Trawling through material from my back pages for content that will form part of my semi-autobiographical comic (Blotting Paper: The Recollected Graphical Impressions Of Doctor Comics) I came across this poster for an event that I conceived and organised at the University of Technology, Sydney back in 1998. I was a lecturer in Visual Communication in the Design Faculty at the time and endeavoured to incorporate comics based projects into the curriculum whenever the opportunity arose. Comics is a perfect form of visual communication reliant as it is on the combination of words and images and being occasionally onomatopoeic, even the sounds employed are silent.
Poster for the event designed by Neil Heymann.
With additional funding from the student group Stop Motion Sickness I invited Mandy Ord up from Canberra, Dillon Naylor from Melbourne and Glenn Smith from Sydney to show their work to visual communication design students. Mindful of the possibility of regional differences from the research I was doing into the Australian small press scene at the time it seemed interesting to have a speaker from three different cities. Each comics creator made a 45-60 minute presentation of their work followed by a Q&A session. Naylor profiled his comic about share-household shenanigans Pop Culture & 2 Minute Noodles, Ord her intensely inky, autobiographical tales of life in Canberra, Wilnot, and Smith his painstakingly linear drawn, slice-of-life The Sydney Morning Hell. After a lunch break, each one led a sequential graphic workshop with a group of students. Gerard Ashworth, also from Sydney, who attended the seminar helped out with the numbers by taking one of the workshop groups. The event was well attended and in hindsight was a small but significant moment in Australian comics history, especially in terms of the ‘academy’.
The title? Attempted irony. I think I was very defensive about claiming comics as a valid medium of visual communication back in those days thirteen years ago. Certainly my colleagues were in different streams of thought (photography was king then graphic design and illustration) so I guess I was being somewhat provocative considering that context, the time and the situation. Catchy, though, and the poster is a good piece of visual communication by the then student Neil Heymann.
This is the third in a series of posts called Archives of Australian Comics History documenting moments in the recent history of Australian comics, particularly alternative comics and the Australian Small Press. I started researching this subject in the late 1990s. That research eventually led to my PhD thesis: Ph.D. Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, by virtue of the thesis, A Study Of Contemporary Australian Alternative Comics 1992-2000 With Particular Reference To The Work Of Naylor, Smith, Danko And Ord, 2003.
The other posts in the Archives of Australian Comics History series are: OZCON4, International Exhibition of Drawings, Sick Puppy Comix, 2011 MCA Zine Fair and 2002 Sequential Art Studies Conference. Others will be added in due course.
