Also on the comics front: the latest Scott Pilgrim book is out this week. Awesome sauce.

I didn't go to any of the talks, and ran into less people than I expected to, but I did bump into Sarah (her review of the event is here) and the lovely Mr Sheret of the Polaroid Press, as well as a couple of other familiar faces that I knew to say hello to, and was entertained by the mini-exhibition of zines and comics, not least because I discovered some new names amidst the usual faces, and blasts from the past.

I picked up a few good zines and comics, too, mostly of the cheaply printed/photocopied variety because they cost less! I haven't read them all, but so far think my favourite is This Was Before You Were Born, a little booklet of stories by Katie Haegele of The La-La Theory, which cost me the princely sum of 50p. They're all tales she's inherited from her family, which I found totally charming especially the story of her uncle Charlie who loved Christmas morning so much as a little boy that the whole family celebrated Christmas every morning morning until Epiphany, which involved wrapping all the presents up after they'd unwrapped them just so that they could unwrap them again the next morning! That's kind of crazy behaviour, but it's sweet rather than dangerous, just how I like my crazies.

Small press stalwart (and Space Station 65 partner) Rachael House made a good list of tips for making zines:

You can see all of them in the photoset on Flickr. (Tip #4 especially amused me, after all the computer vs. paper conversations I've been having/following lately.)

Zine Fest organiser Melanie Maddison also puts together a zine called Colouring Outside The Lines. I picked up the latest issue, #4, which is a great catalogue of female illustrators from around the globe, complete with spot pictures, website information and interviews. I haven't had a proper read yet, but it looks pretty inspiring. You can buy it via Folksy or via Etsy. It's well worth a look, and I suspect I'll be linking to some of the talented ladies I find in it when I finally get a moment to give it a proper read!

So far 2009 is shaping up to be a good one for zine and comics events. I picked up a couple of flyers for some more events coming up:

First up is this Sunday's Alternative Press Fair, back at St. Aloysius Social Club (a place I seem to be visiting often enough for it to deserve its own tag on my site). There's a good interview, full of self-pubishing tips from the guys behind the APF over at Spoonfed (which is a site I signed up to a few weeks ago but haven't really used yet, so I can't tell you how useful it is).

Brighton Zine fest is a two-day event on 21st-22nd of February. I'm hoping to get down for one of the days.

The London Zine Symposium returns on May 3rd. There was a lot of great stuff on sale last year, plus it's right next to one of my favourite pubs!

Via Dave Shelton comes news of a an event on the 14th-15th of February that's probably a bit more mainstream, but worth checking out if you're in the area, the Highland Expo in Inverness. I'm almost tempted to go myself. I like Inverness.

photo by Adactio [cc licensed]

That looks and sounds a bit pretentious and incomprehensible, perhaps, but is easily broken down:

craft = the skills in creating things, be they books or blog posts
bioinformatic = us and our branes
origami = complexity and more skill
unicorns = a bit of the fairytale

I think these are actually easy notions to get to grips with, despite the unwieldy nature of the phrase. It was a fun(ny) line to sum up and end the day with, anyway.

After the summations, we all tripped off to the pub where Penguin generously plied us with booze, and I had a better opportunity to get my box of mini-comics out for people to have a look at. It was nice; people wandered over our table and had a delve, getting excited about paper texture or ink, and even getting nostalgic in some cases.

It was funny, too, as I discovered that some of the people at BookCamp were friends with, or familiar with, some of the small press comics people I know. Ben Read and I not only bonded over a mutual love of Scary-Go-Round, but it turns out that he's mates with Matt Brooker and has "always wanted to go to Caption!

In the afternoon BookCamp sessions I went to, I sat next to Alex Milway, who writes and illustrates children's books (unfortunately, I missed the session he ran, which sounded pretty good). He's friends with Sarah McIntyre (who's just posted this great mini-comic on the pleasures of paper and pens), and acquainted with some other folk from the DFC like Gary Northfield and Woodrow Phoenix, so we had a good natter about them, amongst other things. Looking through my box of mini-comics, he suddenly started talking about the Lady Cottington Pressed Faerie Book that by sheer coincidence of timing I'd been given the day before! (I haven't even had time to read it yet.)

