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The Black Panel Diaries: April Forecast

Cyberspace. Tales Of The Cthulu Quarter beams out its fourth transmission as the city of Belfast approaches the 11th Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. The coming of H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic, tentacled god flaps around the dreams of an unrestful man portrayed by Mal Coney in the stirring short directorial debut of Stephen Downey. Outside Belfast in Tyrone, comic strip artist James Byrne notes scientists has recorded extra-terrestrial signals from an unknown source. The broadcasters aren't prepared to let this wait. In a very read-able 22 page comic power, scrutiny and vision close in. Graphic poet Craig Smith: "The veins bulge there like an obscene tributary" with Downey's painted thick creeping roots accompanying. As I type, Cthulu's call extends across Belfast in a 15 minute podcast by Reggie Chamberlain King and Andrew Croskery (Insomnia Publications)

Theres great enthusiasm at the Belfast comics pub meets for this community-based project. Particularly from Downey artist behind Insomnia's Cancertown, where he and writer Cy Dethan bring a freakish world of gang warfare and the underclasses upon Morley, David Tennant's Doctor squeezed into Hellblazer. It's a cracking yarn. Insomnia sequels from both Croskery and Downey are in the works. Talesofthe.com will be bringing some haunting prose, a celestial beast lovesong and two short essays on Lovecraft and Gothic literature over the coming fortnight.

The Cathedral Arts Quarter festival features music, movies, comedy - all these things that Talesofthe contains. Starting on the 29th it begins featuring campaigning journalist Joan Bakewell, keyboard artist and jazz funksters the Neil Cowley Trio, the adventurous music of Sharon Shannon, and a film by Mark Kermode, whose adventurism appears to make him the Jon Snow of cinema. http://www.cqaf.com/mark_kermode.html

Of course, that's just on the first three days. The rest features work by other artists. Howard Marks, Ardal O'Hanlon, Bill Hicks, The Divine Comedy, Reginald D. Hunter: you know, festival stuff. Until May 9th.

And On The Fourth Day
 

The Black Market and Panel are swayed, moved into the festival marquee at Custom House Square. This confluence, this conjunction...well, Paddy and I saw it coming too. Last month, customers bought out Phil Barrett's work once again. Three titles, a third re-stock is needed. Three of my titles were consumed by their want, and are now gone from print. Three new titles appeared on the stall, totalling close to thirty new comics in our stock.

A harbinger: If you were Keeley Hawes in Ashes to Ashes, you might mistake our regular conversational customer Stephen Maurice Graham for Morrissey such is physical resemblance. Belfast city colour stickers advertise a webcomic called 400 Facts (short for 400 Factory Lane), and Graham enigmatically didn't mention his connection with this. On first sight, it's a little like Hernandez Brothers portraiture, marred by an amateur crowding of content-heavy speech bubbles. It's an engrossing refiltering of The Great Gatsby through a Billy Bragg song, on the set of Spaced. A comic for reading, rather than viewing. Essentially bedsit genre: larger, urban legend, anecdotes, eccentrics and leerers. It's chaotic and kinda pretty good.

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