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Pages 65-68 (silent comics)

12 Mar

You are currently reading pages from Chapter two (of three),
– go here for the First chapter – Friday.
– Previous pages in Chapter two – Saturday
– or go back to the beginning of Saturday.




By and large – the most enjoyable and satisfying part of doing a wordy comic are the silent bits.
Go here for the next pages – 69-72

I s’pose technically this comic is mostly silent bits as there is narration as written by the main character, which is separate from the images BUT the nicest bits to draw were the quiet parts with no words. I figure that it also gives the reader a bit of a reprieve and some silence to digest the intense flow of ideas, and perhaps what is happening. It also helps to remind me and the reader that the place this is set in is Alice Springs …and there’s lots of places and people floating in and around the desert-town in the worn-down nubs of the Macdonnell ranges.

Silent comics are not things that I’ve ever done much of … but there is a different focus when it’s about movement, action and dynamism are fun too … I haven’t had much of them in this comic … just a few moments here and there to punctuate the stillness, which reminds me living in Alice. Long weeks of seeming stillness, but acts of violence or extreme behaviour occurring in some strange symbiosis with the quiet. Perhaps that’s why I found the place so intoxicating – it’s … quite frankly … a surreal place to live.

When I flew or drove home to Melbourne from the desert to visit my parents, mum used to listen to me talking and tell me that I should “write this all down” because I would forget it. It was only in those moments that I realised that I had a pretty bizarre job and life in the outback. The humdrum of doing a job can fool you into thinking that everyone experiences things like you.

I just finished reading the USA’s Anders Nilsen’s monolithic Big Questions … I can almost not believe the world he created in that extraordinarily beautiful masterwork of comics … go and get it – it’s bloody big, but if you’re into silence and mood it’s truly magnificent.

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Pages 61-64

2 Mar

If you’d like to read the first chapter in its entirety go here – Friday
Previous pages in this chapter (Saturday) – 58-60
Or go back to the start of Saturday

Next pages – 65-68.

So far I’ve managed to complete up to page 84: the end of Chapter Two: Saturday.
Today I begin inking the final chapter … I have to rethink the ending.

The first page here is one of the more important ones to my mind, philosophically speaking that is.
Analysing Indigenous peoples is a little beside the point in this and in many things.
Looking at all of us together, the places of our interaction is more the task at hand.

I suspect that one of the reasons that the topic of Indigenous people is such an explosive topic with so many people (i.e. we are so politically correct, so polarised, so angry on their behalf, so angry the opposite way) is because the majority of us in Australia have mixed feelings about our role in the current state that the large amount of Indigenous people live in. Our role as perpetrators is traumatic for us also. In harming others, we harm ourselves also. In denigrating others we debase ourselves. When people point out our awful deeds as Australians, we are quick to become defensive, quick to blame the victim, quick to place the responsibility elsewhere. I suspect we do this because of our collective sense of guilt.

This is a difficult thing to depict, I hope that my slightly imaginative way of doing is effective.

In many ways, drawing this comic has been my way of unpacking this sense of guilt out and finding a way to think about modern Australia.

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Pages 58-60

21 Feb

Synopsis and overview
First chapter – Friday
Previous pages in Saturday

Pages 58-60 (note page 59 is incomplete at this stage)


Next pages – 61-64
This last page is one of my favourites … the fun part about adapting something is that you can pretty much do anything you want with the words because they have no images associated with them. The image of the old man in the backyard singing the Tingari images with Craig’s words about imagination I thought was a great idea … it took me a little by surprise when I’d finished it and stood back to look at the image … as with all things comic based – it’s hard to imagine what it really will look like until you have finished the damn thing. Perhaps the more experienced people have a better sense of whether something won’t work at all … but I still suspect that even experienced people are taken by surprise when their ideas REALLY work.

As I mentioned in the last blog about the long weekend, the image of the map of Iraq is left unfinished at this point until I can get a copy of Craig’s actual map – even though it was only 100 years ago, it’s amazing how many place names look totally different on the modern map versus the old one. I liked the old map sooo much that I wanted to use it in the comic … so I’m waiting on Craig to take a photo and send a copy to me.

The first page here owes a lot to some of the notes in Bardon & Bardon’s amazing Papunya Tula book. It’s a truly monumental book which details so much about the PT movement in the Western Desert that it’s beyond belief – it’s a little like trying to read Strehlow’s works … it sort of saturates the mind and you kind of … implode a little trying to comprehend what it all bloody means … until you put it down to tend the veggie patch.

In other news – Craig San Roque himself is off to America, the land of the free where you shouldn’t forget to tip. He’s going to visit the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco  and he’s going to present some of this comic in a presentation that he’s doing over there … how terribly exciting. I did attempt to send him a booklet of the first 60 or so pages of this comic by Express Post … but apparently Hobart to Alice Springs would still take 5 working days to arrive at Craig’s doorstep (this is EXPRESS post we’re talking about people) and he leaves for the states on Sunday … so no dice! So – digital it is!!

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Pages 51-57

10 Feb

First Chapter – Friday
For general synopsis and whatnot go to the menu bar at the top and click on The Long Weekend (Graphic Novel)
Previous pages in second chapter – Saturday


Next pages – 58-60.

