Looks like I was wrong! Eddie Spagetti and his relation, Eddie Spaghetti, are NOT appearing at the 2014 Rotary Cartoon Awards, as I announced earlier. My invitation to the event arrived in the mail recently, and I have been reliably informed that Balloon Dog Eddie has taken his place! Now that my holiday is over and I have returned to Queensland, I must begin to prepare my Ned Kelly - Monty Wedd speech....

Having arrived back in Queensland (only yesterday evening), I have just learnt the ZICS Team had a wonderful write up in last week's The Sunday Mail (which I have not yet read or even seen). Comic-Con will be happening in Brisbane soon after the ZICS weekend, and the Australian Cartoonists' Association have just announced their line-up for their Sydney workshops prior to the Stanley Awards Night (more of that later), and then it will be Adelaide then Brisbane's turn for the Supanova Pop Culture Expo.... Comic-related activities seem to be happening all around us lately: are you going to join in some of the activities?

First things first, for me, however, is moving all our possessions and settling into our new home....and going back to work (my first shift is night duty tonight)....!! Somewhere along the way too, I must begin working on preparing the Third Issue of Oi Oi Oi!...

This is going to be my last Blog in a little while. Tomorrow Elouise Quinlivan and I are holding a comic-related workshop at The Edge, Southbank, as a prelude to the Zine and Independent Comic Symposium (ZICS) that I have talked about before. In case you have not being paying attention, the Symposium is being Launched on Friday the 29th of August and runs all through the weekend until Sunday August 31st...

The Launch Party on Friday evening will feature "a variety of creative activities, music and an opportunity to mingle and share a drink with some of Australia’s best creative talents from the zine and indie comic world."

A zine and comic fair will be held on the Saturday and Sunday, and local and interstate artists like Jase Harper and Michael Fikaris will not only be attending, but also launching new books! Other artists and writers will showcase their creations for sale and trade, and a range of workshops and panels -- from beginners to advanced master classes -- will be conducted.

Now if you have not done so already, I would urge that you get your cartooning hats on, because August 22nd is the closing date for the entries to the 2014 Rotary Cartoon Awards. I have already detailed the categories and given information on how to enter the Awards, so won't repeat myself here. (Sorry, you will have to check my past postings yourself if you DO wish to enter!) 

The Award Ceremony, which IS what I want to talk about here, is being held at the Bunker Cartoon Gallery in Coffs Harbour on September 20th....and YOU are invited! Yes, I am personally inviting you!


The festivities begin at 6 p.m., with some fabulous world-class live entertainment by none other than Eddie Spagetti. This will be worth the entry price of only $25 alone! Following this entertainment, there will be an opportunity to honour one of Australia's greatest comic storytellers, illustrators and historians, the late Monty Wedd. Both Monty's son, Justin Wedd, and myself will speak of the great man, as we Officially Launch the Comicoz book Ned Kelly, Narrated and Illustrated by Monty Wedd. Copies of the book will be available for sale on the night, and Justin and I will only be too happy to sign and personalise your copy. Of course, all this takes place before the main event of the night: the naming of the official winners of the 2014 Rotary Cartoon Awards.

I know you want to rub shoulders with Australia's top Cartoonists and Artists, so to obtain your tickets to the event, please click here.  The $25 price tag includes drinks, finger food and all the live entertainment, with the night expecting to end at about 10 p.m. I hope to see you there! Please don't be shy - come up and say "Hullo!" to me and tell me you decided to come along based on this Blog's Personal Invitation! I hope, too, that you can now understand why this Blog entry today is going to be my last for a little while: I have got to start working on my speech!

For all the patient people who made Pledges to purchase this little beauty with Monty Wedd's Ned Kelly...your time has come! Rob Feldman is now signing, packing and posting your copies as we speak! Just give him some latitude, as he has a few orders to fill! I know he will have completed the task when I get my copy (I am last on the list)! If you want to ensure you don't miss out, please order a copy from the Comicoz web-store (click here to be directed there) or contact Rob directly...  For those not in the know, here are some samples of Rob's work...

Today marks the beginning of the Ned Kelly Weekend at Beechworth in Victoria (click here for more information), and I had planned to go, if only my roster had allowed me to do so. So, for anyone who does go, please let me know how the weekend went and make me extremely jealous... In the meantime, to ease my disappointment somewhat, I see that Mark Juddery's article on Monty Wedd's Ned Kelly (and other Australian comic superheros) was published in The Spectator this week. Thanks, Mark! For future posterity, here is a transcript of the article...

