Launching today! Get you order in today! Here's where you can snag an early bird price! Do it today! You don't want to miss out! Buy a copy (or three!) for the December holiday season!
Click here to find out more! Are you a regular reader to this site? Everyone who comes here gets the scoop before everyone else! This is the top-secret project that Dillon Naylor and I (with artist Ian C. Thomas and my long-time designer-associate Ryan McDonald-Smith) have been working on for the past few months: Rock 'n' Roll Faires. (Want to know some more comic future plans? Keep coming back and reading this site!)
Dillon created these characters for Total Girl magazine around the turn of this century. We've compiled every episode in the six-year run in a new hardcover book that is soon going to be funded by Kickstarter. You heard it here first! The fabulous music in the film clip (above) was performed especially for the campaign by Zac BNJMN & KIARRA, with the amazing animation by Josh Waddell. We're hoping to have the Kickstarter starting real soon: I hope you'll join us in the venture! It's been a mixed bag of a month. No word on the upcoming Air Hawk title yet. Jeremy Macpherson is busy working on the layouts (in between other things he needs to do to earn a living). And I'm getting back to working on Rock 'n' Roll Fairies by Dillon Naylor (and Ian C Thomas) and Iron Outlaw by Fysh Rutherford and Greg McAlpine. As well as other projects. Work has put a kybosh on a lot of things of late. What with the need to be the (Acting) Nurse Unit Manager, and then night duty. With long antisocial hours, no comic work was able to be attended. It's one of those things. And, more recently, we had to put Moo, our dear mate of fifteen years, down earlier this week. Still there were joys earlier in the month. Jeremy Staples organised a Zine Fair to coincide with the Brisbane Writer's Festival. It was the first market that I had done for many a year, and I was able to sell Dillon's comic (Batrisha) and show off his book. The Fair only went for a short time, like three hours in total, but I managed to get a few comics into new homes, making for a worthwhile exercise. Also saw some talented local talents: Knitting Anarchist (who real name I forgot!) and some nice work by Timothy Delaney, as well as meeting Alicia Grady who knows InDesign (always useful to know!) and will take on work... Somewhere in my dreams I have come up with some more comic ideas. But rather than discuss them here, I know I have to prepare for work (*sigh*). Forty-nine weeks until I retire! John Danger Dixon (20th February 1929 - 7th May 2015) was an Australian comic book artist, best known as the creator-writer-artist behind the newspaper comic strip Air Hawk. Although I have much news to share about my personal comic doings in the immediate future, I just want to delay announcing those to spend a moment honouring my friend. It was sixty years ago today (on Saturday the 11th May) that the daily Air Hawk strip first appeared in Australian newspapers. It was some twenty-five years later (in May 1988) that, with John's blessing, I published the first Comicoz issue of John Dixon's Air Hawk Magazine.
From the Melbourne Sun newspaper, an article by Olivia Jenkins. Please spread far and wide by sharing ... "The hunt for original aviation comics by an accidental artist has taken flight as his family works to track down a complete collection of the historic illustrations. "Aeroplane fanatic Norman Clifford had his first comic published in Melbourne with Southdown Press in the 1950s, where they outsold the likes of Marvel and Disney comics. "Now, Mr Clifford's daughter Vicki Sach, is on a mission to find as many of her father's original comics as she can after they flew off the shelves in Melbourne when they were first published. "Mrs Sach said the comics were a local hit that sold out in a hurry because her father began drawing them amid the aftermath of WWII as the Korean War was splashed across newspapers' front pages. " 'His first comic sold out and he even got fan mail for it,' Mrs Sach said. 'The comic was called Sky Demons and it even outstripped the Disney and Marvel titles of the time. " 'He knew nothing about storyboards ... he made the stories up as he went and my mother did the lettering.' "Now 93, Mr Clifford said aeroplanes were always the star of his comics as even main characters came in second to aviation design and flight. 'Airplanes featured as much as the cast,' Mr Clifford said. "Mrs Sach said she needs the public's help to help her and her father locate original copies of his comics as she helps him write his memoir. " 'It would be wonderful to see his face as he need the pages (of his comics),' she said. " 'I'm on a mission.' " Anyone with information, please contact me either by email ([email protected]) or via this webpage page, and I can put you in touch with Vicki. Last year's Comic Arts Awards of Australia's Annual has just recently been released. I'm very proud to have supported the project, despite the 'handicap' of COVID. Not only did I chair the Ledger of Honour Award - okay, bragging time, for the seventh year in a row! - I also placed sponsorship dollars into the venture. I really believe in supporting the creatives, past and present, of the local Australian comic "industry".
