Last Saturday,16/05/26, I helped host the first spring fair at the Cube Microplex. We have run a very successful winter fair in December on a fairly regular basis. After a really good event in 2025 we decided in consultation with some of the stall holders to run one in warmer weather…
Being the Cube, see Cube Programme for context, the fair is usually an eclectic mix of crafters, Print makers, Illustrators, Zine-makers and people selling random stuff who take over the auditorium and bar for the day for selling stuff, nice tunes, cake and rounded off with and appropriate screening after the event. This years movies was ‘La Bonheur’ by French New Wave director Agnès Varda.
I help, alongside my partner Kari, organise/volunteer the fair but I also had a table selling my comics and a few prints. I like to have something new to bring along and this time I pushed the boat out and decided to make a zine of a short story comic I had made, but never done anything with, called Tower Dreams.
The story came about through a mix of my long term obsession with the cheese lane shot tower in Bristol and JG Ballard short stories…
Built in 1969 for the fantastically named Sheldon Bush and Patent Shot Company Limited. It was designed to make lead shot for guns but fell out of use in the late 1980s as other methods and less poisonous materials took over. Saved from demolition in the 1990s its has survived as part of the central Bristol skyline folded into an office development. It was a land mark now dwarfed by the surrounding architecture and separated from its original purpose, an industrial ghost. It is a singular structure and always appears in my psychic map of the city and when sketching out the pages of Tower Dreams it was always going to be the model for the mysterious structure in the story.
In the Watchtowers by JG Ballard, a short story from 1962 and a direct inspiration for the comic. An unnamed town is an eerie Panopticon, where towers of smooth metal hang inexplicably from the sky. Spaced a few blocks apart, these structures give their inhabitants, mysterious “watchers,” clear lines of sight down onto the streets and rooftops of the town. The inhabitants seem accustomed to the strange sky-turrets and try to lead normal lives in spite of them.
I just loved the idea of the towers hanging from the clouds and looming over the town. The original story is typical of Ballard and has an accepting paranoia that leaves the reader with the option to decide whether the towers are real or a construct of the protagonist’s mind. I loved it and just thought I’d riff on the spooky sky towers…
Then I had to produce the zine… I have access to a two colour Risograph machine at work and was able to use a bit of downtime to print the zine. It is a great printing technique and this was an opportunity to get to grips with making a proper zine and prepare for using it in anger with my students next year when I will hopefully have my first group of Illustration for Comics students starting in September of 2026!
The Zine is A5 and to use the 2 colour option on our printer effectively you need to print on A3. So to get the most out of it I had to double up the spreads on each sheet. It doesn’t matter how much you think you have cracked the pagination(page order), you still have to check and check again… always make some kind of mock up. I made several and even then printed the outer front and back cover the wrong way round!
Once I got into the swing of it I really managed to crank the pages out during my lunch hours and got it done the week leading up to the Fair.
I am pretty happy with the result and this story is the first I have completely made digitally using procreate, although the thumbnails were sketched on paper and scanned. I had it on the stall and sold a couple of copies as well as gifting a few to fellow table folk. It is available from my store at the following link:
Tower Dreams Riso comic book | Richard Starzecki
The event was pretty lightly attended with a few flurries through the day but I think it is something we will do again in addition to the Winter one. I had a great day sharing the cube with really talented makers and lovely people…
Big up to all the Stall holders, DJ’s, Volunteers and the Cube.
Happy Spring!
richard starzecki 