Drawn Out - Congo, Tango and Manga!

On the 'Wireless Comics' front, this morning I was back on 3RRR's weekly arts show 'SmartArts', hosted by the redoubtable (in the 'respected' rather than the 'feared' sense) Richard Watts, with my monthly report from the comic book front, 'Drawn Out'.

CONGO

This 46-page, hardback, colour 'book comic' for kids is unique on the part of almost all of the adjectives that I have used to describe it, and its appearance heralds a welcome change in the make-up of the Australian comics world, where most comics are produced for an adult audience. This one is intended "for primary school age," and I'd like to see more comics in Australia produced for young kids.  Props to Working Title Press for publishing this book, which seems to be working for them as they've gone into a second printing and a sequel, 'Captain Congo and the Maharajah's Monkey', is on the way.

The story is classic adventure stuff set in Abyssinia in Africa, where the Captain and his loyal if cynical sidekick, Pug the penguin, must track down the missing archaeologist Professor Parkinson Perky.  My older son Joseph, who at 8 years old is in the bullseye of the target audience, was very excited to see this book at the breakfast table this morning.  He knows it from his school library and loves it "...because of the action and because it's funny."

Artist Greg Holfeld, a Canadian living in South Australia, provides extremely assured graphics - his animal characters are more believable than the humans in the story, which is as it should be.  Ruth Starke the writer comes from a children's book and young adult fiction writing background, and while the characters are well written, with some fascinating backstory clues, she is still on her way to grasp the grammar of writing for comics - it will be very interesting to read the next adventure of the Captain and Pug.  Congratulations to all concerned: our household is hanging out for the Maharajah's Monkey!

TANGO

This was a shout out to let listeners know that I'm on the lookout for comics submissions to 'Tango9: Love and War'.  Deadline: August 31, 2009.  More details here...

MANGA

In order to consider two comics mega-phenomena about which I know little (namely webcomics and manga), I spoke about MegaTokyo, which is both.  (Thanks to Liam Routt for passing on this recommendation)  This sprawling mega-story, delivered in single page installments, published twice-weekly since 2000, is written and drawn by Fred Gallagher. It concerns the exploits of two North American videogamers, Piro and Largo, who travel to Tokyo and get stuck there.  Lotsa big hair, lotsa numbers-for-letters substitution (ie L33T for 'elite'), lotsa SMS-type 'OMG' language, none of which I approve of.  Young people, hmph.  But, with 1220 pages up and counting, and several large story arcs to get your teeth into, this is a dependable web mega-manga to explore.

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

And that's all I talked about on 'Drawn Out' today (apart from hustling people to go and see 'The Satirical Eye' before it closes on Sunday, see post below).  But last month, as well as reviewing beautiful hardcover books about comics distributed locally by Random House- Underground Classics and The Art of Harvey Kurtzman - I also talked about the locally-produced webcomic (in fact, the  'adventure zomedy comic' - sounds good already, huh?) Sawbones, written by Jen Breach and drawn by Trev Wood.  They've been making this since 2007, and it's the adventures of two loveable zombies, Bones O'Brien and Sheriff Clancy Sawyer.  There are now upward of 130 single-page format strips (in its format it's like MegaTokyo, but Sawbones is in colour.  But it's just once a week.  But it's zombies!) on the site for your reading pleasure.  For a long time the pages have been single-page gag strips, yes, linked up into a story arc, but with a punchline for every page.  Recently, though, Jen and Trev are gunning for more 'longer form' work, with an eye to the flow that the story will eventually deliver when the pages are read together.  Nice going, guys.  The other thing I like about 'Sawbones' is that it's a webcomic, AND you can buy a printed collection or two (I did, and have been drawing Bones and O'Brien ever since with son Joseph) AND it's a blog: you know?  It's a lovely little world, with several ways into it.  Oh yes, I recommend you take a look inside...

Superheroes and Satirists

Well it's a pretty fine time to be a gallery-going Melbourne comics flaneur right at the moment - not since the heady days of Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy and many others) down at the National Gallery of Victoria, and Heroes & Villains (Australian comics) up at the State Library of Victoria, just 6 city blocks apart in late 2006-early 2007, has so much comic booky exhibited goodness been on offer.  Mercy me!

(Quick note: the current show at the NGV, 'The Satirical Eye', is only on until this Sunday 26 July - I talk about it briefly at the bottom of this post - you should really GO TO IT NOW!)