Meantime, in order to boost my own revenue to allow me to both publish more Australian comics and comic books (with the emphasis on books) and support local Australian creatives, I am now going to start selling some books and magazines that are more commercially available. The time is coming where I won't be working and drawing a wage, so I need to prepare for the day where my publishing ventures have to be somewhat more independent (or less dependent, if you will) of other means. SO, if you have a particular DC title that you would like to order on a regular basis, please get in touch! I'm going to initially offer a pull list of some of the more popular monthly titles from only $7.50 an issue. (What does your comic book shop charge?) First person to do so will score a free copy of the CAAA's Annual! What are you waiting for?! And, speaking of more Australian comics and comic books ... time won't be far away before I make an announcement about a book I have been working on for the past few months ... and how you can obtain your copy of the book! It's always nice to read nice things said about a book you're immensely proud of! Batrisha and the Creepy Caretaker got some favourable press from this weekend's Weekend Australian, and more locally in the Redcliffe Guide. It's my job to brag, so here we are! Have you picked up your copy yet?
Earlier this year I wrote a review for INKSPOT, the journal of the Australian Cartoonists Association. The issue it appears in has just been published, so thought I would share the review in full here now. (The journal is not available except through membership of the ACA.) Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System by Safdar Ahmed Twelve Panels Press 234 pages, soft cover; 17 cm x 23.5 cm $30 (plus $10 for posting within Australia) from the publisher or from most good bookstores Here's a link to the publisher: Click here! The Comics Arts Award of Australia (formerly known as the Ledger Awards) was recently held in Perth, with two books chosen as Gold Award recipients: Stone Fruit by Lee Lai (published by American boutique publisher Fantagraphic Books) and Still Alive by Safdar Ahmed (the second graphic novel produced by local publishing group, Twelve Panel Press). I’ve chosen to review the latter book for this issue of Inkspot. Still Alive has received many accolades already. From winning both the Multicultural NSW Award and the Book of the Year at the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Award, more recently it has also won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Eve Pownall Award. The first time a graphic novel for older readers has won such acclaim. Which begs the question: Is this a book for children? With the Children’s Book Council of Australia sticker placed on the book, the inference comes across that this is a book for children. It’s also a graphic novel. The writer/artist of the book, Safdar Ahmed, compounds the problem that the comic book medium has within Australia – that comics are for kids – when being interviewed by stating that “the younger generation genuinely care about human rights issues” and that he wants to see his book in all high schools. This is unfortunate. Very early in the story, in the third chapter, there’s a masturbatory scene that conservative parents might object to, clearly indicating that this is a story that is really for an open-mined readership, one that needs to be read by a much wider audience. Because there are older Australian who care about human rights too. Still Alive is a factual account of Safdar’s first visit to Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in 2011, where he came armed with pencils and sketchbooks, and set up a small art workshop for the detainees. The book follows subsequent visits, and documents both his growing friendships with those detained and his learning of the personal circumstances that some of them endured to arrive there. The book makes for grim reading, with few light moments within the tale, clearly reflecting the dire circumstances the people who become his friends must endure while living there. Interspersed with Safdar’s tale, he allows some of the refugees to tell their stories, most particularly Haider*. (*Not his real name.) Both narratives intermingled with each other, and both used first person pronouns, with the same lettering font and illustrating style, making the first-time reading of these different chapters initially confusing. Safdar’s illustrations are pleasing to the eye, although he seems to lack a certain sequential storytelling that would allow the work to flow more consistently throughout the book. Part of that is no doubt due to the mountain of factual information that he seeks to impart to the reader about the detention system and its clear failings to those detained. Periodically, he allows some of those who have joined his