BLOG Red Nose Day Geek Projects

This year’s Red Nose Day is shaping up to be something very special and, with Comic Relief embracing Twitter and the internet, there’s some fantastic projects happening all over the country that you can help out with just a few mouse clicks. Here are three of them:

Bevis Musson has been one of my favourite comic creators for years. He has an incredibly open, friendly style that’s still hugely detailed and expressive and makes any page he draws a pleasure to read. He’s also a fantastic writer, and Dead Queen Detectives , which is exactly what it sounds like, is particularly good fun. He’s currently working on Knight And Dragon along with Matt Gibbs and Nadine Ashworth for Improper Books, which looks great, as you can see:

And he also has a pin up in Porcelain , a superb new graphic novel I’ll be reviewing shortly.

His Red Nose Day project is simple, and brilliant. He has a page of A3 paper. For £2.50 minimum donation, he will draw whatever character you want on there, and keep going until the page is full. At the end of the project, whoever bid highest wins the piece of art. Red Nose Day get their donation, Bevis gets to draw an eclectic mix of characters and someone goes home with the finished version of this:

Everyone wins. Bevis’ donation page is: http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/bevismusson

If words are more your thing, then you need to go and see Lee “Budgie” Barnett. Lee has, for years, produced what he calls “Fast Fiction” – 200 word or less short stories based on prompts from other people. He’s incredibly good at it too, as shown by the wonderful 12 Days of Fast Fiction ebook he put out for free at Christmas.

The twist this time is he’s aiming for one an hour, 24 stories in total, across Red Nose Day. He’ll have no idea what the prompts are beforehand, only who they come from. The list of prompters incudes people like Rory Bremner, Caitlin Moran, Richard Curtis, Ian Rankin and Neil Gaiman so it looks set to be a very diverse, very fun collection of stories. You can sponsor Lee here , and the ebook will be available on the 16th of March.

And finally, there’s Mitch Benn. The 24 Hour Album challenge I blogged about last month is officially a go (In the same room Lee’s writing the short stories it turns out. As Mitch says ‘I hope he has a decent pair of headphones’) and will take place at the Vineyard Community Centre in Richmond, London, starting at 12.30pm on Friday the 15 March and working all the way through to 12.30pm the following day.

All the details are at: http://mitchbenn.com/blog/1374/comic_relief_update.html

Whilst Mitch’s donation page is: http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/mitchbenn1

Alasdair Stuart

Further links:

Bevis’ tumblr: http://bevismusson.tumblr.com/
Improper Books: http://www.improperbooks.com/
Lee’s blog: http://budgiehypoth.wordpress.com/
12 Days of Fast Fiction Free ebook: http://budgiehypoth.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/12daysffebook/
Mitch’s blog: http://mitchbenn.com/blog