Reading · Neill Cameron News

I am back home and WILDLY jet lagged after an amazing trip to Japan, where I spent a week visiting schools and doing comics workshops as part of a programme arranged by the incredible organisers of the Lakes International Comics Art Festival. It was a full-on schedule, and I am genuinely exhausted, but also it was a trip full of the most incredible experiences, genuine highlight-of-a-lifetime level stuff. I met Godzilla!

(Actually, I met Godzilla a bunch of times. I guess I had an awareness that Japanese people like Godzilla but honestly, whatever preconception you may have about how much Japanese people like Godzilla, trust me: you are lowballing it.)

I’m not going to try and describe all the high points here, because there were simply too many and this post would go on forever. But happily, one of the biggest high points turned out to be the school visits themselves. I guess I had assumed that, being so far from home, it would be kind of like going back to square one with these things: starting with ten minutes explaining who I am, and what kind of comics I make, and what comics in the UK even ARE, that kind of thing. So it was a bit surprising to travel halfway around the world, and walk into a classroom, and be greeted by a lot of kids excitedly shouting “Mr Neill Cameron! Alex and Freddy! CARAMEL JACK!”

It turns out that a lot of the schools we visited had done the absolute best thing a school can do before an author visit, which is: to prep for it, and introduce the kids to the authors’ work beforehand, so that they get the most out of it. It further turns out that they have Amazon in Japan, and indeed Scholastic, and it is in fact perfectly straightforward to get hold of my books there. So that was a nice surprise. There was even one school with a Phoenix subscription! Indeed it turned out that instead of having to work to win over a bunch of kids who’d never heard of me, I found myself faced with the opposite situation - there is no way to mention this without sounding self-aggrandising, but in one school there was one young man who was so overwhelmed by the fact that I, his favourite author in the world, had come to visit his school that he broke down in tears. Which was not a situation I had braced for at all, and possibly why I found it strangely reassuring when another young man ran up to me later and asked breathlessly, eyes gleaming with excitement: “…are you the one who draws Bunny Vs Monkey?”

I felt a lot more at home after that.

Anyway, it was all incredibly lovely and heart-warming and life-affirming, and I feel baffled but profoundly lucky that I get to have experiences like this. It has to be said though that four days of back to back full day school visits is a LOT, in any country, and by the end of the week I was feeling pretty comprehensively mentally and physically pulverised. I was very grateful to have a final day before flying back where I got to just wander round aimlessly, sit in cafes and potter round bookshops, stuff like that. I went and sat on a bench, under a tree, in a beautiful park in Shinjuku and I had a lovely time to myself: earpods in, listening to some tunes and catching up on drawing some donuts in this impossibly gorgeous place.

Anyway, I’d been happily drawing away for ten minutes or so when a nice man came over and very politely enquired about what I was doing. Between my incredibly rudimentary Japanese (“watashi wa mangaka des” / ‘I am a comics creator’ is really about all I know how to say, but it always gets a great reaction) and his much, much better English, we had a nice little chat. I showed him some of the Donut Squad roughs I was working on, and he asked a bit about comics in the UK, and then he asked if he could take my picture with this incredible 80-year-old spring-loaded wind-up camera he was carrying around. And then, after chatting away a bit more as we waited for a few minutes for it to develop, he gave me the picture as a present and wandered back off into the park.

Honestly the whole encounter was so impossibly gorgeous it felt genuinely magical, and if it wasn’t for the fact I have the photo as physical proof I’d wonder if I imagined the whole thing.

(You guys CAN see that too, right? Okay good.)

Oh and also I got to eat a Ham Cutlet and Fried Noodles sandwich.

Which brings me onto…

TOP 5 THINGS NEILL ATE IN JAPAN

5: Hotel breakfast buffet. Fried chicken! Curry sauce! OFFAL HOTPOT. Delicious, or genuinely insane things to put in your body first thing in the morning? Japan: the country that dares to ask these kind of questions. Neill Cameron: the man who dares to answer.

4: Savoury seafood custard! Part of an amazing spread in a gorgeous basement Izakaya styled like an Edo-period indoor street, which was all fantastic, but man. This CUSTARD. Silky smooth, umami-rich, and incredibly comforting in a way I was not necessarily expecting Fish Custard to be.

3: Lawsons Ham Cutlet and Fried Noodles sandwich. (See above).

I mean all Japanese convenience store sandwiches, really, but this one took the crown.

2: bowl of Ramen, near the Meiji-Jingu shrine. Long queue, very touristy area, and I guess my expectations were not through the roof, but every single component of this - the soup, the noodles, the pork, the BOILED EGG - was the best version of that thing I have ever tasted. Just incredible. Like, I’ve always liked Ramen, but I feel like now I GET it.

(These are not actually my noodles in the picture. I was too hungry / scared of the shouty waiter to take a picture, so here is a photo of the vegan version, courtesy of my esteemed colleague / fellow visiting comic artist / generally best human being you could hope to meet in a good year, Ray Ray. I am assured these were absolutely banging too.)

1: Fami-Chiki! Convenience store fried chicken. Seems like it should on paper be terrible, but is somehow the most perfectly moist and delicious fried chicken you’ll ever eat. Just sat there on the counter in every Family Mart, a blessed cornucopia of wonders which, along with Lawsons and 7-11s, you are somehow apparently never more than 30 seconds walk from a branch of.

Good lord, what a country.

Anyway, it was an amazing week, huge thanks to the LICAF team for arranging it all and to Ray for being such a completely delightful person to spend a week hanging out in Tokyo with. Go check out Ray’s work, if you haven’t! They are an incredible artist and are going to make many amazing things.

Alright! Back to regularly scheduled Newsletter Business…

UPCOMING EVENTS

I think you can still get tickets to come see me, Laura Ellen Anderson and Thiago De Moraes engage in a thrilling DRAW-OFF at Hay Festival next week, Wednesday 27th May. Or indeed to see me talk to graphic novelist Astrid Goldsmith about her incredible book The Crystal Vase later that day! So why not do one of those things? And then on Saturday 30th May it’s Comics Club at the Story Museum - I think the morning session is sold out as ever, but there are a few spaces in the afternoon session, for ages 11+.

THE MEGA ROBO CHRONICLES

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | AND NOW… Part 5!