In Melbourne for a couple of speaking engagements during early October, Art Spiegelman & Françoise Mouly met up with a handful of local cartoonists at Squishface Studios to talk comics, art and publishing. Sarah Gooding wrote about Françoise Mouly's career overview with Penny Hueston at the Wheelers Centre on Oct 9th. Bernard Caleo wrote about Art Spiegelman & Françoise Mouly's Squishface visit at An Island Art.
Had to take a break from the Paper Trail over the last few weeks for travelling, editing work, bereavements, and REAL LIFE...
Here is a summary of the entire Internet: The big Pikitia Press news is the release of our new comic Peter Foster's adaptation of For The Term of His Natural Life this Sunday at the Melbourne Writers Festival: Facebook it here.
This Saturday is host to another comics event in Melbourne, capital comics city of Australia. Exhibitchin’! is the title of Squishface Studios latest effort to get comics into everybodies lives. As well as works from David
Blumenstein, Marta Tesoro, Ben Hutchings, Sacha Bryning, Sarah Howell,
Ive Sorocuk, Arran McKenna and Jo Waite, they'll be bitchin' tunes,
crazy costumes, chocolate-infested food, tarot readings, body art, a
comics jam, badge-making, personality testing, portrait drawing... and
an entire leg of ham.
Pat Alexander conducts a tour of Squishface studios in prep for Exhibitchin’!
A flux of comic printing plates have turned up on the Australian ebay in recent months, some from Australian reprints of foreign material and some from honest-to-goodness Australian drawn material. Most of these were destroyed after they had served their purpose. At the time of posting, this auction for a plate of the cover to Fiction House's Indians #21 had a few days to run.
Auckland based biennial literary zine POTROAST are looking for contributors for a special comics issue, details here.
Vice comics man Nick Gazin reviews Karl Wills's recent comic Princess Seppuku here.
Special Nippon edition of Karl Wills's Princess Seppuku
Inverted Dawn: Exhibition and comics launch at Tinning Street, Melbourne. Opening night September 6th - September 16th featuring Html Flowers (Cougar Flashy) and Girl Mountain (Simon Hanselmann)
featuring...
brothers hand mirror and
girl mountain live
Simon Hanselmann
Tom Spurgeon writes here about the recently passing of art critic and historian Robert Hughes and his connections with comics as a cartoonist early in his career for the Observer in Sydney and in his appraisal of the work of Robert Crumb.
F.E.C Comics are launching three new comics at All Star Comics in Melbourne, 22 September, 6.30pm. Have a look on Facebook here. I can't find anything on the normal Internet but F.E.C Comics are located here. From the press release: KRANBURN #4 Ben Michael Byrne returns
with the beginning of his second chapter. Brand begins his war against
Lord. Blood spillage is a promise. FIRESIDE TALES A horror
anthology collecting three brilliant stories from some very talented
Australian creators; Alex Smith, Andrew Shaw, Billy Tournas, Mike
Wszelaki and Will Pleydon. SEVEN Fairy tales were once not so child-friendly. Alisha Jade delves into these origins and presents her interpretations.
Congratulations to Trevor Wood and Jen Breach for their recently concluded webcomic, Sawbones. After five years and 289 pages Trev recently posted the concluding page and a blog hinting at upcoming projects. Five years is a long time in webcomics, many don't last five months, so it's commendable to see the work Trevor and Jen have created and their decision to bring their story to a close.
Panel from Sawbones
Melbourne cartoonist Doug Holgate is amongst the speakers at the second Spotlight on Specialists seminars at NMIT, Fairfield, Melbourne on Saturday September 8th.
There was a kerfuffle on the net a few weeks back with some folk critical of a forthcoming GARO tribute anthology. This provoked an interesting discussion of Kickstarter and publishing in general here and here and here and many other places. Of note the SP7 Alt. Comics tribute to Garo Manga edited by Ian Harker and Box Brown features amongst it's contributors Benjamin Constantine, a fine cartoonist from Brisbane. Check Benjamin out here and here and here.
Pikitia Press will be publishing new editions of James Davidson's Moa #1 and #2 later this year and all being well issue #3 will be available for the Melbourne and Auckland Armageddon cons in October.