Peter Foster at Melbourne Writers Festival 2012

Peter Foster talks with Bernard Caleo at the Skinny Arse comics launch about For The Term of His Natural Life at the 3 minute mark in this video courtesy of Dark Matter Fanzine.

Paper Trail

Had to take a break from the Paper Trail over the last few weeks for travelling, editing work, bereavements, and REAL LIFE...

Here is a summary of the entire Internet:

The big Pikitia Press news is the release of our new comic Peter Foster's adaptation of For The Term of His Natural Life this Sunday at the Melbourne Writers Festival:

Facebook it here.

This Saturday is host to another comics event in Melbourne, capital comics city of Australia. Exhibitchin’! is the title of Squishface Studios latest effort to get comics into everybodies lives. As well as works from David Blumenstein, Marta Tesoro, Ben Hutchings, Sacha Bryning, Sarah Howell, Ive Sorocuk, Arran McKenna and Jo Waite, they'll be bitchin' tunes, crazy costumes, chocolate-infested food, tarot readings, body art, a comics jam, badge-making, personality testing, portrait drawing... and an entire leg of ham.

Facebook it here.

Pat Alexander conducts a tour of Squishface studios in prep for Exhibitchin’!

A flux of comic printing plates have turned up on the Australian ebay in recent months, some from Australian reprints of foreign material and some from honest-to-goodness Australian drawn material. Most of these were destroyed after they had served their purpose. At the time of posting, this auction for a plate of the cover to Fiction House's Indians #21 had a few days to run.

Auckland based biennial literary zine POTROAST are looking for contributors for a special comics issue, details here.

Vice comics man Nick Gazin reviews Karl Wills's recent comic Princess Seppuku here.

Special Nippon edition of Karl Wills's Princess Seppuku

Paul Gravett interviews Shaun Tan

Tim McEwen has been working his way through his bedtime reading pile and offers reviews of Jill Brett and Greg Holfield's In For the Krill here, several Australian comics and a few international ones here, and Dean Rankine's Full Metal Chicken here, and his latest Andrew Fulton coverage is at The Australian Comics Journal here.

Andrew Fulton and other people

Inverted Dawn: Exhibition and comics launch at Tinning Street, Melbourne. Opening night September 6th - September 16th featuring Html Flowers (Cougar Flashy) and Girl Mountain (Simon Hanselmann)

featuring...
brothers hand mirror and
girl mountain live

 

 Simon Hanselmann

Tom Spurgeon writes here about the recently passing of art critic and historian Robert Hughes and his connections with comics as a cartoonist early in his career for the Observer in Sydney and in his appraisal of the work of Robert Crumb.

 Robert Hughes

 
Dylan Horrocks provides the cover for dystopic science fiction novel The Aviator by Gareth Renowden

F.E.C Comics are launching three new comics at All Star Comics in Melbourne, 22 September, 6.30pm. Have a look on Facebook here. I can't find anything on the normal Internet but F.E.C Comics are located here.

From the press release:

KRANBURN #4
Ben Michael Byrne returns with the beginning of his second chapter. Brand begins his war against Lord. Blood spillage is a promise.

FIRESIDE TALES
A horror anthology collecting three brilliant stories from some very talented Australian creators; Alex Smith, Andrew Shaw, Billy Tournas, Mike Wszelaki and Will Pleydon.

SEVEN
Fairy tales were once not so child-friendly. Alisha Jade delves into these origins and presents her interpretations.

Congratulations to Trevor Wood and Jen Breach for their recently concluded webcomic, Sawbones. After five years and 289 pages Trev recently posted the concluding page and a blog hinting at upcoming projects. Five years is a long time in webcomics, many don't last five months, so it's commendable to see the work Trevor and Jen have created and their decision to bring their story to a close.

Panel from Sawbones

Melbourne cartoonist Doug Holgate is amongst the speakers at the second Spotlight on Specialists seminars at NMIT, Fairfield, Melbourne on Saturday September 8th.

Details here.

   Doug Holgate

Mike Lynch has been posting galleries of cartoonists portraits including this one of New Zealand's most celebrated cartoonist Sir David Low.

