Simone Lia and Dave McKean at Medway River Lit 2025
- makeswordswork
- Jan 7
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 9
It was my great pleasure to programme a weekend of comic creators at Medway River Lit 2025.
As a lifelong fan of comics and as a new comic creator myself, I think it’s really important that we feature graphic novelists and cartoonists in the festival’s lineup and I am committed to making that happen. Fewer literary festivals are programming graphic novelists and I absolutely believe that comics are literature and can help reluctant readers become lifelong lovers of all sorts of books.
Medway River Lit is a literary festival based in Medway, UK, which I am co-director of, and this was our third year. In its first year, the festival hosted a whole day of talks and workshops from Sayra Begum (MONGREL), Fumio Obata (JUST SO HAPPENS) and Wallis Eates (LDComics), alongside Medway-based illustrators and comic artists, Nadia Perrotta and Nick Ashton.
In its second year, I launched my graphic speculative memoir (THREE INSTANCES OF NOT MEETING JARVIS COCKER, buy it here!), hosted a panel on Adapting Other Sources into Comics with Matt Adcock (COMPLETE DARKNESS), and we also hosted a comics and zine workshop with local illustrator Skai Campbell.
For MRL 2025, we were delighted to host Observer cartoonist, Simone Lia, at Chatham Library on Saturday 22 November. She talked about her graphic novel HOW TO MAKE LIFE BETTER WHEN IT FEELS LIKE IT'S GETTING WORSE, about the growing pains of bunny Fluffy Pulcino, and what it's like to live with a character for over 20 years. FLUFFY debuted in 2003-2005, as a self published 4-parter and was published in 2007 as a graphic novel by Jonathan Cape.
One of the most surprising things was that Simone said was she creates each page one at a time and completely finishes it before she moves on. To which I replied 'Wow'!
The legendary artist and polymath Dave McKean also gave an illustrated talk about his life in illustration, on the same night.
It was amazing to see all the fabulous work that Dave has produced during his career, from books, to posters and album covers, movies, comics, even an opera. He showed us a book he wrote and illustrated about the war poet Paul Nash, BLACK DOG: THE DREAMS OF PAUL NASH, which he said was probably his favourite of all the work he's created.
One of the most surprising things that Dave said, was that he didn't think he had a style, by which I think he means he works in many media, because he absolutely does has a style and once you know it, it's immediately recognisable.. Some of my particular favourites, are his illustrations for SF Said's VARJAK PAW inky cat illustrations, and David Almond's JOE QUINN'S POLTERGEIST with its more collage approach. The thing that marks out McKean's work in all media is its dark and deep materiality.
My final treat of the weekend was to take part in a workshop we programmed with Shane Melisse, (named One of Broken Frontier’s Six Small Press Creators to Watch in 2021), on Sunday 23 November. It was great to see Shane's work, and then create a character which we then made a one-page comic about.
Below is mine!
Comments