Back To School!

 

We are delighted to confirm that our comics collective, Accent UK will be returning to the convention scene this coming weekend at The Town That Never Was, the annual Steampunk Festival at Blists Hill Victorian Town, part of the Ironbridge Gorge Museums group!

We've had this event penciled in for some time, but with a change of dates, various ongoing restrictions - and sadly the continuing cancellation of most other conventions and festivals, we'd remained cautious, possibly too cautious in announcing it, but here we are! 

The Cthulu Party's succesful mayoral campaign of 2019

It'll - gulp - be my first event since Copenhagen in 2019 and the first together with Dave West in almost two years. In fact it's almost 18 months since we've last seen each other so you can see why we're getting a wee bit excited about being allowed out in the wild again!

The event is again run by the Ministry of Steampunk, (those splendid people behind the excellent Asylum Steampunk Festival, sadly cancelled again this year despite best efforts) in conjunction with the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and this will be it's 4th appearance with us attending them all, exhibiting at the last three.

Everyone welcome from Hopeless Main to Mars (doesn't) Attacks - ack! ack!

It's a remarkable place a town literally rebuilt brick by brick around a foundry to preserve a lost way of life with working printers, blacksmiths, bakers, pub, sweet shop, chippy & much more! Special as all this is, when enhanced by the splendour of steampunk visitors it really comes into its own with attractions, musical acts, dancing, demonstrations, dinosaur detectives, artists, traders, makers & more, really bringing the town alive.

Colin meets his Asylum comic story stars!

This time, we are to be housed in the Stirchley Board School (site 46 on the map below!) dating from 1881 where along with other artists and imagineers we are presenting the perfect Back To School tonic of ABC.....Art, Books & Comics!

We are, as you can see, quite excited by actually having an event to go to and an opportunity to catch up with visitors and the wonderful steampunk community that we are privalged to be a small part of. Please do consider popping in if your logistics and personal situation allows as you are guaranteed a very different, refreshing and inspiring experience and if you visit the school we promise to go easy on the homework!

Comics & Steampunk Double Feature!

To make up for last weekend without an event for Accent UK Comics, we've two this!
 

Firstly, I'm delighted to return to Macc-Pow next Saturday, which I greatly enjoyed last year and is another fairly local one to me which is nice. This year's event is #3 and coincides with Macclesfield's bi-annual Barnaby Festival which I understand was the catalyst for organiser Marc Jackson to put on the first event in 2016. This year like #2 is free to attend and takes place in Macc's impressive Town Hall , which was a great venue for the comic workshops, artists and exhibitors, so I'll looking forward to this.

A nice offical event picture taken off me at last year's Macc-Pow!

Next up, the same weekend but on both days is the mysterious 'The Town That Never Was!' at Blists Hill, Ironbridge. This is a new steampunk 'wild west' themed event organised by those fine folks at The Ministry of Steampunk who are behind the mighty Asylum festival in Lincoln, the world's largest annual steampunk celebration!

The event had a highly enjoyable 'soft debut' at the same venue last year to test the waters (to which Gary & I and our better halves attended in civvies) and all were blown away by the response from steampunks, the public and the venue so a return was inevitable but necessitated a move from the previous July date to June which unfortunately for me clashed with Macc-Pow! (which itself had moved from July to match the Barnaby Festival dates), so the intrepid duo of 'Deputy' Dave West and 'Gunslinger' Gary Crutchley will be there both days, defending the fort until I join them on the Sunday - what could go wrong!

A splendid picture from last year's 'soft debut' event!