The very first Comica Festival was held at the ICA in London and ran from June 27 to July 6, 2003.

Comica Opening Party
Comic artists Charles Burns, John Bagnall, Marc Baines, Ed Pinsent and Woodrow Phoenix DJ in the ICA bar.
Friday, 27 June 2003, 9pm

Film: Cowboy Bebop The Movie
The hottest of Japanese anime - a timely tale of biological warfare.
Friday, 27 June 2003 onwards

Exhibition: Potential Comics
Inspired by OuBaPo (Ouvroir De Bande Dessinée Potentielle or 'Workshop for the Potential Of Comics'), a team of artists will experiment with the comic format in an evolving, wall-sized, multi-pathed artwork in the ICA concourse. The finished Potential Comic can be viewed here. Plus a capsule exhibition exploring the history and legacy of American underground comics.
Friday, 27 June to Sunday, 6 July 2003

Exhibition: WebComica Online
The very best of comics on the web, plus Potential Comics online (inspired by OuBaPo).
25 June to 6 July 2003

Talk: Daniel Merlin Goodbury
Curator of the Digital Studio Comics exhibition Daniel Goodbury takes the audience on a tour of selected works.
Wednesday, 25 June 2003, 7pm

Exhibition: Foo Zap Yow & Now
Five vitrines of underground and alternative comics from North America from the collections of curators Les Coleman and Paul Gravett plus framed prints by Robert Crumb, Joe Coleman, Julie Doucet, Mark Beyer and Chris Ware. A 16-page A5-size brochure was published with an introduction by Les Coleman and quotes and self-portraits by the 18 featured cartoonists.
Friday, 27 June to 6 July 2003

Talk: New Practices, New Comics
Festival curator Paul Gravett, John Barber and John Dunning look at how media tools are changing comics.
Saturday, 28 June 2003, 4pm

An Afternoon Of Conversations:
Sunday, 29 June 2003

DIY Comics: Online vs Offline
Independent comics creators discuss straddling the small oress and internet.

Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis discusses the secrets of writing for comics with Paul Gravett.

Mike Carey
Comics writer Mike Carey in conversation with Joel Meadows.

Alan Moore: An Extraordinary Gentleman
His leading collaborators discuss working with the High Priest of comics, featuring Melinda Gebbie, Peter Hogan, David Lloyd and Gary Spencer-Millidge.

The Great Escape
Contributors to the 1980s Escape Magazine unveil their latest works in print, animation and film, featuring John Bagnall, Ed Pinsent, Woodrow Phoenix, and Chris Reynolds together with co-editor Paul Gravett.

Talk: Charles Burns - The Dog Boy Speaks
Jonathan Ross in conversation with Black Hole creator Charles Burns.
Mon 30 June, 7pm

Talk: Chris Ware - Smartest Cartoonist In The World
Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, Guardian First Book Award winner) in conversation with Alex Garland.
Tuesday, 1 July 2003, 6.45pm

Talk: Joe Sacco - Moral Draughtsman
From the frontline, comics journalist Joe Sacco (Palestine) in conversation with political cartoonist Martin Rowson.
Wednesday, 2 July 2003, 6.45pm

Talk: Sophie Crumb - A Brand New person
Sophie Crumb (Ghost World film illustrator), daughter of comic giant Robert, and rising comic star in her own right, talks about her work with Jenni Scott.
Friday, 4 July 2003, 7pm

Performance: Daniel Johnston - An Alternative Independence Day
Cult outsider comic artist and musician Daniel Johnston, beloved of the likes of Kurt Cobain, Beck and Harmony Korine, will be performing material from his latest album in this alternative independence day celebration.
Friday, 4 July 2003, 8pm

Talk: Frédéric Boilet - Manga, Mon Amour
Masterclass with Frenchman-in-Tokyo Frédéric Boilet expaining his erotic hybrid of European and Japanese sensibilities.
Saturday, 5 July 2003, 5pm

Talk: Three Very Big Comic Artists
Steven Appleby, Tom Gauld and Simone Lia talk about cartooning and their work as comic artists. Gauld and Lia are at the cutting edge of the next generation of graphic artists; they publish together as Cabanon Press and, next month, the quirky and surreal collection, Both, is published by Bloomsbury. Tom also creates the comic strips Move To The City for Time Out and The Writer At Work for the Guardian. Appleby is one of this country's leading cartoonists whose work currently appears in the Guardian, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph; his forthcoming book is Jim: Nine Lives of a Dysfunctional Cat. Chair: curator of the ICA festival Comica, Paul Gravett.
When: Tuesday, 28 October 2003

