Here’s a comic for which I have the original art but I don’t think I have the issue in which it appeared. Also, it took me twentyfive years to actually hang this on my walls.
And I had to move house three times before I could!
Back in the previous millennium, in 1999 to be precise, I had the magical combination of income and free time needed to dive deep into comics fandom. I had been going to Dutch cons for some years, but these were mostly an opportunity to score some cheap comics. By the mid-nineties, thanks to Usenet and the Comix-L email list my tastes had broadened and I had gotten into small press and self published comics. Somehow I heard or read about the annual Caption comics convention held in the Oxford Uni halls and decided I would go to the 1999 edition: SpaceCAPTION99.
Caption was an explicitly small press orientated convention, started in 1992 by Adrian Cox, Damian Cugley, Jeremy Dennis, and Jenni Scott, who were still organising it in 1999. Held over the weekend in the hallowed halls of the Oxford Union Society, it was a small affair, a hundred or so people? As I remember it there were maybe a few stands with people selling their own stuff, as well as maybe one dealer with some esoteric stuff — I remember buying some Jack Chic Crusaders comics about the comic apocalypse. There were a fair few comics creators like Dave McKinnon, Terry Wiley, Andy Konky Kru, Lee Brimmicombe-Wood and Bryan Talbot. The latter gave a talk about how his then recently finished Tale of One Bad Rat was created and which techniques he used to make it as accessible as possible for non-comics readers.
The con also held an auction of various things, including original artwork, which is were I bought this. No idea what I paid for it at the time, but it can’t have been that expensive. The pages looked nice, it earned the convention a few quid for next year and I vaguely thought it would be nice to hang up on my wall. Similarly I bought a great looking Lee Brimmicombe-Wood page showing a space ship in transit across the moon and a page from some superhero story by Adrian Dungworth and Mary Green.
Once home none of these made it to my walls, living at the time in a small, cramped student flat already filled up with bookcases. Instead they disappeared in my parents’ attic, where they stayed for a decade and a half until my father got fed up and shifted all my comics crap to me. At that time, having moved twice and in the first house I’d actually bought I still didn’t have room to hang them, for the same reasons. But the beauty of the overinflated housing market in the Netherlands meant I could trade in my far too small flat in Amsterdam for a obscenely big house in the provincial town my parents live in and now I do have room. So yesterday I finally hung these pages up in my living room.
In the process I discovered that this art was created by Nick Abadzis, best known these days for Laika and Hugo Tate. It’s a simple story about discovering Space: 1999 as a child and how he’s occasionally reminded of it as 1999 approaches. According to the sticky note still attached to the back of one of the pages, this story was done for the Caption booklet this year and Nick had donated the artwork to the con’s auction, hoping to raise some dosh that way. Well, according to the surviving photo album, the auction raised over a thousand ponds, so it must’ve served its purpose. As for the booklet, I may still have it but it will be somewhere among all the other convention bumf moved from closet to closet as I moved houses…
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