English Comics Diversion: Tiny Tots and the Sunbeam Oct 27th 1951

Heiress to Tangarau Part Two

Read part one of Heiress To Tangurau from Princess here.

English Comics Diversion: Jingles #600 August 5th 1950

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Belated Birthday (Yesterday) Tim Danko

I'll put the lateness of this post down to spending a large part of yesterday on planes, buses and trams.

Chromacon 2013 Allan Xia Interview

New Zealand is hosting a new illustration and comic art convention this weekend with the inaugural Chromacon on May 12^th at the Aotea Centre in Auckland. In recent years the Australasian convention circuit has primarily been made up of large scale conventions with a depleting focus on comics and artists so the establishment of a new convention catering specifically to illustrators and comic art has been welcomed by the sixty plus artists from New Zealand and Australia scheduled to attend. Auckland based illustrator Allan Xia, the primary organiser of Chromacon, shared some of the behind the scenes development of Chromacon.

Jigsaw by Allan Xia

What was the impetus for organising Chromacon?

I've been going with a few art friends of mine to different conventions around New Zealand for quite a few years now. I guess with Chromacon It really started off as a joke because I've always found with any of the conventions in New Zealand as artists I really felt we needed an event that was purely about the art and not entertainment or pop culture focused or a specific style or subject matter. I said to a friend of mine after we had a booth at a convention I said, “It didn't really go that well this year, so what if we started our own illustration and comic arts festival?" I guess in my naivety I just decided to jump in the deep end and just decided to do it. Initially I planned it and found a venue space, I sort of just asked around. The good thing about this was I knew quite a lot of people who I thought would be interested. Pretty much everyone has been on the same wavelength, fortunately enough; the response has been really awesome.

What is your background as an artist?

Illustration is pretty much what I try to keep as my main career, how I feed myself. Comics are a great passion of mine and it's also for me personally quite tied in with events like this. It gives me motivation to get create something, get it printed, having something physical in hand that people can flip through. The past few years the comics I’ve made were for events like this which is good it gives me a deadline to work towards.

Allan Xia

Who's involved behind the scenes of Chromacon?

We've got quite a few people who have been really helpful. A designer friend Des Young has been helping me out with a lot of design; he designed our awesome logo and a lot of the promotion material everyone will be seeing around Auckland. We're going to be having a conference, artist discussions at the event. Bec Wheeler from Watermark, she's been really great help with organising that. She used to be part of Illustrators Australia. Bec has run discussion panels like these at festivals before and her expertise has been a really great help. Also Renee Lang who's a great poet and playwright, she's got way more experience than me when it came to organising things like this, she's giving me a lot of great advice so far. Mostly I've just been doing a lot of it solo which is good, because I'm freelancing rather than have a studio job otherwise it would have been quite a big problem because I didn't realise quite how much work it would be.

When I saw the Chromacon site go up I was really impressed that someone was organising an event like this in New Zealand as you mention the main conventions have become more pop-culture oriented and the comics have really taken a backseat.

That sort of thing is reflected around the world. It's also sort of a good thing it gives opportunities for things like Chromacon to carve out our own niche. A few of the inspirations for Chromacon were things like Spectrum Art Live and IlluXCon and quite a few conventions that have popped up around the states. It's similar to what you just said, you know Comic-Con became really really big and eventually artists became less of the focus which gave opportunities for events like the ones I mentioned to start happening. I guess it's similar to Chromacon really.
In my naivety I sort of just jumped into the deep end. I think initially my plan was to have it at a community centre. This was after I had already spoken to a few people that had been really excited by the idea, I was looking at the places available and I decided a community hall wasn't big enough. Like I say I think a lot of it had to with naivety, I knew the Aotea Centre would be a really good space because I wanted it to be a public event not just completely about the creative industry talking to each other but also engaging the wider community. The Aotea Centre is a very central venue in Auckland. Having it at the Aotea Centre will just have the benefit of being able to have more people to attend and having it a free entry event we want as many people to attend as possible.

Why did you make Chromacon a free entry event?

One of the biggest motivations for me was to create a platform where artists can leave the comfort zone of their studios and promote their art to the rest of the community and similarly the community can get an understanding of what it is we do. People ask me all the time what I do for a living and I say I’m an illustrator and seven out of ten times the response would be, “what is that?” Another exhibitor at Chromacon told me almost the same story. That’s a big motivation for me, basically illustration, visual storytelling and arts surround every aspect of our lives these days but the artists and what we do gets pushed to the background so people don’t really notice or understand anymore.

