Way out West

Yep, fresh from WA, here comes the news from Perth. I'm over here this week to attend a Museums Australia/ Interpretation Australia conference called 'At The Frontier' - I'm guessing a whole lot of people in the museum world have come to Perth for this, come over like Brownes' cows. I have been part-funded for this by Melbourne Museum, where I work part-time, so that makes sense.

Today was Sunday, and quite blowy - a westerly I think, coming up the Swan River.

I was looking to hire a bike to get me around, so I thought I'd ask at that tall pointy thing ahead.

 Turns out that it is The Bell Tower, home of the Swan Bells and "probably the largest musical instrument in the world", and furthermore, because this weekend is Heritage Perth's Heritage Days, it's free to go in.  So I go in.  It's a pretty amazing place, you can climb stairs all the way to the top of those sail things and look down over the river or over Perth

 and see what's been going on here recently - oh, I do love that word, CHOGM.

Some of the bells are pretty big. Pretty big.  And today they were ringing constantly, and the whole place was shaking, almost subliminally, underfoot.  It was great.  And, the people there knew where the bike hire place was!

I dropped into the Old Court House Law Museum to see painter Thomas Hoareau talk about his picture 'John Gaven Parkhurst boy #422 - Appears a very good lad' from the exhibition 'Heroes or Villains of the Swan?' which just opened there last week.  15 year old Gaven was the first European hanged in Western Australia.

There were lots of open public buildings, including the Perth Town Hall where there was an exhibition about Perth hosting the 1962 Commonwealth Games, and 'leaving the lights on' earlier in that year for astronaut John Glenn to glipse as he passed over in Friendship 7.

Some of the public art really grabbed me, too, like Anne Neil's 2006 'Memory Markers'

On the border of the Stirling Gardens on Barrack Street.

As a ink-dip nib user myself, to see these big ones

 was pretty exciting. And around the corner on St George's Terrace, I was really amused by these

For which I couldn't find the name of the artist.  But look, the tip of the one lying on the ground

is even crumpled! - great, eh?  Well enough of all this art and culture and heritage - I need a way to get around, and David Byrne is always talking about how good it is to have a bike in a foreign land.  And you know?  He's right!

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Brian.  As in, "a brown like Brian".

Tomorrow, New Norcia. But not by bike.

Melbourne Writers Festival - August 2011

Once we got back from GRAPHIC up in Sydney, it was time for the Melbourne Writers Festival in Melbourne.  This festival has had more and more comics content over the last few years, which is great to see, and above you can see me, Pat Grant and Mandy Ord talking about graphic novels in general, and their ones in particular, as part of the MWF schools program.

Also for the schools program, I presented a kamishibai session at Artplay, in which I spoke about the form and told 3 kamishibai stories: a new one, 'A Box of Stories' (a kamishibai kamishibai); the Fuji snail story (from 'What It Is' #4), and my very first story, 'The Legend of Rat Boy'.  In the lead up to this session, Michael Shirrefs on ABC Radio conducted an interview with me about kamishibai and even filmed (for radio!) the Fuji snail story - and that's all here.

There were cartoonists drawing live outside the National Gallery, there was the launch of a beautiful new comic book from a new-to-comics book publisher (more about this next post), there was a session with the great and terrible Jim Woodring (and anybody who has heard him talk about 'the Age of Cake' will know what I'm talking about here), there was of course the Oslo Davis-edited comics newspaper 'Drawn From Life' and there was the 'Martin Martini In(k) Concert'.  Hoo hah!

This last was at the venue The Toff in Town, where Martini and band played a suite of songs from his 'Vienna 1913' cycle (of which I am a big fan), while Jim Woodring -

- and a rotating cast of three fine local cartoonists -

- Pat Grant, Andrew Weldon and Jo Waite - kept drawing live while the band played on.  The audience got to listen to music and look at pictures:

Yes, it's some sort of bliss, as this crowd of cartoonists shows.  The idea comes from the Angouleme Comics Festival in France, where Mike Shuttleworth had seen some 'Concerts du Dessins' (Drawing Concerts) in January of this year and come back to rave about them to Steve Grimwade, the director of the Melbourne Writers Festival and a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is, to boot.

Photos in this post are courtesy of Dan Hayward and Stephen Elliott, cinematographers supreme!

Other GRAPHIC 2011 folks...

The wonderful Peter Kuper, who presented his 'Revolutions and Art' show as part of the 'Wordless Storytelling' panel on the Saturday. Bloody great.

"The revolution will not be televised, but I am convinced it will be illustrated."

Eddie Campbell pointing out another great image in his slideshow, presented on the Sunday, all about his upcoming book, 'The Lovely Horrible Stuff', which is all about money.  He even went to Yap.

" Came across this interestin' story..."

Also on the Sunday, Andrew Weldon presented the prizewinners in the 'Air Your Grievances' one-panel cartoon competition, as well as showing us some of his own, quite hilarious work.

****************************

So GRAPHIC #2, another great event for comics.  And I just found out today that the conversation that we didn't get, between Gary Groth and Robert Crumb, has just been posted, here, with the non-attendance, amongst other things, discussed.  Okay, he didn't make it over, but in the end it all happened.

In the end?

