Bruce Mutard Interview Update

A Panel from Bruce's submission to Tango 9.

To coincide with a reprinting of Word Balloons 1 we present below an update to that issue’s interview with Bruce Mutard. For those who came late, Bruce is a Melbourne-based writer-artist committed to telling stories that have a deeper meaning. From early socio-political works for street zines he has progressed through his self-published Street Smell, contributions to local and overseas anthologies, such as DeeVee, Tango and SPX, to substantial graphic novels: The Bunker (Image 2002), The Sacrifice (Allen & Unwin, 2008) and The Silence (Allen & Unwin, 2009).

PB: When the interview was published, early in 2006, The Silence was in limbo following Image dropping it due to poor advance orders. The Sacrifice, meanwhile, was in the early stages of production. Given its subject matter you expressed a hope that you may be able to find an Australian publisher for The Sacrifice. Despite the fact that, as you said, it seemed a bit ‘pie in the sky’ that’s exactly what has happened. So how did this come about?
BM: Via what some cynics, in particular authors, might describe as the least likely route to publication: the unsolicited submission. After the term of the Australia Council grant had expired, which I think was the end of 2005, I had produced sixty pages which I decided I should use as a sample of a prospective publication. So I consulted the Australian Writer’s Guide, made a list of likely publishers, and sent off the package. Lo and behold, a few weeks later, I got a call from Erica Wagner [pronounced like the composer], a publisher in the Children’s and Education Division of Allen & Unwin (A&U). She expressed a great admiration for the work and a desire to publish it.
PB: How many publishers did you approach ?
BM: A&U were essentially the first. That occurred in 2006, but it still took me a good year and a half to finish the rest of the work.
PB: Over the course of its production the work has expanded to become a WWII trilogy. You are currently at work on the second volume The Fight. What was the thinking behind the expansion?
BM: At a fairly late stage of the production of The Sacrifice I realised that there were natural sequels to the story. If the first volume told the story of a man wrestling with his conscience and beliefs with regards to enlisting to fight in WWII, then it seemed logical to follow the consequences of that decision in a second volume. To show him in the army and participating in a combat zone, where he sees and performs dreadful things. And then it seemed appropriate to follow the narrative through to the character’s return home, and to look at the issues surrounding how you come back to being a normal citizen having done such things. In Robert’s case, because he was a reluctant participant to begin with, he finds it quite difficult to deal with. So I approached A&U with the idea late in 2007. They were very receptive to it, but given that The Sacrifice had yet to be released, and they were essentially entering into the unknown as far as finding a market for the graphic story in the mainstream book trade, they didn’t commit to it immediately. But after a month or so Erica agreed, going on gut instinct rather than sales. So that enabled me to start researching and writing The Fight.
PB: How have you found A&U to work with? How has the editing process changed both The Sacrifice, which was underway prior to finding a publisher, and The Fight, which A&U have been involved in from the beginning?
BM: They’ve been very easy and good to work with. They have had a very light touch in terms of their editorial involvement. I have actually invited them to be more involved because it is quite constructive to get that objective view. Their input definitely improved The Sacrifice and The Silence. But they are not prescriptive in a way that a more commercial publisher, or an educational one might be. Their position has been that this is my work and it is more their job to make suggestions rather than directions. There have been instances where I have gone against their advice, feeling that they didn’t ‘get’ the point I was trying to make. Although that does raise the issue that if they didn’t understand it, perhaps other readers won’t as well. But on the whole it has been a really good working relationship.
PB: Has their input been primarily in the story, or the art as well?
BM: Primarily with the story. With the art on occasion they may point out some inconsistencies with regard to the appearance of characters. But it is difficult when you are doing a representational style of art. You don’t have the leeway that a more cartoony artist may have with exaggerated characteristics and expressions to describe the internal emotional states of the characters. But most bloopers and errors of continuity I have had to fish out myself. I am aware of some of my failings. I tend to draw fairly masculine looking women with square jaws and can have a certain sameness to character design. Artists tend to have a stock of types and a set way of drawing facial characteristics and it is difficult, especially when you are doing a long work, not to default to easy patterns to reduce your labour.

PB: What have sales been like? Are A&U satisfied with the results?
BM: I’ve only got numbers for The Sacrifice, but they’ve been satisfactory as far as A&U are concerned. Mind you, the bulk of the sales were to some educational marketing firm on release. Traffic since then has slowed to a few dozen every half year, matched by the number of returns. We don’t expect to see any kick along until The Fight is released, which is a long way off yet.
PB: What sort of feedback have you had for either The Sacrifice or The Silence? I recall you saying that when you were doing Street Smell you would get regular letters of comment from readers.
BM: Primarily only reviews in the media.
PB: Do you think that has to do with the greater distance between author and reader in the two forms of production?
BM: Undoubtedly.
PB: But people could still write to you care of A&U.
BM: They could and I was hoping that there might have been a little bit of that. But I do think it has to do with the diminution of letter writing in the modern world. If I had set up a Facebook site or a blog and was regularly contributing to them I probably would have got comments, but I have no interest in doing that.
PB: Why is that?
BM: Just being lazy and perhaps a degree of animus I have against the whole business of exposing oneself online…like publishing one’s personal diary. It just strikes me as being immodest. I see it as an extension of the general cult of celebrity we’re in: “you too, can be a star”. But I can also see it as a rather broad version of the human need for community and neighbourhood gossip.
PB: In the interview you stated that The Silence had been the most challenging work you had done up to that time. How does The Sacrifice or The Fight match up to it? Have they been more challenging?
BM: Yes. Each work that I do does present greater challenges because I set the bar a little higher each time. The Silence was challenging because its subject matter required me to find a visual metaphor for a non-visual idea. Something that would avoid too much explanatory dialogue, which my critics have pointed out is a bit of a problem with me. It is something I am trying to iron out. I write books with a point in mind and it is hard not to make them baldly, rather than integrating them into the narrative so the point comes through that instead of merely being stated. But I think with The Silence I came pretty close to achieving this. I worked pretty extensively to iron out a lot of explanatory dialogue that had been in the initial version. PB: You or A&U?

BM: Largely myself. This is why I really would like the editing to be a little more demanding and robust. I really would like the editing to be an active process. I’m sure it was more so back in the ‘old days’. It may well be the way it’s taught these days and a part of the postmodern discourse where they don’t want to violate the integrity of the artist. I see it often in non-fiction where over-writing and repetitiveness is let go.

PB: So had The Silence appeared from Image these revisions wouldn’t have occurred.

BM: No, that’s right. But to get back to your question, The Fight was difficult to write. It took me a year and around ten drafts. But you expect that with an extensive novel. It has a broad canvas and multiple characters and it’s a challenge to sustain a narrative over such a length. But the feedback that I have had from A&U has been positive and they have sent it to a number of independent readers.

PB: What stage is it currently at?

BM: I have completed the breakdowns, but they still need to be culled a bit as it’s close to 300 pages.

PB: I’m interested in the different formats you’ve employed. The Sacrifice was virtually A4, which you would think would be ideal for illustrated work, especially detailed work, yet I was surprised that I didn’t warm to it. Perhaps that was due to the design, perhaps that’s just me. But presumably you must have had some reservations as with The Silence you’ve gone for almost a square format with only two tiers of panels per page, which I think works better. So why the change?

BM: That was my decision, although it did have a mercenary aspect to it. You once said to me that in its look The Sacrifice resembled a text-book and I tend to agree. In part that was probably intentional on the part of A&U as they had a stated intention of selling it into the educational market. The Silence, on the other hand, was originally in three tiers and around 100 pages and I just thought that a larger book with more pages would appear more substantial, have a better chance of standing out on a bookshelf and seem a better buy. Because each tier was the same size it was easy to reformat. And I liked the option of having some pages with just a single tier. Indeed A&U suggested that I use them as a form of chapter breaks. I liked how that accentuated the wordlessness or ‘silence’ of these panels. So in a way I’m glad that it didn’t come out from Image a few years ago.

PB: During the interview you also mentioned a number of other projects you would like to produce – biographies of Jesus and Hitler among them. Do you worry that because the WWII trilogy is such a long running project that these and other works are held up?

BM: Yeeeah... Sometimes I’d like to be working on a project that is contrary to the trilogy just to have some respite from it.

PB: More to the point are there more stories that are coming to you that are creating a log jam of ideas.

BM: You can never stay away from new ideas. I have contributed some short stories to the last few Tangos and will also have a strip in an edition of Meanjin [one of Australia's pre-eminent literary journals] next year.

