Wireless Comics - Drawn Out (June)

Last Thursday, June 19, I was on Richard Watts' weekly arts review/discussion program on 3RRR, 'Smartarts'. I've got a spot on the show, once a month, where I get to talk with Richard about local and international comic book and graphic novel news, and this was my second go.

In May we spoke about the current boom in Australian graphic novels: 'The Sacrifice' by Bruce Mutard, 'The Great Gatsby' graphic adaptation by Nicki Greenberg, Mandy Ord's 'Rooftops' and Shaun Tan's 'The Sacrifice'. We also chatted about Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's 'The Black Dossier', a comic book from overseas, which I had just begun. This last I wanted to use in juxtaposition to the Australian releases, all of which have strong storytelling at their heart, whereas 'The Black Dossier', in my opinion, was a postmodern exercise. Richard's perceptive, and more generous label was 'metafiction', and having by now completed the book, I would agree with him. However. Having skipped through those current greats of Australian 'book comics', in the first show, my brother Luke's comment later that day was: "Have you left yourself anything to talk about next month?"




Yes indeedy I had. And not only that, after asking for a title for the segment on air at the end of May's show, Richard immediately took a call from listener Robert Glavich who suggested 'Drawn Out'. And even though we got other, very good suggestions, this was the one that took my fancy. In its creation, a comic book is thought out, sometimes written and/or sketched out, but crucially it is... drawn out. Then there's also the sense of duration that that the phrase imparts, again crucial for a time-depicting artform. Finally there's the sense that 'the arrival' (if you will) of Australian comics has been a long time coming. It's been drawn out.

So that's 'Drawn Out', on the third Thursday of every month, at 9.30 am on 3RRR, 102.7 on your FM dial, with Bernard Caleo reporting to Richard Watts.

In the June show, I opened by talking about J. Marc Schmidt's 'Eating Steve', released by SLG Publishing in December 2007. This is a very entertaining zom-rom-com by Schmidt, who has also contributed stories over the years to Tango, the romance comics anthology that I put together. It's a bit smaller than A5, in the format that I'm beginning to think of as (see next post) 'manga size'. Jon is from Sydney, and spends a lot of time overseas in Asia teaching English. His cartooning is beautifully clear, his dialogue well timed and funny, and his characters well observed. And this book is about a cute girl, Jill, who is moved to munch on her boyfriend's grey matter, and the consequences of that. It's not, shall we say, a move forward for the relationship. But it's a great little graphic novella.


The next book under the comicoscope was 'Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday', written by Alex Cox, the writer/director of cult classic film 'Repo Man'. This book comic is the sequel to that 1984 punk- powered movie. Originally written as a screenplay in 1994 by Cox, it has been in Hollywood purgatory for more than a decade, but in a great move, Perth comic book publishing house Gestalt Comics secured the rights and engaged two local comic bookers to illustrate it - pencils and inks by Chris Bones and colour and textures by Justin Randall. This is a slick, accomplished, full colour publication with great production values, and the story is as incoherent, dreamlike and surreal as I remember the original film being. A great ride.

Other publications we discussed were: 'Word Balloons' the only print magazine discussing Australian comics, put out by Philip Bentley, this issue (number 7) featuring an interview with Nicki ('Great Gatsby') Greenberg; 'Going Down Swinging' the Melbourne poetry/stories/comics anthology, this issue (number 26) featuring comics by Daniel ('The Crumpleton Experiments') Reed and Paul Oslo Davis: and finally from overseas, Charles Burns' incredible work of suburban teenage horror, 'Black Hole', which I borrowed from my local library and I'm glad to be taking back, so excellently disturbing is it.

The Return of Miracleman

Two men, two wigs, a doll, a guitar... it can only mean one thing. That's right, the stage adaptation of the comic book 'Miracleman' is back in town. Bruce Woolley is fresh from Berlin, and Bernard Caleo is fresh from turning 40, and they're doing a re-vamped, amped-up version of their two man show with more amplitude than ever before!

So much amplitude, in fact, that it's already been blogged quite excellently by Kevin Patrick (with a Miracleman comic book history appended!) here.

Miracleman: the two man show
adapted and performed by Bruce Woolley and Bernard Caleo
from the comic book written by Alan Moore and drawn by Gary Leach and Alan Davis
at The Croft Institute, Croft Alley, Melbourne CBD
(off Paynes Place, off Little Bourke Street, between Exhibition and Russell Streets)

Wednesday July 2 - Saturday July 12
Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8pm
Fridays and Saturdays at 6.30pm

Tickets $20/15

Seating very limited, book here bernard@cardigancomics.com

The Movies that ate my BRAINS!

