Tag Archives: Glenn Smith

Archive of Australian Comics History: MIND ROT

Posted on by Doctor Comics
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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.

Archive of Australian Comics History: SICK PUPPY COMIX

Posted on by Doctor Comics
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Neale Blanden T-shirt design for Sick Puppy Comix.

Here I go again with a blog triggered by a T-shirt following my recent post Feed On Comics! that featured a T-shirt design by Max in which I was having my initial rant about comics and my last blog where I happened to be wearing this T-shirt (above) when I bumped into Stratu, the creator of Sick Puppy Comix, at the 2011 MCA Zine Fair. It’s about fifteen years old and still wearable and I really love Neale Blanden’s design. Anyway it’s also a catalyst for me to talk about that particular comic.

Sick Puppy Comix was an anthology of short pieces by Australian and some overseas alternative comics creators that was edited and self-published by Stratu who was motivated to commence small press publishing after visiting OZCON and discoverng the mini-comics on sale there. So he placed an ad in the music press calling for contributions. The submissions he obtained resulted in the first issue of Sick Puppy Comix in 1996. Two other issues followed that year, another three in 1997, two more in 1998 and so on until a total of 13 issues had been published. Each issue collected short pieces either sent to Stratu or solicited by him. The range of artistic expressions of the various contributors gave the comic a plurality of graphic styles. By contrast there was a commonality of content with much of the material dealing with aspects of sex and/or violence, the X in the title denoting some adult oriented and explicit content. At times there was an almost scatalogical celebration through the regular flow of bodily fluids and waste in the stories.

The print and presentation quality of the publication improved with each issue and this, and the desire to be included it, seemed to inspire creators to do good work, such as the illustration above by Neale Blanden that was featured on the cover of the comic at some stage. During its existence some of the best alternative Australian comics creators contributed work e.g. Gerard Ashworth, Neale Blanden, Tim Danko, Anton Emdin, Michael Fikaris, Louise Graber, Maccad, Kieran Mangan, Chris Mikul, Mandy Ord, Pox Girls(Susan Butcher and Carol Wood), David Puckeridge, Q-Ray, SCAR(Steve Carter and Antoinette Rydyr), Glenn Smith, Ross Tesoriero and Ryan Vella as well as Stratu himself.

This is the second 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, Mind Rot, 2011 MCA Zine Fair and 2002 Sequential Art Studies Conference. Others will be added in due course.