New Shows! New Shows!

Well as you know us Accent UK guys don't get out very often (yeah right says Mrs M!) so we're pleased to confirm the final show schedule for the rest of this year!


Bryan Talbot's Lakes festival poster 

First up for us is the very exciting The Lakes International Comic Art Festival on 19th and 20th of October, which is starting to gain momentum since first being announced ages ago, it has a stunning guest list with festival founders, Bryan and Mary Talbot, Sean Phillips, being joined by literally a who's who of great comic creators such as Charlie Adlard (fresh from his Copenhagen trip!), Steve Bell, Ed Brubaker, Kurt Busiek, Hunt Emerson, Duncan Fegredo, David Lloyd, Posy Simmonds and the one I'm most excited about, Joe Sacco!

A great line up plus dozens of invited indie creators including Accent UK, Garen Ewing, Ivan Petrus, Black Hearted Press, Jenika Ioffreda, Owen (Thaddeus Mist) Johnson, Scar Comics and many more in a special Comics Clock Tower market place right in the centre of Kendal.

It's aiming for that wonderful European feeling with the whole town of Kendal embracing the event so why not give it a go, it promises to be a very different comic experience.

Next up, the first Saturday in November  (appropriately the 2nd), will be our second trip of the year to  Comica's Comiket in London. The show will return to its latest venue at Central St Martins College, close to Kings Cross station where we had a record selling fun day way back in April, see my wee report here (scroll down!).

No guests have been announced yet but as you'll read from previous shows, there's usually no shortage of willing artists to 'drop-in', soak up the atmosphere and maybe take part in the on stage drawing parade in one of the most relaxed comic shows of the year which seems to have become a welcome fixture on the Accent UK calendar.

Our final show of the year will surprisingly be.....Thought Bubble in Leeds on the 23rd & 24th November! I say surprisingly as you may recall that we were one of the many regulars who missed out when the tables went viral and sold out on twitter in 2 hours flat in February!.

The speed of the sell out surprised everyone and didn't go down well in the normally forgiving comics community, however the organiser's came good on their word to try and find a solution and recently added a third hall close to the main venue at Leeds Royal Armouries which we booked a table at while remaining on the 'reseve list' for the main New Dock Hall -  and we've just heard from the lovely Sarah that thanks to someone dropping out that we are indeed back in the main hall - phew!

We're obviously pretty chuffed with this and you have to admire the organiser's ambition in adding floorspace to an already packed arena, and we are grateful that our unbroken attendance at the festival since the very first 'town hall' show in 2007 will now continue.

With that final thought, Dave and I are already planning ahead for 2014 which promises to be even busier than this year's record breaking 11 shows. Our 'long list' has 18 different events and dates at the moment which is crazy, we obviously can't do them all so will sadly have to 'drop' some of our existing shows to make room for some exciting new ones.

Of course we better have some new books to present at these events so watch this space!