Jeremy Dennis is working on it
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "jeremydennis" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:50 am
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sticky post
This journal is used considerably less than my general braindump journal, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cleanskies. You might want to link up with me over there instead.
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12:27 pm
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Grrr - some photos
I'm clearing out old inboxes, and abruptly come across mails from Elffriede and Cym, who I met at Grrr... in 2004. Ellfriede drew strange creatures, often directly on gallery walls. Left alone for a moment she would whip out her ink and dip pen and start drawing. I watched enthralled, pleased that there was a person who made my doodling look restrained. Cym took photographs, almost continually. It irritated her that people would ask her to record things, like weddings and events. Creating her projects was a separate task from recording for documentary purposes, more akin to creating a photo story of self. I remember spending hours afterwards, when I got back, poring over Cym's photo stories -- this is the one about Grrr....
Myself, Lee Kennedy, Elffriede, and Cym, behind camera.
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02:15 pm
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zine fest, alternative press fair
New year, new excitement.
Details about the Zine Fest at the Women's Library on Jan 24th. Looking at the programme, the bit which will feature some work by me is the Comic Exhibition in the Cafe Space. From the Zinefest Myspace comes this list:
Carol Swain
Carolyn Alexander
Charlotte Percival
Ellen Lindner
Emma Welch
Erica Akerlund
Flo Brooks
Francesca Cassavetti
Heather Crabtree
Heather Middleton
Iro Tsavala
Isy Morgenmuffel
Jackie Batey
Jenny Linn-Cole
Jeremy Dennis <<<<<<
Jess Bradley
Karoline Rerrie
Karrie Fransman
Kate Dickinson
Kate Evans
Lady Lucy
Laura Stimpson - Lazy Soosan
Lee Kennedy
Leonie O’Moore
Liz Greenfield
Lizz Lunney
Lucy Sweet
Mireille Fauchon
Rachael House
Rosie Brice
Sally-Anne Hickman
Sarah Lippett
Sarah Lynch
Sarah McIntyre
Sarah Ray
Siobhan Bowers
Siobhan Britton
Susie Rumsby
Tanya Meditzky
Which looks like a great show. Hmmmm. I wonder if the Women's Library would like my old copies of Spare Rib? They probably already have them in mutiplicate!
Next up, on Feb 1st, is another of Jimi Gherkin's Alternative Press Fairs which I'll be attending with my Whores of Mensa hat on, selling that and various other minis and tiny-zines.
Happy New Year!
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01:33 pm
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women's zine library exhibition
I'm moving house at the moment, and going through piles and piles of old zines and comics. For a few years, Damian Cugley and I ran QZ, which was a listings sheet for UK_based Queer-Fem-etc. zines, which was inspired by Larry Bob's Queer Zine Explosion. This was just before the internet really took off, but people were beginning to feel that there was a subculture out there for them, waiting. Zines were a stopgap measure, a way to reach out and network using existing methods (photocopiers, stamps, lists of addresses) and it was scrappy and messy but worked very well. I still have friends from those days, many of them still making zines.*
So when Melanie Maddison put out the call for comics zines for an exhibition at the Women's Library in January 2009, I said yes, of course, how much do you want? I put together a package of some comics, some photocopies from the really old stuff -- including "Panic Comics #1" recipient of my first good review EVER! (I'd got some (very) bad ones before that.) and some smaller recent stuff. Can't wait to see what she does with it all, the list of exhibitors looks very exciting!
I sound like an old fart. We were revolutionaries, damnit!
*This year I got contacted by the daughter of one of these zine-makers, now a cartoonist herself!
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06:21 pm
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let loose the whores of mensa!
Check it out!
We did indeed get Whores of Mensa -- now 36 pages long, and possessed of one of the most ambitious covers I have ever seen on a comic -- finished in time for a low key launch at Comiket, a small press fair which is part of the ICA's Comica comics festival.
