Battling Knights

A superior product to the Executioner! The pieces for the Executioner had to be cut out by hand, while the pieces for this are pre-cut and just need to be pressed out of the sheets of card. Also, a thicker card is used for the horses and the mechanism, while a thinner card is used for the knights, making them much easier to bend into position. Construction photographs after the cut.

Comics Unmasked at the British Library

Entry: Between free and £10.50 depending on where you fit into the British Library's hierarchy of concessions

The British Library currently has an exhibition on British comic writers and artists called Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK. I went last weekend and have been grappling with this review for the last week. The experience was actually very reminiscent of the Barbican's animation exhibition: a high entry fee, material arranged thematically and a superficial look at the subject. Again, I went in with high expectations, (Dave McKean was the art director!), but overall I was a bit disappointed.

Stack: June

This month's Stack delivery was the dual-language magazine Perdiz. Perdiz is about happiness, or more accurately, some of the things that make some people happy: karaoke, drugs, shoelaces, photography and storm-chasing are some of the things covered by this issue alone.

Each Stack delivery arrives with a letter from the founder of Stack that introduces the magazine and tells you how great it is. I haven't really felt the need to mention them until now when this month's letter described Perdiz's content as "slightly unhinged", which is a pretty accurate summary of how I felt reading it. It skips between wildly disparate subjects with manic glee, perfectly capturing the fine line between enthusiast and obsessive. It even looks pretty strange. Check out the exposed spine:

All text is in both English and Spanish, with Spanish being the first language of the Perdiz staff. The occasionally clunky English translations just add to the general sense of delightful oddness. The whole experience was endearingly weird. Perdiz is definitely something very different.

Would I buy it again? It's quite expensive, so probably not. That said, I found myself thinking about it quite a bit afterwards. I mean, I learnt that I tie my shoes in the same way as the world's foremost expert on shoelaces! (We both favour the Over Under style of lacing, in case you wondered.) That made me pretty happy actually...

Executioner

This took a long time to put together! (After the cut are some photos from its month-long construction.)