Recently I was sent a graphic novel, or as we might have called it in the past, a collection of comic strips. This hardback volume, published (with the help of crowdfunding) by comics aficionado Nat Karmichael, contains artist Monty Wedd's 146-part 'true crime' biography from the 1970s, Ned Kelly. Wedd was a history buff as well as an accomplished artist, so his vis­ual detail was impressive, as was his day-by-day scrutiny of the short lives of the Kelly Gang (which, like the short lives of Elvis and Marilyn, have been chronicled profusely over the decades).

Comics seem like an ideal medium for the story of Ned Kelly. Then again, so does everything else. Kelly is such a folk legend, it's a bonus that he actually existed. His story inspired the world's first feature film in 1906 (a mere 26 years after his death), kickstart­ing the Australian film industry, in which bushrangers were as cool as the gunslin­gers of Hollywood westerns. He has also been the star of folk song, television, musi­cal comedy and, my personal favourite, an alternate-world novel (by a Sydney-based science fiction master, the late A. Bertram Chandler) in which he survives, starts a revo­lution against his British rulers and becomes the first President of Australia.

The comic strip, however, didn't need to change history to be thrilling. (At least, no more than your average based-on-a-true­-story drama.) Wedd had made his name in the 1950s with some very popular adventure comic books, most famously Captain Justice, about a (fictitious) bushranger. Bushrangers were one of his specialities. His next comic strip, Bold Ben Hall, told of the life of anoth­er bushranger.

Ben Hall has also been popular with mythmakers (including film-maker Mat­thew Holmes, who has started a feature film about Australia's second-favourite outlaw), but the appeal of Kelly is unbeat­able. Strangely, our film-makers haven't had much success with Kelly's story since around 1920. The 1970 film starring Mick Jagger (a casting decision that would have seemed commercial astute at the time) was a notorious failure. Heath Ledger did slightly better in 2003, though the film didn't bring the crowds.

But reading the comic strip, one is struck by one lesson it can provide Australia's con­stantly beleaguered film industry. The most famous image of Kelly is his armour, even though he only wore it for less than a day (and it ultimately wasn't much use to him). The armour was the most famous image of the 1906 film, and was missing from the promotional posters of the 1970 and 2003 versions (which foolishly thought that their respective stars' faces were enough). Unwieldy as it was, the armour turned Kelly into a masked avenger. Thanks to the mask, he was a matinee idol and comic strip hero — a superhero of sorts. Not one of those do-gooders like Superman or Batman, who will not kill even the most terrible villains, but one of those vigilantes like Mad Max or Wolverine, who will happily kill if that's what it takes.

Australians have always loved super­hero comics. In 1951, during the 'golden age' of comics, 50 million comic books were sold in Australia. These included Australian reprints of US titles, as well as the adven­tures of local heroes like Dr Mensana, Cap­tain Midnight, the Panther, Silver Starr and the Crimson Comet (who was created by John Dixon, the artist behind Air Hawk and the Flying Doctor). Even in 1983, well after the golden age, Australians spent $17 million just on comics published by the US publisher Marvel — considerably more (on average) than Americans. Marvel even announced a new character called Captain Australia (alias Keith Bennett, son of a sheep station owner), whose name sounded bushranger-like. Noth­ing ever became of him.

We did our own superheroes perfectly well, thank you. A few years later, The South­ern Squadron — a superhero sitcom starring a Melbourne bogan, a Sydney metrosexual, a tough feminist and Croatian werewolf --was selling considerably better in Australia than any of the American imports, despite being published in black-and-white rather than the full-colour treatment enjoyed by Wonder Woman or the X-Men.

Nowadays, Australia's superheroes seem to have faded from memory. The makers of The Southern Squadron later broke into the US market, leaving their own creations behind. Still, if you have a copy of The Crim­son Comet or Captain Midnight packed away in your grandfather's attic, you might well start a bidding war on eBay.

Meanwhile, of course, American super­heroes are still filling movie theatres, often played by Australians. Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine (who's Canadian) and Chris Hemsworth plays Thor (who's technically from Asgard, realm of the gods, though he's often referred to as 'Norse). These general­ly rely on Hollywood budgets, but Australia has the talent to make an impressive-looking movie. (Take, for example, the special effects teams behind The Matrix or The Wolverine.) Some of our best movies this year — The Rover, Predestination, These Final Hours —are sci-fi films that look considerably more expensive than they are.

So perhaps we should consider spin­ning our superhero comics into movies. Sure, not many people under 40 have heard of the Southern Squadron, but nor were most people familiar with Iron Man before Marvel Films made him one of their biggest properties.

