making monsters in dublin

Hello, please meet Manky Horace O’Neill, one of many monsters the kids in Dublin created with me.

I met a bunch of fab people at Irish 24 Hour Comics Day, including animator, illustrator and pop-up guru Maeve Clancy. You can see some of her amazing pop-up work on the video for Lisa Hannigan‘s song, Lille. (You can see a larger version at the Vimeo link and if that doesn’t work, here’s the YouTube link.)

Here’s us watching the video (Maeve’s the one in front of the laptop), and here’s Cliodhna Lyons, who organised the whole thing! (She’s wearing Hope Larson’s Chiggers bandanna she got at MoCCA.)

I was amazed how much detail some of the people were putting into their comics, considering they were going to be working at it for 24 hours on the trot. Here’s one example from Eoin Marron:

I also got to meet Tsyuoshi Ogawa, the workshop leader Cliodhna had brought over from Japan, and who had been her working partner during their two-month internship at the Kyoto International Manga Museum. Here he is with his Australian translator from the museum, Cathy Sell. One fact about Tsyoshi is that he is totally obsessed with fishing, and he lit up when we went to a tackle shop in the city centre. Here he’s posing with the shop’s rather lovely sign, and the also very lovely fishing lures he bought:

I led four monster workshops, which all went swimmingly. We had some fab (and very cheeky!) children make monsters with me at the Comics Day workshop. (Don’t worry, I got permission from everyone’s parents for the photos):

I must confess, I had a little difficulty with some of the Irish accents, although I think we all managed to understand each other in the end.

We sat around a little table in Waterstone’s Jervis Street and had loads of kids stop by:

Dale O’Flaherty (daleof) did the workshop with me, drawing great portaits of the kids and bookshop staff. Here’s the manager, Steve, with his potrait: