'Graphic Novels! Melbourne!' in Paris!

Back in January 2013, Daniel Hayward and I climbed aboard a big big aeroplane to begin a three-week European tour presenting our documentary feature film, Graphic Novels! Melbourne! in France, Germany and England. International man of mystery Bruce Woolley accompanied us as far as Dubai, where we bid him a fond farewell, but only for a week (more of him anon). Dan and I flew on to Paris.

So, it's been 20 years since I've been in Paris, and Dan had never been before, and it was magnifique. Our lovely friend Dominique lent us an empty apartment in the Rue de Reuilly, near the Gare de Lyon, to stay in for the few nights we were there.

That's me spending some quality time with my good mate Corto Maltese, created by the great Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt (RIP).

On our first night we rendezvoused at Notre Dame cathedral with our Sydney friends, academics Adam and Alphia and their son Addison (that's Addison looking around Alphia's hair) and talked and ate and walked and talked.

The following morning, early (the streets dark and wet, the smell of the morning baguettes wafting deliciously out of the boulangeries) we rendezvoused at Charonne Metro with Melbourne artist friend Lily and her friend writer Maude and went and had coffee and croissants for our petit dejeuner.

Then returned to our digs, toasted our good luck and went back to bed.

After a snooze (ah, jet lag, you old fiend!), we visited Lily's exhibition in Belleville, and around the corner dropped into a bookshop and marvelled at the selection of comics, or rather BD (bande dessinees) on display. Like true colonials, however, we were most delighted to find Pat Grant's 'BLUE' in its French edition (published by Ankama) and 

some Mandy Ord in an edition of the anthology 'Turkey Comics' (published by The Hoochie Coochie - the French publisher of Gregory Mackay's 'Francis Bear' books too).

We spent a great evening with Gilbert Shelton, who took us to a brilliant tea shop/comic shop 'The-Troc', in the rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, run by his friend Ferid, who took this picture, and by that time, as you can see, things were getting beery...



NEXT: Angouleme

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...

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.

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.