PB: How did that occur?

BM: It was a strip I submitted to Gestalt Publishing’s Character Sketches back in 2007. When they knocked it back, I submitted it to another anthology, Rosetta, put out by Alternative Press in the USA. They accepted it, but after some three years and no sign of the book, I assume it was killed off by the GFC and the weak market for anthologies in general. Then I noticed that Meanjin was becoming receptive to graphic stories with their new editor Sophie Cunningham (like the serial by Kate Fielding and Mandy Ord). So I gave it a go and it worked. It’s something that I hope to see more of: graphic stories appearing on an equal footing alongside prose and poetry in literary journals, as a part of literature.

PB: As well you began a Masters degree at Monash Uni in 2009. In what discipline?

BM: It began in Fine Arts, but I’ve changed to Design for a variety of reasons.

PB: Why did you undertake it?

BM: Because I felt the medium ought to be examined in the academic field from the point of view of the artform itself, rather than from a feminist, Marxist, or post-structuralist position that has previously occurred. My initial idea was to focus on the transition between word and image, as I had discovered that I would often have to change the script when I came to do the breakdowns. There is something about telling stories in images that is qualitatively different to telling stories in words. And I wanted to analyse that dialectic to see if there was any kind of universal system buried in there. Mind you, it has tracked away from that now. Initially I was going to utilise The Fight, but then I realised that it already had a lot of constraints on it in terms of form, and anyway, it was too big as a project for a Masters degree. So I decided that I might do the Hitler story and work on both simultaneously. But that has been complicated by the need to earn a living doing commercial work, so right at this minute I’m not entirely sure where I am with the degree. But the Hitler book and the Jesus story are two I keep needling at. I still hope to produce them eventually.

PB: Speaking of commercial work you have just completed work on three books for Macmillan Education.

BM: They are for a new series called Stories from Australia. Macmillan have commissioned an initial series of six books of which I have done three. Two other artists have done the other three, but there’s a single author for them all. They are history texts aimed at Years 4 to 6. The three I have done are on the Anzacs and Gallipoli, Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet, and Vida Goldstein and the Suffrage Movement.

PB: Did you choose those or did they?

BM: They did show me the six ideas originally but in the end they chose. They road tested a number of illustrators by giving us all a panel to illustrate to demonstrate our style and how we would interpret the script.

PB: Illustrators or comic artists?

BM: The two I’m aware of are Scott Fraser who did the Dollboy comic a few years ago [see Doug Holgate interview WB 10], and Chris Burns, who I think was the artist on Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday (Gestalt, 2008).

PB: Did this come about because of The Sacrifice?

BM: No, again, it was an unsolicited approach. Earlier in the year I just began to contact publishers seeking illustration work. I mentioned that I had special skills in graphic narratives and as it would happen Macmillan were in the process of commissioning a series that was going to use the form.

PB: How many pages?

BM: Twelve pages per book. The rest of the books will presumably be bulked out with prose, maps, diagrams, illustrations etc. In this case I was just the hired gun. Although I did have input into the script from the position of what didn’t seem to work. It’s hard for me to switch the writer off. They were, for example, far too overwritten. The author was totally unpractised in writing for the medium and the editor and publisher hadn’t had any contact with it either. Indeed this is the first time Macmillan have used comics in their books. So they are testing the waters as well. I think they’ve learnt a lot from the process, and will undoubtedly get better at it. I gather they are thinking of commissioning another series of six next year.

PB: When are they being released?

BM: March 2010, but they will not be available through the general book trade, only to the education market. I hope it works for them, because it’s a very good field for the medium to become a part of. You’d think it would be a natural, but educators have been resistant to the medium up to now because of the old pejorative associations that comics equal too much sex, violence, fantasy and so on, not helped by the big budget films of recent times.

Editorial

Welcome to the tenth issue of Word Balloons, which comes to you in glorious full colour. And what better person to feature as our interview subject this issue than Douglas Holgate, who has a deft hand with a paint brush, be it sable or electronic. Whether I persevere with the colour remains to be seen as the price was more than I had been led to believe, necessitating a rise in price to $6.00. Whilst this may not affect overall sales that dramatically $5 is certainly a lot easier when it comes to dealing through the mail or in person. Consequently, those who want to pay via sending bank notes in the post can still do so via a AU$5 note.

Interview
“Comics aren’t just for kids, but I think we can get a bit obsessed with that at times.”
An interview with Douglas Holgate.

Conducted by Philip Bentley, September 2009.

Douglas Holgate is a prime example of someone with a passion for the graphic story medium who has taken his craft and applied it to a variety of commissioned work, be it in toy designs, children’s book illustration or political cartooning.

In this interview we cover all of these topics as well as his youth in Sydney, the Australian comics scene of the late 1990s and early 00s, the ups and downs of small-press publishing and how to be a creative freelancer in the modern world.

Excerpt

PB: In 2003 you did Tales From Under Your Bed [TFUYB]. Was that a return to cartooning?
DH: Yeah, but in a way, I see it more as the start of my cartooning.
PB: Was it also a statement of intent from you? It’s just that as well as it being a step up in your art, it was an all-ages strip. And both that and a cartoony style were in the 70s and 80s seen by many as something of an anathema. It looked as if you were nailing your colours to the mast and saying this is what I believe in.
DH: That was part of it, but it was probably a culmination of a few things. I had started a new job at a company called Creata. They were a merchandising and promotions concern where I was basically designing toys to be given away in places like McDonalds. So I was working in cartooning every day turning either the McDonalds characters, or those they had acquired rights to use, like Pixar and Disney, into toys. So TFUYB was the first real comics work I produced during that period and the style just clicked into place. It felt more natural and came more easily. It was also the result of being in the Australian comics community for a few years and forming some opinions about where comics seemed to be heading and where I felt they should be heading. Genre-wise it was saying that there weren’t enough comics being made for kids any more. How are you going to get the next generation interested in reading and making comics if you aren’t providing them something to be introduced to when they’re young. And I still believe that. I agree that comics aren’t just for kids, and it’s great that they are maturing and are finally grabbing the spotlight as a critical form of literature, but I think we can get a bit obsessed with this whole notion of validation and lose sight of the forest for the trees. A kid doesn’t start with The Watchmen. We seem to go to extremes in comics. From either censoring ourselves to almost death in the 1950s to seeking more literate works today. There needs to be a balance.
PB: TFUYB was also nicely packaged.
DH: That was probably another statement. A somewhat belligerent belief that just because it’s self-published it doesn’t mean it should be at the expense of quality production. You can still produce something of quality that people would like to pick up without compromising your artistic integrity.

* * *

PB: At some point you moved to Melbourne. When was that and why?
DH: Around the beginning of 2003. I’d lived in Sydney for more years of my life than not and wanted a change. My folks had moved here about five years earlier. The job that I was in at Creata was a good career and well-paid, but it wasn’t satisfying. It had a lot of grunt work associated with it and it wasn’t what I wanted to do as an illustrator or cartoonist. The whole point of moving here was to start freelancing.
PB: How did you go about getting your name out there?
DH: Friend and Sydney illustrator [and some time comic artist] Craig Phillips [Flinch], alerted me that his agent in the States was looking for new talent. So I sent them some examples of my work, they liked them and picked me up. At the same time I hit the ground running and sent out portfolios to anyone and everyone I could think of, from book and magazine publishers, to animation and advertising studios. But for probably the first two years of my freelancing the majority of the work I got was off my own bat. The first six to twelve months I was working for companies doing very similar toy and merchandise design jobs to what I was doing in Sydney, with some spot illustration on the side. Only two publishers initially replied to my mail outs, Random House and Penguin, and really only with a form letter to say that they had put my portfolio on file and would get in touch at a later date if anything suitable came up. At the time I thought that probably meant that they had thrown it in the bin, but that’s not true – they actually had put it on file. [Laughs.] So to all aspiring illustrators and cartoonists out there: don’t lose heart. About eighteen months later I got a call out of the blue from Random House offering me the illustrator’s job on the Horror High books. Those were my first commercially published books. And things have grown and grown since then.

The rest of the interview can be found in Word Balloons 10.

