Paul Gravett is a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing and promotion for over twenty years.
In the early 1980s he manned the Fast Fiction table at the bi-monthly Saturday comic marts held in London's Westminster Hall, inviting anybody to sell their homemade comics from it, with all proceeds going to the creator. This role earned him the tag Man At The Crossroads from Eddie Campbell in his graphic novel Alec: How To Be An Artist, "He will be the purest, most fresh-faced wee fellow you have ever met. His ingenuous enthusiasm will beam from his cheery countenance."
In 1981 he started his first proper paid job at pssst! magazine, a brave but misguided attempt at a British version of a luxurious monthly bande dessinee magazine that typically sold well in France. He worked in a variety of positions at pssst! - as promotions man, traffic manager, coordinating artwork and interviewing potential contributors - but crucially he had no say in the magazine's content and eventually he became frustrated seeing great material being rejected.
In 1983 he launched Escape magazine, which he co-edited/published with Peter Stanbury, showcasing the cream of the alternative cartoonists of the 1980s. Escape lasted for 19 issues before closing its doors in 1989. For six years, Escape helped to promote an evolving bunch of distinctive British creators, many of whom were quickly picked up by other comics publishers and by the UK music press, newspapers, magazines and galleries. The Comics Journal in #210 said of Escape, "This now-defunct London based anthology remains one of the most sorely missed comics of all time not simply because of its tremendous track record of translating European comics but simply because it was always good in so many ways."
Under the Escape Publishing imprint, he co-published Violent Cases in 1987, the first collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, three volumes of Eddie Campbell's Alec between 1984 and 1986, and London's Dark in 1988 by James Robinson and Paul Johnson.
Noted comic writer Warren Ellis latter commented, "...Paul, with his longtime partner Peter Stanbury, was running the small press anthology Fast Fiction, the Fast Fiction stand at the bimonthly Westminster Comics Marts where the small press books were sold, and launching Escape - an excellent European-style professional comics magazine whose book-publishing arm led directly to the careers of James Robinson, Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman."
Between 1992 and 2001 he was the director of The Cartoon Art Trust, a UK charity established in 1988, dedicated to preserving and promoting the best of British cartoon art and caricature and to establish a museum of cartoon art with gallery, archives and reference library.
He has curated numerous exhibitions of comic art, including the first art-gallery exhibition of works by Alan Moore and his collaborators for the Palais des Beaux Arts in Charleroi, a history of British comics for France's National Comics Centre in Angoulême and the annual Comica Festival at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. He continues to write about comics for various periodicals, including The Guardian, The Comics Journal, Comic Art, Comics International, Time Out, Blueprint, Neo, The Bookseller, The Daily Telegraph and Dazed & Confused. |