Webcomic: Sigh Five

The Cartoonist's club of great Britain review Pat Grant's Blue.

 Pat Grant's Blue

There was a kerfuffle on the net a few weeks back with some folk critical of a forthcoming GARO tribute anthology. This provoked an interesting discussion of Kickstarter and publishing in general here and here and here and many other places. Of note the SP7 Alt. Comics tribute to Garo Manga edited by Ian Harker and Box Brown features amongst it's contributors Benjamin Constantine, a fine cartoonist from Brisbane. Check Benjamin out here and here and here.

Pikitia Press will be publishing new editions of James Davidson's Moa #1 and #2 later this year and all being well issue #3 will be available for the Melbourne and Auckland Armageddon cons in October. 

Moa on Facebook here.

Moa blog here.

Pikitia Press Updates

Moa #2 © 2012 James Davidson

Pikitia Press is now set up as a small publishing concern and I'm proud to announce we'll publishing James Davidson's Moa comics with the first three issues including a new full colour number one due out later this year. Moa is an all ages comic series, each issue a complete story following the exploits of Possum von Tempsky and Kiwi Pukupuku as they journey the land of Aotearoa on giant moa in search of adventure and good times.

Have a look at an eight page preview of Moa #3 here.

Go like the Moa facebook page. Remember every 'like' adds to the chi in James's drawing hand.

 

Moa will be available from selected outlets and The Pikitia Press Shop.

Pikitia Press has a Tumblr. I hope to use Tumblr as a repository for images, ephemera, and small bits and pieces relating to cartooning and comics that I don't have time to elaborate on in the main Pikitia Press blog. The plan is to post daily but we'll see how that goes.

I'm doing a weekly comics link blogging column for the Australian Comics Journal. Should be there most Wednesdays. Might not do this forever but check it out while it's there.

The first two comics published by Pikitia Press this year were Australian cartoonist Peter Foster's Ballantyne: Where Hidden Rivers Flow (Written by James H Kemsley) and Peter's update of the golden age Australian superhero The Eagle in Return of the Night Eagle. Enthused by the response to our first two publications I decided to get some more of Peter's work in print and a second volume of Ballantyne's adventures is due for release in early August. 

 Return of the Night Eagle © 2012 P.Foster. Ballantyne © 2012 P. Foster, J. H. Kemsley

A new edition of Peter's adaption of the Australian literary classic, For The Term of His Natural Life will be launched at The 2012 Melbourne Writers Festival in October. Expanded to 64 pages, this edition will be in full colour, include background material and a foreword by Marcus Clarke scholar Laurie Hergenhan. More details to come.

 

For The Term of His Natural Life © 2012 Peter Foster

New Comics from Peter Foster

 

2012 will see releases and re-issues of comics by Melbourne Cartoonist Peter Foster. Foster has had a distinguished career illustrating thousands of pages of comics for DC Thomson in England as well numerous comics in Australia. In the 1980's it was not uncommon to find a DC Thomson comic with two if not three of Foster's stories in it. The Return of the Night Eagle is Foster's re-invention of Carl Lyon's Australian superhero of the '40s, The Eagle, as a legacy hero.

 

 Carl Lyon's The Eagle

  

Interior page from Peter Foster's The Night Eagle

Early 2012 will also see the publication of Peter Foster's out of print adaption of the classic Australian novel, For The Term of His Natural Life, by Marcus Clarke. Initially released in a black and white edition in 1986, well before the term 'graphic novel' was commonplace, this new edition is in full colour with additional material about the background and genesis of this project. As well as these Foster is currently working on full colour editions of his newspaper strip in collaboration with James Kemsley Snr, Ballantyne.

Peter Foster

I'm preparing a longer piece on Australian cartoonist Peter Foster but I thought it'd be interesting to contrast two bio's I have for him. The first is from Challenge No. 4, an educational journal from 1978 featuring stories, articles, cartoons and games. The second is from almost twenty years later is from Ballantyne No.1, self-published in 1996. This volume collected strips from his Sydney Sunday Sun Herald collaboration with James H. Kemsley. In between these two publications Foster worked in England for DC Thomson and IPC as well as illustrating a graphic novel version of the Australian classic For The Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke published in 1986.