New printers (thanks to Andy Luke for the recommendation) this time, which worked out well, although comics this size don't make money. It's a struggle to stop losing too much on them, really! Speaking of which, you can buy them for £4 via the usual paypal (£6 if overseas). See them, how shiny they are!
.. although, actually, the busy grey and pale blue turned out less attractive than I'd hoped with the shoppers at Comiket. Back to screamin' neons next issue, I think!
We were doing Transatlantic paste-ups so naturally there was a lot of yousendit and fat zipped files scooting around. As a way of turning the masses of scanning involved from a chore to a pleasure, I knocked together this little gallery of Individual Pictures of my Parisian Ladies.
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06:20 pm
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flat out to finish whores of mensa (but)
Whores of Mensa, the comics collection I am in with Sacha Mardou and Ellen Lindner has been overdue for a little while now. Not altogether our fault; it's a labour of love we fit in around other things.
Ellen's been beavering away at her online graphic, Undertow, and Mardou's been ... well, more about what Mardou's been doing later.
Anyway, the upshiot is that it's not going to be out in time APE (San Francisco comics convention). In fact, I'm not even sure if Mardou's still going! The revised launch is instead going to be at Comiket, at the ICA in London.
In other news, I dropped into a gig on the way home and drew a comic called Applique Everything. The band who were playing (and who star in the strip) are lovely, talented Megamoog.
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06:17 pm
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rich johnston drops me a mail
Comics mover-and-shaker Rich Johnston got in touch at the end of August to ask me about contributing to an exhibition at Harrods. I'm not sure I even thought very hard before saying yes. I have a strange affection for huge London department stores, Selfridges and Liberties and Harrods. There was a brief movement back in my zine days, in the 90s, called anarcho-decadance, which advocated the enjoyment of luxurious spaces by traditionally disenfranchised or marginalised groups. It didn't last long, despite awesome rallying calls like "ban all chocolate of less than 70% cocoa solids", but for a brief while places like the cafe at Harrods and the Selfridges FoodHall and the foyer of the Ritz were full of punks blowing their benefits on posh tea and scones.
In that frame of mind I snatched the shiniest item from the wall of the Jam Factory and sent it off to Harrods, where it arrived, covered in shattered cheap glass (!). They reframed it and filed it next to pages from the Beano and Judge Dredd and Wired World and a lovely piece by Brendan McCarthy (who is surely overdue some grand coffee table book? I think I'd buy it).
E.T.A I made it along to the closing show. Here's a picture Paul Gravett took of me, stood by my piece:
I think I can safely say that I should have gone for something A3 sized.
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06:16 pm
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Caption Timewarp - back through the dismal fogs of time
Caption Timewarp -- light duties for me! I helped Jenni Scott put together a timeline of Caption, from its conception in 1991, to the present day. It meant going through a lot of old stuff, and I got ground down by revisiting old conflicts, failures and arguments. *sigh* It's odd how the good stuff never seems to hit you as hard! I'm put in mind of "It grows bitter with time", a strip I did back in April, and eventually have to leave Jenni to finish off on her own. I wonder if I could turn that idea around somehow, and write another strip to bring back the good things?
Other than that, it was just the exhibition, up all month at The Jam Factory:
In the end, we didn't do much in the way of events -- an opening and a closing. I got to do some live sketching at the latter, which was fun. I also didn't sell, but I'd priced to not sell, so that was OK.
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06:11 pm
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planning for the caption exhibition
Much of this month was spent preparing for the Caption Comics Collective Exhibition. I decided early on to arrange nine of my comics into a nine panel grid, nine of nine.
Strips selected for an exhibition need to look pretty in and of themselves, so a lot of my odder masters don't make it. Here's the nine I decided on:
Visit to Hesseland, about visiting an Eva Hesse restrospective with a migraine.
Golden Years, written on the bus on the way back from a day of epic public transport fail.
The subconscious strikes back, one of my many morning strips.
