LET ME BE FRANK

These kind of conversations come up quite a lot these days – begging used to be rare in Wellington and Auckland and now it’s quite common. Does the government heaving people off the benefit and cutting social services have anything to do with it? Undoubtedly. As the local elections get closer, the right wing hopefuls are proposing a Rudy Giuliani-style sweep the homeless off the streets, with people like Nicola Young at the helm.

I showed Jonathan this comic and he said “that beggar looks like your dad”. So I added this little bit to the comic, the other thing that really bothers me:

Sometimes I think it’s easier not to overthink things. But if you don’t overthink things then your subconscious brain takes over and makes a whole lot of crap decisions and judgements.

It’s challenging to keep on making art in a world that views worth in terms of dollars. I make hardly any money as an illustrator and a writer – perhaps, if I were more ambitious, I would – but I feel like I am ambitious, just in all the wrong ways. I want what I do to have value but am constantly plagued with the thought that it doesn’t. Still, I keep on writing things and drawing things, hoping that they might bring someone pleasure, they might record something that others have missed, they might prompt somebody to think differently about the world. Or maybe art-making for me is some useless Pavlovian response. I see pen – I pick it up and draw. We will all soon be dead.

On Friday, it was reported that CNZ would have a cut in funding thanks to there being less Lotto money to go around this year. That made me feel depressed. Why is support for the arts dependent on gambling? Statistically more poor people gamble, and rich people in New Zealand are enjoying tax cuts. Large companies avoid paying tax, as so beautifully illustrated by Toby Morris. Couldn’t rich people pay a bit more tax and companies do a little less tax evasion so that arts, health, education, welfare and the environment could be properly supported in New Zealand?

Still, there’s that nagging feeling: if nobody wants to pay for my work, why should I expect the government to support it? I’m wondering if it’s some kind of Stockholm syndrome, the result of living for too long in a free market economy. I look at what my children want: YouTube clips, Netflix movies. They want stories but they want them to move and talk and sing. My son wants to become a YouTube celebrity. My daughter tells me that she never, ever wants to become a writer. What I make is too static, too quiet. Its value is too ephemeral and unmeasurable.

I would write more, but I have another load of washing to hang out.

I have gone off cafés. I don’t ever seem to be able to find any where I can buy myself or my kids stuff that feels healthy and a reasonable size.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to eat – there is – but it all seems to be variations on high-sugar, high-carb or high-fat stuff that would put me, the diabetic, into sugar-induced lethargy and my children into a sugar-crazed cranky hyperactivity. There’s a retro love-affair with the Edmonds cookbook going on, mashed up with a McDonalds supersize mentality.

Is it too much to ask for, to able to choose small savoury or sweet treats where we can go through the ritual of sitting at a café, imagining that we are European, sipping coffee, nibbling on a little something and having conversations about the latest philosophers and YouTube clips and pop stars?

There’s also the children’s drinks question – the two choices seem to be either a sickly sweet hot chocolate with marshmallows or some oversized fizzy drink that has been branded the new evil and the cause of obesity.

When it comes down to it, K bars are relatively harmless about about 10 grams of sugar versus the 40 grams of sugar in a bottle of ginger beer.

I used to like getting scones or muffins to go with my flat white, but these have grown over the years – or maybe I’m less likely to split one with a friend, more likely to drink coffee alone – and I daren’t order them because they are carb bombs, softball-sized, meaning I have to inject myself with large amounts of insulin twice: the first time for the initial carb hit, the second time for all the carb that took its time to absorb thanks to the high levels of butter.

I really don’t hold with cookies the size of people’s heads. Maybe some people think they are getting their value for money, but I’m much more likely to be seduced by a little biscuit or pastry that costs half as much and I can imagine I might walk off on my way up the hill. And why are there so few savoury little somethings? There’s this perception that you have to have something sweet with coffee, but people drink coffee with their bacon-and-egg brunches, so obviously that impulse is misplaced. When my grandmother used to invite us for afternoon teas, the savouries always had to match the sweets.

So I was thinking about all the things I would like to see in New Zealand cafés, in the hope that other people might feel the same way and there would be a ground swell to end the tyranny of boulder muffins and paving stone slices. It did occur to me that what I really wanted was to go and live in Spain where it was okay to drink sherry and eat octopus at 10am in the morning.

What do you guys think? Am I alone in my café frustrations?

I’ve had a really busy year this year – not only has there been all the moving drama, I’ve also been working on two books. The first is my Katherine Mansfield bio/memoir, which is now going to be published by VUP in 2016, and the second is Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa/NZ Women’s Comics. 

Three Words is something special. When I first started paying attention to the local comics world around 2010, there didn’t seem to be many women making comics. They weren’t significantly represented in books or anthologies, and they didn’t hang out much with the comics guys. I assumed that comics was something NZ women didn’t really  do. But I was wrong.

I got together with Indira Neville and Rae Joyce, two other comics creators, and we set about creating our own anthology. Indira had been involved in the alt music/comics scene since the early nineties, and Rae was also a poet and fiction writer. Over coffee and green tea we sketched out a concept for our book – three words that contributors would exchange to create new strips – and called for submissions of up to three pages of existing work.

(image by Sophie Oiseau)

The work flooded in, and it’s still coming in even though the book is about to go to print. We’ve got edgy underground work, comics by Māori and Pasifika creators, editorial comics, beautiful art comics, and auto-bio comics. Lots of the talented contributors had never been in print before, and some of them were print veterans.

(image by Sharon Murdoch)

Of course this kind of book is a modest one, and it relies on people (like you, I hope!) to pre-order it so it can exist. I would love it if you could show your support for NZ women comics creators, and encourage other women to make comics. If you pre-order now you get free shipping in NZ, $5 off the retail price ($50 down to $45) and a free zine thrown in. And you get that sense of well-being that comes with being a patron of the arts!

Pre-order here. 

(And I promise I’m going to start posting some comics soon, once I’ve finished my masters thesis.)

This Friday, I head up to Auckland (again!) to take part in the Splitting Image exhibition of political and editorial cartoonists and illustrators. There’s an opening on Friday night – come along! It’s at 6pm at Lot 23 on Minnie Street, Eden Terrace. I’ll have lots of prints available to buy, along with some original artwork. Also you’ll be able to buy originals by brilliant cartoonists such as Sharon Murdoch, Chris Slane, Anna Crichton, Daron Parton, Peter Bromhead and Rod Emmerson.

This is a picture of Pebbles Hooper, which is part of a spread of celebrities I did for the illustrated issue of Metro, Simon Wilson’s swan song. You must read this interview with Simon — it’s great. I am really enjoying the relaunched Spinofff website. I have a soft spot for Pebbles, based on the fact that she has T1 diabetes and I like her parents’ World clothing brand, but hell she says some obnoxious libertarian things. Although her willingness to be disliked is also admirable.

Graham Brazier has died of a heart attack today – and I’m sure I just saw him in his shop in July, at the end of my parents’ old street. Here’s a comic I wrote 5 years ago when I went into Braziers to buy Brave New World, and crashed a little party he was having.

Graham Brazier was king of the radio when I was a kid, as the lead singer of Hello Sailor.