These pages were endlessly interesting for me – doing lots of ridiculous research into Iraq and Lebanon … the map of Mesopotamia is incomplete as I haven’t had the time to look at Craig’s old map as of yet … but for the sake of people reading this I have put it up anyways. It’s at this part of the essay / comic that the scope of the ideas start to branch all over the planet. Perhaps those readers more accustomed the the Western application of archetypal behaviour will be more at home with the presence of Adonis and Inanna / Ishtar / Venus (and all the other goddess analogues you can think of). The drawings of Saddam Hussein were also fun to do … I checked on the web for photos of him and was a little shocked to find millions of copies of the video of his hanging available for anyone to have a gander at … well, I assume it’s not propoganda material and it’s real, happy to be corrected of course if anyone knows of the details of that video … anyway – I chose to use it, one of the flashes of cameras as he was swinging served as a good model for the drawing. i haven’t decided whether or not I wish to spell it out to the reader what it is they’re looking at or to just leave it as an image … though I appreciate that not all will get that that’s the same bloke as the picture above it with the poor Kurdish folks in the background. any thoughts, comments people? Please leave below.

Hope you’re all well.

Incidentally – Australian comics just got better with Pat Grant’s beautiful Blue now available!!

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Drawings from The Barbarians – MOFO 2012

26 Jan

SO – I just finished being a part of the premiere season of the Barbarians as part of IHOS theatre – here’s lots of stuff that I drew whilst I was sitting around the set in the Hobart City Hall as part of MOFO 2012. I was in the Greek Chorus which didn’t involve much talking, but a lot of costume changes, the last of which  involved us ten blokes being draped in a necklace of offal and being squirted with genuine blood. I assure you that it was a very funny sight to see 10 grown men charging through the backstage area drenched in blood and only wearing their knickerbockers to get to one of the four the showers first. Bravo Constantine Koukias and bravo IHOS – it was tops! And well done to MONA for commissioning this very very very amazing production!

I made a zine of these drawings and others which I gave out to the cast, most people appeared to like it – so that was a success. As an aside, someone gave a copy to Amanda Palmer … hopefully she gives it to Neil Gaiman … who knows. Crazy!! We had sheep in the production … until they ran riot all over the set and placed their faeces and urine everywhere under our bare feet … This was the set they ruined … in city hall in Hobart. This is Ayrton and the donkey (who was far more professional than his sheepish counterparts). The soprano Grace Ovens who was great! The rappers in the show. 

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The Barbarians

14 Jan

I just saw Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics last night as part of the MONA FOMA festival … I felt a bit like I’ve looked inside the universe and understood it.

Also, the following night Nadine and I saw Pierre Henry play. He was in France in his house mixing his music which was filmed and beamed live to the other side of the planet to the big screen. Nadine made a beautiful picture based on it that she put part of here!!

I’m in the supporting cast for IHOS Opera’s The Barbarians at the MONA FOMA (MOFO 2012) … I’ve been making lots of sketches backstage during the rehearsals which I’ll stick up next week when I get a chance to scan them. Constantine Koukias is the director and here’s an article in the Australia Newspaper.

The opera of the Barbarians is based on a poem by the Alexandrian Greek bloke Constantine Cavafy called Waiting for the Barbarians. Here’s a quick comic based on the poster for the opera – I call it: Barbarian (f)art    

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Pages 47-50

8 Jan

Here is the beginning of the second chapter of The Long Weekend – It’s called Saturday.
If you’d like to read the first chapter it’s here – Friday

It has been written and designed to be read as a book rather than online so if you’re the patient sort then you can wait for another year or two whilst I finish off the pages and sort out options for publishing … or alternatively, if you’re the impatient kind of person and you have good connections in the publishing world – you could save me a whole heap of time and send me tips about who to approach.

Next pages – 51-57.

Incidentally, I suggest that some of you who might be interested should check out Palestine by Joe Sacco. It’s from the 90’s, but it suffers from chronic awesomeness. It’s quite related to the LW as Sacco studies the nature of colonisation referencing both Edward Said and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; the latter being directly related to the second chapter of this comic right on this page. I haven’t gotten my dirty hands on Sacco’s new book – Footnotes in Gaza but here’s a good link with an interview with him about it.

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Giants walk among us

4 Jan

One of the first in a series of drawings exploring some ideas for a big comics-based project I have in store for 2012 … the working title is “Sleuth”.

I’ll get stuck into it more when I’ve finished the Damned Long Weekend.

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Cute Marsupials #1 – the Pademelon

2 Jan

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Cradle Mountain Xmas

1 Jan

Here’s a comic from our trip with the German in-laws to Cradle Mountain in the North of Tasmanien last week. I have been to Cradle a few times but this was the first time I actually saw the mountain (i.e. it wasn’t covered in a blanket of cloud and fog and rain) … in fact, it was stunning … I think I can see now why it was made World Heritage Listed.

 

Lots of wombats, pademelons, Bennett’s wallabies, possums, we saw a potaroo (never seen one in the wild before) … and tonnes of skinks. 

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