Talk: Posy Simmonds & Ian McEwan
The Business Of Books: Is the book industry ill-serving both writers and readers - and writing all a publishers' game? How does a literary novel find its way out - from the threat of the blank page, through the slush pile, the blockbuster 3 for 2's and the literary prize judging panels? Award-winning illustrator and cartoonist, Posy Simmonds is best known for the satirical strip she writes for the Guardian. Her graphic novels include True Love and Fred, the film version of which was nominated for an Oscar. Her most recent book is Literary Life. Ian McEwan has won numerous awards and prizes, from the Booker to the Whitbread, for books including The Child in Time and most recently, Atonement. Several of his books have been translated into film and McEwan has also written several plays and scripts for television.
When: Wednesday, 3 December 2003

Talk: Art Spiegelman
Pullitzer Prize-winning artist Art Spiegelman discusses his work with acclaimed novelist Philip Pullman. Best known for the Holocaust narrative, Maus, Spiegelman is also co-founder and editor of the avant-garde comics magazine, RAW, and edits Little Lit, a series of comics anthologies for children. He is currently working on an opera, Drawn to Death about the history of comics, and has recently published a series In the Shadow of No Towers in several papers and magazines. Last year Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Book of the Year, the first book for children ever to achieve this feat; the book is part of the famous His Dark Materials fantasy saga, a great success with adults and children, the latest tale of which, Lyra's Oxford, is just out.
When: Thursday 18 December, 2003

The following review appeared in the UK comics magazine Tripwire in July 2003:

Featuring  some of the most critically-acclaimed international comic book creators as well as the pick of the new turks.

Comics At The ICA:
London Event Connects The Arts
by Gavin MacDonald

London's Institute Of Contemporary Art has had a long-standing, albeit sporadic, commitment to comics as an art form, and this year's Comics Festival, which ran from June 27 to July 6, marks the forth time that serious, prolonged attention has been paid to the form. An ambitious program of events was curated by Paul Gravett, co-founder of the seminal '80s anthology title and publisher Escape, regular TCJ scribe and something of an elder statesman for comics in the UK.

Gravett's association with comics at the ICA is a long one. As a youth he attended 1972s Aargh, an exhibition of artwork that managed to span the polar opposites of the US and emerging UK underground and the nostalgic side of traditional English childrens comics. This was the first time he remembered seeing comic artwork under glass, and it had a profound effect on him. "They had artwork from Jack Kirby's New Gods and Forever People. I didn't know what this stuff was. I just remember being traumatised to see this incredible material."

The next time comics came onto the ICA's cultural radar was a decade later with the 1982 exhibition Graphic Rap. It was in the catalog that accompanied and documented this event that Escape posted an advert, the first mention in print of the embryonic company.

It is now 16 years since the third occasion, 1987's Comics Iconoclasm exhibition, which Gravett remembers as an unsatisfactory fine-art dominated affair that treated comics as not much more than a source of striking pop imagery, and largely ignored narrative aspects of the form.

So why, after such a long interlude, has the ICA returned to comics? Certainly they are enjoying a newfound respectability in the UK, with mainstream publisher Jonathan Cape reprinting highlights from Fantagraphics' back catalog, but some of the motives for the ICA's renewed interest may be more practical. This June and July its elegant premises on the Mall underwent extensive refurbishment, with many areas subject to restricted access, and during the day the building resounded to the din of construction work. Consequently the two permanent exhibits that were on view throughout the season were displayed in the only exhibition space available, namely the foyer.

It's a pity, perhaps, that the ICA's directors could only commit to this program of events during such a transitional (and noisy) period, but. despite the limitations, Gravett threw himself into the task of organising the season with great purpose and vision. "it was opportunistic in the sense that the ICA was going through a program of refurbishment, and had a gap where they were caught with their trousers down, in the sense that there was nothing going on," Gravett told the Journal.

He was also very fortunate to be able to rely on the assistance and infectious enthusiasm of ICA publicist John Dunning, himself a creator whose work has been anthologized in the eclectic and stylish London-based anthology title Sturgeon White Moss. In addition, the festival managed to involve each of the ICA's departments in at least some small way, making for a comprehensive, varied and exciting season that demonstrated the reach and diversity of the art form. Gravett said, "We received a commitment from each of the ICA's departments that they would each organise something toward the program: a performance from Daniel Johnston, a series of film viewings, a club night, a program of talks, two exhibitions and a multimedia event." This interdisciplinarity is essential, as Gravett sees it, for comics to achieve greater recognition: "It's a good way of presenting comics and making links between comics and other art forms. This has got to be done if comics are to avoid being marginalised."

