Comics
This year, as well as creating a collaborative animation projection, we are also running two issues of an illustrated newspaper. Below we detail how you can get creatively involved in telling this illuminated tale of dream experimentation and imagination.
The newspaper will feature comics and illustration and build up a narrative around Marlborough House before the festival event. We want to use the newspaper to tell a story of what has been going on inside the building. Why has the mansion been lying dormant for so long?
The two issues of the 12 page newspapers will be a feast for the eyes. The narrative focuses on dreams and visions: a subject suited for a group comic; after all, we all dream differently. We are looking for diverse visual content on dreams and illumination: from dream comic strips to tongue-in-cheek, one panel adverts featuring the inventions of the Enlightenment period. There are also exciting opportunities for artists to illustrate the narrative itself, either full-page or half-page colour strip.
There are 3 routes for sending in your comics work:
1. Dream Comic strips
Imagine if, during the years that Marlborough House has stood abandoned, people have been asleep inside.
A double page spread within the first newspaper will reveal these sleepers within with thought bubbles to their dreams. The content of these dreams is completely open to submissions. This is a call out for you to illustrate a sleeper and a dream. You have free-range regarding style and layout as long as it fits within the dimensions required.
Can you illustrate a dream? Get drawing and go wild! We only ask that in some way the comic features a “stranger” and that in the last frame an octopus tentacle is featured.
Black and white comic strips of 228.6 x 81.4mm
2. Funny Features: The Wonders of the Enlightenment
Perhaps you would prefer fewer constraints? We have an open call out for black and white Enlightenment themed content. Spoof adverts featuring 18th century knick-knacks and inventions: maybe an austere advert for Oul and Ouls Delectable Dream Tincture or perhaps a zealous, illustrated report of strange phenomena in the sky? Maybe you’d prefer to create some lonely hearts notices, 1790s style? An illustrated yarn from the Enlightenment era? Key figures of the Enlightenment Top Trumps? We are open to ideas, though, of course, it has to be said that obscenity and slander will not make the edit.
Creative and stylistic experimentation is encouraged. The only requirement is that style and content be on the theme of the Enlightenment. You have a selection of four template sizes to chose from and we will not re-size without your explicit permission.
Black and White “Wonders of the Enlightenment” can be sent to us in 53.4 x 95.5, 111.8 x 134, 211 x 170.2 or 211 x 287mm.
3. Dream visions of Brighton
The second newspaper features our key characters journeying round the dream city of Brighton: a place where exotic birds roost on the Clock Tower and immense cephalopods skulk beneath the sea…
If you would like to re-imagine a specific part of Brighton get in touch with your ideas. What can you imagine? A swarm of insects flowing down North Street? Brighton Pavilion made of marshmallow? Be aware that as these half page and page visions will be built into the main narrative itself submission works a bit differently. We are commissioning these panels: so get in touch, before you put pen to paper, with your idea and a link to your portfolio or examples of your graphic work.
Colour: Illuminated Brighton. Either a half page (259 x 172.9 mm) or full page (259 x 350mm). These spots are commissioned so get in touch first at info@bangdreammachine.com.
If you want to make contact about any of your ideas, get in touch at info@bangdreammachine.com, or if you’d rather, plunge right in and get cracking on the first or second call out – create! – and send us your submissions at the same email address titled COMICS.
If you are taken by the idea of drawing a Brighton vision, but don’t have a specific idea, drop us a line as there’s opportunities to illustrate bits of the narrative too.
There is no limit to the number of submissions, so please feel free to contribute all that you can imagine!
Dream Machine 