On Sunday 22nd May 2011, in the shadow of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and opposite the Sydney Opera House, the very hip Museum of Contemporary Art hosted a zine fair as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Comics and zines, comic zines, zine comics, zinesy comics etc….50 tables traded to an admittedly small but really interested crowd. It was good to see zines and comics hosted in an art gallery. It was a fusion of the literary and the artistic with comics increasingly appearing in art galleries due to their recently increased cultural status, the growing popularity of graphic novels and the developing popular culture trend of adapting superhero comics into feature films.

The make-up of the stall-holders on the trading floor was a bit of a mystery with a notable presence of craft makers selling jewellery and accessories! This led to complaints by some comics creators who were unable to acquire a table to trade their comics, about the application and selection process not being all that consistent or transparent. Despite this crossover of artistic fields it was a busy site for trading activities in the Zine area which also provided the opportunity for creators to meet and mingle (see photos below).

I bumped into Stuart Stratu, the creator of Sick Puppy Comix, at the MCA Zine Fair. I happened to be wearing a T-shirt featuring his comic. It’s about fifteen years old and still wearable and I was impressed with Neale Blanden’s wonderful cartoon character design(see photo below) named after his anthology of short pieces by Australian and overseas creators that he edited and self-published. Stratu himself was motivated to commence small press publishing after visiting a comics convention. Stuart Stratu: “It was going to OZCON, one of the comics conventions and seeing the small press booth- that’s when I got the idea to make my own mini-comics. I had never done any comics or cartoons myself, just little drawings and things. So what I did was run ad for contributors in the personals column of Drum Media. So all the people in the first issue, none of them had published their own comics at all. So that was basically how Sick Puppy No.1 came to be. That was April 96. Number two came out four months later. It was very primitive.”  A total of 13 issues have been published in a plurality of graphic styles from a range of alternative comics contributors whose content is often both provocative and oppositional.

Sick Puppy Comix T-shirt with graphic logo designed by Neale Blanden

One common feature of the alternative comics scene was the practice of creators contributing to each other’s publications. Sick Puppy Comix utilised this practice and it gave that comic a variety of graphic styles. By contrast there was some commonality of content with much of the material dealing with aspects of sex and/or violence, the “X” in the title denoting adult oriented content. Whilst emphasising humour, it adopted a somewhat avant-garde attitude which encouraged its contributors to test both their own and their readers’ personal boundaries of taste and creativity. The print and presentation quality of the publication improved with each issue and this seemed to inspire contributing creators to produce better quality 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 post is from the developing series Archive of Australian Alternative Comics created as a result of research conducted for my doctorate studies at Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, and awarded 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. On completion of my doctorate I donated most of my Australian small press comics collection that I had used in my research, along with a copy of my doctoral thesis, to the National Library of Australia.