Monday, December 16, 2013

2013 in Review: Grant Buist


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.

2013 in Review: Jen Breach



What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2013? 
Oddly and unexpectedly, 2013 turned out to be an on-the-cusp-of-years-worth-of-work-maybe-possibly-about-to-pay-off kind of year. 

I've been working on the script for Clem Hetherington and the Ironwood Race, a 220 page YA graphic novel collaboration with Doug Holgate, for four and a half years, but this year I won an Australian Society of Author's Emerging Writer's Mentorship to work on the book with an editor from Scholastic Graphix. (I also won an Australia Council Emerging Writer's Grant for the same book in 2010, so I guess I've been emerging for a while now...)  This is my first time working with an editor and it's had a massive impact on my (for want of a less wanky word) craft.  Each draft I am astounded at how crappy the one before was. My comics highlight for the year has been redrafting.  Sounds kind of sad when you say it like that.

Oh!  Okay, I've got another one, slightly less sad, I hope.  This only just happened this week, but it's still a highlight of the year: Doug and I are gluttons for something or other so a few months ago we started another major book together (called Maralinga and set in post-apocalyptic Melbourne).  Our approach is a little different for this one, though, and we are releasing ten page chapters every two or three months (schedules allowing). We released the first chapter in issue #1 of the Home Brew Vampire Bullets anthology and online and it got a huge, exciting, overwhelmingly warm response.  It was really unexpected and really, seriously cool. 
 
What are some of the comics/cartoonists you've enjoyed in 2013?
What with the amazing small press comics shows here in the States and the fact that my walk home from the subway each night takes me passed Desert Island (possibly the best comic book store ever?) it's been a big year for comics reading...

Not looking at my bookshelf and entirely off the top of my head, I liked: 
In minis and short stories, Pat Grant's "Tormina Video" and Joe Lambert's "Layaway", too.  The latest in Simon Moreton's comics-as-poetry series "Smoo #7" is the best work he's ever done and Lauren Barnett's "I'm a horse, bitch" is 16 perfect pages of a horse telling you how fucking awesome he is. John Pham's "Epoxy" was beautiful as well. 

Jesse Lonergan finished his "All Star" series which I thoroughly enjoyed picking up in bits and pieces over the year. Sam Sharpe's "Viewotron #2" was beautiful and touching and very special. Hellen Jo's Frontier #2 was just freaking gorgeous. 

Sam Alden's ouput this year was pretty remarkable - there were a lot of little books and they were pretty much all great.  Everything Michael DeForge put out this year was perfect, so just another ordinary year for him, then. Sophie Goldstein's work this year was exceptional - she makes comics that have a kind of Golden Age sci-fi feel to them and such smart storytelling.

I was really happy to see a few collections out this year of work that I had loved in previous incarnations: Ryan Andrew's "Everything is Forgotten", John Martz's "Machine Gum", Chuck Forsman's "End of the Fucking World", which was a joy to read in crappily photocopied eight page installments each month, and the Fantagraphics graphic novel version of it is really great. Brendan Leach's "Ironbound" is a great story about 1960s New Jersey toughs - his art knocks me out.  My favorite book of the year, though, might have been Dakota McFadzen's collection "Other Stories and the Horse You Rode In On" through Conundrum Press. 

There are a bunch of books from this year waiting in a nice, neat pile for the Christmas break - I suspect if I'd read them before I wrote this response they'd be in my list too: Ander's Nilsen's "Rage in Poseidon"; Rutu Modan's "The Property"; "The Encyclopedia of Early Earth" by Isabel Greenberg and Julie Delporte's "Journal" from Koyama Press. 

What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2013?  
Did you see Upstream Color?  Oh man, that movie...

Other than that, I found out about the noise that hedgehogs make when they eat (which is second in awesomeness only to the noise that turtles make when they have sex); and John Klassen's second tumblr is pretty much my favorite thing on the internet.

 
What are you looking forward to in 2014?
It's winter where I live right now and my hibernation strategy involves reading the entire Love and Rockets collection from Fantagraphics.  I've never read any of it, so I am pretty excited. (The other parts of the strategy involve blanket forts, stout and the entire series of Parks and Recreation).

Once the weather is fine again convention season starts up and that's always pretty much the best thing ever. I hope Doug and I will have another couple of chapters of Maralinga squared away by the time he hops a plane for TCAF in May. 

