Comics, from Bordeaux to Broome, are up for discussion in the May ‘What It Is?’ event, with Mike Shuttleworth, Bernard Caleo and Brenton McKenna.

For four days every January, the French town of Angoulême is transformed into a dream-palace built of BD ( = bande dessinée = strips of drawings = comics). Writers, artists, publishers and readers of comics from across the world turn up. Just a few. Like 250,000. This year, the intrepid Mike Shuttleworth was among them, and in May’s 'What It Is?’, Mike and Bernard will build Angoulême live on stage at Readings. Along the way, they will discover how comic books work in French culture, and demand a couple of changes to Australian culture.

Mike and Bernard will also speak with Brenton McKenna, whose graphic novel for kids and reluctant readers, Ubby’s Underdogs: The Legend of the Phoenix Dragon, is released by Magabala Books in May 2011. It’s set in Broome in the 1940s, and it’s the first of three volumes: how very French!

PLUS: the kamishibai (Japanese ‘paper theatre’) classic, ‘Jean-Paul and his comics’ (2011).