Yorkshire

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/27032543

Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle.

This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St. Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It’s the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who says he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience.

Thompson says the outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit naturally with a Christian message.

“Boil it down to the basics, it’s good versus evil,” he said. “When I became Christian, I started seeing the wrestling world through a Christian lens. I started seeing David and Goliath. I started seeing Cain and Abel. I started seeing Esau having his heritage stolen from him. And I’m like, ‘We could tell these stories.’”

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At a recent Wrestling Church evening, almost 200 people — older couples, teenagers, pierced and tattooed wrestling fans, parents with excited young children — packed into chairs around a ring erected under the vaulted ceiling of the century-old church.

After a short homily and prayer from Thomas, it was time for two hours of smackdowns, body slams and flying headbutts. The atmosphere grew cheerfully raucous, as fans waved giant foam fingers and hollered “knock him out!” at participants.

Some longtime churchgoers have welcomed the infusion of energy.

“I think it’s absolutely wonderful,” said Chris Moss, who married her husband Mike in St. Peter’s almost 50 years ago.

“You can look at some of the wrestlers and think” — she scrunched her face in distaste. But talking to them made her realize “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”

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Only a handful of people have gone from watching the wrestling to attending Sunday-morning services at St. Peter’s, but Wrestling Church baptized 30 people in its first year. Thompson, whose brand of born-again Christianity is more muscular than many traditional Anglicans’, plans to expand to other British cities. One day, he says, he may start his own church.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26305569

A remarkable Iron Age hoard, unearthed in a Yorkshire field, is prompting archaeologists to reassess the wealth and power dynamics of northern Britain two millennia ago.

The discovery, dubbed the Melsonby Hoard, contains more than 800 items, including remnants of wagons, ceremonial spears, and pony harnesses, offering a glimpse into the lives of the elite in the 1st century AD.

Unearthed in 2021 near the village of Melsonby, North Yorkshire, by metal detectorist Peter Heads, the hoard lay undisturbed in two ditches.

Its sheer scale and the nature of the artefacts suggest a deliberate disposal, a practice laden with symbolic meaning for the people of that era.

Experts believe the Melsonby Hoard could be one of the UK's most significant archaeological finds, requiring years of meticulous study.

The discovery challenges previous assumptions about the distribution of wealth and power in pre-Roman Britain. While some believed such opulence was confined to the south, the Melsonby Hoard's richness indicates a more complex reality.

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Melsonby is around a mile from Stanwick, the powerbase of the Brigantes tribe who in pre-Roman times controlled a large part of what is now Yorkshire.

“The Melsonby Hoard is of a scale and size that is exceptional for Britain and probably even Europe,” Professor Moore said.

“Unusually it includes lots of pieces of vehicles and items such as the wine mixing bowl which is decorated in both Mediterranean and Iron Age styles.

“Whoever originally owned the material in this hoard was probably a part of a network of elites across Britain, into Europe and even the Roman world.

“The destruction of so many high-status objects, evident in this hoard, is also of a scale rarely seen in Iron Age Britain and demonstrates that the elites of northern Britain were just as powerful as their southern counterparts.”

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22343097

“Do you want a shot?” asks Katy Sherrington from Durham, offering up a tiny glass of a pink liquid. Nobody is going anywhere at this point, so it would be rude not to accept.

On Saturday night at the Tan Hill Inn, Britain’s highest pub, the snow is falling and the crowd of about 30 people inside know they are probably stuck here for a couple of days. Throughout the place, at the northern edge of North Yorkshire, drinks are flowing and friends are being made.

Weather warnings for snow are in place across much of the UK, and the Met Office has advised the public to only make necessary journeys, with road closures, train and flight cancellations, and rural communities becoming cut off.

That is something the staff at the Tan Hill Inn, which is 528 metres (1,732ft) above sea level, are used to. The pub has a history of what people call “snow-ins” – in 2021, 61 punters who had come to watch an Oasis tribute band were trapped for three days.

So the team are well prepared. Their electric power comes from a generator and there is enough food for about a month, “but hopefully it won’t come to that” says Nicole Hayes, one of the bar staff, who has done a number of phone interviews with local and national media in the run-up to the weather warning, such is the reputation of the pub.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/19420084

Michael, 46, was back in Leeds from 2001 to 2011 and is now based in Oxford for his work. But Leeds holds a special place in his heart – not least, he says, because it is the home of comics in the North of England.

“The only thing that could tear me away from my favourite city was the ultimate job,” he says. “Particularly in Leeds, the comic scene has never been more vibrant and more diverse than it is now. And that's really fantastic. It's really been great to watch that over the last 20 years.”