Bernard with art by Jack Kirby: photo by Jess Rynderman

At the Jewish Museum of Australia you can see Superheroes and Schlemiels ('schlemiel' is Yiddish for 'bumbling fool').  This is an exhibition that tracks the the contribution by Jewish creators to the comics canon.  For me, I had known that the Jewish presence in the creation and development of the comic book tradition has been significant (Michael Chabon's novel 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' and Dave Sim's comic 'Judenhaas' being reference points), but I left this exhibition gaping.  Siegel and Shuster of course created Superman. Simon and Kirby created just about every other superhero.  Then you've got Will Eisner (The Spirit, A Contract with God.  Then there's Harvey Kurtzman (MAD).  Then how's about Art Spiegelman (MAUS).  More?  You'd like more?  Try Joe Kubert, Jules Feiffer, Hugo Pratt for heck's sake. Hugo Pratt!  It's pretty staggering.  And doesn't stop there...

This exhibition originates from Jewish museums in Paris and Amsterdam.  Those museums were loathe to send original art all the way down to the antipodes, and the JMA has had a very talented designer (Michael Battista from Paper Stone Scissors) use the digital image files to create the look of this exhibition, and has been really lucky that local collectors (notably Lazarus Dobelsky) have loaned them original comic art and books from their personal collections.

The JMA must also be congratulated on including a section on Australian Jewish comic book makers: friends David Blumenstein, Nicki Greenberg,  and Andrew Weldon are amongst those represented.

Superheroes and Schlemiels is on until 30 August 2009, and opening times are: 

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday 10am - 4pm, Sunday 10am - 5pm 

Admission is $10 adult, $5 concession, $20 family.

The Jewish Museum of Australia is at 26 Alma Road St Kilda,

a 2 minute walk from tram stop 32 on St Kilda Road.

The Satirical Eye

The other exhibition that you need to see, but hurry because you've only got until this Sunday 26 July, is The Satirical Eye, a free exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road.  This exhibition is curated by Petra Kayser and features stunning work on paper from the Gallery's own collection.

It really surveys an incredibly important time in the development of what I would call 'the language of comics'.  The show features prints, engraving and etchings by great British artists like Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray, and Cruikshank which satirise the behaviour of both 'ordinary folk' as well as royalty and politicians.  Then there's a goodly selection of Goya's 'Las Caprichios' and finally quite a lot of work by the very funny Daumier.

So, quickly!  Get to this show and be transported to a time when people used to hire out, not a DVD to watch, but a set of prints to hang in their living room to view for a day.

Tango9: Love and War

Cardigan Comics is open for submissions of comics work to Tango9: Love and War, the next issue of Tango, the giant Australian romance comics anthology.  The above image is of course reverently swiped from the great Harvey Kurtzman's cover to 'Frontline Combat' (1952), published by Entertaining Comics.

Tango9: Love and War will be released in December 2009, as will be The Tango Collection, a compendium of stories selected from the first 8 issues of Tango.  Allen & Unwin, the Australian book publisher, will publish The Tango Collection. Cardigan Comics will publish Tango9: Love and War.

There will be more information in due course, but here are some tin tacks:

*please be someone from Australia or New Zealand in order to submit (we are also susceptible to tenuous connections to these countries, so always give it a shot)

 *the page size of the book will be 175mm wide x 240mm long (the book size will be 180mm x 240mm - 5mm is added at the centre by the creation of the spine)

*the 'art area' on each page will be 155mm wide x 215mm (this gives a good border between your work and the edge of the page, space at the bottom of the page for author name and page number)

*of course ignore the above 'art area' idea if you want to, and particularly if you want to bleed your work, that is, take the art all the way to the edge of the page.  If you do this please provide registration marks with your art files that show where the art sits on the 175mm x 240mm page.  And please 'bleed' your work 5mm past the page edge, to guarantee that your art will go all the way to the edge.

