In 2021, we commissioned a series of personal essays by some Australian artists and scholars whose lives and work have intersected in important ways with contemporary Australian comics. We wanted to use their variety of responses as a springboard for thinking about and mapping the network of nodes that make up the Australian comics community.
Was there something or someone that opened up the world of Australian comics to you? What was the first Australian comic you read? What memories do you have of reading, seeking, buying or making comics in Australia? Who are the Australian artists that you return to again and again, and how do you connect with their comics? How do they make you feel? What do they make you think about? Do you think there is something special, weird, different or distinctive about Australian comics? What is 'Australia' in Australian comics? How does it look? How does it sound? What is the Australian comics ‘scene’? What places, people and atmospheres make this scene what it is? Do you have any anecdotes, photos or clear memories of interactions you had with the Australian comics scene? Tell us a story! Show us a picture! What about the not so great stuff? Has anything happened that’s made you reflect on negative, limiting or excluding aspects of the Aus comics world?
Enjoy these essay responses from Safdar Ahmed, Queenie Chan, Rachel Ang, Eleri Mai Harris and Golnar Nabizadeh, complemented by an introductory essay by Lead Investigator Elizabeth MacFarlane.
Coming from fine art, and then engrossed in my architecture training, I didn’t meet any other comics people for a long time. We are pretty rare creatures - not many people read comics, and fewer want to make them. I didn’t realise I was lonely until I met others who spoke the same language.
Read MoreThere is one belief that I have retained for longer than any other in my life. My belief is that ideas are tied to their speaker.
Ideas are spoken in the voice of their author. Scholarship is bound to the body of its writer. To suggest that ideas can float free of the bodies that voiced them has always sat uncomfortably with me. There are many ways that we are taught from a young age how to distance the body and voice of the scholar from the words they are speaking. The surgical excision of the ‘I’ when writing essays in high school takes a long time to heal. In fact, come to think of it, the use of ‘I’ in my writing was excised around the same time that comics were excised from my reading. It took fifteen years for me to find them both again.
Read MoreWhen I was 18 I found a comic book that rocked my tiny world.
Read MoreAs a young girl growing up in Perth, I loved reading Archie comics and would buy them from my local stationary store as often as I could. The bright colours and clean lines of the artwork, along with the improbably vast number of outfits worn by Betty and Veronica, along with the episodic impulse of the comic delighted me. I was able to lose myself in this pop world which maintained a light touch on the trials and tribulations of ‘growing up’.
Read MoreIt’s probably ruining my posture... but I love this process. There’s a tactile joy in scratching lead and ink onto paper which I’ve come to crave. I like to believe drawing is a metonym for thinking.
Read MoreThe concept of ‘Australian manga’ is one that few people are aware of, even if they are reasonably well-informed about the large, global subculture behind it. For many who live acclimatised to the hegemonic, Western (read: American) cultural landscape that dominates this country, it’s inevitable that they are slow to embrace Australian manga’s inclusion in the history of Australian comics.
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