***

WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

INTERVIEWS

AMPHIGORY

MYSPACE

LIVEJOURNAL

FEED

*

HOME

Here's a mostly-final cover for Book 1 of Messiah Complex, my multi-volume sci-fi epic beginning early next year from Humanoids. Still messing with the typography as there are some clarity issues, but this is the general idea:



Yes, gentle stranger. I don't just write films noir! ...I write sci-noir too.

Art by the ever-wonderful Eduardo Ocaña. Hopefully someone will pick up the US rights to the series, but until then it will only be available in French. The Banal Hollywood Pitch is "It's Leon the Professional meets I, Claudius, in space." But it's really more about the thin line between healthy idealism and dangerous fanaticism, about growing up with the whole universe watching you, and how far people will go just to survive. Oh yeah, and gratuitous spaceship battles. Lots of those.

The girl on the cover is Miranda, who in the first book accidentally becomes part of a huge political power struggle... when all she really wanted to do was stay out past curfew and get in trouble with boys.

I suppose I should say something about yesterday. More great production meetings, first of all. I come back from Cannes convinced that my film is good and original and wanted. (Well, actually, my body is back from Cannes. My brain is still AWOL, off in some rosé-wine-overdose/sleep deprivation temporal shift. If found, please return to its One Careful Lady Driver.)

I then singularly failed to go to Marie Antoinette because 1) I find Kirsten Dunst annoying; 2) I also find Sofia Coppola annoying, but hey, at least her directing career keeps her from trying to go in front of the camera, as we all witnessed in Godfather III. Also, the film will get mainstream distribution, so if I can see it at the Odeon next week, why bother seeing it at Cannes this week?.

Instead, I went and camera-operated for Jeremy and Huck at one of the beachfront restaurants on the Croisette... mostly because they promised to buy me lunch. WILL CAMERA-OP FOR FOOD.

If you've ever been involved with trying to get work on the London indie film scene, you probably will find that a little too true to be funny. But anyway: blue, blue sky and sea, beach, white and yellow beach umbrellas, pretty people in bikinis... it was hell, I tell you. Every sun-drenched moment of it.

Then off to back to back screenings of things that will NEVER make it to the Camden Odeon, during which I saw my favourite film of the festival: Benoit Delépine & Gustave Kervern's Avida. Unrepentant old-skool French absurdism, with more sidesplittingly sick black comedy than any one film should have, and oh my sweet zombie Jesus the shot framing! So gorgeous! Black and white, of course. To be honest, you'll hate this film. I can only think of two or three friends of mine who would possibly love this film as much as me. It's just so beautiful and so wrong and has the greatest ending, where you realise just how clever and intellectual the filmmakers are. Shot on DV or HDV, and then flipped to B&W in post and blown up to a 35mm print for Cannes. You could see the noise in a lot of the shots, but it did not matter. I wish I had made that film. And, like Chetyre, I must someday own it on DVD.

Then came Sway, a Japanese psychological drama about both a swaying bridge and vaccilations of morality and relationship and truth. A little over-long, and I would have shot the ending scene differently (it wasn't hardcore enough for me - it kind of wussed out from where it should have gone), but a truly excellent first feature from director Nishikawa Miwa.

(On another note, there's so many mature-audiences animated features coming out soon: the futuristic thriller Renaissance from Pathé, with the voice of the rather ubiquitous Daniel Craig; and from Celluloid Dreams, the film of Persepolis and the portmanteau Fear(s) of the Dark - with animations by Charles Burns, Lorenzo Mattotti and others. Then of course there's Scanner... the comics revolution evolves and changes, but continues stronger than before.

On to evening, where at 9.30 I rejoin Huck and Jeremy and do more camera-work in exchange for dinner and beer: night filming on the Carlton Terrace and along the Croisette. They kept it up until 1am. While overworking one's crew far beyond sane working hours is par for the course in film, remember, gentle stranger, that I am in cute day dress and Loboutins rather than my normal film-geek clothes. Can you say "ouch"? At 1am, in front of the Palais, I down camera grumpily as the lads discuss the next slate ad nauseum. Until then I have been filming pickups and atmosphere shots on the street. Just as I get wrapped up in fiddling around with gain and aperture in preparation for filming against the (brighter) red carpet, I hear Huck behind me say, "Alex! ALEX!"