Ha.

GRAPHIC 2011 Day 1: arvo of Saturday August 20/ More Anon

As mentioned below, the film-maker Dan Hayward grabbed some footage at GRAPHIC.

Here, I'm speaking with Jordan Verzar, the driving force behind GRAPHIC, and one of the 'curators' of the festival.  (Virginia Hyam is the other curator, and Ben Marshall the producer).

There, I'm chatting with Scott McCloud about graphic novels.

Thanks to these gentlemen for their time: it was a busy weekend for them both.

(Blimey, I hope that's my good side!)

GRAPHIC 2011 Day 1: Saturday 20 August/ Oz Comics

Yes folks, there he be, your intrepid reporter, barking into a microphone while the unlikely geometries of the Sydney Opera house threaten to eat his right ear.  Actually this shot and the rest of the photographs in this post are excerpted from footage taken by Dan Hayward, who with his dad Ian came up and filmed GRAPHIC #2. Of which more anon.

Above, the Marvellous Mandy Ord, doing a live reading of stories from her book 'Sensitive Creatures', from the first session that Susan and I saw at GRAPHIC, 'Oz Comics Show and Tell', and below, Leaping Leigh Rigozzi,

who binned a copy of the Sydney newspaper 'The Sunday Telegraph', the paper which, in publishing an article about R. Crumb as a 'self-confessed sex pervert' or similar, caused that same R. Crumb to decide not to attend.  Arrgh.  Humans.  Sometimes they drive you crazy.

Oslo Davis was also there, speaking about Drawn From Life, the comics newspaper which he edited and which was published as part of this year's Melbourne Writers Festival. And also talking about his own, very funny cartoons.

Here are the panelists, who emerged en masse at the end of the session. Prior to this, each of them had done a solo presentation to do with their work.

All of them, that is, except the 'two Sydney Matts' - above, Matt Taylor doing a live reading of his recently-launched Lars the Last Viking goes to the End of the World, with live metal guitar playing by his friend Scott Collins, and

Matt Huynh, who actually wasn't on stage during his piece - a beautiful, continuous horizontal scroll-comic of people rehearsing for a Dragon Festival - which was accompanied by live drumming, and a live dragon!

So there they are, folks - from left to right, Gabriel Clark, Pat Grant, Mandy Ord, Leigh Rigozzi, Oslo Davis, Matt Taylor and Matt Huynh.  A truly great start to GRAPHIC 2011.

Wanna join the club?

There's a whole bunch of brilliant comic book activity swirling around Melbourne in one form or another at present, and one of my faves is this one: The Second Wednesday Comic Book Club, or more to the point Comic Book Club, or even more to the point, Comic Club.

The idea of a club has always got me going - a space where you get together with a bunch of other people and in that space you can focus on and discuss some topic which is important to the assembled group.  You agree to take whatever-it-is seriously for that period of time and delve into it, to the exclusion of the outside world.  I love that. Probably university was at its best for me when it was like that - tutorial discussions in a teacher's room.  It's probably why Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' is such an important book for me, too.

C'mon, Bernard: what about Comic Club?

Well, it's held at City Library every fortnight and every second Wednesday we get together and discuss a particular book comic (as John Retallick describes 'graphic novels').  Week 1 was the Tintin adventure, 'The Secret of the Unicorn' by Herge, Week 2 'Scott Pilgrim' by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Week 3 'Maus' by Art Spiegelman and this week's book (Wednesday 14 September) is 'The Arrival' by Shaun Tan.  The pictures in this post were taken of the Scott Pilgrim week by Gregarious Gary Lee (thanks, Gary!) from the City of Melbourne, who, with Laffin' Luke Scully from City Library wrangled me into running the club.  (Not that I needed a lot of wrangling, you understand...)

(thanks for lending me your Scott Pilgrim box set, Pat Grant - I'm taking care of them, I promise!)

If you'd like to be part of the club (a club? for comics? are you kidding? where do I sign?) and you're over 15 and a student, then tootle on down to the Comic Club page here and sign up.  Then read the comic book in question and come along ready to talk and listen and laugh quite a bit.  It's free, it goes from 6 - 7.30pm, and did I say it's every second Wednesday?

We'll be talking 'Akira' Book 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo on Wednesday September 28, and 'Fun Home' by Alison Bechdel on Wednesday October 12.

And hey, Sumisha Naidu interviewed me about the club in meld magazine.

And here we are, comic clubbing. In a world of our own.  Brilliant.

What It Is? #4 episode

Well well well, in amongst a remarkable period of comics events in Melbourne and Sydney, here is a reminder of the fourth and final 'What It Is?' comics conversation/performance evening at Readings bookshop in Carlton on Monday 25 July 2011. As mentioned in a lower post, my collaborator on this one was the wonderful Mister Martin Martini, who this Sunday just gone provided the live songs for an incredible concert for the Melbourne Writers Festival at The Toff In Town where cartoonists Pat Grant, Jo Waite, Andrew Weldon and Jim Woodring drew live as the music played!

Zowee, baby!

The footage above shot and edited by Daniel Hayward, with whom I am working on a feature documentary with the working title: 'Graphic! Novels! Melbourne!'  Ahh, it's good to be alive...