But what happened to the Southern Squadron, anyway? Their creator, David de Vries, now lives in South Australia, where he dabbles in (among other things) indie film-making. His work so far, including the suspense thriller Carmilla Hyde (2009), shows that his visual sense translates well to the movies. A movie based on The South­ern Squadron would need to be tongue-in-cheek, but then it always was, from their first appearance, when Nightfighter — the most racist, sexist, obnoxious (and hence, most popular) member of the team — yelled out `Hold on to your braincells, we're here!!!'

At first, the idea of Australian super­hero films might seem ludicrous. But com­pared to some successful Australian films of the past (come on, are our superheroes really as weird as The Piano?), it makes per­fect sense.

Just a short note to suggest you go over to the Comicoz Store tab (Click here) and order a copy of Rob's book! Just thought that an understated plug might encourage you to take a look-see! And, besides, it is past my bed-time!

There are innumerable comments I could be posting here, today, on this Blog.

1. Rob Feldman's book has arrived from the printer and is now available for sale from the Comicoz Store.
2. Ned Kelly, Written and Narrated by Monty Wedd is going to have its first National Launch at the Bunker Cartoon Gallery on September 20th.
3. Mark Juddery has written an great article about Ned Kelly and the Southern Squadron in The Spectator magazine, released yesterday.

Instead, I am going to talk about a cartoon published in an Australian daily newspaper on July 26th. This one, by Glen Le Lievre....

Over the past few days, there has been widespread reader and community reaction to Glen's cartoon, used to illustrate a piece of opinionated writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on the Gaza conflict. It seems to me that the reason - ten days later - that the newspaper has decided to issue a public apology for running it in the first place and removing it from the web-site seems somewhat flimsy.

The Sydney Morning Herald now says it "deeply regrets the upset the image has caused", and feels "it was wrong to publish the cartoon in its original form". It was said that the newspaper stands accused of racism for running the cartoon and because it "closely resembled illustrations that had circulated in Nazi Germany...that continue to haunt and traumatise generations of Jewish people".

No matter that the cartoon emanated from the news footage of the more obscene depiction of Israeli citizens sitting in lounge chairs on top of the hills of Sderot and watching the shelling of the Palestinian people in Gaza, almost as casually as if they were watching some live reality television show or playing some sort of computer game.

Although the newspaper now feels "no racial vilification occurred" in the drawing of the cartoon, it was concerned that the use of "the Star of David and the kippah in the cartoon...invoked an inappropriate element of religion" in the cartoon, and for that reason apologised "unreservedly for this lapse, and the anguish and distress that [had] been caused."

My concern is that Glen has illustrated his comment on the Middle East and that someone (apart from Glen) has deemed the subject too controversial to allow it to remain on the newspaper's web-site, and that (retrospectively) it was too hot to run in the first place. The cartoon should be allowed to stand on its own merits as a piece of commentary that, while it may not reflect the beliefs of the Editorial Department of The Sydney Morning Herald, remains an opposing viewpoint to that status quo. Political cartoons are comments just as much as opinion pieces, and both should be allowed to co-exist.  

To remove the cartoon, to my mind, is an act of censorship that reflects poorly on where we stand in Australia today. Removing Glen's creative expression smacks of a organisation that is too scared to express an opposing viewpoint or to back its creative personnel. To my thinking, that is a situation that more closely resembles a situation to eras gone by. (Dare I say, like Nazi Germany?) I thought Australian society had moved more forward in its thinking than that, so I find the decision somewhat dispiriting...

There are only FIVE days to go in this Kickstarter project by Australian comic innovator Sutu, which doesn't give us all a great deal of time to get on over to support this innovative project. But let's do just that! Click here to learn how you can support this Melbourne-based "Augmented Reality comic book" featuring Modern Polaxis, a paranoid time traveller... I have no financial interest in this project succeeding, apart from my own Pledge, but I feel it is well deserving of your support too. What's it all about? Well, head on over before it is too late.... Here's a sneak peek!

"Sutu is a writer, illustrator and interactive designer from Australia. He has a background in creating military HUDs for the Australian Defence Force. After leaving the military in 2007 he pursued a career as a digital story teller. Since then he has created over 20 episodes of interactive digital story content including the Webby award winning Nawlz, an online interactive sci-fi comic series and NEOMAD, an interactive comic book/space opera set in the Australian outback. Sutu has also adapted traditional Australian Aboriginal stories into interactive comics as part of his work with Big hART (a social arts and justice organisation), and created multimedia installations for Australia's National Museum. His work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally and he has been a keynote speaker at numerous international design events and comic festivals."