When the London incarnation of popular monthly comics meet-up Laydeez Do Comics returns after its summer break in October it will do so with a new team at the helm and a brand spanking new venue! While LDC founders and hosts Nicola Streeten and Sarah Lightman take an understandable year off to concentrate on their respective PhDs, their places will be taken by two excellent choices of interim co-hosts – artists Keara Stewart and Wallis Eates. Replacing Foyles at the same time as LDC’s new arena for comicky conversation is London’s Gosh! Comics, home already to a number of extracurricular activity groups including Process, Gosh!p and Capers.
Laydeez Do Comics, of course, was the first women-led forum for sequential art in the UK and, since the London group was founded in 2009, it has gone on to inspire further chapters both domestically and globally in San Francisco, Chicago, Bristol, Leeds, Dublin and Birmingham. With both established creators and up-and-coming talents presenting at its meetings there’s always a thought-provoking and inspiring mix of speakers to enjoy.
The new team will be familiar to regular readers of our ‘Small Pressganged’ column here at Broken Frontier. Wallis Eates was a finalist in the last Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition for her work-in-progress Mumoirs, and her self-published comics have been featured on a number of occasions at BF. I have said of her work in the past that “If memory could ever be described as a medium to work in then Wallis Eates is one of UK comics’ most accomplished practitioners in the field.” You can read reviews of Eates’s Fleeting Faces here, You Chew I Spew here, and The Magic Quadrant here. I also chatted with Eates in a comprehensive two-part interview with her here earlier this year, and she has guest blogged for us about taking comics out into the community here and here.
Keara Stewart’s anthology A Bit of Undigested Potato and work from The Magic Quadrant by Wallis Eates
Keara Stewart is a comics creator and zine-maker whose exhibition ‘On the Escalator’ at Proper Old last year spun out of her series of drawings of commuters as she travelled into work in London. You can buy the zine version of ‘On the Escalator’ from her online store. She is a well-known face on the London small press comics scene and the editor of the multi-creator dreams and nightmares anthology A Bit of Undigested Potato, a collection that combined work from graphic novelists like Karrie Fransman and Gareth Brookes, established small press names including EdieOP, Danny Noble and Andy Poyiadgi, and newer names on the scene like Kim Clements and Rozi Hathaway. You can read my interview with Keara Stewart here at Broken Frontier and my review of A Bit of Undigested Potato here.
The first evening in this exciting new era takes place on Monday 19th October with a Soaring Penguin Press extravaganza that will include Ellen Lindner (The Black Feather Falls), Bach (It’s Hard to Be a Girl), Laura Howell (The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert & Sullivan), and John Maybury (The Erotic Adventures of Space Babe 113). If you’re new to Laydeez Do Comics then be there at Gosh! in three weeks and experience one of the most welcoming celebrations of the form on the regular London comics calendar!
For more information on Laydeez Do Comics visit their website here and follow them on Twitter here. Attendance at Laydeez Do Comics is free but places are limited. Tickets for the October LDC can be booked here.
You can also follow Keara Stewart on Twitter here and Wallis Eates here.