Article

My Life in Comics Part VIII– Fox Comics, the early years 1984-86.
by Philip Bentley

This chapter deals with the small press beginnings of Fox Comics, a magazine that was the brainchild of David Vodicka, but which I played a hand in directing. In the course of its run from 1984-91 it provided an outlet for many Australian comic creators, such as Dillon Naylor, Greg Gates and Neale Blanden. As well, it had a decided international flavour publishing works from New Zealand’s Dylan Horrocks and the cream of the 1980s British small press scene such as Eddie Campbell, Glenn Dakin and Ed Pinsent.

Excerpt

In Chapters 4 and 5 (WB 5 & 7) I related the at times tortuous path of producing the Australian comic anthology Inkspots in the early 1980s. Whilst not without its twists and turns the saga of Fox Comics was far less angst ridden and, frankly, became something of an antidote to the Inkspots experience for me, as well as a bulwark to the dramas that were occurring at Minotaur at the same time (see Chapter 7, WB 9).

The fourth and final issue of Inkspots was released in August 1984. Earlier that year, in April, the first issue of a modest, A5 photocopied anthology entitled Fox Comics had appeared with little fanfare. Its editor/publisher, David Vodicka, was then barely seventeen and still at school, yet he had had a presence in Australian comic fandom since his early teens through his involvement with a couple of similarly entitled fanzines: the Fox Comics Catalogue, a one-man zine and the Fox Comic Collector, produced with Lazarus and Mitchell Dobelsky.

By early 1984, after seven sporadic issues, the three editors of the Fox fanzine were running out of steam. As with most Australian comics, works about them in this country tend also to be labours of love as there is little interest from local fans and enthusiasm can only be sustained for so long. David Vodicka, however, saw that there was the possibility of spinning a comic magazine off from the fanzine.

* * *

To begin with Fox Comics utilised the ‘shelfstuf’ of a number of local cartoonists, augmented by Martin Trengove’s Roscoe the Dawg strip. Many other Inkspots alumni appeared in the Fox although for most it was more of a cameo performance. The only artists to really make the transition between the two magazines were Greg Gates and Darrel Merritt. Consequently the Fox’s most prolific contributors had not appeared in Inkspots. Three of the more notable of these from the early issues were Ian Eddy, The Big Simp and Paul Harris.

The third issue of the Fox marked the beginning of what would become one of the magazine’s defining aspects, the inclusion of artists from the then fomenting British small press scene such as Eddie Campbell, Phil Elliot and Ed Pinsent. Perhaps it seems strange that English artists should feature in an Australian magazine, but I don’t remember the matter being an issue. I can only assume that like me David was more interested in publishing comics in Australia, rather than Australian comics.

* * *

As time went by we began to receive unsolicited submissions from around the country and overseas. This meant that in nearly every issue we were, able to introduce new artists. Yet there is, to my eye, a consistency to the look of each issue that has something to do with a continuing coterie of contributors, as well as the fact that a lot of the strips had an ‘off the cuff’ style, predicated by our preference for shorter strips to showcase as many artists as possible. To call it a ‘Fox style’ would be to go too far given that each issue was an amalgam of submitted work, but there was still an agreeable element there.

The rest of the article can be found in Word Balloons 10.

Also reviews of Bruce Mutard’s The Silence “one of Australia’s leading creators working at the top of his game”, Tom Taylor & Colin Wilson’s The Example “a thought-provoking vignette with some inspired use of panel arrangements” and Star Wars: Invasion 1 & 2 “well-crafted entertainment”.

Word Balloons 9, May 2009

Editorial

In his interview this issue Bernard Caleo suggests that we are “at a really interesting point where we are about to swing into a new, greater appreciation of the [graphic story] medium”. Whilst I don’t know if I share his belief that we are quite at the tipping point, I have noted in these pages, over past issues, that there has been an encouraging interest in the medium by local book publishers, which has sparked and equally heartening number of articles and reviews in the mass media.

Recently the Australian has run two pieces that are worthy of comment. The first of these, “Picture this: the future of fiction” (Australian Literary Review 1/4/09), by long time student of the form Cefn Ridout, is an astute look at recent publications, both here and abroad, wrapped up in a longitudinal commentary on the medium’s development worldwide. The second “In a superhero-free world” by Fiona Gruber (5/5/09) was written to mark the launch of Gestalt’s Flinch anthology (review next issue), but also to highlight a new Star Wars storyline produced by local creators, and Flinch contributors, Tom Taylor and Colin Wilson.

Whilst these are positive pieces, they are still both variants on the ‘comics grow up’ articles that have been appearing in the mass media for at least the last twenty-five years. Whilst it is gratifying that the media is willing to acknowledge that the medium is capable of a wide range of subjects, I can’t help wondering if it isn’t time for a change of tack; essentially for articles on comics to ‘grow up’, or beyond, the ‘comics grow up’ angle.

Back in the 1970s the only sort of article you were likely to get out of the mass media regarding comics was one slanted to their collectability. A favoured question of journalists then was “Do you read them, or just collect them?” Moreover, the journalists appeared to have their angle already worked out and were just looking for some appropriate quotes to slot in. If you tried to move the interview into other areas, like how not all comics were for kids, you were likely to get a short shrift.

An example of this is an article in a suburban news-paper from 1981. As well as some wildly skewed text, it contained a photo of my then partner in Minotaur and Inkspots, Colin Paraskevas, standing in front of the new comic racks at Minotaur holding a copy of Inkspots 2. Colin’s intention was to try and get some publicity for either the publication or store, but the journalist had other ideas. The article made no mention of either entity and captioned the photo “Comics have always held a strange fascination for Colin Paraskevas.”!

Not long after this, in I think 1983, the Age ran the first of the ‘comics grow up’ articles that I can recall seeing. Penned by the budding journo Richard Guilliat, who has gone on to make a name for himself as an investigative journalist mainly for the Sydney Morning Herald, it primarily used a then current story line in Captain America that had, I think, something to do with corruption in high places, to demonstrate that comics could deal with more ‘serious’ themes.

As the 1980s progressed, and more significant changes were wrought in the medium by the likes of Miller, Moore and the Bros Hernandez, these articles began to appear more frequently, both here and abroad. Whilst it is pleasing that some journalists had realised that not all comics were either for kids, or the preserve of collectors, these articles still marked the medium out as in some way separate from most other creative art-forms. Reviews of new plays or poetry collections, for example, do not generally contain a complete history of the form. There is an assumption that the reader, even if they don’t have a complete knowledge of the medium’s development, can still appreciate a new work regardless.

In that way I find the slant of Gruber’s article refreshing in it’s willingness to only give a smattering of the back-story and instead to concentrate on the specifics at hand. This is not to criticise Ridout. Having written my fair share of these sorts of articles over the years I know that the ‘comics grow up’ angle is a convenient hook on which to hang an article. Further, I realise that it is only natural to want to use your knowledge of the medium in an endeavour to make a favourable impression on the casual reader. But I still look forward to the time when comics are treated like any other art form. That, at least, may be in the process of occurring.

Interview

“Formally I’m qualified to talk about Tintin, that’s it.”

An interview with Bernard Caleo.

Conducted by Philip Bentley, April 2009.

Prior to this interview I would have described Bernard Caleo as a trained actor with a great passion for comics. But as a consequence of our discussion, I see that the opposite is, technically, more accurate. Regardless, though, ‘passion’ is a most appropriate word when talking about him.

Bernard is a great advocate for the graphic story medium, both in this country and generally. Through his own strips, either alone or in collaboration, his editorship of the anthology Tango, or even some of his theatrical work, Bernard seeks to convey his love of the medium, both to fellow aficionados and to the general public.

In this interview I seek to explore his roots, his collective oeuvre, his publishing ethos for Tango, his theatrical leanings, both his ‘day job’ as an ‘applied’ actor and his singular two-man play based on Alan Moore’s comic Miracleman , and finally the parallels between comics and the theatre.