"Hang ON, I'm setting here..." A few moments later I look up, the frays in my patience and my exhaustion showing in my voice, "What?"

"You just missed Francis Ford Coppola. He walked right by me."

Story of my bloody life, gentle stranger. Story of my bloody life. You see, there's this Cannes Fantasy, and every young filmmaker who goes has it, even if they won't admit it: you will meet a rich producer or director at a party, and he will think your little low-budget film idea is so cool that he will give you a cheque for a million dollars, then and there. Chump change for him, but your entire film budget for you. This has to the best of my knowledge never happened to anyone. But I still can't help but think, if I had just managed to talk to Coppola, maybe, just maybe... because stranger things have happened to me... But I didn't.

I find out the next day that my friend (and line producer extraordinaire) Chantelle and her gang were out until 7am, having somehow gotten invited to Ivana Trump's birthday party. Sure, trainwreck, and after over six hours of filming I was way too exhausted to go, but how the cultural anthropologist in me curses having missed this opportunity to witness this particular tribe during their yearly celebratory rituals in their native habitat.

Now back in London I eye up the huge stack of business cards and follow-up bollocks I need to do, and the huge negative in my bank account, and my resolve to go straight-edge for the month of June begins to waver already. Anybody got any rosé?

The Cannes Film Festival lasts for another four days, but I leave tomorrow. I'm broke, and I have to get back to real life. Yesterday was karmic payback, and I'm still riding a wave of happiness: I had three amazing meetings with big producers, who were really interested in my project. Of course like everything at Cannes, there's every chance this interest will evaporate somewhere over the Atlantic. They still have to read my script and love it. But the response from the trailer (and the iPod Video) has been humungously positive - and you know what? I think we might just get this film away, with a decent budget and production values.

Cannes has been great. Absurd, intensely frustrating in places, occasionally lonely, certainly exhausting, but it's all been worth it. I made so many contacts. I've seen about a dozen films and there's easily 20 more that I wanted to see but didn't have time. Babel, Volver, the absurdist French B&W film Avida, Electroma, Scanner, Pan's Labyrinth... so much great film, so little time. I did get to stop by the Troma booth (this year's release: Poultrygeist. How can the world be a bad place when there's a film in it called POULTRYGEIST?). I shook Lloyd Kaufman's hand and told him how much as a kid I totally worshipped the Toxic Avenger flicks. Yes, gentle stranger: the intellectual foundations of my art are essentially Flaming Carrot and Toxic Avenger. What can I say? I grew up outside Philadephia in the Eighties. (You can probably add the Dead Milkmen to that list.)

Filmed with Huck and Jeremy for about three hours yesterday afternoon - three hours when I should have been chasing down more production companes, but to heck with it. I wasn't exactly dressed for it: delft-blue Vivienne Westwood dress and four-inch Louboutin heels, worn for a friend's lunch party. My arms ache, as do my legs, but I have zero regrets as what sweet bliss it is to mess about with cameras.

Trying to catch the Marie Antoinette premiere tonight, and either Scanner or Avida this afternoon. More producer meetings this morning, and the Big Gay Cannes Party tonight. Ugh, why on earth did I think a 10am flight was a good idea?

And a musician I quite want to do a video for has a gig tomorrow night. In South London. Sigh. No rest for the wicked.

This has been Alex de Campi, from Cannes, over and out.

Quote of the Day: "So it's... Rear Window meets Blair Witch, sort of."

"What? Rear Window? What's that?"

"Uh, it's this old Hitchcock film. This cameraman, who's played by Jimmy Stewart, thinks he witnesses a murder in the flat opposite his, and..."

"Isn't that Blow Up?"

"Um, no, that's Antonioni. It's good, too, if you got rid of the mimes... My film is kinda like Blow Up in some ways too-"

"What was the other one? Blair Witch? Why would you want to copy that piece of shit? It looked terrible... What names are in your film?"

