October – Octocon and a Graphic Novel Art Masterclass

Octocon 2019 went off well, and in keeping with my tradition I’ll now tell you what happened at last year’s Octocon in Dublin. At that time, we were preparing for Worldcon, and the many Worldcon organisers were not involved in Octocon 2018 for that reason, so my offer of help was gladly accepted and I was kept busy. I also went around interviewing several people to make podcasts for my college course on multimedia journalism.

Panel on Dragons

This included me, and two of the other guests, Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, arrived at the very last minute due to public transport.
We had a great time and chatted about how dragons could evolve (I said the wings would be heat radiators from such large beasts and would develop into useful appendages) and history (Beowulf in Europe, water dragons in Asia) and our favourite instances. Anne McCaffrey’s Pern dragons were most favoured, along with Tolkien’s Smaug and Ursula leGuin’s dragons.
I mentioned allegory, saying The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo would have been less impressive as the girl with the Chihuahua tattoo. A question mentioned Robin McKinley’s books about Dragonhaven, which I was delighted to discuss. I also raised The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly – Jurassic Park with dragons in China. Diane was struck by the possibilities and asked why this hadn’t been filmed yet.

Book Launch: Sean Williams and Garth Nix, for their latest collaboration, Let Sleeping Dragons Lie, and the entertainment was high as they held sword fights with mock swords during a reading / re-enactment.

I bought the first in the series, Have Sword Will Travel for my nephew and niece, and got it autographed. The authors told us that they get on well but in a collaboration there needs to be a veto person selected.

Panel on Comics and Graphic Art

Michael Carroll, famous for his Judge Dredd work, told us that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. He said if research is measured in units, 100 units are needed and 2 or 3 appear in the story.
Colleen Doran, graphic artist, warned us not to give artists an excuse to go on the internet. Give enough detailed specs that she can work, or three hours later nothing is done. Put a picture in the document file of her script and let her work from that. She uses an app to show her what she does in time stages on her computer and locks selected sites. This makes her twice as productive.
C.E. Murphy, author, said it was so amazing to have someone turn her works into pictures. Such a different process to writing novels. Writing for a comic is collaborative and continually exciting, fast. Not as isolating as novel writing.

M - there are restrictions when scripting for someone else’s world like Judge Dredd. But you only rise by climbing. Some of his best work came from these series.
CD - she does not want to draw simple, easy art. She wants challenges. Presented with an eight page script which was very complex, she had to dissect it with highlighter – the writer had gone into sounds and smells and she had to animate it and draw in the style of another artist.
Comics are a separate medium to graphic novels.
Colleen admires Watchman, saying she can read the pages backward and forward. She once drew a page that could be read forward, backward, in a circle and across diagonals. Nobody got it. Pictures are narrative, not illustrations. There is a different way to read them. In the 1960s comics, a caption described the image. Today, it is all deconstructed. She recalled a useful caption in Avengers – “Later, after they escaped...” the caption plastered over holes in the plot.

Panel on Being Human

Juliet E. McKenna, Garth Nix, Sean Williams, Ruth Frances Long and Karina Steffans.
Juliet made a conscious choice to exclude non-human races from her fantasy. Just wizards and dragons. Is there a desire to be human or just accepted by humans among races in SF&F? Why is human best? She thinks it’s easier for writers than a character who wants to be the best American citizen or British Empire citizen. Superheroes often are not humans, who want to be accepted. Those who are adopted or mutated, made into a robot etc. are human.
Garth said dogs may have characters that humans value, like loyalty. Sean said you can be human but bad, or inhuman but good.
J – creatures may live a different lifespan to us. Aliens, cyborgs etc. have their own frame of reference.
S - they are heroes of their own stories. Nonhuman characters are a very valuable tool for writers.
J - the bicycle was introduced in the 1880s and killed the village idiot. The rural marriage circle widened because people could now travel 21 miles instead of 7 miles to seek a wife. Thus, people were marrying people from further away. This was an unintended consequence of technology.
Question - Cyberpunk – can your brain be hacked?
S - bots and fake news are the same thing.
R - when printing arrived governments and churches tried to control it and control translations.
J - medical tech and genome studies show tech starts at the top and trickles down.
K – racism exists when there is just one race, humans. If there are altered races, it could be worse.
G – “those other people are not human” = institutional racism. Often an excuse for a power grab in history.
S – looked up the definition of human – walks on two feet, has opposable thumbs – so is anyone with less than this not human?