Excerpt
PB: So when and how did the notion to produce your own comic arise?
BC: Towards the end of the 1980s I was broadening my interests in comics. Then I fell in love. In 1990 my girlfriend went to England and I followed. Rather than just occupying myself with being in love, I decided I should do something while I was over there. I found an ad for the London Cartoon Centre who were offering a ten week course. So I wrote a letter in strip format, and they replied saying “Why not”.
PB: What was the course like?
BC: There was a lot of basic stuff about page layout, photo-copying technique, brushes and nibs. But it was also a prod towards doing your own comics. And that’s when I really began to join some dots about how comics are a great way to tell stories. Significant for the ideas about creating comics that were buzzing around in my head, was the friendship I had made with this guy, Brendan Tolley, [who I had] met at a life-drawing class just before I left Australia. It was clear from the beginning that he was a strong draughtsman. During my time in London we had a constant communication via weekly letters, this being the time before email. Both of us were awash in ‘heartbreak soup’, to borrow Gilbert Hernandez’s phrase. During one of my rambling letters to him I suggested that we should collaborate on a story set in Melbourne. I have always been fascinated by the city as a place, as an architecture, as a culture, as an idea, as an history. So that’s how the Yell Olé! strip began to develop. When I got back, sans girlfriend, I had plenty of time on my hands and a lot of energy to devote to a project. So we leapt into it. At it’s heart it was a strip that was trying to mythologise, to enshrine, to explore the shape, the physical material of Melbourne.
PB: It was clearly trying to deal with issues relevant to a spirit of place split into two loci: the city in Yell Olé! and the country in The False Impressionists [the succeeding series].
BC: And The False Impressionists is rooted in more of an historical perspective. It’s attempting to be a White Man’s Dreaming sort of story.

***
PB: You are probably best known for editing Tango, a somewhat annual anthology of romance strips. How did that come about?
BC: In 1996, Tolley and I were part of a zines and comics exhibition that was part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. There were a couple of parallel publications, one of which basically contained rants by the various creators. I was asked to write something on the intersection of comics and zines and by the end of my rant I had painted myself into a corner. I had defined the difference between comics and zines, then said that I thought comics had a great future in this country as they weren’t hidebound by genres as comics in other countries are. Then I said that, since the demise of the great anthology Fox Comics, and in the absence of any ongoing anthology, what we needed was a new one, and that somebody should do that. I then realised that that somebody probably needed to be me.
PB: One of the most notable things about Tango is that it includes work by people from outside the established comics community and sees this, I gather, as part of its mission statement.
BC: Absolutely. In the course of writing that essay I had decided that what we needed was a book that showcased Australian comic work. But not just by people in the established comic culture. If you were a songwriter and you wanted to have a bash at comics I was interested. I wanted that interchange of ideas because I see that as one of the steps to developing a more robust comic culture. To bring people in and help them fall in love with the medium.
PB: Whilst that may be one of its strengths, it also could be said to be one of its weaknesses, as you have experienced comic creators rubbing shoulders with neophytes who are learning as they go.
BC: Tango was never set up to be the best of Australian comic book makers. That leads to its unevenness, but also, in my mind, to its charm. It’s very accepting, it’s very embracing. For me, it’s an important part of the texture of Tango.
PB: There’s going to be a best of Tango coming out from Allen & Unwin. I’m interested in hearing the selection criteria. Are they going to be the same as Tango regular?
BC: We’re actually changing the title to The Tango Collection because I felt the draft title ‘The Best of Tango’ cut across the ethos of the anthology. It will be around 200pp released in December 2009 and will feature stories from the first eight issues. I hope to have the next ‘ordinary’ issue (Tango 9: Love and War) out around the same time to capitalise on cross-promotion. Erica Wagner, who is the publisher at A&U in charge of the graphic novel push, will have a hand in the selection, as will the editor Elise Jones. I have provided a rough cut of strips, they have said yes yes yes, no no no, and then I have provided more names, and so on.

***
PB: You mentioned that you acted at University.
BC: I started out doing a Science Degree in 1986 and ended up with an Arts Degree in 1994. Really, I spent only a minimal amount of time studying during that period. Most of my time was spent in the Theatre Department, which is an elective facility like the Sports Union. I basically just did show after show after show because I loved it; the milieu and the people. Out of that came many great friendships, lovers etc. One friendship, in particular, was with Bruce Woolley. I introduced him to comics and he introduced me to various aspects of theatre. He had trained in the Lecoq style of theatre making. That is a French form that goes beyond purely acting, incorporating elements of puppetry, music and multi-media. And it was that training that made Bruce say, when he was reading Miracleman, “Hey Bernard we can make a great play out of this.” To which I replied “Bruce…you’re absolutely out of your mind! It’s a superhero comic book; it’s got flying people and bombs. You can’t do that sort of thing on stage.” So naturally we did.
PB: I have to say that initially I was dubious, but to your credit, with little more than a couple of dodgy wigs and some stackable boxes, you make the audience ‘believe that a man can fly’. This despite the issue of copyright, in which it must be the most complicated comic title ever.
[The saga of Miracleman is long and winding and readers interested in following it twists and turns are encouraged to access the Wikepedia entry.] It works because you take an unlikely situation and make it succeed by turning the perceived weakness into strengths. By taking a deliberately low-tech approach it becomes part of the process. But it’s clever how it is part spoof, part homage. The respect you feel for the work comes through. I think it’s the most successful thing of yours that I’ve seen.

The rest of the interview can be found in Word Balloons 9.

Article

My Life in Comics Part VII: Minotaur–the 1980s
by Philip Bentley

In this instalment I deal with the saga of Minotaur from the opening of the first shop in 1980, though five relocations, to when I left the business at the end of 1989. As with my recollections on the latter days of Inkspots it is a salutary tale of how naïve idealism can be put to the sword on the altar of commercial enterprise.

Excerpt
In the last chapter, I detailed how in 1977 Greg Gates, Colin Paraskevas and myself established the Melbourne comic retailer Minotaur. Although initially begun as a mail order concern, our plans had always been to progress to a shop when it had grown larger and we had resolved the issue of where it would be best located. The city centre had always seemed the optimum position, but we feared the higher rents here would be prohibitive, and we were unsure if an inner-city shop could draw customers from all suburbs.

It was Colin who solved this conundrum, suggesting we investigate warehouse space in the city centre that could double as a retail establishment. Admittedly, the first few places we looked at were less than inspiring but then we found a ground floor location in Tattersalls Lane, a small thoroughfare running between Little Bourke and Lonsdale Streets, between Swanston and Russell. Housed in a crumbling tenement, whose upper three floors contained artists’ studios, it was centrally located without commanding a premium rent.

The premises opened for business on Thursday 11 September 1980 and initially traded Thursday to Saturday. For customers we relied on circulating our mail order clientele, word of mouth and some small ads placed on the comics page of the Sun. This was never going to produce a stampede, but numbers and sales did gradually climb over the initial weeks and months.

Although I had my reservations about the premisis due to it’s crumbling nature, to a person any former customers I have spoken to regarding these times remember the location fondly. They equate the circulative route one had to take to gain access – up the lane, into the stair-well, through the fire door to the shared lobby and finally into the shop – as akin to following the fabled labyrinth to a cavernous treasure trove. And certainly there were many unusual items displayed; the product of three years sourcing stock from around the world: commercial comics both old and new, alternative comics in a variety of formats, French albums, fanzines, art books, prints and portfolios.

***
We moved to the Mid City Arcade in May 1981. We would be there a bit under two years: another nine months in the original shop (16) and about a year over the arcade in a double shop (11 & 12). In mid-1982 we re-opened shop 16, initially to sell rock books and records, then, after the latter proved to be not a success, added a range of books and merchandise about films and TV series with an SF or adventure slant. By early 1983, though, even with two stores, Mid City Arcade was becoming too small for us. So when Colin spotted an old pizza restaurant for rent in Swanston Street, between Little Bourke and Lonsdale Streets, it wasn’t long before we were engaging in another round of renovations and removals.

The rest of the article can be found in Word Balloons 9.

Also reviews of Black House’s The Twilight Age 0 & 1 by Jan Scherpenhuizen “the narrative and layouts are competently handled, but both pencils and inks display an inconsistent level of quality”, The Dark Detective: Sherlock Holmes 0 by Chris Sequiera, Tim McEwan & Phil Cornell “there is no denying the verve with which the work is produced.”, and Pat Grant’s Lumpen Proletariat 5 “his stories are funny and engaging, his art detailed yet clear”.

Word Balloons 8, October 2008

Interview
“I’m just too driven to know when to stop.”
An interview with Jason Badower.
Conducted by Philip Bentley, December 2007 and updated before publication.

Although not a name on every local comic fan’s lips Jason Badower has still forged a career for himself in the US comic industry, working first from Australia, then from 2008 shifting base to Los Angeles. Best known for a number of adaptations of the TV series Heroes (initially online more recently included in the first volume of a trade paperback reprinting) Jason’s career path presents one template for those seeking to establish themselves in the US industry.

Along the way Jason has also worked on some of the more notable local comics of the 1990s and early 00s. He has practised martial arts at an elite level, acted in, produced and been a stunt man for movies, and been a partner in a personal training business and gym.

