What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2013?
The Wellington arts newspaper Capital Times folded after 39 years in print, but luckily my regular cartoon Jitterati was picked up a few weeks later by lifestyle magazine FishHead, so now It’s printed on glossy paper and read by upwardly mobile Millennials. Which is nice. For my own perverse amusement, I’ve been adapting Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for the comic generation site Pixton. There’s over 130 episodes so far, and it’s confusing the hell out of everyone. It was also the twentieth anniversary of my cartoon Brunswick, but I forgot to do anything to mark it.
What are some of the comics/cartoonists you've enjoyed in 2013?
I’m 70km away from the nearest comics store or decent library graphic novel collection, so it’s all webcomics for me. Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona has been receiving a lot of deserved attention, as has Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne’s spectacularly NSFW Oglaf. I also follow Jamie Smart’s Corporate Skull, Madeleine Flores’ Help Us! Great Warrior and Andrew Hussie’s epic Homestuck, which I started reading because it was described as "the Ulysses of the Internet”, presumably by someone who’s never actually read Ulysses. Nothing too obscure there, but it’s all good stuff.
What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2013?
I’ve taken great pleasure this year in scratching large pigs with sticks. Few things are as rewarding as using a stick to raise a cloud of dried skin and mud from the stomach of a happily grunting piggy.
What are you looking forward to in 2014?
I was commissioned to write a radio series based on a musical I wrote a few years ago based on Brunswick, so I’m looking forward to hearing how that turns out. I’m also looking forward to putting out the first chapters of my 14th graphic novel, which I’ve been promising for years now - life kept getting in the way, but now I live in Otaki Beach that isn’t such a problem.
