Lucky Aki in The Stone Age Proofs Have Arrived!

 

New Zealand's most dedicated cartoonist Barry Linton's Lucky Aki in The Stone Age will be available next month. Printed in our new Pikitia 'Dinky' format on lovely thick recycled paper, This first volume of Lucky Aki will be available for pre-order from the Pikitia Store next week.

Brodie Mack Freelance Covers 1917

Brodie Mack illustrated covers for Wellington newspaper The Free Lance from early 1917. While still a teenager Mack provided covers and cartoons for The Free Lance during 1915-1917.

Further examples of Brodie Mack's work and Biographical notes.
Brodie Mack and Peter Amos' (Archie E. Martin) Kazanda part one.
Brodie Mack and Peter Amos' (Archie E. Martin) Kazanda part two.

Source: http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast

William Blomfield (1 April 1866 – 2 March 1938)

William Blomfield was born today in 1866. Blomfield produced cartoons for the New Zealand Observer a newspaper he had substantial shares in for 40 years. Blomfield was also a local politician serving as second mayor of Takapuna.

Happy 44th Birthday Brent Willis

Brodie Mack Gag Cartoons

Brodie Mack gag cartoons from the Australian Woman's Weekly.

Biographical notes and Brodie Mack comics and Illustrations.

 

Source: http://trove.nla.gov.au

Merton Lacey (16th February - 29th July 1996)

 

Animator/film maker/artist Merton Lacey was born today in Purulia, India in 1902.

Lacey was a newsreel cameraman for Fox Movietone News in Calcutta and between 1926 and 1940 made more than 40 short cartoon film advertisements which ran in India, Burma and Ceylon. Lacey was also artist, cartoonist and publicity manager for The Calcutta Statesman and created a comic-strip mongoose character called 'Benji' that appeared on the Children's Page. In 1947 Lacey immigrated with his family to New Zealand.

An animation created by Lacey at the Auckland Zoo is recorded in the New Zealand Film archive from 1930 although I'm presuming this is erroneous as Lacey presumably wasn't in New Zealand at that time.


Lacey contributed a half page comic strip Nez and Zena to the short lived New Zealand Pictorial magazine during 1954-1955. Lacey also had two comics featured in George F H Taylor's Christmas Annual, Eddie and Tu in Adventure on Wheels (14 pages) and Eddie and Tu and The Treasure (3 pages). I consider the square bound Christmas Annual (published circa late fifties) the first large collection of New Zealand comics with over 100 pages of George F H Taylor's comics alongside Lacey's work. During the seventies Lacey was also involved with the New Zealand Woman's Weekly.

Happy 47th Birthday, Roger Langridge

Nothing Fits - Mary Tamblyn Interview

 

 'A group of unlikely heroes: a girl, a clone and an undead mummy attempt to make sense of the strange world they've been thrown into.'

Christchurch comic makers Mary Tamblyn and Alex McCrone have been working on their comic Nothing Fits for two and a half years and recently launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for a print edition. As of this writing Nothing Fits is about halfway to their goal of $5000 with 18 days to go. Serialised online a page at a time since 2011, Nothing Fits tells a fantasy tale of several characters who intercross in a strange world of humans, clones, mummies and anthropomorphic characters. Nothing Fits is an ambitious and impressive first comics project for a couple of young creators please consider having a look at Nothing Fits online and supporting their Kickstarter.

I asked Mary Tamblyn a few questions about Nothing Fits and making comics.

 

 

How did you meet Nothing Fits co-writer/artist Alex McCrone?

We met at high school, in Year 12 painting. We didn't talk very much then, Alex is quite reserved, but we both had troubles with the teacher and her opinions on the directions we needed to take with out paintings. Luckily in Year 13, we both had a better painting teacher - and Alex and I were in Sculpture and Print-Making together. There was a lot of free time in Sculpture, and she asked me if I had any original characters (as she had overheard me once talking about them, I think) and I drew them out for her and told her about them. I had tried to start the comic on my own, but I wasn't very good at drawing. Alex sent me a lovely Christmas card that year, saying how she couldn't wait to start Fine Arts at University with me and that we were going to make really cool stuff. She drew some of my characters on the card, and in that instant, I knew we must do a comic together. She had been thinking the same thing, so we quickly started work. I came over to her house for the first time and we just sat in her room and I just spilled all of the information about my characters and the setting to her and she drew all of the characters out, making tweaks and slight re-designs (especially for the hair) and we got to work on the first 3 pages!

Did you have goals in mind when you started Nothing Fits? Has any of the web material existed in print prior to now?

