For 2025, we have an evening only Graphic Brighton taking place as part of the Brighton Fringe Festival on May 3rd, on the topic of Refugee Comics. Four comic creators will be talking about their work, two whose graphic novels are published by Myriad Editions in Brighton, and two representatives of Positive Negatives.
Majid Adin created an award-winning animation of Elton John’s Rocket Man, and has his first graphic novel Hamid and Shakespeare, due out in the near future. It is inspired by his experiences of being imprisoned and politically exiled from Iran.
Florian Grosset’s graphic novel The Chagos Betrayal recounts poverty & discrimination when Britain enforced US military control of inhabitants’ Indian Ocean home.
Positive Negatives create animations and comics about humanitarian and environmental issues. Creative director Karrie Fransman drew award-winning comic Over, Under, Sideways, Down about an Iranian teenage refugee, for the British Red Cross.
Pos Neg artist Daniel Locke is a widely published, award-winning comic creator & communicator. His graphic novel, Out of Nothing tells the history of life on Earth.
Graphic Brighton: Refugee Comics is a fantastic opportunity to hear these four artists talk about their work, hosted by animation lecturer & broadcast journalist Alex Fitch, followed by book signing.
5pm, Saturday 3rd May, Sallis Benney Theatre at the University of Brighton City Campus, 58-67 Grand Parade, Brighton BN2 0JY
At Graphic Brighton 2024, Paul Fisher Davies and John Miers did another brilliant job sketchnoting the conference. Their informative and intricate annotated sketches are a great record of the talks and interviews that took place at the University of Brighton in December 2024.
Graphic Brighton 2024, Day 1 panel 2 by Paul Fisher Davies Day 1, panel 3 + keynote by Paul Fisher Davies
Graphic Brighton 2024, Day 2, Q and A no. 1, by Paul Fisher Davies and John Miers
Graphic Brighton 2024 Q and A no. 2 by Paul Fisher Davies and John Miers
Graphic Brighton 2024 panel 4 by John Miers and Paul Fisher Davies
Graphic Brighton panel 4 part 2 by Paul Fisher Davies and John Miers
Graphic Brighton 2024 Q and A no. 3 by Paul Fisher Davies and John Miers
Graphic Brighton 2024 Q and A no.4 by Paul Fisher Davies and John Miers
Featured image: Extract from The Miracle Windows by Sabba Khan
Find below details of abstracts by speakers, and their bios, for the academic strand of Graphic Brighton
Keynote (Comics Are Architecture) – Enrique Bordes Comics are a type of architecture; that is the main idea that hovers over the book ‘Comic, Narrative Architecture.’ The concept was inspired by perspectives and works like those of Spiegelman, Groensteen, Ware, or de Luca. Our Pulitzer Prize has frequently referred to the existence of an architectural notion within comics; similarly, the author of ‘The System of Comics’ mentioned the idea of ‘architectures of the mind’ when discussing Ware’s works. Ware’s ‘palaces of memory’ and Gianni De Luca’s approaches are also key elements in shaping this concept, which, as a mental territory, encompasses all possible scales of construction, from a room to a grand city… like Rome.
The exhibition ‘Beatos, Mecachis and Percebes’ at the National Library of Madrid started from the same idea to develop a brief graphic history of humanity through different narrative architectures, from an Egyptian mummy band to the graphic synthesis of the recently deceased Calpurnio.
This interweaving between architecture and comics reveals a profound relationship marked by multiple points of convergence. Surprisingly, these connections have not always been evident to the general public, including professionals in both fields.
Can architects be comic authors? Are some comic authors more architectural than others? What does the knowledge of comics contribute to architecture? Or, as a first-year architecture student asked me, how could your book help me with my work?
