Paper Trail

Emily Dickinson at Gavin Aung Than's Zen Pencils

Luke Pickett and Gerard Dwyer close out chapter one of ACV with an epilogue. Read from part one here.

Nick Gazin reviews Karl Wills' Princess Seppuku in the Lower Depths for VICE. Wills' Jessica of the Schoolyard features in the forthcoming Michael Dowers curated, Treasury of Minicomics volume one, from Fantagraphics.

The Legend of Money Pig at Cakeburger.

Dylan Horrocks has started a new blog exploring spiritual belief, the year of belief. Horrocks' also featured in a creative commons case study for creativecommons.org.

Artic Circle cartoonist Alex Hallat talks to Soda magazine.

Tasmanian cartoonists Josh Santospirito and Chris Downes performed their live comic ghost story, The Shipwright & the Banshees to a sold out audience as part of MONA FONA 2013 in Hobart last night. Chris Downes' stunning poster is available here.

 J Caleb Mozzocco at School Library Journal interviews Roger Langridge.

Roger Langridge contribution to SATAN IS ALIVE anthology

The recently launched New Zealand comics anthology Faction Comics is now available in free digital form.

Fil Barlow is offering 5 day design tutorial sessions here. Series writer Brandon Graham shared Barlow's upcoming cover for Prophet #37. You may see it or you may not, Barlow shares via facebook an interview he did with Brandon Graham from Prophet #28.

Now sold out but keep an eye out for future opportunities to buy Simon Hanselmann's Artist Trash!

Hanselmann shared pages from his forthcoming “Australian” comics/art anthology Victoria Drugs Scene at Girl Mountain.

Our handsome Paper Trail masthead is courtesy of Toby Morris, here's his rendition of Joseph Dredd having a cuppa.

In the neverending quest of cartooning archeology I picked up a pile of old Auckland newspapers, The Weekly News, which my brother has been scanning and making notes on for me. Here's a couple samples,

The Ornate masthead of The Weekly News

Sir Gordon Minhinnick cartoon from Feb 9th, 1944.

Upcoming on Pikitia Press from the work in progress folder:

 Feature on Maori cartoonist Harry Dansey.

Wartime cartooning by Australian soldiers in Stand Easy after the defeat of Japan.

The early comics work of Tom Scott.

English Comics Diversion: Tobruk Original Art Boards

The Lion Summer Spectacular Epic Holiday Special featured comic and prose adaptions of films from the late sixties. Batman, James Bond: You Only Live Twice, Thunderbirds, and more were featured along with an Oliver Passingham (1925-2003) adaption of the Arthur Hiller film, TOBRUK. Passingham's career started on newspaper strips such as Lesley Shane, Rick Martin, Jane Fortune and Sally Marsh during the fifties. Reprints of his Lesley Shane newspaper strips by Amalgamated Press led to work on Rick Random, School Friend and other Amalgamated titles. In the sixties Passingham commenced work with DC Thomson where he would freelance for a further 33 years. During the seventies Passingham traveled, living in the Canaries, on the French Riviera, Monte Carlo and a year in Sydney, Australia during 1980, eventually returning to London in 1990. During this time he continued producing work for DC Thomson until his retirement in 1993.

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The original board of the first page of Passingham's TOBRUK adaption is comprised of a photostat reproduction of the Tobruk movie poster as a header, a moody night scene depicted in inky washes, and two panels showing frogmen sabotaging a french freighter, depicted with ink line drawings and white paint highlights. Upon examining the art-board I found Passingham had originally depicted the entire scene in washes as shown below with the bottom two panels still visible under the pasted on replacement.

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My presumption for the redrawn panels is that Passingham may have been compelled by editorial to redraw the characters to resemble their movie counterparts. He certainly nails the likeness of star George Peppard in the bottom panel close up. In those days of no video or internet reference Passingham did a fine job of capturing the scale of the movie and compressing it into the limits of a comic anthology.

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Trailer for TOBRUK starring Rock Hudson, George Peppard and Nigel Green.

Sources: Lion Summer Spectacular: Epic cover - http://www.comicpriceguide.co.uk/uk_comic.php?tc=lionsum , Oliver Passingham biographical notes - http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/oliver-passingham-exhibition-at-arundel.html (Written by Peter Hansen © 2005)

Cereal Adverts - Australian Women's Weekly

A selection of cereal adverts from the 1940's Australian Woman's Weekly. The first four Vita-Brits adverts are signed Hannan and are likely the work of Jim Hannan (John Thomas Hannan), a freelance commercial illustrator based in Melbourne, who was active during this period. Australasian distributors Gordon and Gotch were amongst Hannan's clients and he also illustrated books and produced recruitment posters during World War One.

