We’re at that point in the month again when we look forward to another guest-artist filled D&D and this one has a particularly BF flavour with three artists who have all been championed at Broken Frontier! The Gosh! Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw is back on Tuesday October 24th and includes not just 2017 ‘Six to Watch’ star Peony Gent but also that long-term fixture on the site Wallis Eates, and also an artist I first met this summer when I was doing the ELCAF portfolio reviews ‘Springboard Meetings’ – Chloe Elise Dennis.
We’re once again at our current home, upstairs in the Coach and Horses pub on Great Marlborough Street. Your co-hosts for the night are myself (Broken Frontier Editor-in-Chief Andy Oliver) and Gosh’s very own Nora Goldberg. The evening begins at 6.30pm at Gosh on Berwick Street before we head off for our sketching and drinking antics at 7pm. Don’t forget you can join the official Facebook event here.
Peony Gent is one of our 2017 Broken Frontier ‘Six Small Press Creators to Watch‘ and one of It’s Nice That’s Graduates of 2016. Her distinctive brand of visual poetry has been seen in a number of anthologies including the ever brilliant Dirty Rotten Comics who first brought her to a wider comics audience and, this year, in the Image Comics-published 2017 Thought Bubble Anthology.
You can read a full interview with Peony at Broken Frontier here and she was also one of our panellists on this year’s Broken Frontier Panel at ELCAF on ‘Comics and the Micropublishing Revolution’. Peony has also self-published a number of minicomics including Static of which I said here at BF ” Gent’s layered use of visual metaphor is simply sublime. Sometimes that can take the form of oft-explored but no less powerful notions of being alone in a crowd while on others it can be far more complex in structure like the incapacitating aura of anxiety as it gradually consumes its host in the image below.”
Wallis Eates needs little introduction to regular Broken Frontier readers. She’s an artist I have oft described here as one of the most vital and important voices working in autobiographical comics in the UK and her ability to connect with her audience on the most fundamental levels of shared experience is simply astonishing.
Wallis was a finalist in the 2014 Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition and has self-published a number of comics and zines revolving around subjects like the veracity of memory and her own relationship with her mother growing up as a child in a single-parent family. You can read an extensive interview with her here at BF and catch up with reviews of some of her projects like Fear of Mum-Death and the Shadow Men here and The Magic Quadrant here.
Wallis is currently working on her new project Like an Orange which is being crowdfunded through Unbound Books. You can read more about the project here and back it here. A graphic narrative focusing on brain injury survivors, Like an Orange is a collection of stories about the people Eates met when working at the East London branch of the charity Headway. It’s a series of accounts about those affected by brain injuries who attended the ‘Submit to Love’ art studio – a studio space that used art practice to help as a rehabilitative process.
And, finally, Chloe Elise Dennis is a creator who came to my attention at ELCAF when I had the opportunity to look through her portfolio of work. Her recent self-published comic Every Hour is Saved is a visual record of interviews she conducted with her grandmother Elsie. The comic looks back on Elsie’s childhood in an India under British rule, her family relationships, her schooldays and also examines notions of British identity within that historical context.
I said of Every Hour is Saved here at Broken Frontier that “It’s always a pleasure to see newer creators aware of and willing to investigate the unique storytelling opportunities of the medium from the very outset and Dennis constantly explores and exploits the boundaries of the page to the advantage of the story’s tone and tempo.”
If you can’t make the night we’ll be tweeting the drawing themes with the hashtag #GoshBFDD for those who want to join in online!
Join us on Tuesday October 24th, then, for another fun evening of drinking, drawing and comics camaraderie. We kick off at 6.30pm in Gosh with a chance to get hold of signed comics and books from all our featured creators before moving over to the The Coach and Horses for 7. We look forward to seeing you then!