That was my second pitch meeting of yesterday, and one of the few times in my life I've been glad to have a crushing hangover.

The day improved from there. Probably have to turn in my nerd card as I decided not to go to the X-men 3 premiere as I wanted to watch Daft Punk's Electroma on the Cinema du Plage (eg the beach) instead. Cold beer, sand, summer evening, mental film about robots in love, giant screen, what could be better? In the end of course we completely failed to get to Electroma for a couple of reasons, one of which involved just sitting in a cafe, drinking wine, and chatting about the industry with my housemates.

The other reason was something wonderful and joyous that happened at the New Producers' Alliance drinks: Huck and Jeremy gave me a camera. Huck and Jeremy are two indie director friends of mine who are shooting this semi-improv DV film called Hardly Bear To Look At Her. It stars them. They arrive at the NPA drinks, having just stepped off the plane from London.

I give them a big hello (I camera-opped on their film for a couple days shooting in December) and they're like, we're shooting. Want to op? "Hell yeah." So for 45 minutes I was engaged in the gentle and lovely art of creating attractive framing and interesting compositions on-the-fly, just working with whatever was happening in front of the camera. I think I got some nice stuff. The Canon's pretty much my favorite DV cam anyway. It was quite bright out so I could shoot at F10 and get a really nice, shallow depth of field. I spent a lot of time filming people's hands - very telling, to watch what people do with their hands at a cocktail party, especially one where everyone is trying to impress everyone else.

Chantelle and Caroline eventually dragged me out around 8.30 and that is really why we missed Electroma. (I'll catch a screening of it tomorrow). Met some interesting people at the NPA drinks, more music video opportunities, and a nice agent (yes! I know! I KNOW!). But as with most Cannes parties, there was not nearly enough booze... Good parties are not rocket science (good music, shedloads of booze, and a fair smattering of attractive women, and you're generally away), but the simple astrophysics of bash-throwing seem to escape most party scientists at Cannes. Still, who am I to complain? It's free.

I'm having Badge Trauma, though. My filmmakers' badge doesn't allow me to reserve tickets for the premieres, so I have to spend several hours each afternoon queueing for returned tickets. It's tedious. So is not automatically being allowed into the market/buyer screenings. Next year I'll have learned, and will get a full (yellow) market pass (which also gets me the big attendees book, which would aid me in my producer hunt). Still, it's better than the paper badge I had last year.

Lot going on today, including possibly more shooting with the lads. More tomorrow.

Oh! Almost forgot to mention. I have succumbed to the spreading evil that is MySpace, so if you prefer, you can read my blog on it here.

No Quote of the Day today. Nobody said anything particularly scandalous.

Saturday night I went out by myself, got a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes and sat at a cafe, working on the opening pages and initial structure of NIL. It felt so good to actually be creating. I haven't written in ages. And I think NIL is going to work. It all unfolded like a peony, delicate and complex... but of course novels are tricky beasts, and they have a tendency to sit down like petulant children and refuse to take a step further when you are about 2/3 done the journey. No promises. I may never finish the book, but at least I have made a start.

Then I had a decent meal (I haven't really been eating), got some sleep, and listened to a lot of Operation Ivy at top volume on the walk into the centre of Cannes on Sunday morning. There's not much that food, sleep and loud ska-punk can't solve.

On Sunday morning, my faith in the industry was also renewed by the magic of damn good cinema. In brief: Robert Altman! I forgive you, even for Resurrection Blues, almost. A Prairie Home Companion was amazing, easily his best work in years. And the cinematography...Great camerawork for me is like great sex. Nothing makes me happier. All I have to say is, watch for the shot with the cigarette-case lid. Of course, I listened to the actual Prairie Home Companion radio show as a kid. My family know the genius of Garrison Keillor of old. And two hours of bluegrass and gospel music took me back home in so many ways. You see, I live in England, but I am not afflicted with that rather cringe-making anglomania which causes some Americans to flock to London. I'm here by historical accident and subsequent laziness. I love my country. I think its government are a bunch of idiots, but I love my country. And Prairie Home Companion was the sort of film that shows why I love America.