J - The Ship Who Sang.
G – Asimov’s robots. Is sentient a better term?
J - Social media equals bread and circuses. It’s distracting from serious threats to democracy.
G - Corporations get human status rights but humans do not get corporation rights.
K – she’s living in Ireland 22 years, passport 10 years ago, nobody believes she is Irish.
Question – what is the new class of better than human? After royalty, etc of the past.
G – Billionaires.
J - the Little Mermaid had to mutilate herself for acceptance as a human. She wants to rewrite stories in a positive way.

Colleen Doran, Guest of Honour, Masterclass

And screen viewing of her work Trollbridge.
Neil Gaiman wrote Good Omens and he would fax pages of work in progress to his pals. Neil wanted to have Trollbridge adapted in 1998. This was not her preferred work by him. Thus she did not look into the mythology behind the Norwegian troll tales. She sat down to adapt without realising what Three Billy Goats Gruff is about. The goats arrive in order of size, smallest first, and Gaiman’s book had one person, Jack, at three ages.

Twenty years later she was asked to do a GN version. The twelve pages would expand to 64 pages. Now she is more mature than in her 20s and Gaiman was older too, giving new perspectives.
She doesn’t like her work to look like digital art. Handmade paper can be used as a background, with the image drawing pasted over it. Oil emulsion and silver paper, with final colours added on a separate layer.
She added to be careful about your jobs. She took one to make a GN of an Anne Rice book – the publisher needed a page a day. She started great but that didn’t continue. People remember your bad work. She didn’t get asked to do a GN again for 20 years. Be sure you only take work you love and that will make you look good.

Story to Script. Mood, pacing, characterisation, symbolism, subtext, subversion.
Mood - colour or the lack can show mood.
Pacing – rural time is slower, people walk a long time and distance between adventures.
Characterisation – body language, clothes, motions, facial expressions. Embellishment, suggesting a fairyland for instance.
Symbolism – the child has a yellow t-shirt, the young teen a black and yellow striped t-shirt, the older teen a black shirt. No capping stones on the bridge to show danger, no protection.
Subtext – subtextual abuse of a child.
Subversion – evokes a children’s book but it is Jack’s choose your own adventure, a more mature story. The editor suggested a final page of a lonely troll. Colleen was tired and had not got an ending she liked, but the editor’s suggestion worked.
She took a photo of the side of her house and Photoshopped brickwork, which saved her from many hours of drawing bricks. In some cases, a page took longer in PS than it would by hand, due to layers of transparency and brush effects. Not practical for comics as they can’t pay someone to spend two days on one page.
Pagination – got to do this as a cartoonist for a comic. The big reveal needs to be on the left page as you just turn the page. Comics may have ads. They fall on the same page in each book, so put a big reveal on the left page after a right page ad. This affects pacing.
A block of thumbnails is good to show the art. She can work on her strengths first and then whatever is left.
She needs to draw the important characters’ faces first. In the past, artists drew in metal. Silver, copper, lead, wire in a stylus. Metal on treated paper, trace corrodes, tiny strokes.

Panel on the Monster’s point of view (POV)

Sarah Maria Griffin – in a retold Frankenstein, a woman makes a partner, but she is the monster. She’s a teenage girl and people find it hard to relate to her, but he is quite nice as a programmed robot.
Jan Siegel – the writer’s journey needs to make the reader see the monster’s lair.
Peadar ÓGuilín – he never goes to the monster’s POV but grew up in Donegal where nationalists got the raw end of the stick for generations. The Sidhe (the Fae) in his book The Call experienced what the Irish did. Many generations later the Sidhe try to be revenged upon Irish children. This is like the POV of Texas Comanches versus white settlers. Colonialism is brutal.
Jan – sins of ancestors are visited on descendants, when everyone needs to move on.
Michael Carroll – favourite monster is Jekyll and Hyde. The author wrote it in three days, but his wife destroyed the manuscript, so he wrote it again.
S - We see evil queens in Disney. Feminine rage and female revenge. Poison is used. As a child this led her to fear older, superior women.
J – a school play cast her as the evil queen in Snow White and she was pleased. There is a glamour turning to ugly women trope (the Shrek type) but no glamour to ugly men. Often elegant, sexy, evil women are shown. “What scares you is not differences but similarities,” Robert Bloch. Also, in Scooby Doo, the monsters turn out to be human.

Panel on Fighting

Peter Morwood said for swordfighting he enjoys The Three Musketeers.
Juliet McKenna said 50% of the fight is not getting hit. She is in an Aikido club. A policeman had a few weeks of training there and it helped him in a riot.
Gerry McEvoy – films show a lot of circling and posturing.
J – inflict nerve pain rather than try to do physical damage. Fiction is entertainment, so go for light realism. Don’t use all the technical terms you researched, in the story. Watch it on YouTube and describe it in your own words. In Aikido the better someone is, the less there is to see. She has taught brown and black belts and has been doing Aikido for 35 years.
Oisin McGann – film choreography has got very good, the actors no longer telegraph punches. Small moves.
J - readers have a low tolerance for pages of cut, thrust, parry, that’s repetitive.
O - use props from the environment to vary the action.

J - nobody is holding a sword correctly, does nobody teach them?
G - Female fighters are terrifying. They tend to go for a decisive move.
J – women training don’t have to unlearn being strong. Her husband is 6ft and a black belt in Judo and Aikido, but women make progress quicker. They use the strength of hips. Men tend to use upper body strength. The longer the arm, the more leverage.
O – a boxer has the advantage for the first few years, then the martial artist’s technique wins as they have more options, like hip throws.
J – researches in Royal Armouries at Leeds.
P – sports have been developed to be safe.

Guest of Honour chat with Colleen Doran

She posts on social media, not about politics but about women’s rights. She said on social media it’s important to block trolls, don’t just mute them. They have thirty sockpuppet accounts and will just move on to the next target.
She reads authors’ blogs, and if she doesn’t enjoy the content, why would she buy their books?
A woman constantly hears “You must have slept your way to the top,” but a man doesn’t.
She said online abuse is very serious in America. If she says representing gay people in comics is okay, someone turns it into a political statement. She once worked for a black-centred comic imprint and what was said about them was foul. Women are getting called liars even for backing up what other women are saying.
Colleen grew up believing that what you did would determine your fate. But she saw no matter how talented or hardworking some people were, other people would still hate or put them down. An artist was called a token minority hire by racists. There is no level of talent that can protect you from other people’s hate.
Now, a lot of guys are getting trouble – which women got all along. Social media brings horrible stuff. All women creators get this hatred – some deny it but will admit in private messaging, because they know if they admit in public, they will get more. She puts nothing personal on her pages, as others tried to dox her. Some women use a non-gendered username to avoid the trolls.
A middle aged man got fixated on her when she was a teen, and stalked her for thirty years. He would get other people to follow her and hit her on the head. He worked in a comics house in the ‘bullpen’ and sent impressionable young geeks. Now there are laws against stalking. She called the police and security to him two years ago at a public event and he was dragged away.

Panel on Book Publishing

Juliet McKenna – the mid list writer is dead. Writers can now cut out the middleman. There is still a significant market for paper. Producing one book a year is not enough to make a living. Two or more, often under other names. No backlists are carried anymore. Writers all want the rights to their e-books. As a writer you are a small business. You can still make a living, but in a different way to 10 – 15 years ago. Small press gets a prize winner, and big London firms want to move in on it. Small houses are publicising by social media and word of mouth.
Claire Hennessey – when reviewing go into detail about what you did not like, to explain which reader would enjoy it.
Edmond Barrett – you need momentum. Need books regularly. He left a couple of years between books and the sales did not pick up again.
J – really prolific authors will be published from two houses.
CH – frequency of publication may be decided by the publisher not the author.

Closing Ceremony

Thanks went to the Guests of Honour Pat Cadigan and Colleen Doran. Thanks to John Vaughan for running the Golden Blasters. Dave Lally announced the winner of the best of winners of this short film contest; Einstein-Rosen. As I had seen this during the 2017 Octocon, I didn’t mind having missed the 2018 Golden Blasters; I was staffing a table in the Dealer Room for any author who wished to have their books sold at the Con. Thanks to main organiser Sakura.
The announcement was made that 2019 would see a smaller Octocon, as a Worldcon was too large and expensive for every regular Con attendee, and next year would be a community event.

Later I made two podcasts from my interviews with Dr Edmund Schluessel, Peadar ÓGuilín, Eris Byrne, Sakura, Eileen Gormley, C.E. Murphy and Liz Bourke. Find them on my website.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Octocon 2018 was a fantastic and informative occasion, and that’s only a flavour of the panels I attended; there were many more events of other sorts including a Doctor Who panel and creative workshops, masquerade and film events.

This month I am making The Prisoner In The Tower: Short Story & Big Cat Bones free. Download it 9th – 12th November. This is a short story followed by an article on lynx and lion in the British Isles; we now have lynx, bear and wolves in a wildlife park in Donegal. The three bears were rescued from terrible conditions.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prisoner-Tow...

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for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcasts about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.