Opening in London at the end of this month, Safari Festival celebrates the new wave of alternative and art comics. Simon Hacking (of organisers Breakdown Press) picks five of his favourite publishers.
Safari Festival is a celebration of the new wave of alternative and art comics from the UK and beyond. Taking place over one Saturday at the end of August, the festival is an opportunity for a curated group of cartoonists and publishers to exhibit and sell their artwork, prints and, primarily, comics, and for attendees to experience the best of UK comics’ avant-garde.The five publishers below produce exactly the kind of work that Safari was created to celebrate and promote.
Space Face Books
Space Face Books are our favourite North American small publisher, so we’re very excited that it’ll be represented at Safari. Run single-handedly by Mack Pauly, top candidate for nicest man in comics, Space Face publishes a broad range of comics in all styles and genres. Some of our favourites are The Man that Dances in the Meadow by Sam Alden, whose loose, animated tales of suburban melancholy make him a true successor to the likes of Clowes and Burns, Life Zone by Simon Hanselmann, an Australian cartoonist whose suburban stoner comedy makes for the funniest comics we’ve read in years, and Emmy by the inimitable Brighton-based JMKE who’ll be manning the Space Face table at Safari.
Breakdown Press
The festival hosts are Breakdown Press, a London-based comics publisher that has been in operation for two years and in that time has released seven short, Risograph-printed comics by Joe Kessler, Connor Willumsen,Richard Short and more. Its most recent project was a collaboration with Japanese comics scholar Ryan Holmberg to publish a short, lyrical comic from 1969 by famed Japanese artist Seiichi Hayashi that had not been previously translated. For Safari, Breakdown is releasing a new sketchbook of upcoming work by Joe Kessler, as well as its first two “graphic novels”, printed by offset lithography in Belgium. The first is Mutiny Bay by Antoine Cossé, a historical drama speculating on the fate of two Spanish sailors marooned on an island off the inhospitable South American coast in 1520. The results are, by turn, a dissection of 16thcentury religious and exploratory politics, and a hallucinatory examination of the human spirit at the edge of endurance. The second is Gardens of Glass by Lando, about which more below...
Decadence Comics
Decadence Comics is the brainchild of Stathis Tsemberlidis and Lando, two artists whose intersecting vision of mind-warping psychedelia, far-flung sci-fi, radical politics and evolutionary theory sidesteps the stuffiness of a lot of high-concept science fiction, instead creating some of the most engaging and experimental genre comics being produced in the UK. At Safari, Breakdown Press will be launching Gardens of Glass, a retrospective collection of comics by Lando bringing together the very best of his short works produced over the last five years for Decadence. Blending Ballardian contemplation of the near future with the aesthetics of early European sci-fi comics, Lando’s incredibly meticulous, impossibly fine pen line describes the deserted world that follows the Anthropocene epoch, where warfare, class division and ecological collapse dominate the landscape.
Famicon Express
Famicon Express produces comics that feel like they were scribbled, scanned and printed on a Red Bull-stained bedroom floor, but read like a breath of fresh air. Most heavily inspired by Fort Thunder-style artists like Gary Panter and CF, Famicon’s comics have a child-like intensity that provides an unmatched dynamism and inventiveness. Its founders, Leon Sadler, Stefan Sadler, Jon Chandler, and their various associates produce comics for the pure joy of it, and so are like nothing else in British Comics.
Landfill Editions
Landfill Editions produces a wide range of material from comics and zines to short fiction and science fact, all impeccably designed and printed by Hugh Frost, who is driven by the desire to explore the many avenues available to the contemporary publisher. Its most ambitious project to date has been Mould Map 3 (co-edited by Leon Sadler of Famicon), the third of its incredible anthologies of comics and art, which is now largely sold out, but will be available to pick up at Safari for those lucky few.Safari Festival
Saturday 30 August 2014
Protein
31 New Inn Yard
London EC2A 3EY