CATS IN COMICS #6 What’s Michael?

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Doctor Comics

In the comic What’s Michael? the cat in question, Michael, gets up to a range of anthropomorphic antics whenever his owner Reiko is out of the house at work or on holiday. He acts more catlike in her presence, chasing moths, annoying dogs, spraying on the furniture when his litter box needs changing, hogging the blankets and the heater and the wooden cover on the hot tub that keeps the water warm. He is also capable of frustrating her by sleeping on the laps of guests who have overstayed their welcome thus extending their visit. When she’s at home he makes cat sounds rather than speaking dialogue and remains on all four furry legs rather than wearing clothes and standing erect. The creation of Makoto Kobayashi who provides both story and art, this manga won the Kodansha Manga Award in 1986.

Cover of A Hard Day’s Life volume, Dark Horse Comics.

Michael and his cat mates are both amusing and mischievous and value their independence whilst being dependent on their owners. As most cat owners will tell you, or perhaps they wouldn’t admit to it, Michael is the kind of cat that controls his owner rather than the other way round. Oh, and he’s bright orange-well on at least on the cover he’s in colour. The manga pages are in black and white. There is also an anime version of the manga. And that is in colour.

Watch Michael’s dance moves as he plays with a ribbon!

Other cats in this Cats In Comics series: Doraemon, Krazy Kat, The Rabbi’s Cat, Danko’s Cat and Mouse Collage and Fred.

BLOTTING PAPER The Comic: Production Report No.7

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Doctor Comics

Whilst steady progress is being made it looks now as if I shall not be getting the first issue completed before the end of this year. On the optimistic side, however, the comic is getting made so I am sure that I shall have something to show in early 2012, apart from this ongoing series of progress reports. The nature of the comic and its format appears to be continuing to digress a little in an e-hon-ish or artist’s book direction whilst still retaining some semblances of an alternative comic. All good. In this report there are some more drawings. These are basic, raw and overlaid to look more interesting online. They may not appear like this in the finished work as they are subject to further development such as reworking and re-composing for the print publication. The figure in the drawings is the older Doctor Comics character doing some printmaking at home in the Japanese sosaku hanga method.

See previous production reports: No.6, No.5, No.4, No.3, No.2, No.1.

CATS IN COMICS #5 Fred (early Fritz?)

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Doctor Comics

At the age of 16 R. Crumb self-produced a comic called Cat Life. It featured a cat called Fred, a typical cat that loved its independence and was not too keen on being befriended and cuddled by kids or made to play games with other cats for the amusement of the kids. Fred possibly represents the early stages of development of Crumb’s later feline creation, the more anthropomorphic Fritz the Cat. What is evident at this early stage is Crumb’s fine understanding of cat behaviour and his ability to visually represent it. In the ‘Bad Cat’ panel below Fred’s response to too much unsolicited cuddling is to strike out and scratch the girl who in turn smacks him back. Fred’s head, on receiving the blow, shows really convincing cat reaction-eyes closed, ears tilted down and mouth tightly closed.

Fred has trouble with kids.

Once the kids have gone to bed it’s nocturnal playtime for Fred and the other cats when Fred and his mates can forget all the behaviour modification they receive from humans, cut loose and most importantly, please themselves. This realisation is beautifully and cunningly stated by means of a thought balloon emanating from Fred’s head and the subtle use of the cat’s eyes. Juxtaposed with the balloon the expression that Crumb generates on Fred’s face is telling.

R. Crumb’s comic cat, Fred.

Images from Cat Life, 1959/60, The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 1: The Early Years Of Bitter Struggle by R. Crumb, Fantagraphics Books, 1987.

Other cats in this Cats In Comics series: Doraemon, Krazy Kat and The Rabbi’s Cat and Danko’s Cat and Mouse Collage.

FLYING THE ANIME FLAG IN PARADISE

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Doctor Comics

In late October I spent a week in Fiji for the Japanese Embassy to present a lecture and workshop at the School of Arts, Language and Media of the University of the South Pacific and introduce films at an Anime festival. It was all part of Japan Culture Week 2011 in Suva, the capital city on the largest of the 300 islands and it seemed a bit like an act of cultural colonisation, raising the Anime flag and flying its colours on Treasure Island, creating a little Anime paradise in the Pacific Ocean.

