Co-creator and former Director of the Master of Animation, Master of Design, and Visual Communication Design courses at the University of Technology, Sydney, Dr. Michael Hill has a Master's degree in animation plus a Ph.D. in comics studies, prompting his introduction on ABC Radio as “Doctor Comics”. A member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Comic Art, and former member of the Comics Grid Journal of Comics Scholarship and the Advisory Committee of the Q-Collection Comic Book Preservation Project, he has delivered public lectures on Comics, Anime and Manga and held academic directorships in Interdisciplinary Studies, Animation, Design and Visual Communication. Having retired from academia and completing the donation of his collection of research materials on Australian alternative comics to the National Library of Australia, he is now active in the artistic domain, writing, drawing and printmaking, creating art postcards and prints and his own graphic novel: Blotting Paper: The Recollected Graphical Impressions of Doctor Comics.
I decided to participate in this event in which participants do a drawing each day during the month of October. I took the option, however, of only doing it every other day. So I planned to produce an inked image on the odd numbered dates-1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th etc. That amounts to a potential 16 drawings over the period. These were progressively posted here on my blog and dated. I also added an image of the drawing implement(s) employed. I saw this exercise as an opportunity to ‘warm up’ for issue 4 of my Blotting Paper artist book/comic…another experimental image-making outlet.
A new drawing made on every odd numbered date of the month.
Midway through the month…I managed to maintain my planned participation of posting an ink image every other day. Next stage…I am move in the direction of making blind contour drawings of moving subjects.
A return to abstraction for the final four images! I am switching to printmaking, exchanging the pen for a brush and using sumi ink to make monoprints.
This post documents a recent walking tour of Berlin’s Staadt Mittee area…with friend, local resident and interpreter Mailef as my guide. The plan was to see the graffiti and traces of an artists’ commune (kunsthaus). I also wanted to visit Renate comics shop and bibliothek which has been located there since the early 1990s. I thought it would be good to purchase some German kunst comicbuchs (art comics) there!
Mailef escorted me to the Kunsthaus (arthouse) Tacheles building on Oranienburger Strasse…a site that was previously part of East Berlin when the wall was up. The Tacheles (translation “let’s talk business”) building had, over a century, successively housed…an elegant shopping arcade, then Nazi offices and squatter artists. The building was damaged in World War 2 then repaired by the GDR…vacated in 1989 then occupied as an international artist squat in the 1990s. The artists were eventually displaced/evicted by representatives of the investors in 2012.
Art comics (kunst comicbuchs) by the hundreds were available at Renate Comics. Many of them were signed and marked as limited editions. These varied in size from A6 minicomics to the larger A3 format. Art postcards (kunst postkartes) have become an additional creative outlet for comics creators. I enjoy making art postcards myself…and there was a range of German stock in a rotating rack on the pavement outside the shop.
Art minicomicbuch purchase from the shop- Pure Sultana by Franziska Schaum.
I took another walking tour of Mitte in Berlin with friend, former student, now animator, illustrator and printmaker, Michelle Park. She showed me a study of terror(see photos below). It was a busy morning for walking tours in Berlin. Starting out in Bezirk Kreuzburg…we passed the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Schützenstraße,…Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Friedrichstraße, then walked along Niederkirchnerstraße to the old Gestapo and SS Headquarters site.
The Gestapo Headquarters building had taken a direct hit from English bombing during World War II. It was demolished after the war. It is now an open-air museum Topography Des Terrors (Topography of Terror). Some rubble remains. There is a section of the Berlin Wall(without the barbed wire) and a new building with an exhibition and information. The exhibition was titled Errfast, Verfolgt, Vernichtet (Registered, Persecuted, Annihilated). It was both grim and candid about the horror that had taken place there.
Next door at Martin Gropius Bau museum was the Hans Richter exhibition…Begegnungen, Von Dada Bis Heute (Encounters: From Dada to the Present Day).It was part of the Berlin Festival. Also present wasthe David Bowie exhibition from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Evidence. What a line-up! This building had also suffered from the bombing alyjough not as much as the Gestapo site. It has been restored but still displays its scarification from shrapnel and bullets.
With both of us interested in animation and printmaking I wanted to show Michelle this wonderful exhibition of the artistic career of Hans Richter. He had been born in Berlin in 1888 and was a key figure in 20th Century art and animation. Three sides of Martin Gropius Bau had been allocated so a lot of walking was required. There were his woodcuts and paintings and his contributions to Dada. These included Dada magazine and his own zine G -Material zur elementarun Gestaltung (Material for elementary design). There were also his experiments with painted scrolls. These had led him to the discovery of displaying images in motion through animation. On screen were his abstract animations and live-action films including Dreams That Money Can Buy. There were also some home movies, plus documentation of his film teaching work in New York. Added to this were works by colleagues Max Ernst, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, Francis Picabia, Viking Eggeling, Alexander Calder and Kurt Schwitters. Richter was a well connected man.