 *stories can be 1-8 pages in length.  Any longer than this, and you'll need to discuss it with me bernard@cardigancomics.com

 *black and white artwork 

 *digital format submission options and file naming protocols are as follows:

• pure black and white artwork (ie no tones, no washes) - scan as a 'bitmap' at 600dpi and save as a .tiff
• if there is tone or wash in the artwork - scan as 'greyscale' at 300 dpi and save as a .tiff
• filenaming - all lower case, no spaces, like so: (surname)(story name)(page number).tiff  (Thus the files for my three page strip 'Battlegrounds' would be called caleobattlep1.tiff, caleobattlep2.tiff, and caleobattlep.3.tiff)

 *if you intend to contribute, please let me know bernard@cardigancomics.com

 *deadline for submissions: Monday 31 August 2009

*you won't get any money for being in Tango, but you will get an author's copy of the book and for a week or so thereafter (this effect may last longer), you will glow.  Glow.

So get thinking, get drawing, get reading, get writing.  Love and War.   It's a very rich theme for telling stories in comic book form.  Enlist.  Conscientiously object. Go to town.  Enter the trenches. Go behind enemy lines. Fly the planes. Cry, kiss, roar, hug, laugh, stab, fight, run, surrender, defy, embrace.

And don't forget that Tango is a romance comics anthology. Our formula for 'romance' over here at Cardigan Comics is this: love + adventure.  Got it?  

Love + adventure = romance.

Tango9: Love and War

Web comics on 'Drawn Out'

Okay, an experiment: I'm going to try blogging about what I'm GOING to talk about on the radio, rather than what I HAD talked about, which I kept not doing anyway.

So.  On tomorrow's 'Drawn Out' segment, 9.15 - 9.30am, as part of Richard Watts' weekly love letter to the arts in Melbourne, 'Smartarts' (9am - 12pm every Thursday morning on 3RRR, 102.7 on your FM dial), he and I are going to talk about web comics, about which I know nothing.

Should be interesting.

(I would like at this point to credit my web comics fingerposts, Liam Routt, Adrian Regan and John Retallick, for at least pushing me towards a computer and assuring me that yes, there are comics in that thing.  No, you don't have to turn the pages.  And very importantly, no, you don't buy them.  You just type and click and read...)

First up: Top Shelf 2.0 is the online arm of the well-built body that is Top Shelf Comics in the US, paper comic book (real? physical? what to call that good ol' content delivery system?) publishers of works by great favourites of mine, Alan Moore ( 'From Hell', 'Lost Girls' and Eddie Campbell (the upcoming omnibus of his autobiographical stories, 'The Years have Pants', 'From Hell'), among many many others.  Whoo! 2.0!  It's digital! It's amazing!  You get a great long list of comic book makers, among them some great Australian comic bookers (the Bens Constantine and Hutchings, Jessica McLeod, Edward J Grug III), in the company of some well-regarded alternative North American talents such as Dean Haspiel, David Chelsea, Alex Robinson, Dash (rising star) Shaw and clearly a raft of folks who I've never heard of but can cartoon like deamons.  Including, incidentally, the great, no, really, the GREAT Glenn Dakin, 'the demon catoonist'. Recommended.

Of course, the other great thing about web comics is the leaping from lilypad to lilypad... you know, the whole intremenet thing. The whole 'Gen XYZ' concentration-span-of-a-gnat thing.  So you should check out James Kochalka's American Elf because it's beautiful and it's short, a daily strip of at most 4 panels, little observational autobiographical moments.

Then, following other recommendations, you stop for a little bit at various recommended sites before realising that they're not for you but then you see something out of the corner of the page, something called Papercuts and suddenly you're in the beautifully realised worlds by Michael Cho, who's having a bit of time off while his wife has their baby but in the meantime you can look at his great singlepage 'Smoking' and his ongoing 'Waiting'.  If the name David Mazzucelli means anything to you, then I'll say it.  David Mazzuchelli.  Interested now, aren't you?

Finally, although of course NOT finally because this web comic universe is immense, but you really should go to Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy's Platinum Grit, a sexy girl/genius nerd story which was brilliant as a paper comic in the 90s and is even brillianter as a web thing in the 00s.  And a really elegant solution to the 'comics on the web' presentation problem too...

 Go.  Laugh.

Finally, this Saturday May 23 you can go to the State Library of Victoria and meet a comic book in person! Shane McCarthy is a comic book writer from Perth who has written for Batman, Daredevil, Star Wars and currently Transformers.   Well, he's in Melbourne for the Emerging Writers' Festival and if you go to the website you can organise to meet him (he's going to be a "living book" at the library) and chat about how one writes these sort of comics.  Or, about what Optimus Prime has for breakfast.

Target 144: join the conspiracy

 

Target 144 is part of International Literature Conspiracy Week.

You've heard of it, right?

