Happy 47th Birthday, Roger Langridge

Nothing Ventured - Natalia Zajaz Interview

Late last year Non-profit Australian publisher Finlay Lloyd launched a new series of books with their Finlay Lloyd Smalls line. Amongst the first five books in the series were NY a graphic story by Mandy Ord and Nothing Ventured, a blackly comic graphic story by Natalia Zajaz. Nothing Ventured was my first exposure to Natalia's work and I really liked her loose expressive style of drawing and darkly humourous stories. I asked Natalia a few questions about her background and working on Nothing Ventured.

How did you get first get interested in comics?
When I was a kid I used to read  stuff  like Andy Capp and Snake, Hagar the horrible and Garfield. Whatever was lying around. I remember loving The Penguin Leunig, the one with the cover of a little man running along with a butterfly net trying to catch his head. When I was about 13 I got a Calvin and Hobbes anthology. It had an essay by Bill Watterson in the front about making comics which I found really interesting. He talked about being inspired by George Herriman’s backgrounds in Krazy Kat. I was super keen to get some Krazy Kat comics but never did. It’s still on my things to do list.

You studied art in Sydney, were you making comics then?
Yeah. I was really into the idea of wordless comics for a while. I was blown away by Shaun Tan’s work and so I copied his style for a bit. Then I met Leigh Rigozzi who lent me heaps of great books and taught me a lot about comics. I read a heap of North American anthologies and made some horrible, horrible autobiographical zines. Then I got into Norwegian comics and copied Jason’s style for a while. Towards the end of uni I moved into a house and met a guy called Adam France and we made some zines together. They were the most fun and the most funny. I found a bunch of them the other day when I was cleaning up and re-read them. Adam draws super fast and loose and doesn’t worry about stuff like spelling mistakes. Where his drawings are honest and spontaneously funny, mine often tend to be contrived and awkward. I’ve learned a lot from Adam.

How did you get involved with publisher Finlay Lloyd? had you started Nothing Ventured before they were onboard to publish it?
I met Julian through my boyfriend, George. Julian mentioned that he and Phil were planning to publish a series of small books by relatively unknown writers and artists and asked if I would like to be involved. I sent some old work down to Phil in Melbourne and they offered me 60-something pages to do whatever I wanted, which seemed like a pretty amazing deal! I struggled with the freedom and took way too long to get started. I was kind of paralysed for a long time because I didn’t want to fuck up such a great opportunity.

Was there much editing or revision involved in the creating Nothing Ventured?
Yeah, heaps. Originally I drew a single 62 page story. I sent Phil and Julian the storyboard and then spent weeks working on it. Once it was finished, inked and scanned I e-mailed it to them. They were enthusiastic but both said they liked the storyboard better. They liked the spontaneity and unfussiness of the sketches, so after that I decided to just draw as much as possible and stop worrying about it. After a few weeks I gathered up a big pile of papers and posted them to Phil for him to sort through and pick what he thought worked.  There were a few bits that didn’t make it in, and a few bits that did, that I was kind of sad about, but I think Phil did a really great job. He took a giant pile of scribbles and made a book out of them! It’s been a really interesting process and I’m grateful to both Phil and Julian for pushing me in a different direction. I think the book turned out to be much more than it would have without their help.

Here’s some panels from the original story:

   

Finlay Lloyd

Images © 2014 Natalia Zajaz

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

2014 Sticky Zine Fair

 
Blurry out-of-focus poorly lit photos of some comic people at the 2014 Sticky Zine Fair.

 David Blumenstein and Anthony Woodward

 People

More People

 Andrew Fulton

 Ive Sorocuk and Alex E Clark

 Jase Harper

 David Blumenstein

 Myles Loughran

 Frank Candiloro

 Phil Bentley

 Marc Pearson

 Michael Fikaris

 Simon Hanselmann

 Michael Hawkins

 Grant Gronewald

 Chris O'Brien and Joanna Anderson

Sam Wallman

David C Mahler

7 Comics You Can Buy from Sticky Institute Right Now (Unless they sold-out at the Festival of the Photocopier Zine Fair.)

7 comics possibly available right now from the Sticky Institute, 10 Campbell Arcade, Degraves Subway, Melbourne.

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.