Message to cleanskies: complay with me couch, about my ongoing obsession with spambots.
Rhapsody at 5.45, one of my many work strips.
Refrain, a strip about bad news stories.
An unpublished strip called "small", written for an anthology on that theme.
All this was sea, about childhood and fossils.
The End of the Party Season, about growing older.
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02:11 pm
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comics currently available
Owl is Angry! - £1.50 (some left)
Minicomic, A6 16pp with hand-stitched, sequinned red tracing paper slip cover.
Tiny Tea Comic - £1.50 (some left)
Teabag-sized comic, 16pp, tagged and individually wrapped. Ink is water soluble.
Scattered Leaves - £2.50 (only a few left)
Anthology of shorter comics from The weekly strip, A5 24pp with hand-stitched sequinned two-layer full colour cover and full colour centre spread.
A primer in Basic Goose - £1.50 (some left)
Minicomic, A6 16pp, full colour.
Whores of Mensa - £3.00 (only a few left)
Longer stories from myself, Mardou and Ellen Lindner.
A4 32pp B&W with full colour cover.
Minicomics, various - 50p/free with order/swap (some left)
Minicomics, A6 16pp, various titles.
Postage within the UK is included*, please add a note to your order saying which comic you want.
Swaps, other titles, postal orders etc., please direct to jrd @ jeremydennis.co.uk
*Add in an extra quid or something if you want a comic sent further afield.
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12:05 pm
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as usual I update too late and do not say enough when I do
So, I was in the Fringe-Fringe exhibition of Oxfringe, which worked out well for me because my strips ended up on the wall right next to an internet connection in Age Concern@183, a Cowley Road internet cafe. Too bad I'm reporting this after the fact really, but never fear, I'm going to be part of the Caption group exhibition at the Jam Factory later this year, with a bigger better version of the piece I did for Oxfringe, and I'll tell people about that before it happens, I promise....
A few of my comics travelled up to Aberdeen with Paul Solar Wind for the annual comics convention there. The furthest north my comics have been? Possibly!
I went to the UK web and Minicomics Ting in London, and what I did there is reported by Gavin, who also includes a review of the new Weekly Strip anthology, Scattered Leaves in his blog. Nice to see everyone, too bad I didn't get onto drawing a comic strip about giraffes (it's another Space Goose strip, with the problems described in previous blogs attached).
At the moment we're getting started on whoresofmensa 2008, and there's a drawing challenge over there to get people warmed up. We're drawing our favourite Lady chefs.
I've also had a few of the mini-er minicomics on the London Camden Comics Stall, hopefully they're getting out to a whole new set there. Hope to get more involved in that soon!
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02:08 pm
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reprint : tiny tea comic
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09:40 pm
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upcoming : 2008
UK Web and Minicomics thing, with Caption, Deirdre Ruane and Damian Cugley.
I'll be selling Whores of mensa, tiny tea comics, and doubtless some other odds and sods.
We have of course started work on the New Whores of Mensa, which is themed along a Parisian demi-monde. I promise frilly underwear, lesbian PIs and tentacular creatures from other dimensions, for I know what my readers like. There will be a new weekly strip anthology out just as soon as I figure out some printing practicalities (my old printer is being rejected by the computer recycling people as we speak). I shall also begin the massive rescanning required to lulu a more substantial book of weekly strips, if I can afford a computer modern enough for the new scanner to work with (le sigh).
As usual for this time of year, I am swinging back through last year's rejected and abandoned scripts, goggling at what might have been. I can't imagine what lead me to abandon "Summer in Space", 28 pages of spacesuit shenanigans, maunderings about Jupiter and the adventures of Space Goose. I even drew a Space Goose strip, but was dissatisfied by the art. It needed ink; I only had time for rollerballs. This makes me sad.
This year I must find more time, from somewhere. But every year there seems to be less.
More plans to be reported as they coalesce.