Red Road is sick and twisted and I adored it, but then I'm a sucker for very psychologically bent films. Its closest comparable is Thomas Vincent's Je Suis Un Assassin (one of my favourite films of recent years), although Red Road's camerawork has none of the supreme style of Vincent. Had the odd Cannes moment of running into the entire cast and director on the terrace of the Grand Hotel directly after seeing the film at a market screening. Do you know how much it messes with my head to have to unexpectedly confront the realities of a fiction while I am still processing the fiction?

A Guide To Recognising Your Saints isn't perfect, but the acting performances by nearly the entire cast, but especially Robert Downey Jr and Shia LeBoeuf (who I have mostly now forgiven for Constantine) were top. See it. They also blasted Ace Frehly's "Back in the New York Groove" over the credits, and let me just say, CHOON. That song has almost a Pavlovian ability to make me cheerful. Princess is mental and like a Park Chan Wook anime by Danish people about porn. See it too.

Last, the duff apple in the bunch: Southland Tales, the second film from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly (who is now dead to me). Oh dear heavens. It's bad, gentle stranger. Showgirls bad. Battlefield Earth bad. Too long, horribly written, and with just the worst choice of actors. It was so bad I had to drink half a bottle of Lagavulin to erase its memory.

At an Icelandic film lunch, had a marvellous talk with the head of programming for the New Cinema Festival in Montreal. We (and filmmaker Christopher Thomas) nerded out big time about film theory, Hitchcock and Lacan, and I was taken to task for never having read Baudrillard's Seduction. Hey, I'm self-taught. There are big gaps in my knowledge. And I'm stone cold broke. But I'm buying Seduction as soon as I can.

More tomorrow. I had something important to tell you, but I'm too hung over to remember what it was.

Quote of the day: "I kept asking for rent boys, but they never materialised..."

This is Cannes: A 20something blonde Eurobabe leans over to shout in the ear of the producer whose post-premiere party she is now at. She shouts, to be heard over the bad 80s dance music: "Do you know what party this is?"

This is also Cannes: A mother and daughter, maman 70 and fille a sprightly young thing of 50, sashay down the rue d'Antibes. Both are dressed in identical cheetah-print spandex, both have dyed black hair, and both have faces like rusty hatchets.

I thought this place was crowded on Thursday, but it doubled in size on Friday and doubled again today.

I had a pretty good day yesterday, shamelessly touting my film to the producers who had offices in the Majestic, and even blagging a meeting with the creative execs at Celluloid Dreams. But on the way from the Fast Food Nation premiere to the film's party, I lost it. Big time.

My whole universe went out of balance and I realised that I'm getting distracted by pop crap and not actually doing the Work. I need to cut down on the number of my projects, doing less of them but doing the remaining ones better. I need to quit my part-time job and survive, somehow, just doing my writing and filmmaking. I probably will need to give up the Primrose Hillton (my flat), which saddens me immensely. But I've failed to find a new flatmate, and even with one I can barely hack the rent. And I need to start work on a novel. A large and possibly insane and unreadable novel (to be called NIL. Originally a comic project, but somehow the pictures went away.) All this marketing has been killing me. I just want to curl up into a little ball and hide and write. I just want to be taken care of, even a little bit, by someone.

I hid today. Well, after I hit a few more production company offices. I just went to screenings, all day, in the lovely cool dark with just the big silver screen in front of me like a better world: the amazing Danish animation, Princess, the new Gondry The Science of Sleep and the new one with Robert Downey Jr (whom I love), A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. Normal service resumes tomorrow... I hope.

As soon as you meet a producer you click with, the next person you speak to (or the next producer) says "Him? he was good once, but don't hold your breath on his ability to raise finance now... or "Oh, don't call her, she's no good...". I feel I am in a hall of funhouse mirrors and distortions. Yesterday I wore my Alice in Wonderland dress and it felt very appropriate indeed.