When the new Cardigan Comics site is (James Earl Jones voice) "fully operational", there will be a page called 'The Movies that ate my BRAINS!'. This page will feature the faux movie posters that I sketch in between putting on films at the two picture theatres that I work at: the Sun Theatre in Yarraville and the Westgarth Theatre in, well, Westgarth. Both of them beautiful Art Deco ladies from the 'Dream Palace' era of movies in Melbourne.

There is also a 'comic strip essay' that I will one day do, to be called: 'The Projectionist Theory of Cinema'. When showing films is your job, it really changes your way (and by that I mean your method) of seeing them.

But however you look at the new Indy film, I would suggest that everyone sees the same thing.

Sim and Tan

No, I haven't converted this blog to a personals column and that title is not a misspelled self-description. Even though I have turned 40 since last posting (the excuse I will use if quizzed about the length of time in between posts), there has been no change to the pallid man-about-town complexion that I have always happily worn.

But there's plenty to report, so let's get cracking:

This evening, I and my family were at Readings in Carlton for the launch of Shaun Tan's new book from Allen & Unwin (one always feels the need to preface those last three words with 'the good folks at'. Because they are.)



This book is not strictly (or even loosely) 'comics': it is a collection of illustrated stories. But I want to write about it here, in this 'thoughts about comics in Australia' blog, for a couple of reasons:

1 given the success both local and international of 'The Arrival', Shaun Tan has put 'serious comics from Australia' on the global radar. "What Shaun did next" should be of interest to comic bookers. One of the great things about the success of 'The Arrival' is that Tan was not known as a maker of graphic novels/book comics before that point. 'The Arrival' is something of a departure in form, if not in content/theme for him. Primarily he is known as a maker of picture books, although for him this does not mean children's books. As he said tonight, he makes books '... not for children, but I try not to exclude them."

2 'Tales from Outer Suburbia' is another book from Allen & Unwin (those good folk) which continues the story of their commitment to a 'graphic story' line. Again, although TOS is not in itself comics, Shaun Tan's post-'Arrival' reputation means, I reckon, that readers will be seeing/reading the stories with 'comics' lenses in their glasses. And so there's a nice two-way street where Shaun Tan is directing the traffic: in one direction come comics-heads like myself for whom his work stretches and breaks fondly-held definitions of what comics 'are' and 'aren't' - it forces us to recognise family similarities with other forms of illustrated writing. And in the other direction come readers for whom 'The Arrival' introduced a deployment of the frame-by-frame narrative technique in an unfamiliar, deeply affecting way. Shaun blows his whistle *bleeeep!* they get comics, then *bleeep!* I get picture books. Smiles all round, and the road rage meter drops ten points.

Other than Shaun's speech, which he peppered with comments from letters that children have written to him over the years in response to his books, the other great treat of the night was the launch speech, from illustration master Ron Brooks, who looks a bit like this:

Ron had come from Tasmania across Bass Strait (he rowed, apparently) to launch Shaun's book, and I was delighted that he had. Not only did his speech extoll the virtues of Shaun Tan's 27 under par ( I think I have that right) minigolf game. Not only did Ron acknowledge Shaun's poetic skill in both the writing and drawing arenas. But also, after the launch, Ron Brooks signed our family copy of 'The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek', a book that he illustrated and Jenny Wagner wrote and which was published in 1975 by Penguin Books. I was seven then, and it was the perfect book for me. Still is.

Wrap up: a great privilege to hear two Australian masters of illustration and story talk on the same night. I recommend both 'Tales from Outer Suburbia' and 'The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek to you all.

Okay, better get some sequential narrative in here or the natives will get restless. Wednesday saw me sidle into 'Classic Comics' in the city and pick up this comic:


Yes, this is Canadian Dave Sim's ongoing comic book après his monsterpiece 'Cerebus', and it's another frankly astounding project. If we can rely on Sim for anything, it is to confound expectation utterly, while not seeming to do so out of wilful perversity. This book is, at face/cover value, a parody of fashion magazines, (One recalls that the 6,000 page, 26 year 'Cerebus' project began as a sword-and-sorcery comics parody) featuring lots and lots of exquisitely rendered pictures of women dressed in haute couture. But really, it seems to me that in 'glamourpuss', Dave's out to explore two interlinked aspects of comics themselves:

Technique Dave Sim has always been interested in the physical culture of making comics, the nibs (Hunt Crowquill), the brushes (sable), the ink (Indian) and the ways that these are deployed to make sequential pictures. Of course every comic artist is interested in this, but Dave's keen on discussing it, in writing about it. In 'Cerebus' this was part of the editorial, but in 'glamourpuss' it's in the text.