Current Mood: my hair's the wrong colour
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03:28 pm
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comic still working after all these years
One of the things that makes producing stuff really worthwhile is turning up something you did years later, and finding it's still in use. Still got it.
So thank-you, jasonelsvis for letting me know that he saw my old A6 minicomic The A-Z of Unusual and Exotic Sexual Terminology, hanging from a string in the reading corner of the Queer Belgrade festival. From the cover, that's a later printing, but I've not reprinted it for at least six years, probably more. Not a bad shelf-life for a grubby little photocopied wotsit.
Really should get around to reprinting that. I've been planning a luxury re-release for a while, and have some faux leather to use for the anonymous binding (it comes in a plain wrapper) and have an excellent replacement for z (one of the pictures I was less happy with) although x still continues to be elusive. Of course, I may not be able to draw in that style any more.
You can't help looking back and wishing about the older things, though. Maybe you could make them again, and sort out all their problems, and make them all lovely.
Trouble is, what's happening now has to take precedence.
Current Mood: a certain glee
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05:40 pm
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spamwife writes:
Hallo!!
I put my ad to the date cause I need to have serious on a site
of acquaintances.
I have chosen you after searching a lot. I like you greatly so I
decided to
write you. I write through the Internet agency that is why my letter
will be a
short one. I am 29. I am young but wise already to
make a woman happy and make the house cozy and comfortable. I have
never
been married before and I think this is the right moment to do it. I
have chosen
you cause I liked your the story you told about yourself. I think the
true love comes with time and what is really important in the
relationship is the
trust and understanding. I hope you will reply and i will send you my
picture at
once.
Please write straight to the address: [and to think, I deleted her email address!]
your Anna
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08:04 am
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whores of mensa 3 -- limited availability
Exactly 19 are available. If you want one, prod the paypal button and pass me £3.50 (UK) or £4.50 (elsewhere). If you're going to see me around and want to get one in person, leave me a comment. It's only £2.50 then, or you can just buy me a drink (note how I automatically assume you'll see me in a pub).
Paypal takes care of the addresses, but if you want to email me to be sure I have it, you can.
Current Mood: alive and well
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12:38 am
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the black light birds
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02:13 pm
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interview questions
( in which I witter about small press, expressing views that are doubtless a good ten years out of date )
Current Mood: hormonal psychosis
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05:20 pm
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I'm losing my edge
I also triggered an enormous livejournal coding error, so my awesome spoof of losing my edge is gone forever. Up in digital smoke. You'll just have to imagine me reciting it with the names of small press comics and places instead of bands along the lines of:
I was there.
I was the first guy selling autobio comics to the superhero boys.
I did it at UKCAC.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
Here's Mr LCD himself, in case you need a reminder:
(provoked by being emailed these questions)
What defines a small press comic?
How did you first get involved in the small press?
Why are you/were you involved in the small press?
Please tell me about a little about your work (feel free to attach samples when you reply).
What excites you about the small press in this country?
What depresses you about the small press in this country?
What are your feelings re: the Judge Dredd Megazine printing small press strips but not paying the creators?
Who are the unsung heroes of the small press?
Who are the (deservedly) sung heroes of the small press?
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03:05 pm
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will be at caption, won't be doing much
So yes, I forgot to mention.
I will be at Caption, but I won't be doing much there. There'll be, oh -- Tiny Tea Comics, Whores of Mensa, Knicker Draw and probably a couple of Girly Comics containing strip by me for sale. I may drink some beer. Or I may find a corner and faint. Still not very well, I'm afraid ...
The much longer list is of things I haven't done. No weekly strip anthology, no drawn-up dream diary, no contributions to Dead by Dawn, no picture of Tim in a sequinned pterodactyl suit for the auction (actually, he probably thanks me for that...) but life isn't pokemon and you can't catch them all.
So in the meantime I'll be going back to darkly chuckling at the readership of Dykes to Watch out For. Alison Bechdel, now she really knows the score.
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