So, yes. Richard Linklater gave me an existential crisis. But that's better than what Lars von Trier did to my friend Tamsin. She was so full of joie de vivre after seeing The Five Obstructions that she climbed up on one of the bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, raised her arms in triumph, slipped, fell off and broke her arm. She still has a seven-inch scar. Until tomorrow, let that be a lesson to you: don't f*ck with the Dogme.

Petit Majestique Quote of the Day: "Scarlett Johanssen's not my favourite actress. I just don't get it with her."

"She's got great tits."

"Whenever I see her in LA, I can't keep my eyes off her."

"Yeah, but yet you've never looked her in the eyes. What colour are her eyes, dude?"

"Uh... aureola?"

Ladies and gentlement, Best Crayon Colour Name Ever.

Last night Ken Loach and the cast and crew of The Wind That Shakes The Barley got a 10-minute standing ovation, and they deserved every second of it. It's the sort of complex, yet wholly natural and unforced film that makes me feel inadequate as an artist. It's early days, but this is a strong contender for the Palme. Amusingly, they felt they had to add English subtitles to the film, as well as French ones. The film is IN English, but all the characters have mild Irish accents (as you'd expect from a film set in Cork). Apparently there was fear that the American audiences wouldn't understand the lines. It was bloody distracting, the entire bottom quarter of the screen taken up with text.

I had queued for an hour and a half for tickets to it. If you have a short-film badge, you don't get to reserve tickets to things, but it's pretty easy if you're patient to wait at the Billeterie Tardive for returns. Doing that again today for Fast Food Nation and Volver.

Cannes is a lot of this: standing around waiting for a ticket, a table, a producer's attention, a friend... unless of course you're doing the other Cannes thing, which is running around madly trying to find people.

My feet are in pieces. Three days and nights of standing up 18 hours a day, and all the walking, in high heels, has shredded them. I'll be limping by the time I leave. (I also managed to forget shampoo, and have been washing my hair with bar soap, seemingly to no ill effect.)

Producer meetings still going well. Although strangely I always have the best meetings with the ones I meet randomly, sharing a table at the American Pavilion before a screening, or in a queue, or working at a computer next to me. The ones I go to beg for crumbs of attention at their booth... those go OK, but it is a bit Master and Servant.

Had such a good (random) encounter with an LA-based French producer yesterday that I actually went off on one about the symbolism of my film. Note to filmmakers: don't do this. Nobody - not your cast, nor your crew, nor epecially producers (many of whom don't really watch films) care about the symbolism of your film.

But this guy did.

More tomorrow. Think I might be going to a big post-premiere party tonight.

Quote of the day: "If you had one chance to bang Jennifer Connelly, would you be able to resist singing Bowie lyrics from Labyrinth at her while you were doing it?"

From a conversation among a bunch of my friends at the Petit Majestique; circa 10pm last night. For the record, we all voted "sing". We also accosted a bunch of hot Colombian TV journalist women because... one of them was carrying a camera, and we couldn't tell if it was the Sony or a Panny and we HAD TO KNOW. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when directors get drunk. Plans were also hatched to do some transatlantic music videos, with an LA director I know filming motion-capture in Chapman's new studio, then me directing the animation side. This could be very cool.

Other things you should know about Cannes:

Glamour amidst chaos: As an indie filmmaker, you'll be staying in a tiny yet overpriced studio apartment at least 20 minutes walk from the Palais. As a female indie filmmaker, that walk will be in high heels.You will be sleeping not on a bed but on a chaise longue on a porch, or on a boat, or on the floor. Yet you still have to glam up and look fresh and rested when defending your casting choices to producers who are staying in the Martinez, or walking up the red carpet at one of the gala evening screenings.

Flirting: A huge number of attractive people of both sexes descend on Cannes during the festival with the single intention of bagging someone in the film industry. This is in no way a bad thing, especially as French men know how to flirt. When you overcome your squalid, cramped living conditions and hangover and lack of sleep and are rocking a good dress, to get a little feedback from random, attractive male strangers is great. Flirting is the harmless swapping of compliments and innuendo between strangers. It is one of life's great delights, like good conversation, clean white sheets and the smell of fresh-cut grass. Vive la France.

