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...

Paper Theatre on the road!

I've really enjoyed making the 'What It Is?' performances using a mixture of kamishibai, masks and 2D puppets, and I'm starting to think of it (to steal a term from last year's comics exhibition in Melbourne Fringe Festival, curated by Jo Waite and produced by me, with art by Jo, Ben Hutchings and Chris Downes) as 'paper theatre'.

Recently I have developed a show about energy saving for Origin, the energy company, and I have tried a paper theatre approach - in the shot above, taken by Iris Baker from Origin (thanks Iris, for all the photos in this post!) you can see a beautiful tree painted by Michael Camilleri, mounted on a couple of large boxes, and behind me, paper whitegoods on the four vertical faces of a couple of stacks of boxes.  I turn the 'whitegoods' boxes to change the location of the show (hallway, lounge, kitchen, bathroom).

Here I am at West Manly Public School in Sydney on the 5th of August 2011, performing the show to primary school kids,

and here's me being chased by Energy Bob, the alien robot who has turned up on Earth doing some research about energy production and use on our planet.  Kids get to ask him questions, too.

Kid: 'What language do you speak, Bob?'

Then I listen carefully to Bob, who whispers his (its?) answer to me, and I relay it back to the audience.

Answer: 'Indonesian.'

The above photos are from our arvo show in West Manly, and our morning show that day was at Tregear Public School, which was also great fun.

At Tregear we did the show (the world premiere!) for the whole school, on what you can see was a beautiful day...

There's me looking at the contents of a paper fridge with my assistants, Brains and the Vampire Slayer (if you see the show you'll understand).  Of course Energy Bob also turned up at Tregear, and was asked to nominate his favourite song.

He thought for a while.

Then whispered his answer, which I relayed to a bemused younger and an amused older audience:

'Eagle Rock.'

Funny thing is, whenever Energy Bob was around, I could never find James Taylor, my other buddy from Origin.  Ah, well.  Iris and I would always tell him about Bob's antics after the show...

I'm looking forward to doing more of these performances in New South Wales over the next few months, yessiree!

What It Is? #4 - July - Comics and Songs

The final 'What It Is?' in this first series was performed/presented at Readings in Carlton on Monday July 2011 at 8pm, and featured me and Martin Martini, as above.  We talked and sang and shew drawings on the theme of 'songs and comics'.

The kick-off kamishibai was titled

'Katasuburi
Sorosoro nobore
Fuji no yama.'

that is, the haiku by Issa (1763 - 1827) which is translated in 'Franny and Zooey' by JD Salinger (1961) as:

Oh snail
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!

and you can watch the whole 8 minute kamishibai here, courtesy of Daniel Hayward (also thanks to Dan for the pictures in this post).

The youtube episode of the whole evening is coming soon.  Watch this space!

What else did we do?  Well, I adapted a song (Alice by Tom Waits) to comics form (and invented a new artform, 'comicshibai' in the process), and Martin Martini

made a song out of a comic ('Douglas and Douglas' from Lumpen #7 by Pat Grant), and then he found out that I was made of comics and I discovered that he was made of songs.

Apparently, we all are.

What's an edicomicorial?

Glad you asked!  There's me, on Wednesday 20 July 2011, in my 'comics talk' purple shirt, trying to work out what such a thing might be with the very talented editors of 'Early Harvest', a special issue of Harvest magazine, 'a somewhat literate quarterly for somewhat literate quarters'.  This upcoming issue of Harvest is edited by this crack team, and will feature writing in its many forms by young folks from Hither and Yon (mostly Yon, as it turns out).

This project is the brainchild of the great folks at Pigeon Projects, Lachlan and Jenna (thanks to Jenna for the pictures in this post), who cook up remarkable writing and art-making projects for kids to do. Lachlan and Jenna involve grown-up (?) writers and designers and illustrators and yes, even comic book types to lend their expertise - or ravings, as the case may be - and each time I have done so I have had so much fun that I have floated home. Seriously.  That good.

Together, we managed to establish that an edicomicorial is a editorial made in comic book form whereby four groups of editors each write/design/draw one page.  Recently I've heard a rumour that the insanely talented Chris Downes, once of Tennessee now of Hobart, is the comics artist who's going to do the final art.  If this is true, it is Very Good News.

And there's me with one of the groups of writer/artists - these editors of 'Early Harvest' are 10 - 12 year old students from schools from the inner west in Melbourne, and the project is supported by the City of Maribyrnong.

Go editors! Go comics!  Go go go!

Talking Comics and Filthy Lucre!

Hey there my comic book reading friends! As you know, every second person out there in the 'words-only' book world belongs to a book club, whereby a bunch of people all agree to read the same book and then get together to discuss that book and eat cheese.  I agree, it's about time us comic book readers did the same thing, and this Wednesday, thanks to the City of Melbourne and the City Library in Melbourne, we're going to do exactly that! Less cheese though, probably.  Sorry, lactose-lovers.

So, if you're over 15 and a student and a reader of comics, hie ye hither here, where you'll find the book list and the dates, and if you'd like to come to one or all of the nights, email Gary Lee and let him know you're interested.  Do come, I'd love to see you there.   We're beginning with Tintin, of course - 'The Secret of the Unicorn', but we will travel all over the world in the first 6 fortnightly meetings of 'The Second Wednesday Comic Book Club'.  Oh yes we will.

And the above is not the only remarkable comics-related thing coming out of City Library.  There is also, in the upcoming Lord Mayor's Creative Writing Awards 2011, a category for 'graphic short story'. You need to enter a 4 - 8 page comics story by the end of August 2011 which will put you in the running for a $1000 prize.  That's right.  A grand.  If you won with a 4 page story, that makes a $250 per page rate, which ain't bad.  And if you win the overall prize for best piece of writing across all categories for a 5 page story, that would be a $1000 per page rate, which is even less bad.

Draw!  Write!  Enter!

Graphic Narratives wrap party!

On the evening of Friday 1 July, there was a comics 'swap and sell' - not so unusual you say, except that this one was held at Melbourne University and the comics being swapped and selled were ones made by the students of the inaugural outing of the course 'Graphic Narratives', offered as an honours subject to students in the school of Creative Writing.  The course is the brainchild of Elizabeth MacFarlane, who you can see below proudly talking about the amazing work made by her students.

The course looked at the history of the comics form, theory about comics, and, given that it is a creative writing course, the students actually made comic books.  Jam-packed, eh?  There were a bunch of guest lecturers/cartoonists too: Mandy Ord, Bruce Mutard, Nicki Greenberg, Mirranda Burton and Pat Grant.

Of course I couldn't let such a monumental occasion go by without throwing in my two bob:

and my two bob was this: the academy has a real place in the development in the comics arts in Australia, if the last week (which had seen the completion by Pat Grant of his magnificent graphic novel BLUE - which you can read in its entirety here - AND the evidence of the piles of books by the students of the Graphic Narratives course) was anything to go by.

The poster for the course was also by the octopoid Mister Grant, who with a bunch of other Melbourne cartoonists, will be drawing live over the next month down at the National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square: written NGV information here, excellent little filmette here.

It's called 'Inherent Vice'. Get on down.