There's no doubt that Gravett has worked under considerable constraints, financially and in terms of space and time. However, his efforts may not go unrewarded. "You have no idea how tiny the budget is, " he said. "We're not even talking about a shoestring; it's more like a piece of a shoestring, but the great thing is that when Phillip Dodd [the ICA's director] gave us permission to go ahead with the event, and we literally only got the word to do it in April, it was with the rider that, subject to it going well, the ICA would look to doing it again and on an annual basis. This stuff deserves to be looked at seriously, not as a minor sideshow to fine art, and certainly not with any acknowledgement of the superhero side of things. That was a decision from the very beginning, from our conversations with Phillip. We felt that there was no reason to cover the mainstream material, as it is perfectly well catered for in the media and in its own celebratory events."

Indeed, practically the only tip of the hat to the mainstream publishers was the presence, on Sunday, of the exuberant Warren Ellis and the scholarly Mike Carey in a panel discussion on writing for comics, part of a day of UK-dominated panels.

The rest of the events program was dominated be a series of high profile in-conversation-with talks, involving Charles Burns, Chris Ware and Joe Sacco. These were well-attended, with tickets selling out in advance, something that bodes well for the possibility of a Comica 2004. Part of the credit for this goes to Ana Merino, coordinator of the Semana Negra Festival in Gijon, Spain, who had already booked these artists to appear at that event and who had arranged, with Gravett, for them to stop over in the UK. An attempt was made to throw links out to culture beyond the comics, with the moderator being drawn from outside of the field; author Alex Garland did well to tease the notoriously shy Ware out of his shell in a crowded auditorium, and UK television chat-show host and inveterate fanboy Jonathan Ross enjoyed a well-informed and relaxed conversation with Burns. The only slight disappointment was that political commentator Tariq Ali, originally intended as the foil for Joe Sacco, had to drop out due to another commitment. His replacement, the newspaper political cartoonist, Martin Rowson, made the best of short notice, but inevitably the conversation focussed a little more on the nuts and bolts of drawing and journalism rather than political realities. However, the talks were still illuminating and entertaining, and overall, this aspect of Comica was an undeniable success. That such high profile, and appropriate, figures were called upon to contribute as questioners and foils speak volumes for Paul Gravett's vision for the festival.

The Web Comica exhibition, co-curated by Web comics evangelist Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, used an attractively designed interface to link the ICA's multimedia suite to twelve Web comics sites. These include three subscription-access anthology titles (Girlamatic, Modern Tales and Serializer), but focussed mainly on the single-creator sites, with obvious inclusions like Scott McCloud and Justine Shaw's Eisner-nominated Nowheregirl rubbing shoulders with newer talents like Paul Fryer and Derek Kirk.

Among the themes emerging from the workshop-style session held in the suite of Saturday, and the panel of small-press creators on Sunday, was the respective merits of Web and print media for new creators, particularly in terms of start up costs, recouping revenues, support networks and finding an audience. There were some vocal Luddite dissentions, and many expressed the feeling that Web comics cannot satisfy either the desire for ownership or the object fetish that so often comes with the territory of being a comic fan (it's hard to file a Web comic away in a Mylar snug). However, there was enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by the Web, and a general recognition that Web and print offer two different kinds of reading experience. Goodbrey's distinction between Web and Hyper comics is a helpful one here, with the former being essentially a comic hosted online that could work equally well in print, and the latter a work that exploits the unique possibilities of the Internet, with multiple narrative pathways and an interactive, nonlinear structure.

In the foyer, the past was put under glass in Foo Zap Yow and Now, an exhibition of US underground material, five vitrines and a series of signed prints which featured material from the '50s onwards. I'm sure many comic devotees, in common with myself, find this kind of static exhibit understandable yet undeniably frustrating. It highlighted some of the problems with exhibiting comics in a traditional space; comics are object that are meant to be handled and more importantly read from cover to cover, and to exhibit them in this way is a little like screening films by framing stills. However, the selection, taken from the private collections of Les Coleman and Gravett was a very rich and comprehensive one and made for some close inspection.

Opposite the vitrines was a wall filled with something that looked at first glance like a blueprint for one of Goodbrey's hyper-comics, or perhaps one of Chris Ware's more dense riffs on structure. The first ever project of the UK chapter of the OuBaPo was an intricate, multi-pathed collaboration, involving artists from the Test-Tube Comics group and Les Cartoonistes Dangereux, as well as conference attendees like Ware and Jonston. OuBaPo is an abbreviation of the Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle, which translates roughly as the Workshop for Potential Comics. Originating in France with l'Association, the OuBaPo is dedicated to experimenting with structure, limitation and collaboration in comics.