As well as more work for Heroes he currently has two strips being published: the SF adventure Zero G from Spacedog and True Blood, a web comic based on the HBO TV series currently screening in the States.

Excerpt:
PB: How did you crack the US market? Was that always your intention?
JB: Yes. Every year I’d go up to the Sydney convention with my portfolio to get some feedback. I remember once [US comic artist] Walt Simonson was there and he said to me “This is nice” and “That is nice”, and I said to him “Walt, if I want to hear it’s nice I’ll ask my Mum. I need to know how I can be sitting in your position”. He looked at me and asked “Really?” and I said ”Really!”. So he gave me some incredible insights into my work. Another great help was meeting [US comic writer and editor] Archie Goodwin at another Sydney Con. I asked him what he looked for in an creator. He said “In this order: reliable, nice and talented. I want to know that you can get the work done. I want to know that I’ll enjoy working with you. And if your work’s good then that’s a help too”. So everything from that meeting with Archie Goodwin has been a work in progress of putting together pieces of that person that I need to be. If he had given me a job at the time I wouldn’t have been ready. I didn’t have the discipline, the energy, the intelligence, the experience or the know-how to produce a commercial job.
PB: Had you been submitting work to US publishers?
JB: I only began around 2000, but didn’t get much response. I think the only person who replied was Mike Carlin, editor in chief at DC. He only sent back a postcard saying that he didn’t think I was ready, but it was really nice of him to take the trouble. It was around this time Darren Close approached me about doing some work for Killeroo. At this stage I was working pretty exclusively with JAn [writer JAn Napiorkowski] so I asked Darren if we could do a strip together and he agreed. It was originally going to be a back-up story, but ended up being the lead strip in the second issue. I had loads of fun doing it. Darren was hoping to get a cartoon series of the character up so that inspired me to draw it in a more cartoony style.
The year it came out (2004) I went up to Sydney and was sitting there doing sketches for the few people wandering by and this guy came up to me and said “Did you draw this?” And I said “Yeah” and he replied “Well, we need to talk”. His name was Roger Mincheff and he runs a company called Space Dog that does a lot of cross-media marketing for Top Cow, Mark Silvestri’s company. He’s responsible for video games, TV Shows, movies etc. He said he only had ten minutes, but we got on so well that we talked for an hour and a half and I ended up bringing JAn into the discussion. So I started working for Space Dog.
PB: What sort of jobs?
JB: A number of short stories for the anthology Proximity Effect. I also did ads for Top Cow and eventually ended up with my own book Zero G [which premiered in Sepetember 2008].
PB: How did your work on the Heroes comic come about?
JB: I was doing a lot of art direction for Roger on various books. One of these was drawn by another Australian, Andy Finlayson, and written by Aron Coleite. At some point Aron contacted us and said that he was going to have to give the book away because his TV show had taken off. We said fine, sure, and that was that. But a few months later I was watching Heroes on TV, saw his name and realised this had been what he was talking about. So I sent him a congratulatory email and we got talking. I showed him some of the work I’d been doing, he liked it, and asked if I was interested in doing some issues of the Heroes web comics. I said sure, so he passed my name over to Frank Mastromauro one of the editors at Aspen Comics, who handle the Heroes web comic, and within two hours I had my first script. It was great because I was just getting into the show. To be able to work on something that I really enjoyed and which was becoming a part of the cultural consciousness at the time was a huge kick. People say to me “You’re so lucky”, but there were plenty of people who had his contact details and didn’t follow him up. It was just an example of making your own luck.

The rest of the interview can be found in Word Balloons 8.

Article
My Life in Comics Part VI– Minotaur: the early years 1977-80
by Philip Bentley

Excerpt:
This is the sixth of a series of articles chronicling my path as a comics aficionado in Australia over the past forty years. In this chapter I move onto detailing the steps taken to set up what has become one of Australia’s largest comic shops Minotaur. In this instalment I deal with its establishment phase as a mail-order concern.

In previous instalments I have detailed how a friendship between myself and fellow Melbourne comic fans Greg Gates and Colin Paraskevas, in the 1970s, led to the publication of the comic anthology Inkspots. The other fruit of this friendship was the establishment of the retail business Minotaur (initially Minotaur Imports, then Minotaur Books, now just Minotaur).

In the second chapter (WB 2) I described the importance of Space Age Books to Melbourne comic aficionados in the 1970s. Space Age, though, was first and foremost a retailer of science fiction books that dabbled in comics on the side. Consequently there was never much system about what the shop stocked, leading many local comic fans to having something of a love/hate relationship with the place.

This prompted Colin Paraskevas to float the idea, in September 1976, that the three of us should set up a comic shop to ‘do things properly’. But it wasn’t until the middle of 1977 that we were ready to commit to the project and it was the end of the year before we started officially trading.

Rather than launch out immediately into a shopfront with its associated overheads we decided to take the simpler option of establishing ourselves as a mail order company. We acquired a post office box in Doncaster (near Colin), but the nerve-centre of the operation was located in a newly-built room at the back of my parent’s house. Deliveries were largely sent here and Colin would phone through the orders for me to fill. The business name was my invention seeking to evoke a fantasy-tinged mood that still carried some punch.

In the next instalment I will reveal details of the transition from mail order to shop in the early 1980s and the rise and rise of the venture thereafter.

The rest of the article can be found in Word Balloons 8.

Also reviews of Bobby Nenadovic’s Digested 01“his artwork has developed nicely and is now operating at a professional-looking level”, Sawbones Vol. 1 by Jen Breach & Trevor Wood “owes much to comedic elements found in American situation comedy and newspaper cartoons”, Caanan Grall’s The Middle Ages 1 “a clean, clear, pleasant style” and Crimes to the Face 1 by Ive Sorocuk “has an appealing goofiness”.

Passionate Nomads

Second Shore’s other publication to date (in collaboration with Paper Tableaux) has been Passionate Nomads a graphic story collection containing four tales of women who travelled, lived and loved in the Middle East of the nineteenth century. It is written by myself, with sequentials by some of the finest comic artists in Australia and New Zealand. With a forward by Dylan Horrocks. 44pp, $15.00 + $1.00 post.

Passionate Nomads comprises:
The Amorous Adventures of Jane Digby Her passionate peregrinations through ten countries and as many lovers as told by those who knew her. Twelve self-contained one page strips by twelve artists: Jason Badower, Stephen Campbell, Andrew Finlayson, Greg Gates, Chris Johnston, Jared Lane, Angelo Madrid, Darrel Merritt, Bruce Mutard, Michael Nason, Maria Pena, and Martin Trengove.
The Odalisque and the Tumbler A glimpse behind the curtain into an Ottoman harem. Art by Maria Pena.
Scenes from my Life Lady Isabelle Burton recounts tales of her colourful life at the side of her husband, the explorer Sir Richard Burton. Art by Darrel Merritt.
Mektoub The short but remarkable life of Isabelle Eberhardt: romantic and mystic of the Sahara. Art by Maria Pena.

Samples of the strips can be found at http://www.users.on.net/~dmerritt/nomads/gallery/Introduction.html

Passionate Nomads or its participants gained four Ledger Awards (Australian comics' equivalent of the Oscars) in 2006:
Best Book- Passionate Nomads
Best Story- "The Amourous Adventures of Jane Digby"
Best Writer- Philip Bentley
Best Design- Darrel Merritt


The introduction follows below…

The stories in this book detail journeys made geographically, culturally and spiritually by four remarkable women. At a time when Western women were largely excluded from intellectual and social discourse, these women pushed the bounds to live more fully and passionately. To do so, they took a step outside of their own culture and embraced elements of trans-cultural identity, even if, at the same time, they remained within another discourse, that of Orientalism: the way the West has perceived the East as dark, mysterious and exotic.

For me, personally, the work also represents a journey that I wasn’t really aware I was on until recently. As a devotee of the graphic story (or comic) medium, I have long been interested in works which push the boundaries of the art-form. During the 1980s, I sought to make a contribution to this cause through contributing to, and helping to publish, two Australian ‘alternative’ comics: Inkspots (1980-84) and Fox Comics (1984-1991). Whilst at times, in the former, we allowed readability to be sacrificed in the pursuit of ‘Art’, with the latter, I discovered that innovation could be combined with a satisfying story; that boundaries can be pushed thematically as well as via technique.

