#elcaf week

ELCAF 2017 – The Broken Frontier Team Look Back on a Fabulous Weekend of Comics Culture in East London!

This year’s East London Comics & Arts Festival (ELCAF) saw our highest level of Broken Frontier participation in the event to date. Last week we ran a very popular ELCAF Week of reviews, interviews and features on the site which you can revisit here. We were also involved in the Springboard Meetings pre-festival and were invited to put together our very own ELCAF Broken Frontier panel on ‘Comics…

Small Press Spotlight on… Dirty Rotten Comics and Throwaway Press

ELCAF WEEK! Since their emergence as one of the most pivotal anthology projects on the small press scene in 2014, Dirty Rotten Comics have given a platform to dozens of new artistic names and played a vital part in pushing a number of creators to a far greater level of recognition. Indeed, I first discovered a number of my own choices for Broken Frontier’s ‘Six Small Press Creators to Watch‘…

Outburst – Pieter Coudyzer Weaves a Brilliant and Tragic Tale of Isolation and Loneliness

ELCAF WEEK!  “To get to know yourself… you have to leave others behind.” Outburst tells the story of introvert and isolated protagonist Tom Deleersnyder, a man who we quickly find has been bullied his entire life. After a particularly vicious childhood prank Tom undergoes a shocking Kafkaesque metamorphosis, unleashing his inner wilderness. From childhood to adult life, Tom’s story is a typical…

Time May Change Me – Jayde Perkin Explores Grief and the Bonds of Music in a Poignant Autobio Offering

ELCAF WEEK! “When I said goodbye to my mum and dad at the airport, I had no idea it would be the last time I’d see her with no wires, no tubes.” Those early words in Jayde Perkin’s Time May Change Me set the scene for a minicomic that incorporates elements of both graphic medicine and memoir in an intimate and raw exploration of grief. Perkin’s ELCAF-debuting book is a poignant piece of the most…

Staff Picks ELCAF Special – Something City, Human Garbage, Badger Vs. Tiger!, Silica Burn #2, Tantra and More!

ELCAF WEEK! Because there were just so many ELCAF debuts that they would have swamped the regular Broken Frontier weekly Staff Picks we decided to cover just the tiniest handful of the books launching at the festival in their own separate round-up here today. It’s a small selection of what’s on offer but it does contain some unmissable new work finding its way into the world this weekend. But…

An Exorcism – A Terrifying Descent into a Nightmarish Abyss Courtesy of Theo Ellsworth and kuš!’s Mono Series

ELCAF WEEK! Where to even begin with the absorbing and often deeply disquieting brilliance of Theo Ellsworth’s An Exorcism? The third and latest book in Latvian publisher kuš!’s mono series of artist showcases is a nightmarish descent into a dream reality that isn’t so much a narrative as a terrifying stream-of-(un)consciousness. The only time we hear the protagonist of An Exorcism talk is in the…

Stones in Focus – Decadence’s Lando Invites Us into the Secret World of Rock Formations

ELCAF WEEK! Although I covered the last issue of the Decadence anthology here at BF last summer it’s been a couple of years since I last took a look at the solo work of Decadence’s co-founding artist Lando back when Breakdown Press collected some of his most notable comics in the excellent and handsomely produced Gardens of Glass compilation volume (reviewed here at Broken Frontier). Lando’s work…

“We are a Collective that Celebrate and Appreciate Illustration in All Mediums and for All Purposes”- OIC Singapore Talk New Movements in Singaporean Illustration

ELCAF WEEK! Of all the exhibitors appearing at ELCAF 2017 this weekend, those perhaps travelling the greatest distance are the artists who make up the Organisation of Illustrators Council Singapore, or OIC Singapore for short. Intrigued to see that the small city-state (and the land of my own cultural heritage) would be represented at an East London comics festival, I caught up with Kaiyee Tay,…