The Mongrel Lives!

At the beginning of last year, 2012, I began a 'monthly comics pamphlet' called MONGREL. I asked people to subscribe to it, and undertook to send them 12 issues in 12 months.

MONGREL is a comic book which when complete will answer the question which keeps me awake at night: 'Is Australia real?'  It stars 'The Uncanny Expats', 'The Creatives', and 'Salvation Jane'.

And during 2012, copies of the issues went to some interesting places: here's MONGREL 5 on Park Street Boston, with the Massachusetts State House in the background, in which, my friend Narayan Khandekar assures me, the sacred cod is kept.

Here's issue 5 again, this time in Braidwood New South Wales, at an exhibition called 'Taking The Piss' curated by Julian Davies at The Left Hand Gallery in September 2012. There's some original artwork displayed next to some working drawings, some writing notes, and an envelope containing all the pencil rubbings that I erased off every page of the 8-page issue in getting it ready for printing.

And yes, to the left there is a selection of work by the wonderful Michael Fikaris, a great Melbourne cartoonist.

I was interviewed by MILK magazine about making comics, and the article featured some artwork from MONGREL 6, showing the stages of a page in progress. The article also featured, as the lead image, a remarkable portrait of me painted by Gina Kalabishis, titled 'Comic Man'

I was the September blogger in residence at Inside a Dog , the Young Adult literature website, in which I wrote and posted pictures about the process of writing MONGREL 7. Now when I say that I am only now getting around to actually drawing that issue, four months later now in January 2013, you will see the slight discrepancy between that pace and publishing a monthly comic.

I blame it all on becoming a filmmaker. In 2012, with Daniel Hayward, I made the film 'Graphic Novels! Melbourne!', which examines comic book culture in Melbourne and which you can find out a lot more about here. We premiered it in November 2012 and next week we are taking the film to the great comic festival in Angouleme, in France. And then on to Berlin, Hamburg and London.

Exciting, yes, but it plays havoc with the MONGREL production schedule!

But never fear - I knew you weren't about to - MONGREL will continue to be made throughout 2013, and by the end of the year, the full 12 issue series will be complete.  And so, particularly if you're a MONGREL subscriber, don't you worry about a thing.  MONGREL issues 7 - 12 are coming.

Unless I start work on another film...

What's Japanese for MONGREL?

Above, our Tokyo correspondent, English teacher, and dem fine cartoonist J M Schmidt peruses MONGREL 4 at the station. His comics novels* Egg Story (currently being translated into Esperanto!), Eating Steve and The Sixsmiths (this last with writer Jason Franks) are all great books, and recommended for your reading eyes.

Seeing a MONGREL being read in this, the emblematic illustration of the ubiquity of manga culture in Japan ( 'In Japan, people read comics On The Trains! Really!') is highly delightful to me.

See? No-one's staring at the comics-reading gaijin like he's out of his mind or anything.  I have written an introduction to JM's collection of hilarious shorter comics stories, 'All You Bastards Can Go Jump Off a Bridge', which will be published by Milk Shadow Books later this year.

Sugoi.  Domo arigato gozaimasu, Schmidt JM!

*a new and entirely satisfactory way of referring to 'graphic novels', invented (I think) by my friend Anne Radvansky last night

Canines love MONGREL

Simon Barnard's dog, Tuco, was one year old yesterday and given his new-found maturity, ponders the intertextual referencing going on in the latest MONGREL.

IS Jane a prosolar mechanic?  Well IS she?

More MONGREL

The February number of MONGREL was adorned with a potplant going up from 3 to 2D.

The March cover, featuring a truncated container.

Local subscribers should be receiving their MONGREL 3s today or so, and international subscribers next week. Many grateful thanks to Susan Bamford Caleo for helping out with the last two mailouts.

It is tremendously satisfying making these comics pamphlets, and it's been great working at them in various places - at home in Northcote and Phillip Island, at Pat Grant's in Austinmer (near Wollongong) and researching number 3's locations in Adelaide while I was there in March performing the show Faraday's Candle. I also did a little bit of work on number three up at Chugnut a couple of weeks ago. What all this means is that for me, each of those pages has a certain association with people and spaces

I am currently working on number 4.  The last five pages are pencilled, and with the arrival of a bunch of reference photographs of the mean streets of Soho (thank you Luke Caleo), the pencilling of the first three pages can begin. Every number thus far has become print-ready via the magic hands of Justin Caleo, to whom also thanks.

Below, an earth-bound Port Adelaide tug that didn't make it into the comic, but I include it here as a gift for the dedicatee in number three:

What a MONGREL!

Yes, MONGREL 1, the first number of a twelve issue series of comics pamphlets that I mean to write, draw and publish this year, is now out in the public domain. It's in some shops (to date: Minotaur, All Star Comics and Sticky, all in the city), but mostly? It's in the mail.

The whole idea with MONGREL is that it be mainly a subscription-based comics reading experience - I'd really prefer you to get it in the mail.  To that end, and to begin with, I have tried a crowd funding model with the pozible mob, which is here and which is active until 23 February 2012.  I'm trying with this to raise a base amount of money which I need to cover print and postage costs for all 12 issues.  If you're reading this after the 23rd of February and are keen to subscribe, go to the MONGREL page of the Cardigan Comics website, which incidentally does have some information about the stories in the book, too.

So, monthly huh?  Yes, monthly*.  That's the other idea. And yes, it does mean that work has more than begun on number 2, and I thought I'd leave you with the roughs for the first page, though I have pencilled and lettered (but not inked) that page in the interim.  I'm putting this up as a sort of confession - I'd envisioned it as a fairly sparse page text-wise, but when I got to really work on it, ahh, those words, they just took OFF -- people who have collaborated with me before (Tolley, John Murphy, I'm looking at you) know Bernard the Prolix only too well...

You may not be able to read this, but it's even titled 'Cath's opening monologue'.

So, then, MONGREL: it's verbal, it's theatrical, it's comical.

And I better get back to the old drawing board.  See you soon.

And hey - subscribe!

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*Kevin Patrick, the knower of things Australian and historical and comicsy, thinks it may be the first Australian monthly comic in 40 years! Let me know if you know different...