It was thinking such as this that led me, in the late 1980s, to begin producing graphic story biographies on the four women whose lives were documented in Lesley Blanch’s The Wilder Shores of Love (1954). There was no great agenda in choosing this book or subject – it was the one that was to hand and I liked her colourful turn of phrase. But I was also interested in dealing with a genre rarely attempted in the comic medium. As a challenge, I decided to write the strips using four different narrative techniques. I started fairly simply, utilising an aside from the life of Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, which, drawn by Maria Pena, saw print as “The Odalisque and the Tumbler” in Fox 16 (1987). From there things became more involved. The strip on Isabel Burton detailed her entire life as a first person reflection, whilst that on Isabelle Eberhardt, not only covered her entire life, but drew on biographical sources other than Blanch as well. As chance would have it, the latter strip, “Mektoub”, also drawn by Maria, appeared first, in Fox 23 (1989). The piece on Isabel Burton, “Scenes From My Life”, passed through a number of artists before reaching Darrel Merritt. Unfortunately, he had not completed it by the time the Fox was discontinued in the early 1990s. Instead, it was printed in another local anthology, Cyclone Comics Quarterly 3 (1994).

The Fox’s demise also put paid to any thoughts I had of completing the quartet. Indeed, at this time, my own life took a divergence from comics. I left the comic shop I had helped to found, Minotaur Books, and entered university as a mature-age student. For ten odd years I had only a casual interest in comics. Then, around the turn of the century, I found my interest growing again. Despite feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle, I found that re-entering the field as an uninformed outsider was a liberating experience. In the interim, David Bird, whom I had worked with on the Fox, had started his own small comic company, Paper Tableaux. Inspired by a collection he published of another Inkspots/Fox alumni, Greg Gates, [Strange Worlds, 2003], I realised that I too had a collection of my own to hand; although it needed the addition of the final biography to complete it. Thus, without really intending to, I found myself returning to comics writing.

Ironically, my trajectory at university had seen me end up with a MA in history, and go on to practice as a professional historian. However, I quickly realised that there was a difference between the history I write for a living and these works which I see more as drama than documentary. Whilst I have generally endeavoured to remain truthful to the ‘facts’, with time, there has still been a subtle shift in orientation. With the final story, “The Amorous Adventures of Jane Digby”, I have not let the ‘facts’ impede the narrative. In fact, I have found the ability to alter events to suit to be a pleasing antidote to the straight-jacket imposed by history writing.

The other distinctive element with the Digby strip, is how it has been adapted. Drawing comics is a labour intensive activity, and since there weren’t great prospects of financial remuneration from this project, I could see it taking years to produce if it was undertaken by an artist working on it after-hours. Given that biography lends itself to an episodic structure, I came up with the notion of producing a series of self-contained, one-page strips which could be illustrated by separate artists. Inspired by a trend in current TV documentaries, I decided to have each page narrated by a different person who had known Digby, as if they were being interviewed about her life.

Unless you are a writer/artist, the process of comic creation is going to be a collaborative affair. Anyone who has collaborated in any endeavour will know how it can be both frustrating and rewarding. Whilst the ideal outcome is a synergistic melding of talents, there is always the danger of the results will display the worst of both worlds. This has certainly been the case in comic strips I have worked on. In some cases the story has been given flight by a sensitive adaptation, in others, artists have trampled all over the script. In this case though, I was proposing juggling no less than twelve artists in a format that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been tried before. If it worked I would hopefully gain an integrated number of takes on a shared subject, if it didn’t, I could end up with a collection of uncohesive pages.

In choosing artists, I initially tapped into to old Inkspots/Fox network and was gratified by the number who were prepared to participate. However, from the outset, I had decided that I didn’t want this to be a comic version of the Return of the Magnificent Seven. It needed contemporary artists as well. In choosing these, I was swayed both by work seen and recommendations from those I knew. Undoubtedly, there were many more that I could have approached, but having been out of the loop for over a decade I admit to being self-conscious in approaching strangers out-of-the-blue.

As the work has progressed, the book has become something of an outlet for local artists who have something to prove. Australia only had a commercial comic industry in the 1940s and 1950s, pre-TV and when war-time import bans prevented US comics from being locally distributed. Since that time, aspiring comic creators have largely had to be satisfied by whatever amateur and semi-professional publications were around. Until recently, working overseas really required you travelling and/or living there. Hence, a whole generation of potential writers and artists have either ceased creating or have moved sideways into allied vocations, such as graphic design or storyboarding. But many clearly still feel they have unfinished business with the field. Moreover, over the past few years, the communications revolution has made it more viable for local artists to work for overseas publishers from home. Therefore, there is now a younger generation looking for exposure. These two groups have come together to work on this project.

This work also makes a contribution to a small, but to my mind important, genre of comics which for want of a better word I have termed ‘naturalistic’; that is, stories, be they fictional or not, that are set in the real world, but aren’t necessarily autobiographical or slice-of-life. These days I can summon up little enthusiasm for the larger-than-life tales that have been the mainstay of English-speaking comics for much of their existence. For me, ‘naturalism’ is a viable means of pushing the medium beyond its current bounds.

The book has also gained an unexpected resonance as a result of the troubled times in which we live. Twenty years ago I could not have predicted that stories involving the sympathetic treatment of Arab-European relations, including cross-cultural marriage and conversion to Islam would come to possess a heightened political dimension. That it has demonstrates, I feel, how much we still live in the shadow of our xenophobic Victorian forebears.

Philip Bentley, November 2005.

Word Balloons 7, May 2008

Interview

“I want to develop an intimate relationship with the text.”

An interview with Nicki Greenberg.
Conducted by Philip Bentley, 26/02/08.

Without really planning it Nicki Greenberg has become something of the face of literate graphic stories in this country. Following the successful publication of her unique adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby last year she has been feted in the news media and at writers festivals around the country.
To discover the path she has followed to reach this point I have placed her under the spotlight (or beside the microphone) as this issue’s feature interview. In the interview you will read of her multi-faceted career as cartoonist, author and lawyer, her youthful creative endeavours, her path to and through the momentous task of adapting one of the major works of twentieth century literature and what she plans to do for an encore.

Excerpt:

PB: Tell us something of your childhood. I’m guessing you wrote and drew a lot.
NG: I’ve been writing and drawing for as long as I can remember. As a child I was constantly scribbling. I was the kid who would get told off in class for doodling while the teacher was talking. And I loved writing stories.
PB: What about comics. Where do they come in?
NG: When I was about seventeen I started drawing these little page long cartoon strips. They were semi-autobiographical stories about my character Bug. I loved doing them and soon started doing other strips, gradually getting more and more into it. What really blew open the comic world for me was when I went over to Canada on a student exchange in my final year of Uni, 1996. Over there (in Montreal) I met other cartoonists and got involved in comic jams and anthologies with them. When I got back I started to meet people in the Melbourne indie comics scene and contributed to various anthologies like The Pointy End, Tango and Silent Army.

* * *

PB: I gather you first encountered The Great Gatsby at school.
NG: I studied it in my Year 12 Literature class. I completely fell in love with it.
PB: Was it always your desire to adapt it?
NG: No, I probably didn’t get the idea until about 1999.
PB: How did the project develop? Were the characters always going to be cartoon creatures?
NG: Yes, but the original drawings were much more detailed than what I ended up with. Although they didn’t look like Edward Gorey pictures they still had that level of line work. I don’t know how many decades that would have taken. [Laughs.] I’m glad that I simplified the characters, not simply because it meant I got the work done in six years rather than sixteen, but because it made the characters look more lively and immediate. Their expressions were fresher and I think it helped the look of the book. So the first step was doing all the character studies. I then did a lot of research to get source material for the sort of houses, buildings, gardens and cars of the period.
PB: Was it always going to be designed like a photo album?
NG: Yes. I love to look of panels on a black page and that’s probably what got me thinking in that direction at the beginning.
PB: Was there a concern with doing it like that that you might lose some of the sequential movement from panel to panel?
NG: I tried to be very careful to make it easy to read. Quite a bit of thought went into the placement of the panels on the page. There’s a lot of intuitive nudging of frames slightly closer together or a little bit higher or lower so that it feels natural to read. I did want to have a lot of black space around the frames, especially for readers who aren’t used to the very compacted nature of the traditional comic page. I wanted it to act as a sort of breathing space for the eye.
PB: Did you look at other examples of comic adaptations of literary works, like Hunt Emerson’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Knockabout, 1986) or even Classics Illustrated?
NG: No, I didn’t look at anything. Nor did I look at any of the movie adaptations. I wanted to lock myself away with just the text. It wasn’t until I was a good way through it that I read biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wanted to develop an intimate relationship with the text.
PB: When in the creative process did you find a publisher? I’m assuming that at the beginning you just started on spec hoping to find a publisher down the track. And to begin with you must have needed to maintain quite a bit of faith in it and yourself.
NG: Yes, it’s a bit like Gatsby’s mad dream. [Laughs.] I always wanted it to be published, but I had been working on it for five years before I found one. During that time I had some other books published, but they weren’t graphic novels. In some ways I tried not to think of the possibility of it not being published. [Laughs.] When I first showed it to Allen & Unwin, which was after I had been at it for a couple of years and had done 100 pages of finished work, they were very enthusiastic, but at that stage to put out a graphic novel in Australia was a big challenge. A major problem was the varying copyright periods around the world. It was out of copyright here, but not in Britain or the US, and if they couldn’t publish it in those markets they didn’t think it would be viable. So it was really exciting when a bit later they decided to do it.
PB: What had changed?
NG: I think it was a whole cultural shift thing. Partly it was because the market is more receptive now.

