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Paul Gravett
Paul Gravett is a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer, and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing and promotion since 1981.
In the early 1980s he manned the Fast Fiction table at the bi-monthly Saturday comic marts held in London's Westminster Hall, inviting anybody to sell their homemade comics from it, with all proceeds going to the creator. This role earned him the nickname 'Man At The Crossroads' from Eddie Campbell in his graphic novel Alec: How To Be An Artist, "He will be the purest, most fresh-faced wee fellow you have ever met. His ingenuous enthusiasm will beam from his cheery countenance."
In 1981 he started his first proper paid job at pssst! magazine, a brave but misguided attempt at a British version of a luxurious monthly bande dessinee magazine that typically sold well in France. He worked in a variety of positions at pssst! - as promotions man, traffic manager, coordinating artwork and interviewing potential contributors - but crucially he had no say in the magazine's content and eventually he became frustrated seeing great material being rejected.
In 1983 he launched Escape Magazine, which he co-edited/published with Peter Stanbury, showcasing the cream of the alternative cartoonists of the 1980s. Escape lasted for 19 issues before closing its doors in 1989. For six years, Escape helped to promote an evolving bunch of distinctive British creators, many of whom were quickly picked up by other comics publishers and by the UK music press, newspapers, magazines and galleries. He and longtime partner Peter Stanbury also ran the small press anthology Fast Fiction, and the Fast Fiction stand at the bimonthly Westminster Comics Marts, where many an independent comic creator's zines were sold, and helped grow awareness of their work, often leading to professional commission. This included uniting Rian Hughes with John Freeman on the pan European publication of Rian's project, The Science Service.
Under the Escape Publishing imprint, he co-published Violent Cases in 1987, the first collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, three volumes of Eddie Campbell's Alec between 1984 and 1986, and London's Dark in 1988 by James Robinson and Paul Johnson.
Between 1992 and 2001 Paul was the director of The Cartoon Art Trust, a UK charity established in 1988, dedicated to preserving and promoting the best of British cartoon art and caricature and to establish a museum of cartoon art with gallery, archives and reference library.
He has curated numerous exhibitions of comic art in Britain and in Europe, including 'God Save The Comics!', a survey of British comic art at the National Comics and Image Centre in Angoulême, France and the first exhibit devoted to the writer Alan Moore and his collaborators at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi, Belgium. As Project Director of The Cartoon Art Trust in London, he worked on tributes to Carl Giles and Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, and The 100 British Cartoonists of the Century. His subsequent exhibitions have included retrospectives of Jack Kirby at the Fumetto Festival in Lucerne, and of Tove Jansson and Posy Simmonds at the Belgian Comics Art Museum in Brussels.
Since 2003, Paul has been the director of Comica, the London International Comics Festival, initially at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. From 2011 to 2017, Comica became an independent not-for-profit organisation running both the annual festival and other events and exhibitions throughout the year. Currently, Comica continues to run the monthly meet-up, Comica Social Club, and the annual Graphic Short Story Prize and finalists’ exhibition in association with The Observer and Jonathan Cape Graphic Novels.
Paul is the author of the book Manga: 60 Years Of Japanese Comics (2004), and co-author, with Peter Stanbury, of Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life (2005), Great British Comics: Celebrating A Century Of Ripping Yarns & Wizard Wheezes (2006) and The Leather Nun & Other Incredibly Strange Comics (2008). He is also the editor of The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics (2008) and 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (2011). He has also written essays in the catalogues for the exhibitions Cult Fiction (2007) toured by the Hayward Gallery, Into The Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction (2017) toured by Barbican International Enterprises, and Tove Jansson: 1914-2001 (2017) toured by The Finnish National Gallery.
On television he has been a consultant and interview subject on The South Bank Show's programme Manga Mania (2006) and BBC4's documentary series Comics Britannia (2007). Also, he appeared as an interview subject in the DVD documentary The Mindscape Of Alan Moore (2007). He is regularly interviewed about British and international comics for the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4 News, France Culture, TRT World and others.
He continues to write about comics for various periodicals, including The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, ArtReview, ArtReview Asia, The Comics Journal, Comic Heroes, Time Out, Blueprint, Neo, The Bookseller, Dazed & Confused, New Internationalist, Third Text, 9eme Art, The Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, Fortean Times and Varoom Magazine.
His more recent books are Comics Art, published by Tate Publishing (2013) and Yale University Press (2014), and Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK with John Harris Dunning, published by The British Librar (2014)y. This accompanied the exhibition of the same name at The British Library, the largest exhibition of British comics ever held in the UK, which attracted some 60,000 visitors between May 2nd and August 19th 2014.
In 2016, Paul co-curated the following exhibitions: Comix Creatrix: 100 Women Making Comics with Olivia Ahmad at House of Illustration, London; The Story of British Comics So Far: Cor! By Gum! Zarjaz! with Hamish MacGillivray at The Lightbox, Woking; and Land Escapes with Alberto Corradi at Treviso Comic Book Festival, Italy.
He developed the book Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics (Thames & Hudson, 2017), published in English, French, Italian and Korean, into Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics, the first major exhibition of Asian comics art for Barbican International Enterprises. This 1000-square metre exhibition with nearly 300 pieces of original art opened in October 2017 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and travelled in 2018 to Villa Reale, Monza and Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, as part of its ongoing five-year world tour.
In 2018, he curated Global Webtoons: Invention and Innovation, an international survey of digital and online comics, from pioneers like Scott McCloud to the latest developments in Virtual and Augmented Reality Comics, for the Busan Global Webtoon Festival in South Korea.
2019 brought together his latest book and exhibition devoted to the life and work of Posy Simmonds. He wrote the first monograph about this much-loved British cartoonist, as part of Thames & Hudson’s new line The Illustrators, and this coincided with her first major UK retrospective, which he co-curated with Olivia Ahmad for House of Illustration. The French edition, So British! L’art de Posy Simmonds (Denoël, 2019) was launched at Posy Simmonds’ first French exhibition, J’ai deux amours, which he curated for PULP Festival in Paris.
He continues to give lectures, interview leading creators, and chair and participate in panel discussions at galleries, festivals & conferences worldwide. In 2019, these include keynotes at the 20th Anniversary International Comics and Graphic Novel Conference in Manchester and the ‘Comics & Travel’ Conference organised by TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities), a programme of panels with Taiwanese guests at the Munich International Comics Festival, and chairing a symposium at the British Museum with specialist curators on the history of ’Storytelling Through Pictures’.
PAUL GRAVETT ONLINE
Web: paulgravett.com
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