Tradition He is upfront about trying to imbibe the styles of the 'photo-realist' newspaper comic strip men of the mid twentieth century - Alex Raymond, Stan Drake, Al Williamson, Neal Adams. As well as drawing the magazine models in the photo-realist style that he has gleaned from these greats, the book also has direct copies of frames from their comic strips that Dave has re- drawn and inked. He has a lot to say about the declining quality of the reproduction of these strips, by which means detail has been lost over the years as they have been reprinted.

Technique and tradition. These two aspects of course are central to any artform. In Australia, what would be the equivalent of 'glamourpuss'? Doing a book in Norman Lindsay's style say, or Phil May's, while discussing how they managed to achieve the very effects that the pictures, re-drawn by the current day author/artist, are illustrating.

'glamourpuss' is a comic book about comics, and at times smells a bit like an exercise - one wonders how long it can be sustained, but as I said at the outset, it's Sim's specialty to second-guess and to wrongfoot his audience. And his wicked sense of humour is still intact.

(above: self-portait of 'evil genius' Dave Sim from 'glamourpuss' #1. Cop those canines!)

Where will he take it? Impossible to say. Will I keep reading it? Affirmative, Mister Sim.

The Age gets festooned with comics talk and folk

Open last Saturday's paper, all 15 kilos of it, and it's choc-a-block with comic book folk: there, on page 7: Neil Gaiman's in Melbourne to talk at a children's book conference (Shaun Tan will speak at it too) and en route, he'll Johnny Appleseed some 'comics is grand' talk.

And there, on page 12 of the A2 section, an article about a book about doodling, but the main picture is of Mandy Ord and her ink-stained hands! You read about 'em here, a couple of posts ago...

The above is a detail of Simon Schluter's photo.

And then on page 27, a short review of Bruce Mutard's 'The Sacrifice' by Owen Richardson. I can't find a link to this at the moment, but it got me pretty steamed, I can tell you. Richardson starts with some good points about comics/graphic novels in general, and then mounts a fair description of Bruce's book in particular (although saying that "... the pictures are in the tradition of the exact verisimititude of the Tintin books..." is spectacularly wide of the mark), but finishes the review (and that's the business end, after all) with a summation which is quite dismissive of 'The Sacrifice'. It's unearned, either by book or by reviewer, and I dispute it.

As I say, the smell of this review has hung around me like a dead possum under the floorboards - I will clearly need to deal with it in another post.

But just to tie this one off to say that 3 fair-sized mentions of comics and their creators in the weekend paper seems just about right to me, and it is what I will be expecting from here on in.

Problems with Money (#1 in a series)

This, after hearing John Carroll being interviewed on Radio National last week about difficulties associated with supported chairs at universities: how does this financing deform research, findings, ideas etcetera?

'The Arrival' at The Arts Centre

This morning Zebedee my younger son, Mary Anne my mother and I trained it into the city to visit Collected Works Bookshop, where we talked to Kris Hemensley, who runs the shop with his wife Retta. It is always a pleasure to speak with either of them, and Collected Works is one of the reasons that one would live in Melbourne.


Then we headed south along Swanston Street, passing Young and Jackson's Hotel, Flinders Street Station, and crossed the Yarra Yarra River using Princes Bridge. It was like being in a comic book about Melbourne. Somehow, I'd discovered that there was an exhibition of the artwork from Shaun Tan's mesmerising silent book comic, 'The Arrival', outside The Studio, a small theatre at The Arts Centre. And there it was.


What I hadn't realised was that the theatre show of 'The Arrival', featuring actors, projections, moving sets and puppets, was also on, and we arrived just in time to see hordes of school children march into the Studio to watch it. We didn't have the tickets or the time to see the show, but a very kindly usher turned on the television monitoring system so that we could get an idea of what the show was like. It looked GREAT. And when I find a link to the theatre company who produced it, I will post it here.

(Thank you Scott Wright: name of the company is Spare Parts.)

The exhibition is only on until Sunday May 5 - it features digital prints and original pencil art from 'The Arrival'. Of course, to see the work this way, out of the 'flow' of the narrative, is instructive as I found that I was looking at the pictures as 'finished art', rather than 'ongoing art', a topic which surfaced in the discussion with Mandy Ord on last weeks 'Comic Spot'. (see last post)


Above is the sketch that I made from the monitor displaying the show: that's not 3 characters at the front, by the way, but two shadows from the main character. And there's his creature/pet in the right hand window - in the show it was coloured blue. The audience really was spilling all the way down onto the stage. One of the most amazing things, from my attenuated view, was the use of projections of images from the book, on the three main flats and the ramp, to create all sorts of spaces and scales. The flats were made of screens that could be drawn up, across, down. I loved that.