Lecturing on the spread of Japanese pop culture in the 1980s. (Photo by Louise Graber)

My lecture Up In The Air: Anime’s Journey To The Stars described the global success of Japanese animation and its rise to prominance in the film world and in popular culture. It covered the work of Osamu Tezuka and the success of his work abroad. It also referred to Rintaro’s involvement with him as an animation director on Astro Boy prior to his subsequent productions that included his Tezuka homage film Metropolis, his adaption of Leiji Matsumoto’s manga Galaxy Express 999, and of Sanpei Shirato’s manga The Dagger of Kamui. Describing Shirato’s beginnings as a kamishibai artist before moving to manga and the alternative publication GARO the lecture was situated in the context of anecdotes from my time as a lecturer at an Arts college and a School of Design in Sydney where I observed the growing interest of students in Japanese popular culture. They became fascinated with manga, Anime, cosplay, J-Pop, scanlations, computer games, cameras, turntables, TV game shows, food and fashion, not to mention the learning of the Japanese language and the odd visit to Tokyo. The lecture concluded with an analysis of the productions and rise to prominence of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli who, like Tezuka, found an international audience and critical acclaim.

The tools and materials for the printmaking workshop. (Photo by Louise Graber)

In addition to the theory lecture I also presented a practical workshop demonstrating the printmaking technique I have developed as part of my artistic practice. Based on the Japanese creative print movement of Sosaku Hanga and the work of Koshiro Onchi and Shiko Munakata in particular I showed examples of my work that have been made following this approach and methodology and applied to prints, postcards, T-shirts and comics.

Teaching techniques to students of University of the South Pacific. (Photo by Louise Graber)

After the demonstration the students then made their own prints. By chance, the cultural activities took place in the same week as the Rugby World Cup finals and the only paint colours to hand were those of the Wallabies, yellow and green. My own rugby woodblock print (on the table and being passed around the class, in the photos above) provided some amusement and interest.

The ‘sosaku hanga’ creative printmaking workshop. (Photo by Louise Graber)

On the roof of the Village Cinema complex Batman and Spiderman look down intrigued at the sight of people going in to see the Ninja super hero Kamui. It was here that the Anime Film Festival was held each evening. The films Galaxy Express 999, The Dagger of Kamui, Laputa: Castle in the Sky and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time were screened to impressed audiences. Anime is now a fixed part of the Japanese cultural coat of arms, emblamatic of the country’s long history of graphic arts that feeds into and nurtures both Anime and manga. A week long festival of Anime films and supporting contextual cultural events signaled an alternative offering to Hollywood and the further spread of Japanese popular culture in the South Pacific.

Village Cinema Centre, Suva. (Photo by Louise Graber)

Many thanks to Sayuri Tokuman and Susan Yamaguchi of the Japanese Studies & Intellectual Exchange Department and Tokiko Kiyota, Director of the Japan Foundation in Sydney, and to Nobuko Iwatani, Mako Nakauchi and Mele of the Embassy of Japan in Fiji, and His Excellency Yutaka Yoshizawa, Ambassador of Japan, for their ideas, assistance and support with this project.

Read my other Fijian project post: ON TREASURE ISLAND

50 YEARS OF FANTASTIC FOUR

Posted on November 6, 2011 by Doctor Comics

It is now fifty years since the first issue of the Marvel Comic Fantastic Four was published. The cover of Issue #1 is dated November, 1961 although it was probably in the shops a month or two earlier as part of the magazine distribution policy of putting product up for sale in retail outlets two or three months prior to the cover date. The comic carries credits for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby although the exact nature of their contribution is not indicated until Issue #9 (Stan Lee-script and Jack Kirby-art) and has been the subject of some debate over the years since as has who of the two had the initial idea for the series. With a scenario that starts with the space race battle between the USA and the Soviet Union the new team encounter cosmic rays on an experimental space flight that affects their human capabilities. It was a landmark comic for Marvel, for the superhero genre, and for these two creators.

Preceding the X-Men, the team of Mr. Fantastic (Dr. Reed Richards), the Thing (Ben Grimm), and brother and sister team Invisible Girl (Susan Storm) and the Human Torch (Johnny Storm) became the Fab 4 even before The Beatles. Eschewing secret identities and hideouts these super heroes seemed somewhat human, fighting amonst themselves as well as against foes. The comic featured a fantasy parade of villains including Mole Man, the Skrulls, Miracle Man, the Sub-Mariner, who developed a crush on Invisible Girl, Doctor Doom, Kurrgo the Master of Planet X, the Puppet Master, Impossible Man from Planet Pop-up, and the Incredible Hulk, and that is in only the first dozen issues. The Silver Surfer and Galactus followed later, along with origin stories and films.

First panel of the first page of the first issue. (Fantastic Four Omnibus Vol.1, 2007)

And they became popular. Marvel started receiving a deluge of fan mail for the Fantastic Four and began a letters page in each issue that eventually spread to two pages. Lee actively engaged with the fans by selectively commenting on some of the issues raised in the letters whilst Kirby cut loose in an increasingly inventive period. Some say he based the character of the Thing on himself. Others have pointed to the fact that the Dr. Reed Richards’ character developed a striking facial likeness to Kirby himself. Whatever the case, the new team struck a chord with the comics buying public and became a seminal part of the Marvel line-up. It’s been a fabulous fifty years.