The Petit Majestique: A skanky bar behind the Grand Hotel that you can never find the second time, because you were so hammered the first time you went there. Has the dual virtues of cheap (for Cannes) beer and being open all night. The de facto late-night hangout of the indie set. Bless it, and all the daft drunken art v commerce or Truffaut vs Godard conversations you will have there.

Ups and Downs: As soon as you complain to your friends that you're worried it's all a waste of time, you will meet a nice, friendly American producer in the queue for DaVinci Code tickets who loves your film and its budget, and is from the city you want to film in so knows its tax breaks.

The red carpet: Because it makes you determined to come back one day and get your film in competition, so you can own it for a night.

Heidi MacDonald mentions my film in her column, The Beat, with a picture and everything. Thanks, Heidi!

Off to go walk around the Marché and approach likely production companies who have made things in my genre and budget range. Will be soul-destroying, but I don't care. Got good responses from some cold emails sent out based on scoping the dailies for potential producers and need to follow them up with visits to their Cannes offices. Plus, some of the companies sniffing round my film in LA seem to be doing more than sniffing now.

More tomorrow.

I forgot how magical it is to arrive in Cannes; the air heavy with hope and jasmine, everyone with a happy, slightly incredulous smile on their faces, and a dream in their heart... Of course, this first-day bliss sours as the festival goes on. Never stay until the end; dreams fly on wings of glass and so many are shattered over the next 10 days. Nothing is more sordid than the sight of the hotel hallways on the 28th of May, like the aftermath of the Somme if the trenches were made of discarded scripts and the shards of hopes of people like me. Still, one can only try.

I shall try to blog as much of the Cannes experience as I can, from my adopted home base in the American Pavilion; providing of course anything of interest happens.

We got out of post on the trailer very late; I was literally still burning DVDs half an hour after I was supposed to leave for the airport. So although I know a bunch of people here, I have set up not a single meeting. My entire Cannes strategy consists of wearing pretty dresses, blagging party and screening invites, and forcing people to watch my film trailer on my iPod Video. And right now, on this first day when there are no screenings yet to hide in and with none of my friends/housemates here yet, I feel the first ticklings of a fear... what am I doing here? Will this be a big waste of time, spending money on beer? I love my film, and believe we can create a great, memorable, commercially marketable thriller with some very innovative imagery... but can I make anyone care? Or even make myself heard?

Cannes is hell for actors and writers. There's not much love for directors, either: it's an industry market first and foremost, for deals between producers with finished (or nearly finished) material and distributors. But there are a lot of directors here - met three lovely ones (including Sean Flynn, who just finished a short called Numb with James Duvall - envy!) and a publicist on the way in from Nice airport, as we clubbed together on a 5-person taxi. We nerded out about cameras, me as usual defending HDCam to the filmheads. And I made everyone watch my trailer. I'm shameless.

But this is Cannes: huge highs and huge lows, plus passionate and occasionally deeply technical conversations about the art and craft of the moving image, all in the glorious sunshine of the South of France. Wish me luck, me and my little film and my wings of glass.

The Publishers' Weekly article on Tokyopop's new line launches is up; here's a direct link. Both the books featured (Kat & Mouse and Agent Boo) are by me, so of course I couldn't be more pleased with it!

Off to queue for Da Vinci Code tickets. I know it's going to be appalling, but hey, it's the opening gala screening. More tomorrow.

About to leave for Cannes. Borrowing Dave's computer to finish this; he's about to leave for America. The only constant is change...

Trailer to my feature film Transmission now online at the Lot 49 Films website; as usual there's also an iTunes/iPod Video version for download and we're just coding the 3G version at the minute. Clicky image below to go direct to the Transmission page.

It's only 48 seconds long, people. Watch it. Send it to producers you know.

Lastly, one for Londoners' social diary: the latest Being in Motion gig, Thursday night. Bands, electronica, video installations, and general cool stuff you'll never see anywhere else until it becomes the Next Big Thing. Plus booze, and dancing. Only a fiver as Freddy (the organiser) is so uncommercial it hurts and has not worked out yet that he should charge people more money. Details: Thurs 18th May, 7.30pm-2am at The Dome, Junction Rd, N19 opposite Tufnell Park Tube. Just go.

