Blog: The Fox and Newt

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After all the excitement of Comics Forum, it would have been nice to have A Bit Of A Sit Down on Friday night. However, that was not available to me for I had an appointment with ROCK!

Thus it was that I stomped back to my hotel in the TIPPING RAIN, collected all of my gear and then headed out into the MONSOON towards The Fox And Newt. It was a bit of a scary walk there, especially going over a PRECARIOUS pedestrian bridge over a massive motorway IN A HURRICANE, but it was worth it as the pub itself was LOVELY. I was soon joined by ace promoter and all-round good-guy Mr S Gibb aka STU BABOON, and after some HUGS we headed upstairs to get ourselves ready.

I always think it's going to be PEASY doing this show as I don't really need a soundcheck or anything, but things were complicated here because the equipment for the projector was right at the back of the room and could not be got anywhere near close enough for me to operate it from the stage. Luckily a) Stu had thought this might be the case and advised me to bring my own little projector b) I had done so and c) we had ace soundman Mr J Mazur on hand, who could not have been more PATIENT and HELPFUL in getting it all worked out. Between the three of us and some gaffer tape we managed to get everything set up, leaving time for me and Stu to have a bit of an old catch-up (it turns out we haven't seen each other in 9 years, and a LOT has happened since then!) and also for me to have my tea, which was BANGERS AND MASH. Cor, I tell you what, when you have A Bit Of A Dicky Stomach like what I had last week, there is NOTHING so lovely as some mashed potatoes. It was ACE!

At this point people started turning up! HOORAY! I had spent my day in the usual cycle of PANIC, alternating between thinking "Oh no, nobody at all is coming" and "Oh no, far too many people are coming and will have to be turned away" but in the end it was a pretty much perfect number, almost EXACTLY filling the number of seats we had available in the main room. PHEW.

The show itself was LOTS of fun - I mucked a few bits up because I was worrying about standing in front of the projector, and about how the TRAPEZIUM effect I'd had to use to make the screen fit was working, but I had done my usual "mistakes are SPECIAL" speech at the start so it was fine. The audience was also mostly people from Comics Forum with a few there via Thought Bubble, so it was an UNUSUALLY receptive audience for a lot of the comics theory stuff, which made it a LOT of fun, although I did worry before getting to the "like many unemployable people... I went to work for a University" joke, but it seemed to go OK!

We'd set it up to be a whole evening with an added Q&A session at the end, which meant there was an INTERMISSION, allowing me to use the special SLIDE what I'd made, shown in LIVE ACTION below:



Good eh?

The second half was deliberately shorter than the first - and felt possibly a bit TOO short - so as to leave room for the QUESTIONS, of which there were a LOT. I feel I may have RAMBLED ON a bit, especially when I got a chance to talk about some of my OTHER Doctor Doom papers, but hopefully people left FULLY SATED with Doom Knowledge. Actually, given the amount of Comics Scholars in the room it may have FATALLY SKEWED the entire FIELD in the direction of Latveria!

I packed up, thanked James heartily, and then me and Stu stomped off through the rain again to my hotel and its bar, there for an EXTREMELEY well-earned pint and a further bit of CHAT. It had been a BLOODY GRATE evening!

posted 18/11/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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