getting ready for this weekend

Here I am, sitting in the studio, doing my homework:

At the British International Comics Show in Birmingham this Sunday at 11:45am, I’m interviewing Japanese manga artist Michiru Morikawa. She just sent an e-mail to say she’s rushing around packing for the trip, and I’ve been reading through her brilliant comic, Advent, at the beginning of Woodrow’s copy of The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga and putting together a slide show from the images she’s sent me. We’ll both be launching books there: Morris the Mankiest Monster by Giles and me, and Buskers by Michiru, Jeymes Samuel and Sean Michael Wilson, which is also being made into a film.

Michiru sent through lots of amazing images, but some of them were so complicated that I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to get the most out of them in a slide show. I hope she doesn’t mind, I’ve done a lot of closeups of her work, because I think the artwork looks even more beautiful when it’s broken down into little pieces.

Here’s a closeup of the first picture in the sequence:

Hope to see you at BICS! (I’d give you the web link but they seem to have exceeded their bandwidth…)