Apologies for my silence. It's been a bit manic, prepping for Cannes, and OSX 10.4.6 is refusing to talk to Blogger for some reason. But enough about my tech catastophies, let's talk comics! Various reviews of the Kat & Mouse Tokyopop sneak preview released on Free Comic Book Day last Saturday:

Johanna Draper Carlson liked it: "Saving my favorite for last, Tokyopop collects three lengthy samples of upcoming OEL all-ages books. Kat & Mouse features a girl detective at private school, which provides a number of hooks — this could easily be promoted to fans of Harry Potter, Nancy Drew, or even the OC, if they wanted a younger version. It’s got terrific writing and art, touching family drama, an intriguing mystery, and plenty of interesting suspects."

So does Dorian at PostModernBarney: "Tokyopop Sneaks: This book contains excerpts from three books from Tokyopop’s line of original titles, Kat and Mouse, Sea Princess Azuri and Mail Order Ninja. Of the three, Kat and Mouse was the most entertaining. It follows the story structure of a high-school set shojo comic fairly closely, but it doesn’t all out ape the look and feel of a Japanese comic. It has a nice blend of American and Japanese styles. If more of Tokyopop’s original line was like this I’d be more favorably inclined to their efforts."

But Graeme MacMillan isn't so keen: "TOKYOPOP SNEAKS: A nice little freebie trade, this one has the first chapter of three new OEL books that they’re putting out… which is kind of its downfall. The first two previews have exactly the same set-up (Kid in new school, doesn’t fit in) and stop before getting to what would presumably differentiate them from each other, giving the book a feeling of “Oh, Tokyopop has a generic house plot for new series” (The third preview, however, is for Sea Princess Azuri which unsurprisingly is about a Sea Princess and doesn’t have any new school horror whatsoever). Being a dirty Westerner, Alex DeCampi’s Kat and Mouse is the story that worked best for me, but even that felt uncertain and a bit forced – Definitely different from her Smoke series from IDW, so she should be applauded for her versatility, but not as good as Smoke, either."

Kat & Mouse Book 1 is out on 1st July, but we're hard at work on Book 2. Here's a pretty little teaser image:



Also, the ever-charming Chris Arrant pens an exclusive about the new Tokyopop Manga Readers line (and Manga Chapters) at industry bible Publishers' Weekly. Scroll down (waaay down) and click on Comics Weekly under PW Newsletters. Tolle, legge - this is the future of comics, sneaking graphic novels into the normal Prose / Young Readers section of bookstores, rather than leaving them in the ghetto of the Graphic Novel section or only in comic book shops. Think of it like Bookstore Risk. Tokyopop just captured Kamchatka, and everyone else is toast.

Spent Thursday afternoon with the most wonderful Cathy Ward in her Shoreditch studio, and came away with strange gain: a rare copy of a five-page interview with the sci-fi writer JG Ballard and his friend the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Ballard... manages to say, far more elegantly than I ever could, several things that have been occupying my mind about art and society recently:

"Surrealism took one of its main inspirations from psychoanalysis, accepted the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. But one, the world of the mind, is largely ruled by the laws of fictions, by one's dreams, visions, impressions and so on, and the whole idea of the unconscious as a narrative stage. Surrealism moulds the two worlds together, remakes the external world of reality in terms of the internal world of fantasy and fictions.

Now what has happened, and one reason why there are really no Surrealist painters in the true sense of the term today, is that this position has been reversed. It's the external world which is now the realm, the paramount realm of fantasy. And it's the internal world of the mind which is the one node of reality that most of us have. The fiction is all out there. You can't overlay your own fiction on top of that. [...] The environment is fulled with more diction and fantasy than any of us can singly isolate. It's no longer necessary for us individually to dream."