Hans Richter exhibition pamphlet at Martin Gropius Bau.
DADA: art and anti-art by Hans Richter.
With a life’s work on display there was much inter-connected visual material in the exhibition…we found ourselves walking back and forth. We could have spent 4 or 5 hours watching the films, videos and documentaries alone. It was an exhibition that called for fresh legs and more than one visit. Excellent art, impressive show, Michael.
Blauer Mann, 1917, by Hans Richter
Visionary self-portrait by Hans Richter.
Stalingrad (Sieg im Osten) (Victory in the East), scroll painting by Hans Richter.
An awesome aspect of the recent Internationaler Comic-Salon Erlangen that I attended…in the old university town of Erlangen, Germany, near Nuremberg…was the staging of two contrastingly presented and equally impressive exhibitions of comics art on World War I…by Joe Sacco and Jacques Tardi.
Joe Sacco’s The Great War was displayed as an open-air exhibit in Schlossplatz. It was enlarged on display boards arranged in a long series of folds. Seeing it spread across the square magnified the herculean task that Sacco undertook in drawing this epic, concertina work. It represented one day of the Battle of the Somme fitted into one panel.
His wordless comic is structured around this single seemingly endless panel. It had been folded into 24 segments that unfolds to form a single piece. It depicts events in a continuous, cinema-pan like take. That is spread across time and space with soldiers assembling, attacking, engaging in crossfire and then returning to their lines. The unfolded published comic is too long for a table. Consequently, for exhibition, it has to be spread across the floor of two adjoining rooms or a long corridor. In Schlossplatz it ran right across the square necessitating a reading whilst walking approach. With so much detail it required several passes to take it all in.
The panels above show the trenches and the movement of the soldiers into the hostilities of ‘No Man’s Land’. This includes their exposure to artillery attacks and its associated schrapnel, plus machine gun and rifle fire.
By comparison, the war comics art of Jacques Tardi were exhibited indoors. Low level lighting created a sombre mood appropriate to the theme. It also perhaps protected the original art work from exposure. Corrections such as the whiting-out of errant black border lines and some alignment and registration marks were visible. This was the original art on display! It was not it’s cleaned up and reduced size reproduction as seen in the published comics.
The work, titled Landscape of Death, was bleak, expressing the agony of those who fought in World War I. Many of the images were painful to view. These included soldiers’ bodies torn apart by flying pieces of shredded metal. They were lacerated, disfigured or rendered limbless, with some surviving in this state.
Exhibited in a darkened theatre, the low level of the light created a reverent atmosphere for the images. It also acted as a canopy of protection, from fading, for the original art work. The work was housed in a series of narrow wooden walled and roofed walk-throughs. Some shapes were cut into the walls so that one could see out to lessen the confined effect. Tardi’s use of colour was impressive. His delicate watercolour brushwork added a poignant hue to his poppies, pools of blood and rising smoke.
These two exhibitions, Sacco and Tardi respectively, had contrasting presentations:…open-air/indoor; …spacious/confined;…sunlight/low level artificial illumination;…expansive/confined;…complete/edited; …served to express and communicate aspects of the texts/open…the vulnerability of soldiers both out of the trenches and restricted by the narrow confines of the trenches;…time-one day or six years of living with gas masks, flame throwers, helmets, barbed wire…and the dampness, misery, the stench of rotting bodies, despair and the ongoing expectation of death. This all made a memorable imprint on me, Michael.
UPDATE 2017: I found this discarded Jacques Tardi sticker (below) from the set that the Erlangen organisers were disseminating…and decided to add it to this post, Michael.
Job done! Production of the third issue of my artist book/comic Blotting Paper: The Recollected Graphical Impressions Of Doctor Comics has been completed. The comic was launched in June at Comic-Salon Erlangen in Germany. I had been invited to attend the event by German design colleagues…Professors Markus Fischmann and Michael Mahlstedt…of Visuelle Kommunikation, Design und Medien Department…Hochschule Hannover University of Applied Arts and Sciences where I had a visiting academic engagement back in 2007. Comic-Salon is the largest comics convention in Germany with 25,000+ attendees. Oh wow!
GOING DEEPER INTO PRODUCTION MODE! Progress report on my artist book/comic Blotting Paper: The Recollected Graphical Impressions Of Doctor Comics, Chapter 3, The Chthonian Turn. It is subtitled The Cats’ Revenge as it starts heading in the direction of a funny animal comic.I am approaching the mid-way point in completion of the artwork, averaging one page per day. It’s been a struggle maintaining this rate.
