Safari Festival Flyer.jpg

If you’re lucky enough to be in the UK this weekend you can attend
The Safari Festival, a comics arts festival sponsored by Breakdown Press and featuring cutting edge publishers and cartoonists from the Euro scene and beyond. You  can sample some of that at the official tumblr of follow along on Twitter with   @safarifestival.

And the details:

The 2017 line-up features American cartoonists, Anya Davidson, Charles Forsman and Lane Milburn as special guests. All three have found critical acclaim with their own self-published works as well as with releases from legendary North American publishing house, Fantagraphics. Forsman’s popular graphic novel, The End of the F**king World, is currently being adapted into a television series which will debut internationally on Netflix in Autumn, 2017.

Publishers debuting new work at the show will include Decadence Comics (UK/Denmark) and Landfill Editions (UK), alongside International publishers 2dcloud (USA), Bergen Street Press (USA), Black Hook Press (Japan), Super-Structure (France) and Uncivilized Books (USA). Other guests exhibiting their own works include Laura Callaghan (Ireland), Jon Chandler (UK), Aisha Franz (Germany), Joe Kessler (UK), Roman Muradov (USA), Wai Wai Pang (UK) and many others. Alongside these, festival organisers Breakdown Press will be debuting new graphic novels, Showtime by Antoine Cossé (France) and The Good News Bible: The Complete Deadline Strips of Shaky Kane by Shaky Kane (UK), alongside the Risograph-printed Klaus Magazine 3 by Richard Short (UK) and Berserker, an anthology of comics and writing examining the relationship between contemporary art and genre narratives, with contributions from Adham Faramawy, Joey Holder, Lando and Benjamin Marra.

As always, the Festival, and all of its satellite events, will be free to attend. The festival itself will take place at Studio Two, the Shoreditch gallery space of creative agency Protein, on Saturday 12th August, within walking distance of Old Street, Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street stations. The after party will be held at the Shacklewell Arms in Dalston. DJs will provide music throughout the day and evening.

The festival poster is by Anya Davidson. Broken Frontier has been having an entire Safari Festival Fortnight  with news, interviews, reviews and spotlight on many many deserving creators, and an overview here.

Bringing this back round to Safari Festival, that growth has also allowed shows curated for specific audiences and there’s few better examples of that than Safari which always lives up to that “new waves in contemporary comics” tag showcasing some of the very best in experimental and boundary-pushing comics to a potential new readership.

Safari resonates with me because it’s one of the few events I attend where I still find artists and work that is new to me. That sense of discovery was a huge part of the success of ‘Small Pressganged’ in its early days and it’s exciting to know I could be coming home on Saturday with previously unread books and comics for review that so firmly fit the BF ethos in terms of content.