It's always so nice when my interests converge like that, and it served as a reminder for me of something that I wanted to mention before I finished writing all of this up, which is that there are loads of comicsy people doing interesting things using POD technology, papercraft, collaborative stories, and even social media, and I reckon they need to be getting involved with events like these, or at least considering the unconference/barcamp approach for their own events. If, as the Really Interesting Group say in their editorial of Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet, "2009 feels like a year for printing and making real stuff in the real world," it would be superduper brilliant to see more convergence and crossover, don't you think? Let's make it happen.

He made a few nice points about maps. They are populist ("maps are for people who obviously don't take taxis"), and can serve more than one need ("you don't always need a map to show you where you are, but where the cool stuff is"). Guide books are getting smaller to favour the pocket-size, and newer versions are produced more often, making them more-or-less disposable as information gets out of date. Taking this disposable nature into consideration, and inspired in part by DK's customised guides, the City Guide notebooks from Moleskine and the recent issue of Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet, Chris has been considering newsprint guides, compiled from various sources, including pirate maps and friends' recommendations, and printed in relatively cheap/small print print runs. Being cheap there's less of an issue about tearing them up to suit your own needs.

After that, another demonstration of nifty thinking, Nick O'Leary's 3D pie charts and paper graphs. He wants to make a pop-up book of statistics, which could work really well in bringing those numbers to life more than two-dimensional charts on a page, although Aaron's suggestion of topological mapping (e.g. a 3D map of the hills of San Francisco) was brilliant too. And the diagrams look so pretty in 3D!

¹This attitude reminded me of a poem by Adam Ford (the genius behind Monkey Punch Dinosaur), I Kiss This Book, which I've quoted in its entirety the comments in case anyone wants to read it. Hope Adam doesn't mind!

Following that, Alex Deschamps-Sonsino gave a fun workshop on Thinking Through Paper, encouraging us to think in 3D, and to think about how to build ideas into objects. She asked us to remember the last thing we'd made with paper (which was easy in my case, being the contact-info cards I'd made the night before). She also had a couple of interesting things to say before we started the hands-on participation, including a horrifying anecdote of teaching a class of 16-20 year olds how to make paper airplanes. Apparently none of them had ever made one before, and took so long to be convinced that she had to download plans off the internet before they would even try! No, really, that horrifies me. What kind of culturally deprived lives had these people been living?

Alex expounded on how this fear of the blank page can be damaging to the creative process, talking about different attitudes to "old" paper versus "new" paper. If paper is already printed on, it can often be an invitation to use it for something else (e.g. cards etc.) whereas a pristine blank page can be quite scary. I understand this "fear of the blank page" myself; every time I get a new notebook, I struggle to think of something worthwhile to put on the first page, and frequently start using it a few pages in, or sometimes right in the middle of the book — as I happened to do with my notes from Saturday's sessions. (Although, to be fair, my new notebook does have different sections, and I chose a specific one for taking notes.)

During this session, we also heard from Giles Lane of Proboscis Studios, who have been producing Diffusion Shareables; e-books and StoryCubes that you can customise and download. (Not to always bring it back to the comics thing, but while he was talking about this I was reminded of a cube-shaped minicomic about a box that Sally-Anne Hickman made a couple years ago, utilising the box shape to parallel her story.) Watching Giles demonstrate the idea of using the cubes as building blocks to create a larger story, I was also reminded of the pizza-box comic that some of us made at Caption in 2003.)

Inspired by a product design workshop she'd taken at college, Alex challenged us to make either a chair, a building, or something we liked; an activity we all dived into with great enthusiasm. Despite only having ten minutes to come up with something, there were some great designs at the end of it, and it's a shame that no one took photos of them all (but I think some of them were captured for posterity). I made a bracelet from scraps of yellow paper linked together with yellow paperclips, each scrap printed with "PAPERCAMP 09″ on both sides, using a nifty little moveable type rubber printing set provided by Matt. (I so want to buy one for myself now!). As I commented to Tom Taylor when we sat back down for the next presentation, "you know it's been a good morning when your hands are covered in printers' ink before midday!"