Gravett explained that this is perhaps not as formal and dry as it may sound; importantly, the real meaning of the word Ouvroir here is closer to knitting circle than workshop. "It's meant to be fun," Gravett said. "It's not deadly serious or earnest intellectual pursuit, but underneath it all there are potentials for opening up new ways in which comics can work, both on and off line."

The project was directed by Tom Gauld, who took responsibility for the over all structure and the central narrative spine, a sedately surreal strip involving a man walking through bizarre, shifting landscapes on a quest to buy a bottle of milk. Gauld, whose early collaborative projects with Simone Lia are due to be collected and published by mainstream publisher Bloomsbury later in the year, described the process: "Paul got us together and told us that he wanted to do something on the opposite wall from the vitrines, something modern by British creators. There was a minuscule budget, and the space was already determined, and I had some strong ideas about how it should be presented, and from there I got myself into a position where I was designing and co-curating the exhibit."

Each panel was a square piece of yellow paper, which although of outsize dimensions was extremely reminiscent of a certain proprietary brand of gummed notepaper. This was an inventive decision, connoting ephemerality and playfulness, and it did well to counterpoint the busy but static vitrines across the foyer. [The completed project can be viewed on-line here.]

Comica's genesis also partly lies in Gravett's plans to commemorate Escape's birth, but by the time the ICA's involvement had been secured, this aspect had been reduced to a panel discussion on Sunday that reunited Escape creators to discuss their recent projects in print and other media. Plans are afoot to organise another event next year to commemorate Escape's 21st birthday and coming of age, which may or may not be tied into a potential Comica 2004 program and will hopefully include contributions from such esteemed Escape alumni as Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Whether or not this pans out, there is no doubt that Comica 2003 was a successful festival, and Gravett is optimistic about the possibilities of expanding to venues beyond the ICA in the future - already this year they have linked up with the French Institute to present work by L'Association creator Frédéric Boilet. It may well be that we have just seen the inception of a major new international festival devoted to sequential narratives.
Text © Gavin MacDonald

Teenage Exile:
Toby Litt misses the stench of adolescent bedrooms in an exhibition of comic art.

Imagine a cartoon panel with a door at the end of a corridor in a house. The door is covered in stickers and scrawls. A sign dangles from a nail: "DANGER! DO NOT ENTER!" Zaggy lines around the door's edge show that it is vibrating to the beat of loud, angry music. The caption at the bottom reads "America".

In the second panel, we have entered the room behind the door. If a bomb were to hit it, the result might be a little tidier. There is junk and garbage everywhere: CDs, trainers, pants, gloopy shapes. A stack system vibrates zigzaggedly. But our attention is drawn to the figure at the far end of the room. All we can make out is a bent-over back, a long-haired head. More lines show that their right elbow is moving up and down. We can just glimpse what looks like a magazine. The speech bubble reads: "Nnggg, Nngg, Nnggg."

The third panel is the revelation. Looking down from a point directly above the figure, we see that the magazine isn't a magazine, but a comic - and that the rhythmic elbow movement is explained by the pencil with which our long-haired hero (or heroine; it's still impossible to tell) is copying the comic's first panel, which - you guessed it - shows a door at the end of a corridor.

You will not have found this cartoon strip at the recent Institute of Contemporary Arts mini-exhibition Comica: A Festival Of International Comic Art & Literature, for it is my own cartoon strip. At the ICA the annual celebration of underground comics or e-comix also belongs behind a door - at the end of the American corridor. Comics (which, in this one-week only mini-exhibition, means underground comics or e-comix) have a pretty clear lineage. The fans of one generation become the stars of the next with work that pays homage to the ideals of the past. A quote from Charles Burns, one of the current stars, sums up a large amount of the work displayed under glass in white cases here: "The theme I always come back to is sexual horror, the fear of the physical, the conflict between the mind and the body."

To say comics are perpetually adolescent is not to undermine them. The popular caricature of comic fans as geeks, freaks, trainspotters and losers is not entirely inaccurate. I once went to a comics fair with a lanky friend of mine. He walked through the door, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Then he spread his arms wide and surveyed the various mutants flicking through troughs of plastic-sheathed rarities. "My people!" he said. Comics, like adolescents, and like comic fans, both do and don't want to grow up. The adolescent's questions are also those of the comic. How can we go on when the world is such a horrible place? How can we live in these disgusting, leaky, lumpy bodies? How can we ever be loved? This is the dissidence of adolescence from the internal exile of the bedroom.

