Illustration and cover gallery.
Film Illustrations from the Evening Standard 1920.
Wartime illustrations.
Source: http://trove.nla.gov.au
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Australian Woman's Weekly Covers - Virgil Reilly
Selection of wartime Australian Woman's Weekly covers by Virgil Reilly.
Illustration and cover gallery.
Film Illustrations from the Evening Standard 1920.
Wartime illustrations.
Illustration and cover gallery.
Film Illustrations from the Evening Standard 1920.
Wartime illustrations.
Monday, February 17, 2014
Paper Trail
Trailer for Connie Radar short film
Jem Yoshioka on tumblr.
Robert Virtue writes about the 2014 Parkes Comics Fest, that happened a couple days ago at the Parkes Library and I'm posting late because the links pile up in no discernible order and it's hard to keep on top of things.
Dr Matt Finch and Tracie Mauro from the Parkes Shire Library. (Pic yoinked from abc.net.au).
INTERVIEW: Mary Tamblyn
Graphic! Novels! Melbourne! available on DVD.
Lauren Maier reviews Rooster Tails
Garrick Tremain on cartoon censorship.
Paper Trail masthead courtesy of Toby Morris.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
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.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Refugees in Australia - Policy and Detention Centres
Excerpt from Sam Wallman's At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard's Story.
There's been a lot of discussion of refugees and detention centres in Australia in the last week initially sparked by Melbourne cartoonist Sam Wallman's comic At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard's Story.
Sam's comic brought awareness of an Australian Government commisioned comic launched last November as a disincentive for refugees to attempt entry to Australia via people smugglers. Mostly wordless this comic contains warnings in dominant Afghan languages Dari and Pashto and has been distributed overseas as part of an effort to discourage asylum seekers from coming to Australia through people smugglers.
news.com.au story on the federal Government comic.
Excerpt from Statt Consultancy produced comic.
This Goverment commissioned comic was largely vilified for many reasons from it's message through to it's execution and revealed by the Guardian writers, Oliver Laughland and Asher Wolf to have been part of a two million dollar contact held by a Hong Kong based Global agency STATT Consultancy with Australian Customs and Border Protection to provide "education and training services".
Guardian Article on Consultancy behind graphic campaign.
Elizabeth Mcfarlane article on Government graphic campaign with commentary from cartoonists.
Refugees immigration policy and asylum seekers in Australia have been a hot topic for a quite a while. A year ago I walked into a 'Boat People' conversation between an irate woman, another man, and the owner of the bookshop we were in. I was 'on my day job' at the time and she asked me how I'd feel if Polish people moved here and took my job from me. I mentioned that was a ridiculous scenario and that I was an immigrant myself from New Zealand. I then told her the bookshop owner had migrated from New Zealand and it turned out the other man was from Britain. Australia's made up of people from other places, some folk come here from peaceful countries, some from war zones, can't we show a little compassion for the people that need it? Sadly her response to my suggestion that she had 'come from elsewhere' and the original people of Australia were here long before 'her people' was, "That was a long time ago, they should get over it."
Many creatives in Australia are protesting the Governments handling of Asylum seekers with a one reaction this week being the launch of a crowdfunding campaign to produce a comic to encourage people seeking asylum in Australia. As of this writing the campaign has achieved almost 30% of it's target in two days.
From the You Are Welcome In Australia Pozible campaign,
We would like to publish a comic in direct opposition to what the government has published. We have no plans to directly encourage people to seek asylum within Australia; instead we are aiming to create a comic explaining that seeking asylum in any country that has signed the UN Refugee Convention (as Australia has) is not illegal, that there are many Australians who disagree with the government's treatment of asylum seekers and who are fighting for their fair treatment; and that there are a large amount of resources available for asylum seekers who are already settled in Australia, such as the ASRC and RISE.
This Sunday Sam Wallman is having a silent auction of the artwork from his Detention Centre comic at H.O.P, a new community centre, at 659 Plenty Rd, Reservoir. They'll be Sun, DJs and juicing as well.
From the facebook event page,
Sam Wallman and the global mail last week launched a piece of comics journalism about the experience of refugees living in detention in australia, from the perspective of an ex-employee of serco. a large selection of these drawings are being shown on the walls of H.O.P. on sunday, and people are invited to take part in a silent auction throughout the day. money raised will go directly to R.I.S.E. (Refugee Survivors and Ex-Detainees), an organisation run and governed entirely by ex-detainees, for the benefit of those recently released from detention. 10% of the artwork's sales will go to H.O.P. to help pay the rent of the space.
If you're unable to make it to H.O.P. on Sunday, email bids are welcome - email sam@penerasespaper.com with a price and a description of the drawing you're interested in.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Mini Paper Trail
Comicoz tease an image from a forthcoming Michal Dutkiwicz book Verity Aloeha.
Ung Bun Heang Obituary (1951/52-2014) by Tom Spurgeon
PODCAST: Darren Yeow on Sidebar Nation
Congratulations to Kevin Patrick on completing his thesis on The Phantom.
I interviewed Richard Fairgray for sequart.org
Scans of a how to cartoon book circa 1945 The Cartoonist by Australian cartoonist Tom Shield.
The Art of Jason Hong.
The Phantom exhibition at the Albury Library Museum profiled by the Border Mail.
PREVIEW: Dean Rankine's Itty Bitty Bunnies in Rainbow Pixie Candy Land #1
David C Mahler - Excerpt from Coracle #4
Thursday, February 13, 2014
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.
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:
Images © 2014 Natalia Zajaz
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