#curatorsantospirito

[ourcomicsourselves]

Day #7 - Aussie Comic Makers

Sarah Firth is a most WONDERFUL human from Melbourne, Australia. She infuses all of her stories, animations, comics, zines, drawings and art-projects with her most excellent vibes.

So MANY things to talk about with her ... I can't think of where to start. I'll start with when I first met her at Comics-camp back in 2011? I looked at her drawings and saw this overflowing positive-power just oozing out of her pen and I thought to myself "Hmm ... watch out for this one" - she just has this exciting whirl of fun, naughtiness and inclusiveness which I think you can feel in her lines and character designs! (and stories) - everyone just GRAVITATES towards her work. (I've have witnessed this, it's an incredible phenomenon to observe! They might be 100 metres away and looking the opposite direction, but some unseen instoppable force pulls them over! )

SO - what to read by Sarah?? Well - this story is about growing up with her parents' designer chair collection, published at The Nib: Have A Seat (Or Don't)

This is a great short story - the title says what it's about The Day We Didn't Go Into A Brothel

This one is about being haunted by your ex's A Ghost Story

Sarah is working on a longer project that is looking pretty wonderful - Thoughts for a longer work

If you're keen on a longer read - go check out the comic that Sarah made with her wonderful sister Adi Firth Adi & Sarah Draw Life

I also HIGHLY recommend you go check out her Vimeo site as Sarah makes wonderful animations such as "Gentlemen Please" and many of her other projects are really interesting and always with her trademark fun energy.

[ourcomicsourselves]

Pat Grant

Pat Grant is a fine man, and probably the most respected comic-artist/writer in Australia. He’s also a damn fine cook. Recently he organised the inaugural Comic Art Workshop with Liz MacFarlane, it was held down in Tasmania - and it was bloody fantastic, mostly because Pat cooked for everybody for TWO WHOLE WEEKS. It is also a fairly big deal, as it is the first graphic novel workshopping program that has really been organised on this side of the planet (I think).

Pat has such a large backlog of different amazing projects that it feels very difficult to choose images to cover his works thus far - so I have just chosen a random bunch - but I hope you follow all of the links I have placed below - you can read a LOT of his works in-full - online!

Pat’s comics to date have been quite important, and as such - have probably done more to elevate comics to a place of respect than any other works available in Australia. His first graphic novel Blue (which you can read for free online at the link) grew out of Pat’s experience of being in the wrong place at the wrong time during the 2006 Cronulla race riots on the Southern beaches of Sydney back in 2006.

Toormina Video (read it also online for free at the link) is a heart-breaker about his Dad who died of chronic alcoholism.

My opinion of Pat’s art is that it is an example of some of the finest cartooning in the world - he has has an excellent understanding of colour, and his two-colour work in his comics thus far has been outstanding. Check out the stuff online for Ambient Yeast - Pat’s Graphic Novel in progress and you’ll see what a gun he is at watercolour as well.

Pat’s old stuff such as the “I Shit You Not” series of surfers comics

[ourcomicsourselves]

Australian Comic-makers #5 Tricky Walsh Tricky Walsh is a Hobart based artist who makes monolithic sculptures out of wood and other stuff. She does lots of collaborations with her partner Mish Meijers and other people like Sally Rees and Matt Warren and other things. But most importantly she makes comics. She makes standard comics, such as her ongoing Hoppers saga, and her old Dog Man comics (which you can find on her website), as well as Tiefenzeit which is a current art-project that you should jump on her Tumblr to check out - it’s incredible and I do really really hope it turns into a publication. I have always felt the presence of sequential art throughout a lot of Tricky’s fine artworks. She and Mish do this wonderful series of exhibitions called The Collector which stars a character named Henri Papin (who is the obsessional collector of items things that make up the exhibition). As part of a particular major exhibition that they put on for MONA FOMA in Hobart (Tasmania) one year Tricky included a series of drawings that outlined various parts of the exhibition - I was so amazed because it was unmistakably a comic that could be read in multiple directions. Much like maps use similar language to comics but are bound by a different set of established rules. Tricky’s Tiefenzeit seems to combine the obsessional colour paintings (see above) that she has been doing for years with comics and it looks set to become a triumph! I can’t wait!

[ourcomicsourselves]

Australian comics makers #3

Mandy Ord Mandy Ord is a comic-maker who grew up in Canberra (Australia’s capital city) but now lives and works in Melbourne. I think Mandy’s “comics voice” is just so beautiful and idiosyncratic, her one-eyed version of herself is kind of weird when you first see it but she slowly grows to become perfectly normal. She is the comic-artist who made me fall deeply in love with the colour black.

A large amount of her comics are set in Melbourne … sometimes they are about Melbourne, such as her graphic novels Rooftops and her new comic Trains. She has been published in street-press and by larger publishing houses such as her super large collection of comics Sensitive Creatures

[ourcomicsourselves]

Australian Comic-makers/Cartoonists #2 Sam Wallman Sam Wallman is a dynamo artist who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His work is usually political but I also love the political nature of his more observational drawings of people on his instagram @ppplonst. The most impressive comics-project that Sam has been involved with is this comic about the experiences of being a worker at immigration detention centres in Australia - A Guard’s Story - I also point you all to this interview about the making of this super investigative journalist comic: https://www.broadsheet.com.au/sydney/art-and-design/article/global-mail-guards-story Other projects of Sam's In 2014 Sam edited a beautiful anthology of Australian history comics called Fluid Prejudice - the title was taken from a Mark Twain quote - “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice." FP’s main focus was on marginalised Australian histories. The first image by Sam Wallman in this post is taken from this anthology - a glorious cartoon of Sam's that depicts homosexuality and its presence throughout colonial and post-colonial Australia. Sam is currently editing another comics anthology about class which will be coming up in the next year or two. The second image by Sam is about beats around the Yarra River in Melbourne - again, I absolutely love this map as it reclaims the language in a sex-positive way! It is wonderful in its glorious love for the local hook-up culture around Melbourne. I especially love the bottom right panel of the Yarra Boulevard. Another work of Sam’s that really spoke to me was this one about his kayak trips on the Birrarung River - you can read it at the Chart Collective’s website (please also check them out) - Seed Water