Avilés Photos At Last

I didn't take as many photos of sketchees as I meant to.
Top row (from left to right): Alfonso with a sketch of Galactus & me; Kapy with Death from Sandman; Oscar with Morpheus & Death
Bottom row: Miguel with a sketch of Delirium & Dr.F

Stickleback: England's Glory has been eating me alive since I got home, but I finally found a bit of time over the weekend to sort my photos of the trip to Avilés and post them on Flickr.

Left: Juan & me in the Plaza de España, Avilés. It turned out I already knew Juan via this blog; he'd supplied helpful corrections to my articles on Alberto Breccia.

This was the twelfth annual comics festival in Avilés, and the biggest to date; aside from a stellar cast of US guests (including George Perez, Michael Golden and Gene Ha), the largest-ever number of past invitees had asked to return on a voluntary basis, packing out the main hotel. Dr.F and I ended up in the overflow hotel, which in many ways was nicer; the decor was reminiscent of a set from a Bond film, and there was free wi-fi. The only drawback was that our room was up under the eaves, so the ceiling sloped down dramatically at the foot of the bed.

One of the great advantages of Avilés is that it gives you a chance to meet the other guests on a more-or-less equal footing; if Michael Golden, George Perez or Mike Ploog had attended the Bristol Expo, I'd probably never have got anywhere near them, but in the laid-back free-for-all of the meals, everyone was mixed together, and a more gentlemanly bunch I'd be hard put to describe. All the American guests worked like Trojans too, with George Perez alone clocking up more than sixty detailed, finished sketches in three days.
From a personal point of view, the greatest pleasure was getting to meet Gene Ha, whose quiet enthusiasm and sense of fun made him a delight to be around. Perhaps the most memorable moment of the trip was watching him produce a fully painted sketch using only red wine, coffee dregs, cigarette ash and his fingers!

Gene Ha painting with coffee & wine dregs - amazing

It was my third time at Avilés, and I was pleased to see some familiar faces coming back for sketches. Thanks also to those patient compañeros who were willing to let me practice my Spanish on them; in particular Juan, Leticia, Alfonso and Silvia.

The Hulk from the main marquee; I think he's remodelled from this really well-hung chap.

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 :-)