Not only is it a student city, which fosters interest in comics, but it sustains three comic book stores – OK Comics, Travelling Man and Forbidden Planet International – which “all have their own identity and their own clientele,” says Michael. And lots of comic creators are from, or are based in Yorkshire, too, including Peter Doherty, Greg Staples, the late John Cooper.

“All the stars align over the head of Leeds and I know from my decade back that it always felt exciting to be in comics and to be around people who love comics,” says Michael, who is husband to Katherine.

It was in Leeds that he started to write freelance pieces about comics, going from consumer to somebody who worked in the industry. He has interviewed numerous names including Alan Moore, known for works such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta.

Now, Michael does have to “pinch myself” sometimes, he says, working for 2000 AD. He says: “I get to hang around with some of the most creative people on the face of the planet.”

But earlier this year, his own work was celebrated. In July, his book on the politics of Judge Dredd was named as Best Comics-Related Book at the Eisner Awards, in San Diego, California.

Blending comic book history with contemporary radical theories on policing, I Am The Law analyses how John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s character has reflected, parodied and predicted the rise of military-style policing.

For those who have never delved, what do comic books offer that other forms, such as novels, cannot? Michael sounds almost pained trying to answer what is such a big question for him. “People have quite literally written entire books about that,” he says.

So on this subject, Michael follows up by email. “There’s a great writer called Scott McCloud who has a lot to say about the way comics can mess with the illusion of time passing through the arrangement of different elements. That's comics’ central magic – the translation of space into time.

"Ultimately, comics gives your unconscious mind a workout by playing with symbols, images, and information to build a narrative. The effect of all that invisible mental effort is that the reader is so deeply invested that the emotional beats hit harder.

"The American cartoonist Will Eisner, after whom the awards are named, did so much to explore and expand on this idea. There really is no other artform like comics.

“The adult historical horror series Somna, by Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay (an Ilkley-based artist), is a great example of how two creators can write and draw together in a mutually supportive way that puts across two aspects of a single narrative.

"I can't see prose doing quite the same thing and it demonstrates how art styles can affect meaning – art style is to comics as prose style is to fiction.” He also highlights, for instance, how Yorkshire artist Zoe Thorogood's It's Lonely At The Centre of the Earth is a “complex and layered narrative response to her mental health, often switching from speaking directly to the reader to third-person narration,” he says.

“One particularly brilliant visual trick is where she covers her face with narration boxes, making the narration even more intimate.” And Thought Bubble is the place where these artists and themes coalesce. "Loads of people from across the world converge on Thought Bubble,” says Michael. “It’s the show that comic creators tell other comic creators to attend.

"I was in Portland in Oregon at a convention and there was this American artist saying to another American to go to Thought Bubble. I was just like, that’s so strange – these two people on the other side of the world going: ‘You must visit Harrogate’.”

For line up details and ticket, visit: www.thoughtbubblefestival.com

Archive

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/19050032

In the 1960s and 1970s the British war comic was big business. Titles including War Picture Library, Battle Picture Weekly and Battle Action, mainly saw the heroic Brits triumph over the evil Nazis. But these comics were much more than just a tale of goodies versus baddies.

Many of them depicted full battles and therefore were an historical record of the First and Second World Wars. Sadly, many of them and their remarkable artwork were consigned to the bin when the genre dipped in popularity at the end of the Seventies. But a dedicated team of comic collectors and researchers at Rebellion Publishing have tracked down the surviving pieces and the results are shown in an exhibition telling the story of the British war comic currently at York Army Museum.

“Britain has been publishing comics continuously for over 130 years. During that time, conflict has remained a staple of comic book storytelling and by the 1960s and 1970s war stories were the most popular genre,” explains Rebellion’s Head of Publishing Ben Smith.

“But British comics boomed and then busted in the late Nineties and the glorious history that had taken a century to build was put in mothballs.

"The owners of the various archives didn’t make that work available so consequently the story disappeared and at Rebellion, which has been publishing 2000AD the Home of Judge Dredd for 25 years, we realised that if we didn’t go out and acquire the rights and the catalogue and ownership of these comic archives the story and the history of British comics was going to be lost.”

They founded the Treasury of British Comics in 2018 to conserve, curate and present the history of British comics.

“This exhibition is a wonderful example of that,” says Smith.

“It tells the story of war comics across a century we go from the real boom in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies and then individual stories about what made those comics interesting to people at the time and into the present day.

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And it seem the exhibition is already proving a massive hit with visitors young and old coming from as far afield as London and Scotland to see it and footfall up 25 per cent as a result.

Into Battle: The Art of British War Comics is at York Army Museum, 3 Tower Street, York, YO1 9SB until November 17