No?

Good.

What you must do:

Monday 9 February, 2009, 12 midday: start making a comic.

Tuesday 10 - Friday 13 (ooooh!): keep making the comic.

Saturday 14 February 2009, 12 midday: finish making the comic.

Simple, eh? There's more, but the above is pretty much it: if you've been looking for an excuse to dive in to comic making for 6 days, whether you're a first-timer, a battle-scarred veteran or somewheres in between, this is the 144 hours (6 x 24 = 144) you've been looking for.

What's 'more':

1.  Your comic needs to be about what is happening during those six days, either what's going on in your head or in the world outside or the space in between (where, after all, so much happens).

2. You need to tear out and include the date from some  'official' print source (newspaper, tram ticket etc) to effectively 'carbon-date' your work.

3.  You are most welcome to kick off the 144 hours by spending the first 6 with me, other comickers and some zinesters down the rabbit hole at Sticky (in the Degraves Street Subway under Flinders Street).  We'll be there from 12 midday to 6pm on Monday 9 February and I'll be buying top notch coffee, tea and donuts for any comicker there until my 'organiser funds' have run out.

4.  You are most welcome to celebrate the end of 'Target 144' by coming down to the aforesaid Sticky on Saturday 14 February (yes, by all means, bring your Valentine) with copies of the comic you have made (which you have photocopied at the photocopier of your choice) and you can --- well, sell 'em, swap 'em, give 'em away for a kiss if you're that way inclined.  The zinesters will be there too, and all of us 'Target 144' folk will be holding hands and singing old 'zine and comic' folk ballads from the 16th century. Or something like that.

5.  Finally, get good copies of your pages to me the following week (Feb 16 - Feb 20).  I have been entrusted with the sacred task of compiling the 'Target 144' publication, collecting all the pieces, zine and comic, produced that week and packing them up into a natty little photocopied A5 book.  Already I think this will be a beaut publication, so make that comic.  Set those evenings aside.  Take one of the days off from work/school/sleep and really hit the target.

Target 144.

6 days of sheer comic (or zine if that's your scene) making pleasure.

Carpe carpem, as Thomas Pynchon says.

Seize the carp.

Contact me bernard@cardigancomics.com if 1) you have any questions, and 2) if you're going to be part of it (and good on you if you are!) so I can book you a place in the 'Target 144' book.

International Literature Conspiracy Week and Target 144 has been whispered about in shuttered rooms by: Sticky, Polyester Books, The City of Melbourne and Cardigan Comics.

Wireless Comics - 2009 begins!

Hello all, welcome to 2009 - year of the ox and year of oz comix! 

(actually I don't really like either of those misspellings but they both seem to go with with 'ox')

There'll be another post tonight letting you know about 'Target 144',  a 6 day frenzy of comics making which will take place in the second week of February, and which you really should get involved in, but right now it's important to let you know that the comic book media circus has pulled into town and they're setting up the Big Top right now.

Tomorrow, Thursday 29 January, will see Melbourne's community radio stations (and this year TV too!)  rev their engines in the transmitting of comic book news via the airwaves:

9.30am: I will be on 3RRR's (102.7 on your FM dial) weekly arts show 'Smartarts', hosted by Remarkable Richard Watts, talking about the international and local comic book scenes and recent publications for 10 - 15 minutes. This segment is called 'Drawn Out' it will be featured on the third Thursday of each month.

5 - 6pm:  Jo Waite,  John Retallick and I take over 3CR's (855 on your AM dial) weekly 'DIY Arts' program to talk exclusively about Australian comic books.  We will be doing this on the last Thursday of every month at this time, so mark it in your diaries.  Jocular John also helpfully podcasts this broadcast.

Yours truly will also be appearing on TV this year, doing spot reviews of local and international comics on Channel 31's arts program, 'Yartz', 10pm Thursdays.  Maybe those will startbeing broadcast tomorrow night too.

(Thursday clearly is talk-about-comics day...)

You know, all of this is the sort of thing that will be great for the 'Sexy Men of Australian Comics* Financial Year Calendar 2009-10' when it gets drawn and launched at 'Comic Book Funny' as part of this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

You betcha.

And now, in the words of Scott McCloud, and taking our cue from the spirit of this Oxen year, it's time to:

 'Work like hell'. 

So: go! Write! Draw! Publish!

See you in the year.

* as drawn by the women of Australian comics