* * *

PB: The next graphic novel you are working on is Hamlet. Why another adaptation? Why another set text?
NG: I love the process of adapting and I find it endlessly fascinating to engage with a brilliant text. You add your own interpretation, but you’re mining something that is very rich. It’s like asking a musician why they keep playing Beethoven. [Laughs.] It’s because it’s something you can draw so much from. I could make up a story of my own, but at the moment I am getting so much out of the dialogue with these amazing texts. Hamlet is an extraordinary play, and one which has been explored and reinterpreted for centuries. It’s inexhaustibly fascinating, because it keeps on making us engage with those huge eternal questions about our existence. Irresistible!

The rest of the interview can be found in Word Balloons 7.

Article

My Life in Comics Part V: Inkspots–the later years 1981-84.
by Philip Bentley

This is the fifth of a series of articles chronicling my path as a comics aficionado in Australia over the past forty years. These articles have been inspired partially by a sense of nostalgia, but also to record certain aspects of the local comics scene for posterity. These are firstly, the patterns of comic collecting in the 1960s and 1970s, a process that has been irrevocably changed by the arrival of comic stores; secondly, the beginnings of comic fandom in Melbourne and Australia; and lastly, my reflections on the establishment and running of two comic magazines and a shop (Inkspots, Fox Comics and Minotaur). Primarily these are my recollections alone and make no claims to be the authoritative view. It would be interesting to see more recollections, especially from those in other states.

In this chapter I chronicle the later years of the early 80s Australian alternative comic Inkspots ; a salutary reminder of how creative endeavours can go haywire even with the best of intentions

Excerpt:
In the last instalment (WB 5) I detailed how in the mid-1970s Greg Gates, Colin Paraskevas and myself undertook to publish a comic anthology initially with the intention of seeing our own work in print, then as the project progressed including others as well.

One reason the project expanded was that there weren’t any comparable publications in Australia at this time. Indeed, there were hardly any local comics being published period, neither at a commercial, nor even at a small-press level.

Following the release of Inkspots 1, in the middle of 1980, we began to plan the next volume. Whilst the year it took to produce was considerably quicker than the five it had taken for the first one it still seemed to move at a snail’s pace. Again we were hamstrung by all creators working on it after hours given projected sales were not enough to allow us to pay contributors.

I am not conscious that our philosophy for the production of issue two was significantly changed. Certainly, from my perspective, I was still looking for works that pushed the envelope creatively. Instead, changes were made in the production values, with the magazine being printed by a major printer on slick paper and with colour inside the cover as well as out (the interior remained in B&W). Once again there were a great diversity of styles on parade, even more than the first issue. This is something I think I saw as a strength at the time, but now tend to feel took the issue in too many directions at once. Carry over creators from issue one included myself, Greg, Colin, Chris Johnston, Stephen Campbell, Darrel Lindquist, Stuart Mann, Martin Trengove, Phil Lyng & Trevor Sumper. They were joined by Russell Edwards, Tony Crooks, Malcolm English & Ian Eddy. However, the most striking new contributions came from Fil Barlow and Phil Kanlides, both then just eighteen and chock full of talent and confidence.

Inkspots 1 had primarily been distributed through US comic distributors. With this issue we took the plunge by adding the local newsagent distributor Gordon & Gotch. At the time this was not a difficult task to achieve. From memory we gave them 2,000, keeping another 1,000 for overseas distributors and our own sales. Sales were, however, were modest. From memory we achieved a sell through rate of sixteen percent across Australia, peaking in the mid-twenties in Melbourne and Sydney, but dropping into single digits in more far flung rural areas.

Whilst I may not have been surprised by these results it was still a disappointment. Although I think I was more hung up on the ‘comics as art’ ethos than Colin or Greg I was still needled by this perceived failure and for a time became more compelled to achieve higher sales. So our emphasis for issue three became to make the book more accessible by including stories with a greater emphasis on narrative and continuing characters. As time wore on, plans were made, meetings were had, strips were started, but it seemed the harder we pushed the longer things took.

The rest of the article can be found in Word Balloons 7.

Also, reviews of Bruce Mutard’s The Sacrifice “the first in a trilogy of graphic novels that may indeed dare to dream such a thing as ‘the great Australian graphic novel’ exists”, Rooftops by Mandy Ord “an elegy to inner city life and her own idiosyncratic spiritual search”, Skye Ogden’s Vowels “a gem of a book” and Love Puppets by Grug & Mcleod “a romantic soap opera of the best kind”.

Word Balloons 6, October 2007

Interview

“You end up feeling a bit like Indiana Jones at times.”

An interview with Mick Stone.

Conducted by Philip Bentley, August 2007

Having interviewed a variety of artists and writers in previous issues, I thought it was high time that I looked at the other end of the scene, namely that of collectors and dealers.

Mick Stone has been passion-ate about comics for much of his life and growing up in the 1940s and 50s meant that he had a healthy exposure to home-grown titles, as well as US characters in reprint. His experiences, then, take the saga of collecting comics in this country, that I have been chronicling in my own recollections, back a decade.

Mick is the proprietor of Melbourne’s Camberwell Books and Collectables
www. camberwellbooks.com.au. He also made a significant contribution to the 1990s history of Australian comics Bonzer (Elgua Media, 1998), in particular through his index of all known titles 1900-60; something I found an invaluable resource in preparing this interview.

Excerpt
PB: I’m interested in your early experiences with comics. The question of how you discovered them is perhaps a bit redundant given that they were a fairly ubiquitous part of childhood during this period.
MS: That’s true. I was a pretty early reader. I can recall around 1949, at the age of four, reading the comic strips in the Herald every night; things like Mandrake the Magician. The other two primary forms of entertainment for kids at this time were radio serials and movies of a Saturday afternoon, and they, and comics, all complemented one another. I can remember sitting next to the radio, it was one of the big furniture style ones in the corner of the lounge room, listening to Tarzan and Superman. I found out later that Leonard Teale [Australian actor who went on to be a mainstay of local TV] played both characters with his rich, mellow voice.
PB: And comics?
MS: Heaven was to have a bunch of comics. One of the seats of urban power among boys at this time was to have a fantastic collection. There was an old lady over the back fence who had a collection of comics and we used to traipse over there and borrow them. These were titles like Captain Marvel [Australian reprints of the American Fawcett line]. There was also an older girl down the road who had a box full of various titles and I would go there and read them. You would also borrow and swap comics with your friends.
PB: What were some of your favourite comics or characters from that period?
MS: Well, everyone loved the Phantom [reprints of US newspaper strips, published by Frew from 1948 to the present]. I think I started reading him in the late 1940s when he was in the Women’s Mirror. He’s a sort of a peculiar Australian phenomenon who’s far more popular here than he is in America. And if you had a bunch of comics, the Phantom was always the one your father would want to read. [Laughs.]
PB: What other titles did you like?
MS: There was Mandrake the Magician [another US newspaper strip reprinted here as both strips and comic books]. I think I was in love with Narda, she was this beautiful, cleanly drawn woman. I was also a great fan of the Disney material [Australian reprints published by Walter Granger, 1946-78], especially the Carl Barks stories, although I wasn’t aware of who he was at the time. [Because Disney didn’t run credits.] He had a luminescent sort of art and favoured stories about lost civilizations and the like. I’ve had a fascination with archaeology ever since, and in the early 1970s saw a lot of ancient ruins on an extended tour of Africa.

