On my travels, both local and overseas, to comic art and animation events, galleries, museums and stores, I have endeavoured to study creators’ works, and sometimes even managed to meet and chat with them. In this post, set in Australia, I meet legendary Australian cartoonist Jim Russell at a comics event in Sydney in February 1994. What a comic art hero and really nice guy! We had a good chat. There is also some mention of my role in education and diplomacy in relation to carrying the comics flag in Australia and the staging of the first comics conference to be held in Australia, 2002 Sequential Art Studies Conference that took place on April 19, 2002 in Sydney at the University of Technology, but to begin with, a brief mention on things Japanese i.e anime and manga when they started to impact on the local comics and animation scene in Australia.
Ghost In The Shell director Mamoru Oshii visited Sydney, met with fans and attended a screening of his film at the Glebe Art Cinema in Sydney’s Inner West. (Photo-©1999 Michael Hill)I took a group of my students to see this exhibition, TEZUKA: The Marvel Of Manga, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. It covered a selection of Osamu Tezuka’s massive amount of manga work plus references to his anime work. Based in Sydney, the bookshop HONDARAKE full of books was a good source of manga material when I was teaching at the University of Technology, Sydney(UTS). It obtained regular new additions from travellers returning from visits to Japan or from Japanese coming to stay in Sydney and wanting to offload some of their collections. (Photo by Louise Graber) OZCON, a Sydney comics convention program primarily supported superhero comics in addition to local Australian work and the burgeoning manga, here has a cover design of Spiderman swinging from the Sydney Harbour Bridge with the Sydney Opera House in the background.Cosplayers on the roof at the back of the Sydney Town Hall at a manga convention. They were taking a break from parading on the stage downstairs. (Photo-©1999 Michael Hill) Major cartoonist and contributor to Australian comic art, Jim Russell, whom I met at a comics convention in Sydney in 1994 where he was launching his instructional video on cartooning! We had a good conversation about cartooning and his career in that field.
I am a member of the International Journal of Comic Art’s International Editorial Board as Australian representative…I first met up with the Journal’s editor John A. Lent at a comics conference in Washington, D.C. in 1999 to which he had brought along the first issue of the journal. (Photo-©2018 Dr. Michael Hill) I received invitations to some diplomatic meetings for representing the study of the comics medium (this is from a page from my own comic BLOTTING PAPER: The Recollected Graphical Impressions of Doctor Comics. ) (Photo-© 2002 Michael Hill) I also participated in a comics based group show at a gallery in Sydney as a comics artist. (Photo-©2003 Dr. Michael Hill) A post University career promotional sheet as Doctor Comics , written and designed by my amazing agent Andrew Hawkins. CRITIQUING page and for my creative profile see the CREATING page on this website. MY TRAVELS posts form part of my graphic based material that includes painting, printmaking and cartooning.
Doctor Comics 