mcm expo: day two!

This weekend The Fleece Station well and truly barnstormed London MCM Expo. Here’s our studio: me, Ellen Lindner, Lauren O’Farrell and Gary Northfield:

A huge thanks and congratulations to Emma Vieceli, Swedish Anna, Pud and all the organisers for putting together such a great festival! The word’s just in that this was the most successful Expo yet, pulling in more than 41,000 people! I spent a lot of time popping back and forth between The Fleece Station and The DFC Library stands, where several of the DFC creators were drawing and generally doing their magic. (You can see yesterday’s photos here.)

Here are Dave Shelton (creator of Good Dog, Bad Dog), John Aggs (artist of Philip Pullman’s John Blake, creator of Robot Girl and writer of The Boss, all of which appeared in the original DFC weekly magazine), me and a fabulous DFC fan named Agnes. (I ditched the pink wig for the second day.)

Here’s the big drawing John made of Robot Girl:

Visitor Rian Hughes, Dave Shelton and Jamie Smart, creator of Fish-head Steve in the DFC, and about a zillion other projects including Desperate Dan in The Dandy and an upcoming book with Scholastic about a little ball of white fluff named Chaffy.

Thanks, Jamie, for taking this picture of me taking part in a game of on-stage Pictionary, writers against artists. Unfortunately, the artists lost, but Gary Erskine did a fine split-second drawing of Captain America. (Other panel members included Robin Furth, Svetlana Chmakova, Ben Templesmith, Kieron Gillen and a bunch of other people I would know if I wasn’t so clueless about superhero comics.)

Here’s the DFC Library’s Mezolith artist Adam Brockbank signing, with its writer Ben Haggarty in the the background.

Former V&A comic-artist-in-residence Karen Rubins lounges in one of the stall bean bags and pinches off John’s face.

Louise Stothard shows off the lovely DFC Library books, with Mo-bot High‘s Neill Cameron drawing behind her:

Several visitors were fans of my Vern and Lettuce, which made me super pleased.

Here’s one of my fave convention compadres, Gary Erskine, with 17-year-old comics creator Katja Hammond and her book, The Shadow Generation.
Edit: Gary writes: The lovely and talented Katja Hammond at London MCM. She writes and draws her
own manga style comic books. Always a delight to meet her and her dad at the
event. Can’t wait for the next part of the story.

I couldn’t resist a comic and a mighty-fine tea towel by John Allison.

I couldn’t resist buying a Ming doll from Declan Talbert.

Our fab neighbour, Jenika Ioffreda. You can read a review of her latest book, Vampire Free Style, on the FPI blog here. She had to suffer the indignity of a group of self-appointed Twilight Bashers coming round to tell her off for making something about vampires. (They’d been earnestly campaigning earlier outside with big signs that read Twilight Sucks.)

FPI also reviewed My Cardboard Life by Phillipa Rice, and Dave Shelton came by with a stack of them he’d bought. Then Lauren bought the whole series, too.

The ever-marvelous Chichester Harbour boat captain and brilliant comic creator Warwick Johnson Cadwell.