* * *

PB: Any particularly memorable tales of finding ‘lost’ collections?
MS: When I returned from overseas it was clear that there was a prime collection out there because many of my friends had acquired some classic titles: things like Fatty Finns Weekly and other comics from the 1940s, all in mint condition. We were all mates, but no-one wanted to give away their sources. Anyway, [fellow collector] John Melloy’s wife let slip that he had seen an ad in the Age, so I went straight to the State Library and looked in the For Sale column of all the Saturday Ages for the eighteen months that I had been away. Sure enough there it was, an ad saying “Old Comics For Sale”. So I rang the number and explained to the bloke, because he wanted to know, how I had got onto him. He was a travelling salesman and it was clear he had been sourcing the goods from a country town, but he wouldn’t say where. Well, some time later, I was chasing old bottles at a bottle collectors show at Williamstown. In the swap and sell section I saw this collection of old comics and magazines. Don’t ask me how, but I knew instantly that they were from the same mother lode. I overheard the proprietor tell someone that he had stopped off at this shop in Talbot [Central Victoria] and that it was like walking into yesterday. So I rang the Talbot Post Office and described what I was looking for and they said: “Oh, that’ll be the Weilandt’s Store”. As I later discovered, Mr Weilandt had taken the shop over in the 1920s as a going concern and had never returned anything. There were sheds and barns out the back full of stock. He had actually died a few months before, but I made an arrangement with his son to go up and view it. I went up with [fellow collector] Ian Atkinson and there it was; it was like entering Tutankhamen’s tomb, or maybe another pharaoh as it had been ‘raided’ over time and not all the material was still there. There was something like a ten foot high stack of Pals magazine, all with their original football inserts; not so many comics, but lots of old toys. Some time later I compared notes with [another collector] Colin Williams, who had acquired a lot of stock from the traveller while I was overseas. Colin told me how he was looking at them all one night and he decided that the answer must be in the issues themselves: “They know where they’re from”. A lot of them were unclaimed subscription copies that had surnames on them. So he took a note of all the names and then starting from the more unusual surnames began to cross-reference them against the electoral roll. After only three of four names he had locked in to Talbot. I thought that was brilliant deduction. So he started going up there and buying in small portions. Mr Weilandt would say “That’s four pence ha’penny and three more at nine pence, that’s two shillings seven pence ha’penny, that’ll be twenty-seven cents”. He was just charging cover price on everything.

The rest of the interview can be found in Word Balloons 6.

Article

“Hearken to Me Faithful Ones!”
The Rise & Fall of Newton Comics.

by Robert Thomas

Editor's introduction

At first glimpse, the Newton Comics venture may appear to have been little more than a failed attempt to reprint Marvel Comics in Australia. But as Robert Thomas shows in this article the Newton experiment was much more. It was part of a colourful episode in Australia’s publishing history led by the larger than life Maxwell Newton.

Whilst those of my generation may have dismissed the line as mere reprints, and those who grew up in the 80s and 90s may have never heard of it, to those children of the ‘70s Newtons may have been their first exposure to Marvels, or indeed comics. Moreover, the fairly eccentric publishing regimen followed means that the line is full of curious twists and turns that do imbue it with a sort of lovable goofiness. And their scarcity today means some are just as rare as those comics of the earlier age mentioned by Mick Stone in his interview. Philip Bentley

Excerpt:
There were some interesting sales in the Australian comic book market on eBay in 2002. A frenzied bidding war resulted in record prices for the following comic books:

· Amazing Spider-Man 1 $360
· Fantastic Four 1 $204
· X-Men 1 $204
· Incredible Hulk 1 $202
· Silver Surfer 1 $112

The Comic Price Guide website comicspriceguide.com currently values a near mint copy of Amazing Spider-Man 1 at around US$40,000, so why is $360 considered a record? More like a bargain price surely? That would be true if referring to the original Marvel version from the USA. However, this is the Australian comic reprint. $360 for a 30¢ black and white reprint? So what’s the story here?

The tale begins with the Perth-born journalist and newspaper entrepreneur Maxwell (Max) Newton. The company in question was Newton Comics, which during 1975-76 was licensed to reprint Marvel comics for the Australian market. Maxwell Newton (1929-90) has been described as brilliant, complex, creative, driven, gifted, passionate, unorthodox, excessive, extreme, erratic, and, sadly, ultimately self-destructive. He made friends and enemies, polarising both in equal measure through their loyalty or loathing of him. At the height of his career he rubbed shoulders with politicians and prime ministers, captured the attention of thousands of readers through his news-papers, fought the establishment of the newspaper industry and commanded the respect of his peers with his influential economic and political columns. By contrast, the depths of his career were equally extreme. While constantly battling the life-long demons of booze and prescription drugs, he would endure bankruptcy and police raids on his offices. He also, briefly, boasted the largest brothel and pornographic publishing house Melbourne had ever seen, prior to his self-imposed exile to the US in the 1980s.

* * *

In 1971, Maxwell Newton began publishing the Melbourne Observer, later renamed the Sunday Observer, seizing the opportunity to fill a gap left after the paper’s previous owner had closed it down, leaving Melbourne without a locally produced Sunday newspaper.

Having secured updated printing facilities, Newton now had to tackle the problem that many new publishers face when publishing a once-a-week newspaper. The Sunday Observer only saw the presses operating on weekends, therefore Newton needed to publish something during the week to keep the presses running. His solution was two-fold: he used the presses to publish soft-core pornography, pop magazines and comics.

Marvel Comics had revolutionized the comic world in the early 1960s with characters such as the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Uncanny X-Men and other now heroic icons. However It was unlikely that Newton knew what Marvel Comics were besides being a commodity to feed his presses and generate cash. What he did do was employ people who were in the know. One of these was journalist and wheeler-dealer, Martin (Marty) Dougherty.

Dougherty had always had a general interest in comics from a reader’s point of view. Charged with the responsibility of producing comics for Maxwell Newton’s Regal Press, Dougherty travelled to the US and met with Marvel executives, including then publisher Stan Lee, securing a licence to reprint Marvel Comics in Australia. [To be strictly accurate it appears Dougherty met with members of Transworld, the company charged with licensing Marvel characters world-wide, although Stan Lee was apparently in attendance. Ed.] An initial payment of $30,000 was made and Marvel released enough black and white proofs to begin printing the first few comics.

In early 1975 an advertisement was placed in the Sunday Observer seeking an experienced comic enthusiast to edit the upcoming Newton Comics series. Nineteen-year-old Melbourne University engineering student, John Corneille, who was looking for a distraction from his studies, was chosen from the respondents. Corneille was already well-versed in Marvel lore and comics fandom in general [see “My Life in Comics” in WB 2 & 4] and his knowledge would prove invaluable in his position as editor.

Marty Dougherty was keen to emulate the up-beat Marvel style bulletin and letters pages and so John Corneille became ‘Gentle John’, the editor and respondent for the “Marvel Mailbag” letters page. Corneille recalls, “The name ‘Gentle John’ was coined by Marty. I still cringe when I hear it!”

The first Newton Comics titles rolled off the presses in May 1975 accompanied by the biggest advertising campaign for comic books ever seen in Australia. The first titles, published in fortnightly rotation, were Amazing Spider-Man, Planet Of The Apes, Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the Incredible Hulk. The forty-four page comics sold for 30¢ [as against the imports which were 25¢ for thirty-two pages of which only twenty were story, Ed.] and were published in black and white with colour covers and colour super-hero posters in the centre.

Maxwell Newton flooded the market with thousands of comics. The heavy promotion initially paid off with sales of up to 30,000 recorded for the first issues, dropping to around 20,000 for the second and third issues. After a few months sales had dropped to 6,000-8,000 per issue. It soon became apparent that sales projections were grossly overestimated, with print runs being too high and returns from newsagents being substantial. Marty Dougherty returned from the 1975 Christmas holiday break to find Maxwell Newton had closed the venture down during his absence. Dougherty persuaded Newton to resume publishing with a revamp of titles and schedules.

The rest of the articles can be found in Word Balloons 6.

Also reviews of Nicki Greenberg’s The Great Gatsby “an audacious work”, Something Weird Quarterly 2 “original takes on the notion of ‘horror’”, Bedford & Pop’s The List “a tightly paced psycho thriller” and Shiranui by Gary Lau “a visually striking project let down by some basic flaws in the story”.