This keynote aims to present this journey, attempting to provide answers to these questions and finding other surprises along the way, from accidental comics to a better way of being an architect (or a doctor!) through the panels
Bio – Enrique Bordes Cabrera; Architect from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and associate professor in the Department of Graphic Ideation at ETSAM. In his professional practice he tackles museography, editing and curatorial work, with special attention to photo-graphic narration in architecture and the city. Curator, lecturer, PHD qualified Architect
Image: extract from Rumble Strip by Woodrow Phoenix
What: Graphic Brighton: Comics and Architecture
When: 13th-14th December 2024
Where: Sallis Benney lecture theatre, University of Brighton City Campus, 58-67 Grand Parade, Brighton BN2 0JY
Schedule:
Friday 13th December
10-10.30am Registration
10.30-10.45 Introduction: 10* Years of Graphic Brighton (Barbara Chamberlin & Alex Fitch)
10.45-11.00 Why Graphic Architecture? (Alex Fitch)
11.00-11.15 Coffee break
11.15-12.45 Academic Panel 1 – (Architectural comics, pedagogy and embodiment) – Nina Mickwitz / Lee Christian / Phevos Kallitsis
12.45-13.45 Lunch
13.45-15.45 Academic Panel 2 – (Society and Graphic Architecture) – Abishek Wagle (online) / Sofia Fernandez (online) / Yvette Putra / Namitha Soman
15.45-16.00 Coffee Break
16.00-17.30 Academic Panel 3 – (Comics and Flânerie) – Trisha Dasgupta (online) / Marion Eisenmann (online) / Reed Puc
17.30-17.45 Break
17.45-18.45 Enrique Bordes keynote speech: Comics are Architecture
Sat 14th December
10-10.30am Registration
10.30-11.30 Canterbury Cathedral Comics – Karrie Fransman, Sabba Khan, & Zara Slattery
11.30-11.45 Coffee Break
11.45-13.15 Academic Panel 4 – (Engaging with Graphic Architecture) – Andrea Hoff / Sreemoyee Ray (online) / Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
11.45-13.15 Parallel workshop (Humour: Messing with Architecture in comics – Clari Searle)
13.15-14.15 Lunch Break
14.15-15.15 The Location of Architectural Comics – Woodrow Phoenix, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, and Clarrie Pope
15.15-15.30 Coffee Break
15.30-16.30 Den City: Stories of Crowds and Cities – Colin McFarlane (online), Jordan Colliver (online), Myfanwy Tristram, Karrie Fransman
16.30-16.45 Break
16.45-17.45 Comics and Architectural Practice – Henry Chebaane, Sabba Khan and Alison Sampson
17.45-18.00 Plenary / wrap-up
This year’s tenth anniversary Graphic Brighton festival as ever mixes talks by comics studies academics with panel discussions by comic book creators. This year’s theme is Graphic Architecture – the depiction of Architecture in Comics – with comic book and graphic novel creators who have engaged with this theme in attendance including Karrrie Fransman, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Woodrow Phoenix, Clarrie Pope, Zara Slattery, and Myfanwy Tristram… As there is a cross-over between comics and architectural practice, several architects and interior designers who have turned their hand to comics, and are attending Graphic Brighton, include Henry Chebaane, Andrea Hoff, Sabba Khan, and Alison Sampson.
The festival is also proud to have Enrique Bordes, associate professor in the Department of Graphic Design at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and author of the seminal Graphic Architecture book Cómic, arquitectura narrativa as a keynote speaker, as well as Clari Searle (Coventry University) who is an expert in Comic Funnies, who will be running a workshop on “Humour and messing with architecture in comics”…
The event runs from 10am-6pm, on Friday 13th and Saturday 14th December in the Sallis Benney Theatre, University of Brighton City Campus, 58-67 Grand Parade, Brighton and Hove, East Sussex BN2 0JY
Please book your free ticket via eventbrite.
After much delay, Graphic Brighton: Comics and Architecture will be taking place in mid December in Sunny Chilly Brighton! We’re intending to hold the event on 13th and 14th December 2024 at the University of Brighton, TBC. So, mark your diaries, and look forward to graphic novelists including Karrie Fransman, Sabba Khan, Woodrow Phoenix, Clarrie Pope, Alison Sampson, Zara Slattery and Myfanwy Tristram talking about their work, a keynote talk by Enrique Bordes, a variety of academic panels featuring scholars such as Andrea Hoff, Nina Mickwitz, and Yvette Putra, and much more…
More info to come in the Autumn!
(Featured image: Painted wall art for Bleecker Burgers by Alison Sampson, photographed by Zan Kaufman)
Excerpt from The Roles We Play, Sabba Khan (Myriad Editions, 2021)
This call for papers invites scholars, practitioners and researchers to submit papers on the inter-disciplinary topic of Comics and Architecture, for a conference to be held at the Moulsecoomb Campus of the University of Brighton on Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd September 2023.
The inter-disciplinary potential of comic books and architecture is something that is gradually being investigated by the academy, a field termed ‘Graphic Architecture’ (Lockhart 2014). Titles which explicitly explore the intersection between the two disciplines include Comics and the City: Urban space in print, picture and sequence, Ahrens, J. R. and A. Meteling (2010), Bricks & Balloons: Architecture in Comic-Strip Form, Hoorn, M. V. D. (2012), Cómic, Arquitectura Narrativa, Bordes, E. (2017) and Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives, Davies, D. (2019), as well as a chapter on the topic in The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and The City, Arana, K.L. (2018). There have also been exhibitions of architectural comics in London (Sequential City at Anise Gallery, 2015) and Canada (Architecture+Comics at Winnipeg Architecture Foundation, 2019) in galleries that promote architecture themed artworks.
There have only been a couple of international symposiums looking at this topic – Graphic Novels / Novel Architecture at Kent State University College of Architecture & Environmental Design (2016) and ‘L’édifice dans les cases: Le décor monumental en bande dessinée’ at the University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens (2018) – and so Graphic Brighton 2023 proposes to be the first British conference to look at architecture themed comics, and the many topics that this theme can be connected with. A number of comic creators have backgrounds as architects, including Alison Sampson, Owen Pomery and Sabba Khan, and architectural bandes dessinées writer Benoît Peeters (Les Cités Obscures) has recently lectured on graphic fiction at Lancaster University.
