’re young. When there is literally nothing more important in life than to spend endless quantities of time together, sitting up all night in kitchens and living rooms in shared flats, drinking tea and smoking fags and watching terrible movies and talking, talking, endlessly talking. About the most important things in your lives and about nothing at all. About your backgrounds, and your families, and the complicated sexual dynamics of your friendship group, about the Spice Girls and Sunset Beach. (It’s just possible, I realise as I write this, that some of these cultural reference points might be slightly 90s-specific). Just immersing yourself in each others’ company; forging a new family out of wildly different life experiences and shared senses of humour. Learning everything there is to know about each other, all the better to sarcastically destroy each other, and then make another round of tea.
It’s also hard, though, just to maintain those friendships. That found family that was once everything doesn’t have to fracture dramatically. It just recedes, as everyone grows and moves away, moves forward on their own paths. Life gets full of demands and complications, of careers and families and all the actual, real responsiblities that constitute being a grown-up. When there are mortgage payments to be made, and school runs to be organised, and endless meetings and health issues and young children and aging parents and one million other important and boring and wonderful things. Who has time to sit up all night with your pals and just drink cups of tea and talk shit? And when you live in an actual different country from those pals, when you’re hundreds of miles away from each other, any chance you do have to meet up carries an added weight of expectation. We haven’t seen each other for ages. We’ve come all this way. We need to do something.
All of which is to say, it turns out that sitting behind the table at a comics convention together for a weekend is the closest thing I’ve found in adult life to replicating that glorious, immersive level of Just Hanging Out from the days of youth. I almost preferred it when there weren’t any customers to distract us and we could just sit and drink cups of tea and talk, and talk, and talk. About comics, and about the comics scene, and the politics and the social dynamics and the gender dynamics of it. Emma was endlessly interested in learning about people, and it’s like this was a whole fun new weird pocket of the world for her to discover. But mostly just about our lives, the details and texture, the boring and important bits, all the stuff you just never normally have the time to really get into.
It became a fixture in the calendar, something I looked forward to hugely. To the point where, one year when I didn’t really have any new books out or any legitimate work reason to go to Thought Bubble, but we just decided to go anyway. Not for work, not to sell any books, just for the hangs.
Anyway.
Those of you with a keen eye for literary technique may have noticed that I’ve been writing this whole thing in the past tense. And if you didn’t know this was coming, I apologise, because it feels like a bit of a mean trick. But I kind of needed to ease myself into this.
Because this weekend marks two years, impossibly, since Emma died.
It was sudden, and shocking, and the outpouring of grief and loss that followed is something that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. Emma was an incredible woman who left a deep and lasting positive impact on the world. She’s been euologised and memorialised in lots of ways, and I’d urge anyone reading this to take a little time to read some of the memorials that her colleagues at Engender collected in the wake of her death, if you need any proof of the positive impact one person can make upon the world.
But, a couple of years down the line and for my own dumb part, I just wanted to talk about this lesser-known aspect of her career; that of being my Occasional Weekend Comics Convention Assistant.
Because, of course, she was absolutely great at it. She would delight in talking to anyone, finding out what they were excited about, who they were cosplaying as, who they were here to see. She would sell my comics to people with a level of enthusiasm and confidence that I will never be able to achieve in my entire life. And she would take a delightful amount of pleasure in working the till, ringing up sales on my iPad (when we could get the wi-fi to work). She made comics conventions something they had never been for me before, a genuine and unalloyed joy. Just to get to spend that kind of time with my pal, one of the funniest and smartest and sharpest human beings on the planet, and to get to introduce her to my weird little corner of the world. I was childishly proud of Emma, and I loved introducing friends from the world of comics to her. This brilliant, remarkable person, who’d decided to take a weekend off from addressing the UN or flying to the European Parliament or whatever it was this week, from fighting for justice and genuinely making the world a better place. To come and hang out with us.
I haven’t really done many comics conventions since we lost Emma. I pulled back, withdrew from that whole circuit. Because, honestly, I just felt like it would make me too sad. Sitting there behind that table without my pal, my cheerleader, my brilliant and inexplicable friend by my side. It wouldn’t be the same, and it would make me sad, and I haven’t been in any hurry these last couple of years to go out of my way looking for more things to make me sad.
And look, I’m not an idiot. I know that shutting myself off from the world in any way is literally the dumbest response possible, and absolutely not what Emma would have wanted, and indeed exactly the kind of classic Neill bullshit that she would have had hilariously little patience for. And I dare say at some point I’ll suck it up and get back out there. But I just needed to take some time off, and feel sad, and miss my friend.
And after two years of putting off writing this, and struggling for words, that’s actually all there really is to say.
I miss my friend.