We have a lot of really awesome creatives in New Zealand especially since we have Weta, there’s a lot of great concept artists and designers from there who do great work on the films that everyone really appreciates it but outside of ‘art of books’ they don’t really have a platform to showcase their own artwork at least not to the local audience. Which is very surprising because we’ve got all this talent in New Zealand but I doubt the public really knows about the great artists we have here. That was the first thing when I decided to create this event was I definitely wanted it to be free admission.

  Greed by Allan Xia

How is Chromacon funded?

It’s quite a hard process. Step one I wanted to make it free admission. As soon as I announced the event we had retail stores asking for retail booths, I never announced we’d have retail booths, people just took it for granted. I really wanted the event to be about the artists and I think having retail and merchandising booths would clash with that mentality, that core philosophy, because I want it to be about the artists showing their original artwork and their self published works. That being said it has added problems for us with financial budgeting. Basically how we are funding, is mostly through sponsorship booths. I’ve taken great care to make sure they fit in with the culture of the event. Quite a few educational providers, art schools from Auckland, they see that we’re engaging with kids and students locally who are interested in art. This is another thing we want to foster as well, so we sort of happen to meet the same demographic. Also we have Takapuna Art Supplies which is run by Jim Auckland who is a great old school illustrator who has a history in education as well. He’ll be doing demos at the event as well. We have some other sponsors coming onboard but mostly we’re trying to budget the best we can at the moment. We didn’t manage to get government funding but I already budgeted for that so even though we don’t have it, it’ll be okay. Obviously I would have liked to have had it because then we could have more money for marketing.

Do you think Chromacon could become an annual event?

I definitely hope so. Hopefully my budgeting is all good and we don’t end up being in the red this year. I’m pretty confident that it will be successful. The response from the artists has been really good so hopefully we can get the same sort of response form the community.

Interview conducted by phone Early April 2013

Pikitia Press News

 

I'm proud to announce the Pikitia Press Blog has been invited by the National Library of New Zealand to be added to the National Digital Heritage Archive which collects copies of New Zealand websites, plus sites relating to New Zealand, for the preservation of their historical and research value.

 

This Sunday 12 May Pikitia Press will be attending the Illustration and Comic Art Festival Chromacon from 9am – 5pm at the Air NZ Foyer, Aotea Centre, Auckland, New Zealand. Sunday will see the offical launch of some new releases from the publishing arm of Pikitia Press:

Toby Morris' Dreamboat Dreamboat.

Toby Morris is an illustrator, designer, art director and comic artist recently returned to New Zealand after 9 years of living and working in Melbourne and Amsterdam. He made his start by drawing and self publishing comics from the age of 13 and currently works as an advertising art director by day and an illustrator at night.Toby's style has roots in the clear line school of comics, but in more recent years has evolved into a looser and simpler but still very graphic look.

Sarah Laing's Let Me Be Frank #1 and #2

Sarah Laing is a novelist and graphic designer who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. She has had two books published, and a third, The Fall of Light, is due out in July. She began drawing comics seriously in 2003, when she read Persepolis and was reminded how much she loved the medium. She kept comics diaries of her life as a new mother. These graduated to the internet in 2010, when she was the Frank Sargeson writer in residence in Albert Park. Her blog, Let me be Frank, quickly gained a following and she began contributing to magazines such as Metro, Little Treasures and Booknotes. Sarah is now working on a graphic novel about Katherine Mansfield.

James Davidson's Moa Volume One.(Collecting the first three issues of Moa and extras.)

James Davidson, creator of Moa, a comic series set in a distant New Zealand where history and myth collide. An Art teacher by day, James has a passion for sequential art and plans to convert the children of New Zealand to the comic form. With his plucky heroes Possum von Tempsky and Kiwi Pukupuku, James hopes young people will be brought into the world of comics he so enjoyed as a child.

Another mini comic joint from the gutter by M.Emery.

 
These titles will all be available from the Pikitia Press Store next week.

We'll also have a limited selection of Steve Ditko's contemporary work from Robin Snyder and titles from Milk Shadow Books including Tim Molloy's It Shines It Shakes And Laughs and Mr Unpronounceable Adventures.

 

 

Click to enlarge the Chromacon floorplan below. Pikitia Press will be located at H2 and H3. James Davidson and Sarah Laing will be attending the Press tables most of the day, catch them and Toby Morris at Adrian Kinnaird's Best Of New Zealand Comics panel on Level 4 at 9:30am.