As a consumer I am pretty excited about Jase Harper's "Awkwood".  I've seen a few drafts of it and it's a corker. And Jesse Jacobs' has a new book coming out in the Spring from Koyama Press. Chuck Forsman's "Celebrated Summer" should be pretty great too.

Mostly, though, I am looking forward to making more comics. My comics work feels like that old chestnut of analogy of a duck on water - calmness above and furiously paddling legs underneath. I am a really, really slow duck paddling a really, really long way.  Next year it would be amazing if a couple of my projects - I have seven on the go right now - bubbled up to the surface. Just like little duck farts.
 

2013 in Review: Brendan Halyday



What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2013?
Putting out Graphic Narrative no. 1 which features PANIC!, my first (of several planned) comics on having an anxiety disorder. Am drawing issue 2 right now. Wrote a comic called Xtreme Champion Tournament which will be published by Comics2movies. I'm also taking my first stab at publishing someone else's work with 51% issue 1 by Chris Gooch.
 
What are some of the comics/cartoonists you've enjoyed in 2013?
Have enjoyed reading Hanselmanns comics when I decide I can deal with reading comics on screen (never lasts long). Like what Katie Parrish has been doing. Liked M. Emery's Adversaries. That guy needs to produce more.

Loved End of the Fucking World and Charles Foresmans new minis too. Really liked Mind MGMT. Read a couple of Lucy Knisleys self-published books and really enjoyed them. Loved what I read of Jezebel by Elijah Brubaker on study group. 
 
What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2013? 
TV, definitely. The usual suspects like Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy, Breaking Bad, Rectify, The Fall.
 
What are you looking forward to in 2014?
Putting out more comics. PANIC 2 and Xtreme Champion Tournament 0 are both scheduled for release in early-mid 2014, publishing more by Chris Gooch, maybe adding one or two more creators to the publishing lineup.
 

2013 in Review: Ben Michael Byrne



What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2013?
More Kranburn! And we published the first Kranburn to have a full colour cover. I did the first 7 issues with black and white covers as that's the way I like to draw, but #8 was screaming for colour so I did it, and now I'm pretty keen on doing colour from now on etc unless the artwork really feels like it wants to be left B&W.

More Job Dun! Written by Mark Hobby, plus I also did a short Job Dun story (full colour by Noelle Criminova) that will be in the next issue of South African/Australian comic Velocity that I'm still happy with the art I did (for now, you hate yourself soon enough... :-P )

Had a short story (written by Tim West) printed in the late 2013 issue of UK comic Something Wicked by FutureQuake Press.

Just recently started co-hosting (with Jason O'Callaghan from New Game Plus) a comic review show which is a blast, acting like a silly billy (tee hee) in front of a camera feels very natural to me.

My new 'Copping A Feel' initiative! When readers pose with writers/artists they enjoy, the writer/artist might do the bunny ears/pull a face/do the tongue in the ear thing, I invite my readers to cup my balls if they wish! What could be more bonding than to feel the warmth of
the balls of someone whose work you enjoy? Not much! So please, if you enjoy my work and ever want to get a photo with me, you're welcome to cup my junk! Any sex etc, just be of age and have asbestos gloves, my nuts run at about 87degrees celcius.

My fifth finished Comikaze challenge! If only I could create 24 pages every 24 hours rather than once a year, that'd be sweet. But it does have a tendency to burn me out for a week afterwards. It's so much fun and I really hope that although the website PulpFaction is now down, it will somehow/someway still exist in 2014.

Doing a mini Comikaze challenge for some students with Ben Hutcho and Martin Nixon, 8 pages in 8 hours! Was great to see teens keens on comics and was fun to do. Not as fun as what I imagine spending a day with my face between Yolandi Vissers legs would be, but quite fun!

What are some of the comics/cartoonists you've enjoyed in 2013?
I'll admit it, I'm a pretty simple chap, the highbrow is not for me and when people try to engage me into talking about coffee I want to pull out my cock and run screaming down the street, slapping old people on the face with it as I pass them. So I admit, I love Crossed, I reallllllly love Crossed. It just does it for me, yum yum.

I've also been squirting further than normal over the new style Prophet, man, its the business. Got to the end of trade #2 (yes I'm a trade waiter, I live out in the burbs and can't get to/afford floppies often enough, don't judge me lest ye be sodomised by an angry dove that thinks you're trying to eat its offspring) and wanted to cry knowing there was going to be such a wait for number #3. It reads/feels very...European? Something I'd be expecting in old Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal. Again, yum yum yum.