Read my other superhero related posts:

Captain America: The First Avenger: RED SKULL VERSUS CAP

The Green Hornet: GONDRY GOES FOR IT

Green Lantern: MAN IN A GREEN MASK WITH MATCHING RING AND LANTERN

The Incredible Hulk: INCREDIBLE HULK TURNS 50

Thor: A GOD COMES DOWN TO EARTH

Thor: THOR’S COMIC OPERA: Götterdämmerung Revisited

X-Men: DO OR DIE, BABY THE NEAL ADAMS X-MEN RUN

X-Men: First Class: A FIRST CLASS X-MEN FILM

BLOTTING PAPER The Comic: Production Report No.6

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Doctor Comics

There are books and fish in this comic. In the first chapter, a lot of books including graphic novels and at least one fish. Glee, or Glebe, is a very bookish suburb and is located just across the road from Sydney University and near two others, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Technology. The area has several bookshops, cafes and restaurants. It is also within walking distance of the Sydney Fish Market. The Bookseller of Glee is a portrait of the proprietor of one such bookshop, Gleebooks, and friend to Doctor Comics. Although he stocked graphic novels in his bookshop he refused to carry coffee and cakes.

This is the original colour art work. A Black & White print of it will appear in the comic (as shown below).

The prinicipal character is an aficionado of fish and cakes as well as comics. We’ll get to the cakes and coffee shops later but as regards his interest in fish his cats don’t mind this aspect of his behaviour at all. In the first chapter there are no cakes or coffee and only one fish, possibly one of the two fish shown below, but it’s a large one. And a bottle of wine. There are two cats, too.

See previous production reports: No.5, No.4, No.3, No.2, No.1.

CATS IN COMICS #4 Danko’s Cat and Mouse Collage

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Doctor Comics

Something a little different for Cats In Comics this time around in the form of an art piece, a cat and mouse collage by Tim Danko from his published collection Wall Paper: Scraped through darkness 1986-1998, Dead Xerox Press, p.9. Danko plays in the postmodern domain of popular visual culture, appropriating existing images and cartoon characters, repositioning them in new contexts, creating new associations and having them speak with different voices. The resulting rearrangement of these elements of visual culture produces a critique of that culture and encourages the possibilities of alternative interpretations.

In this strip the rodents in panels 1 and 2 face the felines in panels 3 and 4 with cats by Herriman, Crumb and Hanna-Barbera caged together in panel 3. Lines from Lyotard and Barthes are used as foreground decoration, superimposed over the assembled collage of characters and employed as visual elements of the panels as much as text. Cut from their original pages these cats have been pasted or “rewritten” by Danko into a new scene whilst looks of uncertainty and wonderment abound. The characters seem displaced and reflective, lost in this new space that represents a shift from their role as entertainment figures.

Other cats in this Cats In Comics series: Doraemon, Krazy Kat and The Rabbi’s Cat.

Archive of Australian Comics History: OZCON4

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Doctor Comics

In terms of the larger comics conventions in Australia before Supanova and Animania and SMASH! and Armageddon and Comic-Fest there was OZCON and even before that there was ComicCon back in 1979. However, OZCON was the big annual comics convention when I began researching Australian alternative comics. The promotion of and garnering of publicity for the more mainstream(read imported) comics seemed to be the raison d’être for the event although there was some presence by independent creators and their publications and some discussion of comics apart from the emphasis on sales. It also provided a sense of community for local creators to meet and discuss their self-published comics and to compare their work to the mainstream product.

Spidey swinging from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (Poster design by Ant Larcombe)

Probably influenced by comic conventions such as the one in San Diego the poster shows that OZCON and Australian comics creators and fans at the time (1995) had the spectre of the US super-hero genre hanging over them. In any case it was a wonderful poster for the event by local creator and designer Ant Larcombe as was the inset avatar and character Flash Domingo by another Australian creator, Gary Chaloner.

Comic Con T-shirt design. (artist unknown)

Reflecting on OZCON made me think of those big US comics conventions. Here is a scan of the T-shirt I bought at the largest convention in the USA San Diego Comic Con in 2000. It was from an earlier staging of that event, had been discounted as a remainder, and it caught my eye. The in-your-face aggression, the confidence, the swagger and the speech balloon seemed to say what that convention was largely about. The blue paint stains are a subsequent addition from my wearing it whilst printmaking. I think there were fewer than 50,000 attendees back in 2000 but over the past decade this convention has grown to around three times that number but remains considerably less than the 500,000 that go to Comiket in Tokyo, twice a year-that’s a million of them!

To see my other comics based T-shirts visit: Feed On Comics (T-shirt by Max) and Sick Puppy Comix (T-shirt by Neale Blanden). I did have a yellow Platinum Grit one at one stage but that one seems to have disappeared.

