The Sunday Spotlight: Your Fast Spin Round The Comics News

by Richard Bruton

Another Sunday, another Sunday Spotlight, another set of bits of news that I reckon you’re going to find interesting…

This week, more of the same. More news pieces that I saw this week and figured I’d do something about that, write something on that, tell you about that… and then ran out of time to do a whole article and ended up sweating the deadline to get them all written up for you in this weekly digest.

And remember, the Sunday Spotlight hasn’t ever promised to be all the news – but it is the news that I thought was interesting, a personally curated news feed of the sort of stuff I’m into… oh, you poor things.

Okay then… shall we?

Tony Husband at work – image from Northern Soul

Tony Husband RIP…

One of Britain’s finest cartoonists died this week – Tony Husband. He’d drawn for Private Eye for the best part of 40 years as well as a multitude of other publications. His art was simple yet effective, his humour always cutting and quite brilliant.

One of the most famous tales about him comes from the creation of his Private Eye strip, The Yobs…

“When I was a hippy I was beaten up by a gang of skinheads. I’m not a violent person, so I started to draw them to get my own back, and I did some skinhead gags – two skinheads spraying a wall, and one says to the other, ‘How do you spell NF?’ Ian Hislop took it for Private Eye and then wrote to me saying, ‘We love your skinhead jokes, do you want to do a strip and we’ll call it The Yobs? Give it a shot and we’ll see how it goes.’ Anyway that was 38 years ago.”

Dan Clowes’ New Yorker Cover – Quiet Luxury…

Clowes was on the cover of New Yorker and he and Françoise Mouly discuss ‘patronage, in-home pillars, and what he’d do with a billion dollars.’

Si Spencer’s Bodies on Netflix…

Bodies was a great comic series, written by Si Spencer, who sadly died unexpectedly in 2021, and with art by Dean Ormston, Tula Lotay, Phil Winslade, Meghan Hetrick, and Lee Loughridge, and published by DC Vertigo in 2014-2015.

It’s now been adapted into what’s meant to be a rather good Netflix series starring Stephen Graham. Which has led to a fair number of articles about the series talking about Si Spencer’s Bodies, including this one concentrating on Spencer and explaining who he was and what he did. It’s lovely to see his name and his work getting so much coverage.

But there is the old problem here of the media looking at comics and only attributing the series to the writer. Yes, it’s great that Si gets his due, it really is, but I’m sure he would have been the first to want the artists, his essential collaborators, mentioned every time the book was talked about. Hell, they even included the cover to the book and didn’t credit Fiona Stephenson as cover artist.

AI comics = theft. Seems Wales Millenium Centre don’t think so…

I think we’re all on the same side here. Or at least we should be. AI-generated art, including comic art, is produced by the wholesale theft of artists’ work, scraping the work of others to generate the AI things.

Unethical simply doesn’t cover it. AI equals theft of artists’ work.

But not everyone thinks so, including the Wales Millenium Centre who are putting on a ‘Creating Graphic Novels with AI‘ two-day course. There’s been a bit of pushback on it to say the least, leading the WMC to issue a statement in response. The statement’s here but to save you reading it I can summarise it as, ‘well, yeah, we’re still putting it on’.

Well, they can do that. It’s wrong of course. And they can find out just how wrongheaded and ill thought out it is when they next come to put on any arts course requiring an actual comic artist. Because I imagine few will be available after this.

Interview with Garen Ewing of Rainbow Orchid and new Julius Chancer adventures…

Matt Badham at Down The Tubes has a great interview with Garen Ewing that you should all be reading at John Freeman’s excellent Down The Tubes site. Ewing, as you should all know, is the creator of the euro-influenced and rather wonderful Rainbow Orchid. That series is highly recommended as a great action adventure from days gone by, a real out-and-out romp that looks absolutely superb.

And now there’s new work from Ewing, The Adventures of Julius Chancer: The Brambletye Box, which is being serialised online here. More from Ewing at his website.

Mark Stafford in conversation at The Bookery Gallery…

Another date for your diary, Mark Stafford talks about his latest book, The Salmonella Smorgasbord, at The Bookery Gallery on 23 November.

Leo Baxendale’s Supercomic – a lost classic of Brit comics…

Another fabulous blog to look at, Richard Sheaf’s Boy’s Adventure Comics, has a piece and art on Leo Baxendale‘s Supercomic, genuinely one of THE lost classics of Brit comics.

Baxendale, one of the geniuses of Brit comics, creator of Bash Street Kids and so much more, came up wiht the idea of a monthly comic to be called Supercomic.

It never happened and as far as anyone was aware, there was no art from it. And then Richard turned up some art from a recent auction. More at the link.

The toilets at Thought Bubble – so good there’s going to be a Kickstarter for a comic about them…

A very special Kickstarter to keep a look out for that’s coming soon – Secrets of the Majestic, put together by Chris Mole – a 76-page anthology of toilet-themed comics, centred around one very special lavatory…

Saw this one via Kieron Gillen‘s newsletter for this one. Go subscribe. He had this to say…

“Thought Bubble is coming. For the faithful, it is a time of pilgrimage. Not to the con, as good as it is. But to the majestic toilet in the Majestic Hotel. Chris Mole has pulled together an anthology of comics about it. It’s kickstarting soon. I’m doing the bookend story, in the mode of crypt keeper. Sign up here to be told when it launches.”

And if you’re wondering how majestic the Majetic’s toilets are, this from Cassie Fairy…

And speaking of Thought Bubble… a list of new works debuting at the UK’s finest convention…

I wish every convention would do this (but then again, few are as organised or as good as TB) – a complete list of all the books debuting at Thought Bubble Festival on 11-12 November in Harrogate.

Trina Robbins’ new book out in November and available at Thought Bubble…

The wonderful Trina Robbins, an absolute star of comics and national treasure, has advance copies of Don’t Back Down, her pro-choice anthology that comes out mid-November from Last Gasp. Copies will be available from Thought Bubble from contributors, including Alison Sampson.