2013 in Review: Michel Mulipola

What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2013?

I have a couple of personal comics highlights:

The first is definitely helping my good pal, Jeremy, open up the comic book store, Arkham City Comics in Auckland, NZ. It's a place we've created as an 'asylum' for freaks and geeks to be who they are and celebrate what they love.And the second would be the very successful Headlocked Kickstarter campaign. Due to the amazing support from our backers, we were able to get this motion comic made as a Stretch Goal:

Also, being a finalist in the inaugral Secret Walls X Aotearoa Live Art Battles was choice! I went out to represent comic book art taking out graffiti artists in the process.I lost out to my friend, Paul Walsh, but am proud to have drawn the first ever full comic book page in a Secret Walls battle!

What are some of the comics you've enjoyed in 2013?

There are so many comics and creators whose work I've enjoyed in 2013. Working at Arkham City Comics, I get spoilt for choice. I enjoy Greg Capullo's stuff on Batman. Also enjoying Thor: God of Thunder. SAGA is fantastic as well as anything by Sean Murphy. Oh, and Tom Taylor's stuff on Injustice and Earth 2. Pretty much anything he touches is gold!

What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2013?

There's not much non-comics related stuff that happens in my life. Even my pro wrestling career is rooted in comic books. But one non-comics related highlight would be my nephew successfully battling a brain tumour with minimal side effects from radiation therapy. He's a little battler and inspires me every damned day.

What are you looking forward to in 2014?

2014 is shaping up to be a big year for me if 2013 is anything to go by.

I'm currently working on the Headlocked Kickstarter stuff, got a few side projects in other media going, a possible collab with a writer I admire and I'm hoping to make it to SDCC next year to do signings and maybe a panel. But yeah - who knows what 2014 holds for me, I'll just keep chugging along and before I know it, it's 2015 and Avengers 2: Age of Ultron time!

kid-liger.deviantart.com/

Chromacon 2013 and Assorted Auckland Ramblings

A couple months back I had the pleasure of tabling with Pikitia Press at the inaugural Chromacon Illustration and Comic Art Festival in Auckland. This was the first comics event I've made the trek from Australia back to New Zealand for and It was well worthwhile. For a first time comic art festival, organiser Allan Xia and helpers seemed to pull it off without a hitch. This is the sort of event I'd love to fill my calendar with. Amongst the highlights of the couple days I spent in Auckland for Chromacon:

• Chromacon was a one day event which for my coming-into-middle-age is the perfect duration for a convention.
• It was nice to attend an event down this part of the world with a focus on comics and illustrators, no commercial retailers, just local creative folk.
• The audience which I think numbered around 1000 for the day keep a steady flow of people through the venue. Not too busy, but rarely a quiet moment.
• Chromacon was a veritable who's who of New Zealand Comics, there were some notable absences and I don't believe there were any South Island cartoonists there but on the whole it was a great opportunity to meet and catch up with a large variety of comic folk at one event.
•  I got to finally meet Tim Danko in person for a few minutes!
• Getting to meet the cartoonists I publish. It's probably not so much of an odd thing in this day and age but I had never met in person, Sarah Laing or James Davidson, despite having published several of their comics by this point. Lovely hard working easy to deal with folk. They make my work easy.
• The venue, one floor of The Aotea Centre, in the heart of Auckland, was an ideal place to have Chromacon, easily accessible and a comfortable fit for the amount of exhibitors and audience.
• Grabbing pizza and gabbing comics with Kelly Sheehan, Ben Stenbeck and Chris Slane after the show. Heck, even the barman at the pizza joint was a cartoonist (look for a Pikitia Press comic from him sometime soon.)
• Heading into the carpark after pizza this was waiting for us:

 

• Grabbing coffee and gabbing comics with Timothy Kidd, Kelly Sheehan, Karl Wills and my little bro Sam at the Auckland Public Library.
• On a quest of New Zealand comics archeology at the Auckland Public Library I found some real gems. Evidence that I suspected existed of a connection between two golden age NZ cartoonists surfaced and a NZ "Kramers Ergot" from the seventies? More to come on these developments...

 Interview with Chromacon Organiser Allan Xia.
 Fuzzy photography of some but not all of the comic folk at Chromacon.

 Theo Macdonald and Richard Fairgray

 Tim Gibson

 Tim Bollinger and Barry Linton

 Toby Morris

  Sophie Oiseau

 Czepta Gold

 Dylan Horrocks

 Chris Slane

 Chris Slane

 Ant Sang, Ben Stenbeck and Adrian Kinnaird

 Jesca Marisa

 Damon Keen

  Karl Wills

Marc Streeter

James Davidson

Michel Mulipola

Kelly and Darren Sheehan

Art in park

No visit to Auckland is complete without a visit to the St Kevin's Arcade Secondhand Bookshop. Piles of FP Phantom comics, Eric Resetar facsimile comics, the first 2000AD annual,  I've bought many a fine comic from here over the years. This time I snapped up some reading for my flight home, an Australian edition of Buck Rogers Annual No. 2. Hundreds of pages of early Buck Rogers adventures compiled in one aromatic pulpy volume.

Before heading to the airport I took a shortcut through the Auckland University Campus to pick up my luggage. My "eagle book eyes" spied a table of old books next to a reception office. A lifelong fascination with old books, (I lived in secondhand bookshop for several months) I was compelled to go in and have a look. The receptionist told me they were donated to the university, who didn't want them, and had put them out for folk to take away. All German texts from the early twentieth century, I couldn't resist the offer of free old books so gathered up as many as I could carry and made my way back through the winding alleys and paths of the University. I'd love to keep all the wonderful paper goods I gather, but I can't, so I sold a selection of these to antiquarian book dealers in Melbourne and Switzerland, which paid for my trip and my coffee bill for the next three months.

A tragic inscription from the inside page of Conrad der Leutnant.

Mini Paper Trail

 

A new instalment of a slowly forming continuity, the Poetic Justice saga, on Zen Pencils, Playing the Game.

Five Questions with Michel Mulipola.

Wilfred Brandt writes about the recent music themed issue of the Lifted Brow featuring comics and art by Ben Sea, Simon Hanselmann, Blaise Larmee, Ben Juers, Matt Huynh (with Jolie Holland!), Thomas Toye, Leonie Brialey, Sam Wallman, Lunch With Friends, Tahlia Palmer, Tin Can Forest, Jacob Ciocci, Peter Glantz, Becky Stark, Amandine Thomas, Matt Bissett-Johnson, Mark Chu, and Alex Mustakov.

Roger Langridge has had artwork go AWOL please have look at his recent post with images of the missing pages.

"Some of the pieces are ones I intended to keep for the rest of my life. Others I was hoping to sell to help get me through a period where I'm not earning very much. One piece is the property of another person, who kindly lent it to me for the exhibition."


Hopefully these will surface soon.

Possibly New Zealand's greatest cartoonist ever, David Low, hasn't featured on the blog yet, I hope to finish a couple pieces on him shortly and to showcase some of work.

The Listener's Young Cartoonist competition.

Fundraising to preserve one of Australia's pioneering works of animation.