Comics are supposed to have grown up several times. In the 1980s, the graphic novel - Art Spiegelman's Maus, for example - achieved a brief respectability. Something similar is happening today with equally engaged comics like Joe Sacco's Palestine and Safe Area: Gorazde, or the film adaptations of Road to Perdition and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth won the Guardian First Book Award: an honour, as Ware puts it, "generally only bestowed upon those authors who refuse to learn how to draw". When I asked staff at the Gosh comic shop on Museum Street what they thought of Comica, they said ICA's festival was "a bit too Guardian". In other words, it's the same comics getting yet more attention from the same mainstream readership.

However, the exhibition, accompanying a number of sold-out live events featuring among others Sacco, Ware and Burns, remained marginal, even within the building. Located in the long white corridor that leads from the entrance foyer to the bar, the main part of the show was a special commission from OuBaPo (Ouvroir de Bande Dessinee Potentielle, or "workshop for the potential of comics"). This collaboration between roughly 15 artists makes a virtue of being staged in a transient space. A large number of different stories (all on yellow Post-it notes) cross, collide with and jump off from a simple linear strip by Tom Gauld, whose similar Move to the City appears in Time Out magazine. The most outstanding contribution came from Ware, whose old-fashioned style of clear line and definite inking is both moving and elegant.

Across the corridor there was a brief history of underground comics, starting in the 1960s in the bedrooms of West Coast America and spreading out across the country. The most powerful image here was Joe Coleman's poster-size mommy/daddy, in which the left half of Mommy and the right of Daddy are displayed in symbolic crucifixion. The bottom of the picture shows their tomb-stones and rotting cadavers. The rest of the exhibition comprised covers and two-page spreads from classics. This is where the white glass-topped cases come in. It might be overstating it to say that comics can only be appreciated with an accompanying teen-bedroom stench of sock, scalp and crotch, but there is something weirdly antiseptic about this form of display. Better to trudge up Charing Cross Road to Comic Showcase or Forbidden Planet. At least there you can browse. That said, the ICA Bookshop has put together a fantastically wide selection of comics, to be touched, admired and purchased. Perhaps even taken home and copied.
Text © Toby Litt

Chris Ware VS Alex Garland

Chris Ware, writer/artist of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth, winner of the Guardian First book award and recipient of 9/10 from URT. Alex Garland, author of traveller cliché book The Beach and screenwriter of 28 Days Later. The battle of the century! However, when I arrived at the ICA, there was no paddling pool filled with jelly on the stage, just the two men sitting there looking quite nervous (especially Ware). Clearly tonight was to be more about talking than wrestling, which I for one was glad about.

As part of the ICAs Comica season, Ware was here to discuss his work, with Garland acting as a kind of interviewer/facilitator. It started with a slideshow of Wares work, from Art School to the present day. This was a fascinating view of the artist in development. Themes emerged continually, and you got a sense of the shaping events of Wares life, that he would continually return to, including his sense of betrayal from his absent father, and the trauma of his grandmothers death. He also showed his influences, such as Krazy Kat and Siegel and Schuster Superman, alongside pieces where this influence was especially obvious. There were also photos of the toys he created, showing surprising skill with woodwork. You realise that the cardboard cut-out sections of Jimmy Corrigan will certainly work. He even showed al the models he made to check he got the lighting right in sections. Very in-depth.

After this Ware fielded questions, both from Garland and the audience, and finished with reference shots used for the Worlds Fair sequence of Jimmy Corrigan and some pages of his new strip as works in progress. The whole affair was very effective as an insight into the creative process of a genius. Ware, though shy, was incredibly witty. His continual self-depreciation did begin to grate, as it clearly did to Garland, who often took him to task for describing his own work in disparaging terms. The two managed to get a good flow of conversation going, though, and Garland's questions were often insightful, allowing Ware to talk about his work without much interruption, but guiding him subtly between topics. The audience questions were slightly more mediocre, being along the lines of ‘What pens do you use' and 'How do you colour your work'. There was also some sorry customer who began his question ‘I asked you this 10 years ago, but I'm going to ask you again'. And then asked him why he used amputations a lot. Sicko.

But I think the greatest thing was seeing visually how autobiographical Jimmy Corrigan was. Ware looked like Corrigan, down to the big ol' head, he sat like Corrigan, he even walked like Corrigan. It was like meeting a comic character come to life! Oh, and seeing Frank Skinner.
Text © Unified Review Theory