downthetubes Partners With British Library For Digital Conversation Event In April

Titled “Venturing off the page: exploring multimedia, animation and new narrative forms” guest speakers will be Kate Ashwin, Yomi Ayeni, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Bryan Talbot and Priority Booking for British Library members has just opened.

We’ll be exploring the impact of new technologies on how we read, create and understand comics, and investigating the challenges of archiving them for future readers – no easy task as software and platforms continue to evolve.

Here are details of all the speakers (including myself, which is a little strange). I do hope that if you are creating digital comics this will be of interest and you can make it on the night.

Kate Ashwin has been both artist and writer for various digital comics since 2002, with her most recent project being the critically-acclaimed online comic series Widdershins, five print volumes of which have been successfully crowdfunded via Kickstarter.

Her work has also appeared in The Phoenix, Dark Horse Presents, and three Cautionary Fables and Fairytales anthologies, which she also co-edits.

Yomi Ayeni is an award winning Transmedia creator, producer, filmmaker, and storyteller. His current project, Clockwork Watch, is a retro-futurist Steampunk / Victoriana story told across graphic novels, interactive theatre, online, and film which has, so far, spawned three tangential threads, immersive live events, exhibitions at the Royal Observatory, Scottsdale Civic Library (Arizona), National Maritime Museum, The Asylum in Lincoln, and a fictional online newspaper.

He is one of a few writers engaged in bringing a multicultural slant to the steampunk genre, by exploring Victoriana outside Great Britain.

Yomi worked as a broadcast journalist in the BBC newsroom, was an active part of the Burning Man Festival media team, and is a founding member of the European Burning Man Regional event, ‘Nowhere’. He lectures Transmedia Storytelling at the Royal College of Arts, and believes mapping stories to everyday life, creates experiences that bring audiences closer to the heart of a narrative.

He has developed several reality TV formats, including Global E-Missions (ITV), winner of the 2002 Broadcast Award for “Best Use of New Media” and his 2009 project “Breathe” was one of the first interactive participatory stories to explore how an ongoing narrative offered the audience a chance to become characters in a film, and help solve a fictional murder mystery. He is currently writing a sequel, which he hopes to produce in 2019/2020.

You can find him online at www.yomster.com

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is a principal lecturer in Narrative & Interaction Design at The University of Hertfordshire. A prolific and innovative comic creator, Goodbrey has gained international recognition as a leading expert in the field of experimental digital comics.

His hypercomic work received the International Clickburg Webcomic Award in Holland in 2006 while his work in print was awarded with the Isotope Award for Excellence In Comics in San Francisco in 2005.

His smartphone app, A Duck Has An Adventure was shortlisted in the 2012 New Media Writing Prize. In 2017 he was awarded a Professional Doctorate for his study of the impact of digital mediation and hybridisation on the form of comics.

An archive of his work can be found at http://e-merl.com

Bryan Talbot has written and drawn comics and graphic novels for over 30 years, including Judge Dredd, Batman, Sandman, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (written by Mary Talbot and the winner of the 2013 Costa Biography Award) and his current Grandville series of steampunk detective thrillers.

He is published in over twenty countries, is a frequent guest at international comic festivals, and has been awarded an honorary Doctorate in Arts and an honorary Doctorate in Letters.

Bryan has been online for 22 years at www.bryan-talbot.com

John Freeman has been a comics editor and writer for over 30 years, starting his career as designer and editor on Doctor Who Magazine and working on the “Genesis 1992” comics including Death’s Head II and Warheads. His numerous credits also include editing Star Trek Magazine and Babylon 5 Magazine for Titan Magazines; running the Lancaster Literature Festival; and publishing the downthetubes comics web site for 20 years, primarily focusing on British comics but other cult media, too.

Working toward developing comics for mobile since 2002, he was editor and writer at ROK Comics, which published numerous digital audio comics including The Beatles Story and Team MOBILE, was editor of STRIP Magazine and has more recently edited Doctor Who titles and Lost Fleet – Corsair for Titan Comics.

• Digital Conversation: Digital Comics 6.30 – 8.30pm Wednesday 18th April 2018 The Terrace Restaurant, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB. The British Library’s priority booking for members is opens now (as of 1st March 2018) and tickets for the event go on general release on 8th March 2018. The event booking page is here on the British Library web site

Price: Full Price: £6.00/ Member: £6.00/ Senior 60+: £5.00/ Student: £4.00/ Registered Unemployed: £4.00/ Under 18: £4.00 | Enquiries: +44 (0)1937 546546 E-mail: boxoffice@bl.uk

Digital Conversations British Library www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk