Along with all the poets and novelists and biographers and historians and musicians who fill its capacious tents every August, one of the real pleasures of the Edinburgh International Book Festival is its ongoing commitment to comics through its Stripped strand.
This year’s programme takes in Neil Cameron talking about manga, Fin Cramb and Stephen White talking about their Peter Pan graphic novel, Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, Polish comic creators who witnessed the Solidarity movement in Poland at first hand and the Etherington Brothers, Lorenzo and Robin, telling you how to make your own comics.
And that’s just for starters. Below are the shows we think you can’t afford to miss.
1 Steve Bell
The Guardian’s veteran vituparist-in-chief (if vituparist isn’t a word already it is now) is in Charlotte Square to talk about this year’s General Election and the challenge of caricaturing David Cameron. We reckon someone will be asking questions about his SNP-themed cartoons. And they may not all be friendly questions.
Steve Bell: The Cartoonist’s Election Campaign, Friday, August 28, 5pm.
2 Karrie Fransman and Rob Davis
Graphic Content favourite Karrie Fransman teams up with Rob Davis later the same day to talk about their latest books. Fransman’s Death of the Artist is a clever, shape-shifting “memoir” about a group of student friends who meet up again for a weekend away in the Peak District. As she told Graphic Content back in March, “it starts with sex and ends with death and the middle is a messy myriad of moments that we must make sense of.”
Davis, meanwhile, is the creator of The Motherless Oven, a vivid, surrealist fable about growing up. Sex and death are part of that package too. That said, there will be no deaths in Edinburgh. Hopefully.
Rob Davis and Karrie Fransman: Unique Voices Telling Strange Stories, Friday, August 28, 7pm.
3 Joe Sumner and Evie Wyld
One of Jonathan Cape’s most intriguing summer publications, Everything is Teeth, is a memoir of novelist Wyld’s childhood in Australia. It is about Wyld’s fear of sharks, or maybe what they represent.
Sumner’s art is a mixture of cartoony and photo-realist and the whole thing cuts through the water with seeming ease but it leaves a trail of blood winding dark red in its wake.
Joe Sumner & Evie Wyld: For the Love of Sharks, Saturday, August 29, 3.45pm.
4 Abraham Kawa and Alecos Papadatos
Fresh from proving that the life of philosopher Bertrand Russell was the perfect subject for a graphic novel in Logicomix, Kawa and Papadatos return with a new novel set in ancient Athens that takes on no less a subject that the birth of democracy. The clue might be in the title (Democracy). You may apply the description “show offs” if you so require.
Abraham Kawa and Alecos Papadatos: Having a Democratic Party, Saturday, August 29, 7pm.
5 Jean-Pierre Filiu and Martin Rowson
There is a lot of politics this year. Jean-Pierre Filiu has tackled the conjoined history of the US and the Middle East in his two-volume graphic novel Best of Enemies. (Both books are illustrated by the wonderful David B).
And Rowson is, if possible, even more acerbic towards British party politics in his cartoons than even Steve Bell. (Can I present the title of his latest book, A Cartoon Catalogue of Britain’s Worst Government in 200 Years, as evidence?)
Together, they will be doing their best to put the world to rights at Edinburgh. Or at least flag up what’s wrong.
Jean-Pierre Filiu and Martin Rowson: Taking a Strip off Governments, Sunday, August 30, 5.45pm.
6 Darryl Cunningham and Katrine Marcal
And to finish things off, we’re talking about money. Darryl Cunningham’s Supercrash remains one of Graphic Content’s favourite books of last year, as well as being an excellent primer for anyone trying to understand the financial crash in 2008 that has led to the last few years of austerity politics. He is intriguingly teamed here with Swedish journalist Katrine Marcal whose book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? looks at economic history from a feminist perspective.
Darryl Cunningham and Katrine Marcal: Who Hijacked the Global Economy, Monday, August 31, 2pm.
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