The goals are really to have a printed product, something we can both be proud of and work to do better things in the future. For a first project, we are aiming high, so that when it's finished, and we go on to make other work, that we'll have to work to be better than Nothing Fits. We want to push ourselves to do our best and for a first project, we are pretty proud of our efforts. It's been going online since we started making pages, and without it being online I don't think we would have come this far. The support of the readers and the community on ComicFury (our webcomic host), really helped us keep up the momentum of the story. Actually I really need to post the rest of the pages soon... My laptop is broken so I will have to wait till it's fixed/I get a new one to finish those pages though... But yes, it's always been online. Some people have warned us against doing that, because they feel anyone could steal it from us? But, in the two years it's been up, it hasn't been stolen, and we have all the original hard copies of the pages, so we can prove that it's ours if someone stole it. 

 

Is there much of a comics scene or community in Christchurch? I don't hear a lot about goings on down that way, I know Funtime Comics used to have more of a national presence although I guess people have had other things on their minds after the earthquakes.

 There really isn't a lot, we go to Funtime every month, but it isn't a huge group of people. There's always Armageddon Expo, but that's not really New Zealand comic focused, so there has never really been much of a comic presence while we've been doing our comic, which is why we turned to being a webcomic. To be honest, I don't know how big the comic scene was here in Christchurch before the Earthquake? I was only 16 when the first September one hit, and 17 in the February one, I hadn't noticed much of a comic scene before those times, but that may have been due to my age. I only remember there being one comic shop in the city though, Comics Compulsion. 

Post-earthquakes have led to a lot of new and innovative creative projects in Christchurch though, the gap filler project, where different things would be exhibited, or preformed on the gaps that were left after buildings were taken down. A lot of art from the people of this city, decorating the fences in the central city and putting flowers in road cones. I think that it's just going to get more exciting here art-wise, the art scene here might not be as strong as other cities, but the main players here work really hard and produce great works for the community as a whole to enjoy, and they've made living in a broken city a lot more pleasant, they've given a lot of hope for Christchurch's future. I hope the comic scene follows suit, but who knows.

How has your collaboration evolved over the last three years? How do you approach creating comics together now?

We've worked really well together, Alex can pretty much read my mind when it comes to what I want things to look or feel like. It helps that we've had many sessions of staying up far too late or going off to the corner at parties and just talking and talking about what we wanted to achieve story-wise. She's really forgiving with me, especially because for a long time we didn't know how it was going to end. For most of the time we worked on the comic, I was writing only a few scenes before Alex was drawing them, which didn't help with seeing how long or far this project would go, but last year, 2013, in about October or November, I finished the script and just left Alex to finish - because it was getting to a point where it was easier for her to sketch all the pages, then ink them all, then colour all in one go, and I was being a slack writer. It's amazing she managed to work with me, I'm not the easiest person to deal with on creative ventures! I think after this, we won't work together on a comic for a while, maybe again in a few years we'd do a short story or a picture book together. We will do exhibitions together though, we did one last year called 'Ghost Hotel', which was her prints and a sculpture I did, we can't wait to do another one this year, just working off each other's artistic vibe. Her works give me a lot of inspiration. 

Photos from Ghost Hotel Exhibition

 

Are either of you interested in pursuing comics as a career? Do you have other artistic aspirations?

Oh man, that would be amazing, but it's near impossible to achieve that. Making comics or doing illustrating or writing would be a dream job for either of us - but it's such a hard thing to break into. The art scene may be easier, if we can keep doing exhibitions and stuff through arts school, but I don't know about selling things and making a career out of it. Alex would totally be able to make money out of her prints, they are stunning and so very detailed. We're planning on selling some stuff at some markets this year to get some money, her selling her prints and me making wee ceramic creations to sell. It's good to have aspirations, but I think Alex and I are a bit too cynical and realistic, we have high hopes, but we don't really go into them - like we don't talk much about "oh, what about a Nothing Fits tv show or movie or video game?", just because we know that would never happen, and we prefer to have realistic goals, getting printed, getting the story out there, sharing our work - those are things within our abilities and can actually control. Also it's great to have something that is done that we can show to potential future publishers when we have other work we want printed, it's a good thing to have on our artistic resume really. 

 

Building on top of and doing better each time we do a new project, is the best way to have a good stable foundation for achieving great things. Rushing into things and making grand plans isn't helpful, it makes you not appreciate the work you are doing now as much, the work you are doing now becomes just a means to and end. You should always think of your work as the end, which means being as passionate and dedicated to it as any other work you do.