While architecture is ubiquitously found as the backdrop of superhero comics (set mainly in the built environment, often New York City), there are graphic novels about famous architects – such as Robert Moses and Eileen Gray – plus tales of fictional architects in such titles as Mister X, Asterios Polyp, and Batman: Death by Design. Graphic novels Building Stories, Here, and The Voice of the Hall are concerned with individual buildings, while Yes is More and Julius Knipl are narratives about architectural photography.
Architects themselves have used comic book imagery to promote their work over the years, from Le Corbusier’s “Letter to Mme Meyer” (1925), Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau in their book S, M, L, XL (1995), and C.J. Lim and Ed Liu in their revised smartcities, resilient landscapes + eco-warriors (2019). Magazines and journals on this interdisciplinary topic have included the work of Archigram in the 1960s, and in recent years MAS Context #20 and Critical Inquiry 41. 2 (University of Chicago).
With all the above in mind, Graphic Brighton 2023 invites scholars, academics and practitioners working in the fields of architecture, comic studies and related disciplines to propose papers about the intersection of these fields. As with previous iterations of Graphic Brighton, we expect the line-up of the conference to include talks, panels and workshops by academics and comic book practitioners.
Topics you might like to consider include, but are not limited to:
Architecture, comics and world-building
Using comics to understand building use and purpose
Architecture, comics and communities
Comics and sustainable development
Comics, architecture and social justice
Using comics to explore real and imagined space
Comics and stained-glass narratives in churches
Building stories and stories of buildings
The cityscape as narrative design
Architectural comics as social commentary
Architectural comics as microcosms of lost worlds on the page
The comic book creator as flâneur
The architecture of the comics page
Architects and the use of comics to disseminate ideas
Building models and dolls houses as a storytelling method
Please submit a 300 word abstract on the topic you would like to explore as a paper at Graphic Brighton, plus a brief biography, to Alex Fitch (a.r.fitch at brighton.ac.uk) and Barbara Chamberlin (b.j.chamberlin at brighton.ac.uk) by Friday 23rd June.
As mentioned above, alongside the presentation of academic papers, comic book practitioners will also be in attendance to discuss their work. Confirmed guests (so far) for this year’s Graphic Brighton include Karrie Fransman (The House that Groaned), Sabba Khan (The Roles We Play), Clarrie Pope (Welcome Home) and Zara Slattery (Coma).
Conference organisers:
Alex Fitch teaches in the School of Architecture, Technology and Engineering, and the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton, is pursuing a PhD on The Depiction of Architecture in Comic Books and has been published on this topic by Cambridge Scholars, Studies in Comics, and McFarland. He also presents the UK’s only regular broadcast radio show about comics.
Barbara Chamberlin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton and teaches comics and creative writing at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. She is pursuing a practice-based PhD at University of the Arts London that fuses folklore, witchcraft and collaboration in papercut comics using walking as key to the creative process.
Clockwise from top left, Hannah Berry and Lance Dann, Michael Rosen and Cole Henley, Danny Noble and Matt Baxter (with Alex Fitch), Zara Slattery and Jaime Huxtable discuss their work at Graphic Brighton 2022
A number of talks and panel discussions recorded at Graphic Brighton have been broadcast on Resonance FM, and subsequently podcast over the last year. If you weren’t able to come along to Graphic Brighton in recent years, these are a great way of catching up with the exciting events that take place in each year’s festival!
These include (recorded at Graphic Brighton 2022):
Panel Borders: Multimedia Comics – Audio producer Lance Dann and graphic novelist Hannah Berry discuss their comic and podcast called The Rez, which is a science-fiction title about kindness aimed at a young audience, how the different formats of storytelling interact, and invite input from readers.
Panel Borders: Unusual Buildings – Former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen and artist Cole Henley discuss the comic book adaptation of Rosen’s classic novella You’re Thinking About Tomatoes, in which a boy on a school trip gets embroiled in an adventure with a girl from a painting and a mummy come to life…
Panel Borders: Youth and Wellbeing – Artists Jaime Huxtable and Zara Slattery about their titles for younger readers including G Bear and Jammo, and Don’t Call Me a Tomboy respectively (and in a Q and A at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, Hannah Berry chats to Fun Home author Alison Bechdel).
Panel Borders: Junkyard Jack and Monster Fun – Artists Matt Baxter and Danny Noble about illustrating Hire a Horror and Junkyard Jack and the Horse that Talked (also, Alex Fitch chats to Danny Noble’s publisher Liz Frances).
Find more Graphic Brighton podcasts on the Panel Borders blog, and the next Graphic Brighton event is tentatively scheduled for Autumn 2023…
Panel Borders: Multimedia Comics
Graphic Brighton 
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