And on the self-infliction of violence/harm as a form of entertainment and societal or experiental one-upmanship, a subject Cathy and I have been somewhat obsessing about since hearing Rod Dickinson talk about the Waco Reenactment. Dickinson was only interested in, so to speak, what he was selling; Cathy and I were much more fascinated by why people were buying it - why a bunch middle-class, ICA-going punters would pay cash money be bussed to a disused sports ground in Essex and be subjected to FBI psychological warfare methods. Anyway, over to Jim:

"I think violence is going to play the same role in the 70s and 80s that sex played in the 50s and 60s. [...] the death of feeling, that one's more and more alienated from any kind of direct response to experience. And the car crash is probably the only act of violence most of us in Western Europe are ever going to be involved with, is probably the most dramatic event in our lives apart from our own deaths, and in many cases the two are going to coincide.

Although our central nervous systems have been handed to us on a plate by millions of years of evolution, have been trained to respond to violence at the level of finger-tip and nerve ending, in fact now our only experience of violence is in the head, in terms of our imagination, the last place where we were designed to deal with violence. We have absolutely no biological training to deal with violence in imaginative terms. And our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or react quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited expertiese is never used. We sit passively in cinemas watching movies like The Wild Bunch, where violence is just a style."

The interview dates from 1971. I cannot find a copy on the internet.

Free books: Free Comic Book Day is May 6th. What that means for you non-comic folks is that all the big publishers put out special editions of their upcoming books and graphic novels in a first-one's-free, as-tested-in-Hackney's-finest-crack-dens sales methodology. I'm particularly happy about FCBD this year because Tokyopop has chosen to spotlight my upcoming book Kat & Mouse, as one of the three they excerpt in their FCBD offering. If you like Girls' Own Adventures, Nancy Drew on amphetamines, and gratuitous teenage nastiness, you'll probably enjoy Kat & Mouse. Plus, Federica's art is rrreallly pretty. Go, score. (Note that this is mainly a US thing - not all UK comic shops participate. In London, GOSH on Great Russell St opposite the British Museum is your best bet.)

Free videos: I recoded the Lot 49 Films website and put up streaming editions and free downloads of the recent animated video I directed for Flipron and my recent short film. Trailer for my feature up soon, too. Go, see. And if you can find it in your heart to watch the music video on YouTube (here's a direct link to it) and comment, it helps push the video up their popularity list and thus gives Flipron and me more exposure, hopefully eventually leading to all of us being able to quit our day jobs and make money off this art and music malarkey. Thank you.

What else... I've pretty much decided not to go to SDCC this year. Two reasons: 1) Cannes is going to wipe out my travelling budget; and 2) a friend and I are planning something which, if it comes off, means I can't go larking off to conventions in July as I'll be too busy co-curating and directing in a fairly major London theatre event. However, I will be at the Bristol convention on the 13th and 14th of May, as Mike Allwood is lovely and hey, it's only Bristol. We should have advance copies of Kat & Mouse also. (I'm now starting to get layouts through for Book 2 of Kat & Mouse... it's always a strange feeling, this, when Book 1 hasn't even hit the shelves yet.)

In other matters, I urge you to go download the Pipettes' "Your kisses are wasted on me", the first great alt-pop song of summer. On a passing invitation from Mr Gillen, this brazen hussy of a tune has moved into my iPod like it owns the place, and ever since has been leaving lipstick traces on the milk cartons of my mind. There's so much good new music out there right now. I feel a mixtape coming on.

SYNDICATION: LiveJournal

ARCHIVES: October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007

& FOR HER NEXT TRICKS:

KAT & MOUSE 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598165496
$5.99 / All Ages

AGENT BOO 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598168037
$4.99 / All Ages

***

RECENTLY:

MESSIAH COMPLEX 1
October 2006
ISBN-10: 2731617667
EUR12,90 / Teen

AGENT BOO 1
Sept 2006
ISBN-10: 1598168029
ISBN-13: 9781598168020
$4.99 / All Ages

KAT & MOUSE 1
July 2006
ISBN-10: 1598165488
ISBN-13: 9781598165487
$5.99 / All Ages

SMOKE
December 2005
ISBN-10: 193323928X
$24.99 / Teen

***

Brief Loves:
Music: Berlin Cabaret Songs
Film: Chetyre (4)
Book: Camera Lucida