Serial production offers the opportunity of revisiting the work at some future date with the opportunity to make changes. With hindsight, the possibility of reworking things and adding new material seems appealing. One hopes it would improve the material…as this wouldn’t happen till after I have published a first edition.
About half of this issue is being hand-printed and/or painted. Those are the areas I have spent most of the time working on. The remaining half will be digitally printed. Most of the page numbers are being stamped, some directly onto the page, others scanned then printed.
Over the past month I have completed the artwork, printing and the finishing stages of the labelling, stapling and bookbinding. I started out stitching the sections together but found that I lacked the skills to do the job properly. I abandoned this approach and switched back to the simpler form of stapling…however, I shall endeavour to master stitching techniques in future.
It looks interesting as a volume being half hand-printed and half digitally printed. The varying pages are sometimes shuffled together. In addition to adding pages of colour and print-made texture this method has resulted in a shorter period of production.
The feline characters continue to assert themselves. This altered the generic pattern from auto-bio to funny animal comics with the odd not so humorous scene.
Notice of publication should be posted on this Blog around the end of the month. It is intended take place at a comics event in Germany…but we will have to wait and see about that, Michael.
This is the first in a series of regular reports documenting the production of the third issue of my artist book/comic…Blotting Paper: The Recollected Graphical Impressions Of Doctor Comics. It continues on from my previous posts on the first chapter/issue The Ingurgitator…and the second chapter/issue A Blot On His Escutcheon. The new chapter, The Chthonian Turn: The Cats’ Revenge…deals with the feline characters’ reaction to the demise of Doctor Comics…and that gentleman’s adventures in another dimension to which he has travelled. I hope to self-publish it before the end of the year.
As with the two previous issues printmaking is involved in the generation of images…via woodblock, linocut, Japanese sosaku hanga technique, rubber stamps and wooden seals. In addition other visual communication techniques…such as drawing, painting, collage, cartooning and photography…with the intention of producing a limited edition artist’s book comic.
I also intend having more colour pages in this issue…following the use of sporadic spot colour in Issue #1 and the 8 full colour pages in Issue #2. The colour will assist in the graphic representation of both the real and imaginary worlds featured in the comic.
I am continuing to edit the script, refine ideas, and develop others. There has been some unscripted image-making and printmaking activity…with the intention of using this as a loose but parallel means of creating vaguely conceived and experimental visual content. Examples produced through this printmaking strategy are featured below.
In the present chapter the two feline characters deliberate over the decision of what to do following the sudden departure of Doctor Comics. Meanwhile the latter character continues his travels in the chthonian world…confronting various vaporous forms and ghostly figures…including a trio of roaming red shades (see the three red shade illustrations). The raw state of these printmaking images will most likely be subject to further graphic manipulation.
The target date for completion of the five 8-page signatures have been approximated…and with a good run the comic could possibly be ready for binding as early as June.
Ink, more so than paint, appears to be the dominant graphic ingredient in the production…with dip pens, drawing pens and brush calligraphy involved…although some of the inking will be made onto previously painted paper.
There are some pencils in there too…as well as the pens,…with drawing and handwriting components plus my regular use of printmaking for image generation.
Having gotten deeper into production modeI am now approaching completion of the artwork …having advanced from scripting to page layout…however, I am keeping things open in terms of the resolution of the story.
I find the creation of the images…and the entire image-making process…including the resultant generation of the artwork…to be the most pleasurable part of the production process. Culling, selecting and editing the artwork is a tougher task.
Printmaking has again been employed in the image-making…a little more than photography…but about the same proportion as drawing. In terms of style, abstraction is making an impression. The notion of developing this project into graphic novel form continues to firm.
I have been involved with this project as an academic advisor for the past three years. It’s formal title is Q-COLLECTION COMIC BOOK PRESERVATION PROJECT, an initiative to preserve a particular collection of comics. I like to refer to it as Q, the “Q” standing for the city of Quincy, Massachusetts. The city’s shield was presented to the project’s founder Dr. John Offerman Sindall for use on the project. Sindall, a member of Mensa, has collected around 200 key American comic books from the period 1930s-1960s. This was an era of printing comics on low grade paper that will eventually crumble into powdery form when handled. The Q project is a strategy to prevent this by cutting up the comics, coating them with Mylar and mounting them in wooden binders that will provide an estimated life of 10,000 years. Hearing this part of the process, that the comics will have to be destroyed in order to be saved, is disturbing for some collectors. Librarians understand the beneficial outcome, however. It means the comics will be able to be read. In terms of financial investment this collection is not about unopened first issues in sealed plastic bags.
Two of the comics in the collection, both No.1’s, Strange Adventures (1950) and MAD (1952).
In addition to the comics, the collection contains associated artifacts such as trading cards, bubble gum wrappers, photographs, ads, membership cards etc. These items will be subject to the preservation process.
