Creepy Crawly Comics at Morpeth and Cramlington Libraries, Wed 17th Feb

What are you doing this Wedesday 17th February?

Coming to our Creepy Crawly Comics workshop at Morpeth Library or Cramlington Library?

And you've already phoned the library to book your place?

Well that's just awesome.

Half-term family comics workshops

Attention all Spineless comic fans!

Join our FREE drop-in comics making workshops at Great North Museum Hancock this half term.

On Saturday 24th, Monday 26th, and Friday 30th October we'll have comics making activities from 11am-3pm.  Come and work with comics artists to draw your own comics, all with a Spineless invertebrates, minibeasts and bugs theme.

These drop-in activities are for children age 6-11, with their families. You're welcome to stay for as long or short a time as you'd like - just turn up on the day, there's no need to book.

Want to make a day of it? Here's a link to other Spineless activities at Great North Museum: Hancock https://greatnorthmuseum.org.uk/whats-on.

Take our Spineless reader survey!

Dear reader,  you'll have seen Spineless: The Newcastle Science Comic, our free comic about invertebrates in partnership with the Spineless exhibition at Great North Museum: Hancock.  Please could you fill in our Spineless reader survey to tell us what you thought of it? 10 questions, should take about 5-10 minutes, works on desktop/laptop computers and mobile devices.

Here's the link: www.surveymonkey.com/r/MVTYRHC

Your feedback will help us make even better comics in future, so is reeeeeally important to us.

Spineless-the-comic is free and launched in print on 1st August 2015 - get your free copy at the Spineless exhibition.  The digital version is available here on our blog - just click the cover image at the top right of the page

Spineless-the-exhibition runs from 1st August to 1st November 2015 at the Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle.

Spineless published today 1st August 2015

Spineless: The Newcastle Science Comic

We're jumping up and down excited to launch Spineless, our new comic in partnership with the Great North Museum: Hancock. 

Pick up your free copy (we've printed 20,000) at the museum's free Spineless exhibition this summer, 1st August-1st November.  And/or read it in full for free here on our blog: click the cover image on the right of the screen. 

Here are links to our marvellous reviews so far: 

• Richard Bruton at Forbidden Planet International says: 'every comic works, all of them doing the simple things very well, keeping the storytelling through the art nice and simple, straightforward. An outreach project such as this relies on clarity, on getting the message across really well. And that’s precisely what Spineless does very, very well.'
• John Freeman at Down The Tubes says: 'The strips are fun and informative and all the creators involved were, importantly, paid for working on the title (as well as clearly enjoying themselves in the process).'

We've published Spineless with a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.  This means you can share the comic (physical and digital versions) with others as long as you credit our project, but you can't change the comic in any way or use it commercially. We hope this will make it easy for children, adults, teachers and other professionals to read and share Spineless. Keep in touch if you use Spineless with schools or other groups - we'd love to hear from you! 

ISBN: 978-0-9574570-4-1.  Published by Lydia Wysocki, Applied Comics Etc. 16 pages, full colour, mini newsprint format. 

We Have Comics

Attention all comics readers, comics makers, science doers and that. We have comics. This is not a drill. 20,000 comics are now printed and ready for the Great North Museum: Hancock's Spineless exhibition, opening on 1st August 2015. Our Spineless comic is full of collaborations between comics makers and exhibition curators.

For those keeping score Asteroid Belter was 10,000 comics, two pallets on delivery. Spineless is printed on Newspaper Club's Mini format, a bit smaller, meaning the 20,000 copies fitted on just the one pallet. We sent our top people to track down the comics for the traditional pre-launch celebration/inspection.

The Spineless comic was printed by the brilliant Newspaper Club. It was made on one of their massive newspaper printing machines. Like real grown up newspapers. Woosh.

Then the comics were loaded onto a big pallet and shipped to the museum where they are now in maximum security storage awaiting launch day.

Luckily we were able to acquire access  early on Monday morning for that previously mentioned tradition.

And it wouldn't be a pre-launch celebration/inspection without vines. Unfortunately Lydia wasn't able to dance on the comics this time, so we're going to re-share the Asteroid Belter dance. Because we can.

Hello John Gatehouse and Dave Windett

Who are you?

Writer - John Gatehouse, Artist – Dave Windett

Why did you get involved in Spineless?

We got involved in the Spineless project because we are both interested in using comic strips as an educational tool.
We contributed to Applied Comics Etc's previous project Asteroid Belter and have created a number of other comic strips with educational content such as The Wacky World of Animals.

Tell us about your comic.

Our feature shows the reader how to identify and encourage insects in their garden.

The picture of a wasp's nest was chosen as it is a good representation of the garden feature.


John and Dave are working with Environmental Records Information Centre North East.

Little Lemming Books
@l_lemming_books