art workshops a space on the pages to demonstrate their experiences through their drawings. I would have liked to have seen some of those highlighted a little more: perhaps a page to each of their works would have been better, rather than squeezing two illustrations to a page. Still Alive touches only briefly on the women detainees and their lived experiences, and I imagine that their access to Safdar’s art classes may have been limited by the authorities that ran the Centre. Similarly, no effort has been made to humanise any of the Serco workers or the administrators of the Detention Centre. While I can see that the intent of the book is to tell the tales of the people detained, there must have been some latitude given to Safdar to allow him to enter the Centre in the first place or, as detailed half-way through the book, when an attempt was made to deny him access to the refugees. Nonetheless, there were certainly some powerful and moving parts in the book. The fate of one detainee, Ahmad, hits the reader with a sledgehammer. Not surprisingly, Safdar Ahmed has dedicated his book to him. This book is hardly entertaining. There are many readers who will not be interested in reading it. It’s grim. It’s bleak. There seems no respite or anything that is remotely uplifting in Still Alive. Does it deserve its accolades? Should it have be awarded the Gold at this year’s Comics Arts Awards of Australia? Yes. On both counts. This graphic novel will in the future prove to be a unique sequential narrative reflecting just some of the darker political stories of this country’s history. That there are many Australians who have welcomed the return of the Murugappan family to Biloela, gives hope that perhaps Australians are beginning to see the human side of the people behind the walls of places like the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. It’s no small measure that Still Alive will be one of the means of moving us forward to that better place. We can only hope. Just have to share the news that Dillon Naylor's book, Batrisha and the Creepy Caretaker (published by Comicoz) has today been nominated for an Australian Shadow Award, run by the Australasian Horror Writers Association (AHWA). The Association, founded in 2003, is a non-profit organisation that provides a community and unified voice for Australasian writers of dark fiction, attempting to foster the evolution of the genre within Australia. Dillon's book has been entered in the Graphic Novel-Comic section. Interested in reading the group's blog page? Click here! Or if you're interested in knowing more about the Association, please click here. Dillon and I would like to sincerely thank Jason Franks for letting us know about this Award...
There's too much going on in our household during the school holidays (with wonderful grandchildren visiting) to try to work out how to remove the middle border in this illustration. But there was enough time yesterday morning (while everyone else slept) to pick up a copy of Frew's first comic release of the year. I wasn't fussed about the internal pages (although they looked pretty, all in colour).... it was the wraparound cover that caught my eye. The editorial credits as by being drawn by an Australian artist that I don't know and am not familiar with: Daniel Picciotto. I'm going to have to question my comic mate Jeremy Macpherson to tell me what he knows about Daniel! It's such a cracking cover, I just had to buy a copy to share the illustration with you here.
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Comicoz is Nat Karmichael's publishing imprint. Nat is committed to preserving a permanent collection of Australian comic and comic strips. He feels that there is a need to recognise comics' contribution to and depiction of Australian culture.
Nat Karmichael.
Since 2011, Nat has self-published over twelve comic-related books and was Publisher-Editor of Oi Oi Oi! -- the last series of nationally-distributed comic books of original stories to appear on Australian newsstands. He is a member of the Australian Cartoonists Association and edited the Association's journal Inkspot for 14 issues from late 2015. He remains the Lead Judge in the Ledger of Honour Awards for the Comic Arts Awards of Australia (formerly the Ledgers). Nat has now retired from his former occupation as a Clinical Nurse in the Psychiatric Emergency Centre in Queensland's largest public hospital, so that he can spend more time with his long-suffering wife and their six children and fourteen grandchildren. He still plans to publish more comics and comic-related books, the details of which you should see here in the coming months... Comicoz acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay respects to elders, past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations peoples.
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