Superman bubble gum wrapper.
Sindall has put together a wide-ranging international advisory committee for the project. Here is my statement of support: In a world in which comic books have been treated for far too long as consumables and ephemera the Q-Collection Comic Book Preservation Project represents a significant plan to preserve key items of these as popular culture artifacts. This project also provides physical protection against the transitory status of comic books by means of coating, wrapping and encasement in protective materials that will ensure defense against their decay. The selection and acquisition of these rare comic books that have become classics of popular culture, their preservation treatment, deposit and safekeeping and subsequent availability for reading and research by future generations has my support and deserves backing by business benefactors, patrons of popular culture and by an appropriate public collection institution.
The collection is destined for the Library of Congress.
UPDATE: FEBRUARY 2016: An article about the project’s founder has been published: Comic Book Heroics: Mensan Leads Efforts To Preserve Aged Comics by Michael Hill, Ph.D., The Mensa Bulletin, February 2016, No. 592.
UPDATE: DECEMBER 2016: The Q-Collection Comic Book Preservation Project’s 2017 promotional calendar-strictly limited edition gifted to committee members. Thank you John!
This symposium continued the productive association between the University of Technology, Sydney and Supanova of co-staging comics related research events. In this case topics were not confined to the study of comics in general nor Australian alternative comics in particular. Rather, the papers reflected a more wide-ranging list of subjects that included connections between comics and fashion, film, animation, literature, calligraphy and computer games. There was also a presentation on the design of comics for young readers with vision impairment. This range of topics reflected the a broad scope of the university’s teaching and research areas. This had resonance with Supanova’s own broadening interests that had spread from an initial focus on comics (it was originally known as ComicFest) to a wider pop culture spread.
Page from the SUPANOVA program listing the event.
In this symposium researchers focused on the use of the design elements image and space and the manipulation of these in the creation of fantasy worlds in various media forms. Co-curated by Dr. Vicki Karaminas and I, the symposium was staged at the UTS city campus in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building on 14th October 2005 and opened by the Dean of the faculty.
This is the twelth in a series of posts called Archives of Australian Comics History that document moments in the recent history of Australian comics, particularly alternative comics and the Australian Small Press, however, as stated above, this post has a broader orientation. I began researching this subject in the late 1990s and it eventually led to my PhD thesis and doctorate: Ph.D. Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, 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 the research I donated the materials and comics I had collected to the National Library of Australia: Michael Hill Collection of Australian Comics.
My artist book, The Grafik Guitar, has undergone a marked transformation by being bound and covered by designer Imogen Yang. This has resulted in an elegant and artistic encasing collection of the prints.
The book consists of 38 prints on the theme of deconstructing the elements of the guitar. The images were carved in lino and wood. I followed the Japanese creative print (sosaku hanga) approach using Japanese knives, gouges and chisels. The book was then printed on Chinese 2 ply paper with Dr. Ph. Martin’s water colour ink and some sumi.
Imogen emboss-printed the guitar strings block onto a strip of kangaroo skin for the front cover. Then she got me add my MH signature chop. Her use of 6 thick binding strings to the front and back cover boards echoes the guitar’s 6 strings. I can’t explain the stitching pattern she has employed to bind the pages together. As an iteration of the cover design she used my separate guitar strings prints for the endpapers.
The book is currently on display at the Art Gallery of NSW. It is part of the 16th annual exhibition of the Australian Bookbinders. The exhibition runs from 7th November to 14th December in the Research library and archive.
THE MAKING OF The Grafik Guitar ARTIST BOOK This follow-up addition to the above post shows some of the printmaking. I made 38 monoprints on the theme of the deconstruction of some elements of the acoustic guitar. These included the machine head, tuning pegs, fretboard, strings and sound hole. The separate elements were carved in lino or wood then overlaid in various combinations and intensities to form composite monoprints. The Japanese creative print method (sosaku hanga) was employed. This blocks were carved with Japanese knives and chisels. They were printed on Chinese paper with water colour ink, sumi and additional hand colouring.
I incorporated elements of that design in a subsequent project. It involved the design of the cover for publication of the conference proceedings of the international popular music studies conference. Titled CHANGING SOUNDS: New Directions And Configurations In Popular Music in Sydney, IASPM 1999. (Picture below). I also presented a research paper at that conference.
This post covers some glimpses of the works on display and visitors to the exhibition Blotting Paper: Works On Paper 18-29 September at GAUGE Gallery in Glebe, Sydney. It included the publication and launch of the second issue of my artist book/comic Blotting Paper: The Recollected Graphical Impressions Of Doctor Comics, Chapter 2: A Blot On His Escutcheon.
Did you see this exhibition? If so, I would love to hear of your impressions of the show and of my art…and/or of this post about it. You can post to this Blog, Michael.
Doctor Comics 