 

Images © 2014 Mary Tamblyn and Alex McCrone

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen - Dylan Horrocks

 

Dylan Horrocks' forthcoming graphic novel Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is now available for preorder as part of Fantagraphics Fall schedule. I don't think an official announcement has been made yet other than Publishers Weekly mentioning last month that Fantagraphics had taken on publishing. I believe the Magic Pen was originally planned as a trilogy of books but will now be a single 210 page hardcover volume.

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen online.
 
From Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen book description:

Acclaimed cartoonist Dylan Horrocks returns with a long-awaited new graphic novel, the first since his perennial classic, 1998’s Hicksville. Cartoonist Sam Zabel hasn’t drawn a comic in years. Stuck in a nightmare of creative block and despair, Sam spends his days writing superhero stories for a large American comics publisher and staring at a blank piece of paper, unable to draw a single line. Then one day he finds a mysterious old comic book set on Mars and is suddenly thrown headlong into a wild, fantastic journey through centuries of comics, stories, and imaginary worlds. Accompanied by a young webcomic creator named Alice and an enigmatic schoolgirl with rocket boots and a bag full of comics, Sam goes in search of the Magic Pen, encountering sex-crazed aliens, medieval monks, pirates, pixies and — of course — cartoonists. Funny, erotic, and thoughtful, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen explores the pleasures, dangers, and moral consequences of fantasy.

As part of the New Zealand festival Dylan's collection of shorts Incomplete Works launches from Victoria University Press on Saturday 8th March, 7:30pm at the Exchange Atrium. More details here.

Nevile Lodge - Golden Kiwi and Convoice

Nevile Lodge drawing the Golden Kiwi numbers and visiting a NZ news stand in 1964.

Nevile Lodge (1918-1989) drew from an early age and like his fellow New Zealand cartoonist Sid Scales honed his skills as a prisoner of war during World War Two after being captured at El Alamein. Lodge later joked that he ‘studied on the Continent for three years’ referring to his time in camps in Austria and Italy. After the War Lodge became one of New Zealand's most prolific cartoonists of the twentieth century with regular features in newspapers as well as book and magazine illustrations. In 1981 Nevile Lodge was made an OBE.

Prior to his experience as a prisoner of war Lodge contributed cartoons to a variety of troop publications including Parade and the New Zealand Expeditionary Force Times. In 1941 setting out with fellow New Zealand troops of the 4th reinforcements aboard H. M. T. 24 Lodge contributed cartoons to a sixteen page troop publication Convoice which is credited on the last pages as 'Published and printed on board H. M. T. 24'.

From the Convoice introduction,

CONVOICE - a voice from a convoy. A live young voice, born, nursed, and grown on H.M. T 24. It laughs, it moans, in patches it is serious. To those on board we hope it will be more than a memory of life aboard the "Twenty-four" on this, her first voyage with New Zealand troops. To our people at home we hope it will show something of our hopes joys and little disappointments. Newspapermen at home. overseas, and even in the Army are wont to talk -shop-. So it was on this ship: they talked, planned, appealed, wrote and from it all arose this publication. It sounds easy, but let nobody be deceived. There were a thousand difficulties each one presenting its own little complications. From the beginning it has been a race with time. Old Man Time has had his supporters, but with more than our fair share of good luck we have won. Photographs and cartoons were rushed ashore to make reproduction blocks; thousands of sheets of paper were bought and taken on board; a printing staff has worked 24 hours a day. A race well won has its own reward. All we ask is that "Convoice" be accepted in the spirit with which it was published. Overlook its short-comings and remember that it is a troop magazine written by troops for troops. Long hours of work and thought are nothing if to those on board, all working for the same cause, it is of some small value. To many ashore and afloat we are indebted for their assistance. To them all we extend our thanks. Other troops will follow us in H. M. T. 24. and other magazines will be published. We hope they are an improvement on what we have done, but, as New Zealanders, we are proud to have been the pioneers.

Lodge began a long association with Wellington newspaper The Evening Post in 1947. Lodge is one of the few New Zealand cartoonists that had cartoons produced at broadsheet size with his cartoon covers for the Saturday Sports Post. For significant sporting events Lodge would prepare multiple covers for publication depending upon the outcome of the game.

Nevile Lodge Sports Post Covers on Pikitia tumblr.

Nevile Lodge cartoon from the Sports Post.

Source: Ian F. Grant. 'Lodge, Nevile Sidney', from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 5-Nov-2013 URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/5l14/lodge-nevile-sidney