This is the fifth 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: 2011 MCA Zine Fair, International Exhibition of Drawings, Mind Rot, Sick Puppy Comix and 2002 Sequential Art Studies Conference. Others will be added in due course.

DRAWING TAMARA DREWE and other writers

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Doctor Comics

I first read the Tamara Drewe graphic novel nearly three years ago. Then in February of this year I saw the film. Both the reading and the viewing occurred before I began blogging. Now that the DVD of the film is available I am revisiting these texts and writing a short blog about them. The story is set in the English countryside, seemingly not too far from London, at a writers’ retreat on a small farm near other farms. The main characters are mostly writers of various types, academic, crime, literary, journalism etc. They are supported by a collection of cows, goats, geese, a stray dog and rock star, plus immediate family and workers and assorted local characters such as bored schoolgirls and egg-throwing boys and liberal amounts of tasty cakes, biscuits and wine. The goings on are charted in chapters arranged by the seasons from Summery August to the following Spring.

Originally a comic strip in The Guardian before being published as a graphic novel the story has some roots in Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. The principal character Tamara Drewe writes a kind of social media column in a newspaper in which she documents things of perceived interest including her own cosmetic surgery. What she really wants to write, however, is a proper book so it is somewhat expedient for her to mix with the writers down on the farm. Her mother’s home is located just across the paddock. There is ongoing discussion of writer’s problems including, acceptance, blocks, contracts, deadlines, relationships and fame.

A page from Tamara Drewe: writers discussing writing and other writers around the table.

Artist and writer Posy Simmonds uses lots of text as well as the drawings. Some of her pages have entire paragraphs of text next to the panels. She also ‘draws’ the speech in her characters’ voice balloons. You could say that she employs the literary techniques of the pen portrait and word picture. Her art has a most muted and restrained palette as if constructed from pen and ink drawings that have been gently brushed with water-colours. Posy can write and draw, and she draws well what she writes. There is satire but like her pencil and brush technique it is applied with a soft hand.

There is the film, too. Liberties have been taken with the characters and the story. Drawing with light and lenses this time, the ensemble playing efforts of a good group of English actors and tight direction creates a strong result with a standout performance from Tamsin Greig of Black Books fame. The liberal use of sunlight pumps up the palette resulting in brighter colours than the Simmonds style drawings in the book. Whichever way you look at it though, book, strip or film, it’s a well-drawn portrait of some of those who aspire to the writing life.

Read my other reviews of comics based films:

Captain America: The First Avenger: RED SKULL VERSUS CAP

The Green Hornet: GONDRY GOES FOR IT

Green Lantern: MAN IN A GREEN MASK WITH MATCHING RING AND LANTERN

The Rabbi’s Cat: TRAVELS WITH A TALKING CAT

Thor: A GOD COMES DOWN TO EARTH

X-Men: First Class: A FIRST CLASS X-MEN FILM

CATS IN COMICS #3 The Rabbi’s Cat

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Doctor Comics

This cat can talk! The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar.

This is a wonderful talking cat from Algeria that lives with a rabbi and occasionally visits Paris. One day it ate the rabbi’s parrot and in so doing, gained the gift of speech. Being a smart cat it denied eating the bird and instead demanded conversion to Judaism. The design of the cat appears loose and improvised. Whilst it is rather thin and scrawny in physique it is big in terms of personality, intelligence and cheek. This richness of character and determination affords the cat the capability of comprehending foreign languages(he speaks Arabic, French, Latino and a bit of Spanish) and of learning the Torah. The rabbi’s cat is a marvellous, witty and charming cat that pleases itself, as cats do. It has appeared in several comics and most recently in an animated feature film of the same name and is the creation of the very talented Joann Sfar, a jury prize winner at Angoulême for The Rabbi’s Cat graphic novel and the director of the highly stylised live-action film of the life of the famous 1960′s French pop singer Gainsbourg (that’s Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte’s dad). The film won the French Oscar, the Cesar, for Best First Film. The cat likes to hang out with the rabbi’s daughter and snuggle up close to her. It even tells her that it loves her. She tells it to shut up as she prefers it when it’s quiet or not around. It’s also inconvenient for both of them when her boyfriend visits. The cat loves a bit of a scratch, preferably on the ear by a female foot with painted toenails. Resilient, resourceful, stubborn, smart, curious and decidedly nocturnal, this cat is difficult to ignore.

This cat is considering taking up painting to impress his love.

A more formalist analysis of The Rabbi’s Cat comic can be found in my post on The Comics Grid and there is also my review of The Rabbi’s Cat film.

Read the other Cats In Comics posts in this Blog: Doraemon and guest blogger Gene Kannenberg Jr.‘s take on Krazy Kat.

Doctor Comics

Creating and Critiquing Comic Art