That Nick Fury Max trade. I don't read/care about Nick Fury normally etc, but after seeing some preview panels by the art-god Goran Parlov, I had to have it and I wasn't disappointed. Its feels a lot like the Punisher Max issues Goran illustrated and reads similar. That is the best way I can discribe it to people who might have been kept away from it thinking it was a superhero type book: it isn't. If you enjoyed Punisher Max while Goran Parlov was illustrating it, then do yourself a favour and grab this, its pretty much the same.

What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2013?
My second Daughter was born, so that was pretty awesome, little bit more prepared this time whilst also finding out that babies are all different in a million little ways.

Also, I'm finally building a tank that I can drive, its a 40% scale King Tiger/ Tiger II/Koenigs Tiger and the hull is 3 metres long. Its a slow process and I've only just finished most of the hull frame and built the transmission. I have the gears/sprockets needed to connect the engine to the transmission but first I need to get the suspension built, that's a big job so updates are every few weeks, not every few days!

What are you looking forward to in 2014?
More Kranburn, more Job Dun, More Velocity, watching the kids get older, enjoying the rude bits of the female of the species (and any Thai ladyboys reading, I'm down with you in my pants, pom rah kuhn!) driving a 3 metre tank down the driveway to check the mail, having enough money to get horns implanted in my forehead, the usual.



Sunday, December 15, 2013

Paper Trail


More 2013 in Review surveys run this week. Cartoonist's featured so far:

Bruce Mutard
Stuart McMillen
Frank Candiloro  
Richard Fairgray  
Colin Wilson  
Jason Franks
Matt Kyme
Anthony Woodward
Caitlin Major
Sarah Laing
Sam Orchard  
Gavin Aung Than
Scarlette Baccini
David Follett
Simon Hanselmann
Michel Mulipola
Li Chen
Ryan K Lindsay  
Christopher Downes
Dean Rankine
Alisha Jade  
Theo Macdonald
Paul Mason
James Davidson
Tim Molloy
Jason Chatfield

Garth Jones writes about logo design for Home Brewed Vampire Bullets.


Dave Dye has been quietly blogging his progress on The Anzac Legend: A Graphic history.


New Zealand Phantom comics covers derived from interior artwork.


Jerome Bihan's Oakward Park.


Emmett O'Cuana guests on Sci Fi and Squeam.




Owen Leong interviews Matt Huynh.


Bobby N takes photos of Melbourne comic folk.

 




Gary Clark celebrated drawing his 10,000 Swamp strip this year.



Should have been mentioned earlier: Ronnie Scott reviews Dailies #3, Victoria Drug Scene and Blood and Thunder #2.


Wandering through Collingwood yesterday I spied some work going on around the Keith Haring mural down there. Has this been repainted in recent years? It seemed more vibrant than the last time I saw it. (Click to enlargenify)



Paper Trail masthead courtesy of Toby Morris.

18 Comics You Can Buy From The Sticky Institute Right Now

The Sticky Institute at 10 Campbell Arcade, Degraves Subway, Melbourne is a great place to pick up local and international small press comics with a steady intake of new goodies. Here's a pick of what they have on the shelves right now.


 Sure, Cinema Sewer's not comics but a steal for 4 clams, previous issue also available.




Michael DeForge Oily Minicomics! Only a few left!


Sticky keep a steady stock of recent Kuš! anthologies and solo comics.





 Still a handful of Steve Ditko's recent work available





Sunday Gem: Fane Flaws

A long Scrawl through the art of Fane Flaws.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Pikitia Press: 2014 Publishing Season

Taking a break from our 2013 in review surveys, here is a sampling of forthcoming comics from Pikitia Press for our publishing season during the first half of 2014.

Barry Linton's Lucky Aki - The first in a series of volumes featuring the stone age adventures of Lucky Aki.

 
Die Popular - Collection of new material and classic material from MVH's wonderful Die Popular.



The Art of Harry Bennett - Collecting the art and story of H. W. Bennett, a professional cartoonist in his teens who went on to create a one man publishing industry in New Zealand. Written and compiled by Tim Bollinger, Geoff Harrison, and Matt Emery.

 


 Tim Bollinger's Wellington Stories
 



Bob McMahon's Claire Melody - Bob's second Claire Melody book in the vein of DC Thomson and IPC adventure comics. Read about Bob's background in New Zealand comics here.


 

New Zealand Reprint Comics - A comprehensive survey and catalogue of comics published in New Zealand reprinting foreign material from the 1940's - 1970's. Written and Compiled by Geoff Harrison.