 

 Source: trove.nla.gov.au

Salt Cover Gallery

SALT was published fortnightly during World War Two by the Australian Army Education Service and distributed free to all ranks among all Australian troops in Australian and adjacent territories, and Royal Australian Navy, to inform, entertain and educate service personnel. Published in digest size, initial covers featured text descriptions of interior contents but eventually illustrative covers were employed featuring work from many cartoonists and illustrators of the time. SALT featured work from troops, staff writers and artists in the form of articles, illustrations, stories, poetry and cartoons.

Illustration Diversion: Places and Chases

 Jungle Man © Gary Venn

I'm late to this but thought it worth mentioning for folk passing through or living in Hamilton, New Zealand. Places and Chases, an exhibition of illustrations by Angela Keoghan and Gary Venn, is in it's last week at The Framing Workshop, 120 Silverdale Road, Hamilton.

Artist bio's from the Framing Workshop,

Angela Keoghan

Angela’s illustrations continue themes of exploration and discovery, which are commonly found in her work. In this exhibition they are based on a fictional narrative of a Wild Goose Chase set in the Victorian era. Her characters always seem to be outwitted by the wild and elusive, the curious and the playful goose and their hunt continues on and on becoming legend. Angela is an award-winning illustrator from Hamilton, New Zealand. She runs The Picture Garden, a freelance company specialising in Illustration and Photography.

Gary Venn

“In my commercial illustration work I have recently produced quite a few illustrated maps – for clients such as Jamie Oliver magazine and EasyJet airlines in the UK, and I have enjoyed the specific challenges of producing illustrations which ideally work as a mixture of map, landscape and narrative illustration all at once. I thought that it would be fun to carry this sort of approach over into a series of prints for a show, and these were the result. It was enjoyable to be able to make images that worked like maps but could be more abstract and decorative.”

 The Framing Workshop

Places & Chases from Sarah Bradley on Vimeo.

Several years ago I used to drag poor Gary Venn up and down New Zealand with my noisy pop band, Amy Racecar. As well as being a talented illustrator Gary is a mighty fine guitarist as evidenced here:

  

Peter Foster - Johnny Red

Upon emigrating from Australia to England in 1979, Peter Foster touted his portfolio around comics publishers, securing an initial job with IPC on the following eight page Johnny Red story for the 1979 Battle Holiday Special. Foster was the third artist to depict the adventures of Johnny Red after original artist Joe Colquhoun and his successor John Cooper. To achieve the grey tones for this story Foster experimented with grey paint whereas watered down ink or watercolour paint were more commonly used.

 

 

Johnny Red © 2013 Egmont UK Ltd.

Russell Clark - Living in a Maori Village

Prolific New Zealand illustrator Russell Clark previously featured in posts here and here. Living in a Maori Village is another example of his work for publisher A.H. & A. W. Reed. Written by co-publisher Alexander Wyclif Reed who wrote many books about the indigenous people of New Zealand and Australia. Reed had no firsthand knowledge of the Maori, deriving his research from secondary sources. Reed considered his role as an author to be a populariser and simplifier.

Reference: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4r9/1

Popeye - Langridge and Minhinnick

The Roger Langridge written and occasionally drawn Popeye series for IDW concludes with it's twelfth issue this year. Below is another New Zealand cartoonist's rendition of Popeye from 71 years prior, an editorial cartoon by Sir Gordon Minhinnick from The New Zealand Herald, 9 July 1941.

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Minhinnick used Popeye to represent the might of 40,000 American troops stationed to Iceland to replace the occupying English forces two days prior to this cartoon's publication. Iceland intially declared themselves neutral during the war but found themselves occupied by German forces by 1940. After failed attempts to persuade the Icelandic government to join the Allies against the Axis forces, British Marines invaded Iceland on 10 May 1940.  The defence of Iceland by 25,000 British troops was transferred to 40,000 American troops on 7 July 1941, with American troops outnumbering Icelandic males at the time. (Iceland's population numbered around 120,000).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland_during_World_War_II