At this month's Cartoon County, Alex Fitch talks to Ben Cullis, a.k.a Benksy, the editor of retro comics anthology The 77, and to Steve MacManus, a former editor of 2000AD and contributor to The 77.



The 77 is a love letter to classic British comics from the 1970s and 80s. It has been a platform for new comics creators to work on short stories and serialised narratives, as well as a venue for veterans of the industry such as Glenn Fabry and Lew Stringer to provide variant covers for the kickstarter editions. There have been seven issues of The 77 so far, plus a 136 page annual, and also a couple of sister titles - Blazer and Pandora - with more to come!

Steve edits and writes for Blazer. He was the editor of 2000AD between 1979 & 1986, and also worked on a number of other venerable British comics in the 1970s and 80s including Battle, Action, Valiant and Starlord. Shok!, the strip Steve created with Kevin O'Neill in the 1981 Judge Dredd annual, was adapted as the feature film Hardware in 1990.
Ben has been engaged with comics for three decades and previously worked with the animation company Bolex Brothers, so both of them have a lot to talk to us about...

More info at https://the77comic.wordpress.com and https://the77comic.bigcartel.com

25th April at 6.45pm, online. Click here for our eventbrite registration and link to our zoom room!

Monday 28th March, 8pm online. Note: this is an hour later than usual, as Sarah will be joining us from America.

This month our guest is Sarah Mirk, who is a contributing editor at acclaimed graphic journalism website The Nib, where she writes and edits nonfiction comics.

'When I tell people I write comics, they're usually confused. "So they're funny?" they ask. "No, not usually," I reply. "But they're always interesting!" I specialize in writing non-fiction comics about history, politics, and identity. Comics are a great way to make thorny and complicated topics accessible to a wide audience.'

Sarah also edited the 2020 anthology Guantanamo Voices - an illustrated oral history that shares the stories of 10 people who are connected to the world’s most infamous prison.



She has produced her own comics and graphic novels on subjects including You Do You: Figuring Out Your Body, Dating, and Sexuality (Lerner, 2019), post-apocalyptic romance Open Earth (Limerence Press, 2018), and the collection of her 365 daily self-published comics: Year of Zines (2020).

Join us on Zoom by signing up to the event here on eventbrite

More info about Sarah's work at https://www.mirkwork.com

Alex Fitch will be chatting with American cartoonist Ellen Lindner, known for making a splash on the UK scene with her graphic novel The Black Feather Falls, and transatlantic anthology The Strumpet. She'll be talking about her current project - 'A History of Gender Rebellion in Baseball' - which has generated the comics, Lost Diamonds and two issues of the zine The Cranklet's Chronicle so far. These stories tell the story of how women and people of colour have been excluded from the public face of America's favourite sport, but still found a chance to create teams of their own to 'play ball'. Ellen will also be discussing her Pandemix: One COVID day at a time diary strip, created during lockdown...

7pm, Monday 28th February, online

Join us on Zoom by signing up to the event here on eventbrite

More info about Ellen's comics at http://littlewhitebird.com/

Forget wild swimming, take up wrestling. Josh Hicks, author of Glorious Wrestling Alliance is our first guest of the year, on Jan 31st, in conversation with Alex Fitch of Resonance FM.

Join us for another Zoom-based hour of comics chat by signing up to the event here. Alex Fitch, of Resonance FM's Panel Borders, will interview Josh Hicks about his recently-published Glorious Wrestling Alliance, which follows the escapades of 'the universe’s least-professional wrestling company'.

Josh also runs Carp Publishing Endeavours, a micropress based out of Cardiff, and co-founded Cardiff Comics Carnival. Find out more about all of this on his website here.

Cartoon County is Brighton and Hove's friendly comics community, now gone online. Everyone's welcome to come along! Register as above and we'll send you the link nearer the day.

Our guest for 7pm, on 29th November, is Simon Moreton, small press cartoonist and lecturer in Creative Arts, who has won a cult following for his self-published title Minor Leagues. Where? is an expanded version of a story serialised in Minor Leagues, and mixes text, photo collage and comic strips to create a heady mixture of folklore, autobiography and ruminations on our relationship with the landscape. The excellent nature / wildlife publisher Little Toller are to be congratulated for having recently published Where? as their first graphic novel. Simon will be talking to Alex Fitch, our resident comics interviewer from Resonance FM, about this new direction in his work as well as recent self-published titles such as What Happened, What is Britain? and Plans We Made...

Register for this free event here on Eventbrite.

More info about Simon's work here https://www.simon-moreton.co.uk/ and https://smoo.bigcartel.com/