Françoise et Art in Brunswick!

On the weekend just gone, Art Spiegelman presented a new work of images, text and music, WORDLESS, at the GRAPHIC Festival at the Sydney Opera House.

Today, Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly visited Squishface Studio in Brunswick, and a group of local comic book people were there to welcome them to Melbourne.

Nicki Greenberg and Mandy Ord speak with Francoise.

Outside Squishface - Matt Emery, Ben Hutchings, Nicki Greenberg with Coco in arms and Poppy standing, Mandy Ord, Mirranda Burton, Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly and Gregory Mackay.

Oh, there's Shaun Tan too!

Art Spiegelman chatting with Shaun Tan.

We went across the road to Ray and drank coffees and ate cake and talked some more. Francoise Mouly, Penny Hueston, me and Mirranda Burton (photo by Matt Emery)
 

Art and Ben Hutchings talk pens.

It was remarkable to meet these two legends of comics, and to discuss with them Art's most recent book CO-MIX and Francoise's children's comics imprint TOON BOOKS.

Many thanks to Text Publishing's Penny Hueston who lined up today's meeting.

Art speaks at the Melbourne Town Hall on Tuesday 8 October.  Francoise speaks at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday 9 October. Both of them are brilliant.

Get GRAPHIC!

Above: a smile, a look, some bared teeth. Bernard Caleo, Shaun Tan and Neil Gaiman at the 'Evolution of an Idea' panel at the GRAPHIC festival up at the Sydney Opera House, August 7 and 8. You have to imagine Eddie Campbell to the right of Mister Gaiman.

Hey, there's some good photos from GRAPHIC here.

And the Sydney Opera House has posted some video from the festival here.

Graphic! Novel! And operatic!

Hey there team, very excited to be going up to this: GRAPHIC, at the Sydney Opera House, next weekend August 7 and 8. An incredible lineup of speakers and presenters and events - have a look at the program. Congratulations to Jordan Verzar, who has organised it all! Take a bow, Jordan...

On the Saturday I am joining an all-star lineup of cartoonists (Pat Grant, Matt Huynh, Leigh Rigozzi and Andrew Weldon) to present a comics workshop, and on the Sunday I am being the anchorman for a panel,'The Evolution of an Idea', featuring the speakers Shaun Tan, Eddie Campbell and Neil Gaiman. What, as Susan would say, a hoot.

Folks, Gary Groth is going to be there. Gary. Groth. Who made it possible to use the words 'comics' and 'art' in the same sentence? Gary Groth did. He did for comics what Gary Gygax did for dice, and I say that without being facetious or didactic in any way.

'The Arrival' at The Arts Centre

This morning Zebedee my younger son, Mary Anne my mother and I trained it into the city to visit Collected Works Bookshop, where we talked to Kris Hemensley, who runs the shop with his wife Retta. It is always a pleasure to speak with either of them, and Collected Works is one of the reasons that one would live in Melbourne.


Then we headed south along Swanston Street, passing Young and Jackson's Hotel, Flinders Street Station, and crossed the Yarra Yarra River using Princes Bridge. It was like being in a comic book about Melbourne. Somehow, I'd discovered that there was an exhibition of the artwork from Shaun Tan's mesmerising silent book comic, 'The Arrival', outside The Studio, a small theatre at The Arts Centre. And there it was.


What I hadn't realised was that the theatre show of 'The Arrival', featuring actors, projections, moving sets and puppets, was also on, and we arrived just in time to see hordes of school children march into the Studio to watch it. We didn't have the tickets or the time to see the show, but a very kindly usher turned on the television monitoring system so that we could get an idea of what the show was like. It looked GREAT. And when I find a link to the theatre company who produced it, I will post it here.

(Thank you Scott Wright: name of the company is Spare Parts.)

The exhibition is only on until Sunday May 5 - it features digital prints and original pencil art from 'The Arrival'. Of course, to see the work this way, out of the 'flow' of the narrative, is instructive as I found that I was looking at the pictures as 'finished art', rather than 'ongoing art', a topic which surfaced in the discussion with Mandy Ord on last weeks 'Comic Spot'. (see last post)


Above is the sketch that I made from the monitor displaying the show: that's not 3 characters at the front, by the way, but two shadows from the main character. And there's his creature/pet in the right hand window - in the show it was coloured blue. The audience really was spilling all the way down onto the stage. One of the most amazing things, from my attenuated view, was the use of projections of images from the book, on the three main flats and the ramp, to create all sorts of spaces and scales. The flats were made of screens that could be drawn up, across, down. I loved that.