 

Mini Paper Trail

Preview of Simon Hanselmann's contribution to from kuš! #13

Pudge interviews Li Chen.

Pepi Ronalds takes a tour of the Melbourne comic scene.

 Panel from ‘Panic’ by Brendan Halyday.

Australian and New Zealand produced board and card games with vintage sci-fi images in a flickr set from Qilich.

 

Cory Mathis has won New Zealand's Young Cartoonist award.

Tim Gibson's Moth City is joining Mark Waid's Thrillbent webcomic line up:

"I am extremely excited to be involved with Thrillbent.com and very lucky to have been passed along to Mark Waid and John Rogers by some very supportive parties. Moth City has been greatly influenced by Thrillbent's work, and other digital comic pioneers like Alex De Campi and Dan Goldman, so this opportunity is akin to buying a Nirvana cassette, starting your own band and then being invited to tour with them. 

In an attempt to 'out-enthuse' Mark Waid all I can say is holy-s&!t, am I grateful for all the support Moth City has received from it's existing readers, and the comics community as a whole, and I can't wait to get my noir-crime-horror-genre-mash in front of more readers."

 

 

Dylan Horrocks shares a cute commission from more innocent times.

 

 

Debra Jane Boyask 11 April 1966 – 23 April 2013

 

[Editor's note: The following remembrance of Debra Boyask was written by Darren Schroeder.]

Debra Jane Boyask aka Teacake aka Pelms, aka Bad Astronaut  

11 April 1966 – 23 April 2013

Born in Chelmsford England, Debra and her family moved to New Zealand in 1974 where they settled in Auckland. Brought up with the occasional UK kids comic It was while training to be a hairdresser in the mid 8o's she developed an interest in comics when she began reading the subversive British kids comic Oink.

She moved between Christchurch and Auckland in the late 1980s, and at one time was on the fringes of the Flying Nun music scene, where her musical skills came in handy tuning guitars for various male musos who needed her help with that sort of practical detail but wouldn't let a girl play in their bands.

When a group of us at the University of Canterbury got involved in setting up a small press comic fanzine/anthology Debra helped out by picking the title: "Funtime Comics". She designed the masthead, submitting comics for the anthology under the pen name Pelms as well, including her ongoing tales of Spunky, Punky, and Monkey. Her humorous approach to storytelling and the medium itself was questioning of the "grim and gritty" comic clichés that we, a bunch of geeky male comic fans, held dear in the late 1990s.

Debra completed a BEd at the University of Canterbury in 1991, then BEd Hons 1992. After university she got work at the Education Training & Support Agency as an educational evaluator. As her interest in self published comics grew and she started publishing her own small press comics titles she travelled with me to the 1999 Small Press Expo in USA, and we took a side trip to take part in a comics jam held in the Cameron building, Toronto. Inspired by the work of creators such as Ariel Schrag, James Kochalka, and Joe Matt she began to produce comics with more autobiographical themes and narratives.

Wanting to get more time to draw comics she helped establish the tradition of Midwinter comic retreats in 2001: a weekend away where a group of comic artists drew comics without too many other distractions apart from food and walks in the country.

After several years working with as an educational developer at Otago Medical School in Christchurch she began looking for jobs in England, finding work at the University of the West of England as an educational developer. She had particular interests in equality and diversity issues in education, and became involved in support groups and message boards for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual communities in Bristol and the wider UK.

She continued to send Funtime the occasional submission while being involved in a variety Bristol's creative communities, taking part in Stitch and Bitch workshops, ladyfest, the Here Shop/Galley, rambling, and much more besides. She also made wider contacts within The Caption small press comics festival in Oxford, submitting material to the Girly Comics anthology, and introducing UK comic creators to the delights of midwinter comic retreats.

Debra took funny comics very seriously; taking great pleasure in reading them, making them, hanging with folks who did the same, and hanging out with people as they made and read comics while they ate the food she made for them. She was also very supportive of other folks giving comic creating a go.

In her final days her huge store of inner strength was much in evidence as she dealt calmly with the cancer that claimed her life, but never took her dignity. I have no doubt that she'll be the subject of a number of autobiographical comics documenting the impact she had on so many peoples' lives, and would have heartily approved of any bum jokes that folks decide to include.

Debra Boyask on the NZ Comics wiki.

Jason Brice interviews Debra Boyask.