Avilés 2007

Supergirl, what are you doing? One of the giant figures used to mark the festival.

We've been at the 12th Jornadas De Cómic De Avilés since Tuesday; had a great time enjoying the town, being fed to a standstill and sketching for fans. Avilés is a wonderfully civilised experience; despite the excellent organization, the atmosphere here is so relaxed that some of this year's American guests said they didn't realise they'd been "on duty" until they'd already been sat sketching at a café for a couple of hours!
It has to be said that the aficionados here are an absolute delight; enthusiasts for comics with a wide knowledge of the form, they organise and police themselves with the minimum of fuss, help to look after guests, and on top of that provide the best quality sketching paper I've ever used. Plus they're extremely tolerant of my halting and painfully clumsy Spanish.

Anglophone guests include (above): Angel Medina, Liam Sharp, Gene Ha, Doug Braithwaite & George Perez. Not shown here but taking part are Michael Golden & Mike Ploog, though sadly Michael Avon Oeming had to drop out due to illness.

Rodney Ramos, front & rear elevations: inside Rodney is a shy, retiring wallflower, struggling to stay in :-)

There are more guests than ever this year, including a big American contingent and several of us from the UK as well as some incredible guys from Spain & France (at some point I'm going to do a feature on an amazing artist called Jorge Gonzalez whose work I discovered this year.)

Together again for the first time; George Perez & Mark Buckingham with their Spiderman sketch (Bucky pencils, George inks)

I've also been priveliged to meet such titans of the trade as Geroge Perez, Michael Golden & Gene Ha. Last night I got to neb over George Perez's shoulder as he inked a Spiderman sketch by Mark Buckingham for a local charity event. I did have one small come-down though; just as I was about to tell Michael Golden I'd loved his comics as a kid, he started complaining to a companion about "middle-aged guys with grey in their beards who tell me they read my stuff in the seventh grade." Oh well. Good to know I belong to a minority, I suppose :-)

Asturias & Avilés

Though I can't exactly boast a jet-set lifestyle, one advantage of being a comic artist is it's a very portable job; at the moment I've ported it to Asturias in the north of Spain, where I'm staying with my old mate Mark Buckingham before we go on to the comic festival in Avilés.

Left: at an outdoor café, Mark Buckingham draws layouts for Fables while I do thumbnails for Stickleback (foreground).

Sharing a studio with Bucky is a nostalgic experience; my first ever commercial work was helping him out with the inking on Hellblazer back in the late 80's, filling in backgrounds for him in his somewhat-chilly bedsit in Stoke (I still remember being both astonished and appalled by his ability to put in 20-hour days while suffering from a fearsome fluey cold).These days the surroundings are considerably more upmarket, and I'm bashing away at Stickleback for 2000AD on my laptop while Bucky pencils Fables for Vertigo. It's not precisely a holiday, but it is good to catch up with an old friend, and sharing a studio makes a pleasant change, especially as Bucky's latest work is gobsmackingly terrific; twenty years on the job and the talented swine is still improving.
We do also see daylight time to time; since we both had page layouts to do the other day, we took our sketchbooks down to the harbour and sat at an outdoor café to work. Life could certainly be worse :-)