Blog: All The World's A Comic

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On Friday after work I went back to my old stomping ground of BLOOMSBURY to attend an event at The British Museum - or, as all the cool kids call it, "The BM". It was BRILLIANT being round that way again - I worked in Bloomsbury at Birkbeck College from 2003 to 2014, and then adjacent to it a couple of years later at UCL, and I flipping LOVED it. The whole area is full of MUSEUMS and INTERESTING PLACES and SHOPS both Chain and Non-Chain and mostly PUBS. Much as I love my current job the area around Kings Cross is nowhere NEAR as much fun!

One of my favourite things to do when I was at Birkbeck was to pop into the British Museum on my lunchbreak, just to go and see one Interesting Exhibit at a time. I would usually pop in via the back door, and did the same on Friday night, passing the Easter Island statue (i.e. Arthur in "Storm House") on the way. It was very WARM in the main building, but thankfully the talk I was going to was in the air-conditioned basement, where various staff members somehow knew EXACTLY what I was there for.

For LO! the talk was called "All The World's A Comic: Storytelling Through Pictures" and the audience contained a large proportion of The Usual Suspects. It was chaired by all-round legend Mr Paul Gravett and featured a talk by HIM and then from five EXPERTS from the museum, discussing items they looked after which related to narrative storytelling. I knew Paul Gravett's talk would be fun, but I was expecting the others to be a bit DRY and BORING, and possibly not much related to comics. In this expectation I was ENTIRELY WRONG however, as each of the experts were INCREDIBLY ENTHUSIASTIC and REALLY REALLY wanted to tell us about their items. They all had different styles too - some bombastic, some a bit cheeky, some just desperate to tell us why they found it all SO VERY EXCITING!

It didn't teach me a lot about comics, but it DID teach me a lot about ROCK PAINTING, the ancient Assyrians, Buddhism, and LOTS more. One of the amazing things about living in That London is that talks like this happen EVERY DAY, all over the city. If I wasn't worried that my BRANE would explode I would go to them all the time!

posted 29/7/2019 by MJ Hibbett

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