MACC-POW!

And air-breathing fish!

Last weekend was MACC-POW, Macclesfield’s annual comic fair, conceived of and run by Marc and Betty Jackson. It’s one of my favourites, because Macclesfield town is lovely, and I’ve been attending since the second MACC-POW and have seen the festival grow year on year. Marc’s enthusiasm for comics is an absolute restorative to be around, and I always come back from the fair excited to make more work.

All set up and ready to sell!

I was tabling next to my friend Jim Medway and got to see his rolling comics mart in real life for the first time - it’s a joy to behold!

My table neighbour and friend Jim with his insanely wonderful rolling comics mart, which he built and decorated himself out of an airline trolley.

Slightly better picture of my wares.

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Home again, on Sunday night we watched the second of a two-part series called Wild Cuba: A Caribbean Journey. (Here on iPlayer for anyone able to watch.) I know so little of the island, and when I pictured it before this show I imagined Havana, Castro, trade embargos and Hemingway’s house - I had no idea how much is jungle and how much amazing wildlife is there.

The programme told us that the tropics in general are home to almost 80% of the world’s species. The wild areas of Cuba are packed with creatures and plants - approximately 50% of plant species and 42% of animal species there are endemic to Cuba. They filmed a bizarre, ancient-looking fish called the Cuban Gar fish:

It lives in fresh and brackish waters, and if the water it’s in gets a bit deoxygenated, it can poke its snout up and breath air!

From breathin’ to smokin’

Part of Cuba’s unusual geology is how much of the island is composed of limestone. I was struck by this, as when I was in Florida I learned it too is made of limestone - Florida sits atop an enormous aquifer, which is the primary source of drinking water for most cities in the central and northern parts of the state.

I looked up Cuban geology, and found this easily-understandable bit on Wikipedia:

Western and central Cuba are a deformed orogen, that came about due to the collision of an island arc in the Cretaceous with the Florida-Bahamas platform. As a result, the Cuban ophiolite zone became obducted and a northward verging fold and thrust belt formed. A second small orogeny took place in the Paleocene and Eocene.

Bit much to call somewhere a deformed orogen right off the bat, but there it is. Looking up orogen, I find this enlightening bit of help:

Orogeny is a mountain building process that takes place at a convergent plate margin when plate motion compresses the margin. An orogenic belt or orogen develops as the compressed plate crumples and is uplifted to form one or more mountain ranges.

Obviously it all sounds very you-know-what, and really it’s not surprising to find that so many animals and habitats are endangered in Cuba, as if there’s one place on earth you could predict men being clumsy and heavy-handed it would be an orogenous zone AM I RIGHT LADIES¡¡¡¡¡¡

That joke was LABOURED, and I like to be paid for my labour, so please send me your high-five emojis stat!!!*

*this “joke” was workshopped with me by my friend Hattie, who came up with the wording to make it work, so I’ll share the high fives with her!!