November 10, 2014, by Tara de Cozar

Violence in comics — Three at Thought Bubble

So, it’s Thought Bubble this week, the annual festival of comic art which culminates in the Leeds comic con at the Royal Armouries this weekend. Do you like comics? Or are you even just vaguely interested in sequential art? Then you should go. It’s jam-packed with talks, artists, writers and cosplayers. It’s friendly, interesting and lots of fun. But gird your wallets. There’s lots to spend your comic coins on.

And as an added incentive, two of our academics are on the programme. Lynn Fotheringham and Steve Hodkinson will give a couple of talks with awesome comics writer extrordinaire Kieron Gillen the main responsible for Young Avengers, Invincible Iron Man, Journey Into Mystery and Phonogram. We’ve talked about this team’s working relationship before here, here, here and here. Lynn, Kieron and Steve will be talking about working on Three, a comic with Sparta as its setting — which is Lynn and Steve’s area of expertise within the Department of Classics. Steve advised Kieron on the historic aspects of Sparta while he was writing the scripts for the comics, and the single issues feature Kieron’s interviews with him.

The trio will be talking about Three as part of the Comics Forum Conference — a two-day academic event that is part of the Thought Bubble programme. This year the conference is focusing on violence — something Three doesn’t shy away from. Their event will take place on Friday 14 November —  a panel discussion entitled ‘Story-telling, historicity and the depiction of violence in Three — a conversation’.

Then on Saturday 15 November Steve and Kieron be speaking at the main Thought Bubble convention at noon at Decompressed: Live — an event that takes its name from Kieron’s semi-regular series of podcasts where he talks to comics creators about their craft. Again, if you harbour the vaguest interest in comics these are worth a listen.

Can’t make it to Leeds this weekend? Don’t worry. We’ll be live tweeting both events from the @UoNresearch account. Friday’s takes place from 1pm – 2.15pm, Saturday’s is from noon to 12.50pm. Apologies for typos in advance — these are going to be packed full of interesting stuff and it’s difficult to get it all down quick. I’ll storify the tweets and post a link here after next week.

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