Caption 2004
Having found Wolfson College far easier than first assumed, I arrived to find a few familiar faces waiting in the lobby to open the hall. Having eventually got my badge, I stumbled into the hall carrying far too much. I spent the next half an hour carefully writing “C - £1.50” on post it notes to stick on all the issues I had available to sell on the “Caption Table”.

I gingerly moved around the venue, obviously looking pretty uneasy and lost, and numerous organisers very kindly asked if I was ok. So even though I was, thanks for the concern.

At about 12 the cavalry arrived, in the form of Andy Richmond, fortunately I was sat next to him at the UK Web Comix Thing, and thanks to his wildly enthusiastic and kind nature, kept in touch. I was briskly reintroduced to Grant, a superb artist also working with Andy on Dusk. I also met (another) Andy and Leonie who were incredibly cool freelance artists.

I spent most of the day just getting used to my surroundings, and flicking through what the UK small press community had to offer – which by the way is a great deal.

At 12:30 I went along to a panel on “The History of Small Press”, which was incredibly enlightening, I had no idea as to the sort of establishment the UK small press has become, springing from a bimonthly small press table in London, moving through to small press reviewing and anthologies.

At 1:30 I sat at the back of the main hall doing a bit of sketching, and managed to catch a bit of a talk by Al Davidson, which again was very good, and I especially liked the film at the end.

For the rest of the day the bar was the place to be, where numerous obscure sketches were done on giant sheets of paper. Perhaps the greatest achievement was “In The History” which was an illustrated timeline of the history of humanity spanning from George Lucas creating Star Wars and in turn the Death Star becoming earth, through to the end of humanity in the form of The Simpsons, while taking numerous diversions to appreciate the likes of King Kong, Mel Gibson and The Fonz. Unfortunately, to my knowledge there was no record of this miraculous historical manuscript, but I assure you it was wondrous.

After a trip to the Oxford town centre for a very tasty supper in the form of a noodle bar, we headed back to Caption for the auction. All the money from the auction was going to help people exhibit at international cons, as well as to try and pay for guests to come over to Caption, so in other words a very good cause

The auction itself was mildly insane, with a giant collection of twisted badger drawings going for £60, as well as budget Marvel titles such as “J2 – The Son of Juggernaut”, going for tiny sums. Andy in his wine fuelled state managed to spend around £30. His submission went for around £10, while Grant’s masterpiece went for £20. It was all good fun, and I’ll be sure to submit some stuff for next year.

So by this time the day was done, or so I thought. As myself and Andy sat outside the event talking about deep and meaningful things, Andy flagged down a passing stranger, who turned out to be Pat Mills – creator of the likes of Judge Dredd, 2000AD and Charley’s War. We chatted for a while, which was really cool. Although Pat is one of the greats in the comic world, he was incredibly nice, always engaging you in the conversation. We were later joined by Grant and Pete. Although I’m not really a chatty person, I do like to listen, and just listening to this guy talk with such knowledge and understanding was probably one of the highlights of my weekend.

So we all eventually retired to the guest house, where we dozed off to the calming sounds of The Magnificent Seven 3. I slept on a two seated sofa, so it was a bit of a challenge finding a comfortable stance, and eventually gave up on trying to get a good nights sleep at about 6am, when I just updated the comic, and just sketched until the others awoke.

We headed out for a quick breakfast at about 10, where we were served by quite possibly the most depressed waitress on the planet. We headed in to find it already bustling. I had a quick through the 10p bargain comic bins, which although weren’t the greatest comics on the planet, will serve as great reference.

We sat in the bar, while I collected marvellous sketches from those that surrounded me, we also played “Beedle Hand” which is a game in which one player holds the pen in a sort of claw and the second player holds the first players wrist and tries to draw a picture with the other person’s hand. Which by the way is incredibly hard.

At 2pm Andy convinced me to head along to “Autobiography of Everybody” a workshop ran by Jeremy Dennis. We started by writing notes on certain biographical elements, such as first pet, what we hate, what we did as a baby etc. and these were split up into nine panels. The challenge was, in groups of three we had to combine these notes to make a comic of an amalgamation of all our lives. This was incredibly entertaining, as I was left to draw Nightcrawler teaching biology and art, as well as a Dalek ranting about Edwardian etiquette and wasps, while our protagonist is asleep having drunk a bottle of undiluted squash. Yes, very odd imagery indeed, but Jeremy will be sending the finished Zine through and it will be posted then.

The workshop was cut a bit short as I had to leave. So I said my farewells to the many people I had got to know over the weekend, as well as make over £16 on some comic sales which was a happy bonus, on my way out I managed to bundle a load of issues into Pat Mills arms, so my day was complete.