More bike comics
I seem to have a compulsion to draw bicycles, maybe because I know that I’m not very good at it and I find it hard. Actually, looking back at this Metro comic, I see that I was a bit crafty and cropped most of the bikes out. But anyway, this is a true story (of course! I wouldn’t make stuff up!) My mum did get a serious head injury from being knocked off her bike and she’s still recovering, 2 months later. This has been a bad year for our family on bikes – my dad came off his in January and ended up in a neck brace for a couple of months, and my husband came off his and buggered his shoulder. We should walk, right?
Who is Anna Darko?
I just joined the rest of NZ and upgraded my phone from a basic nokia to a smartphone. Here’s my first smartphone comic post, all about Anadarko doing deep sea oil exploration in NZ. As you can see, it upsets me, as many things do, but I don’t usually have time to draw a comic about it.
Eastbourne
I found this comic in my journal and I thought I would share it with you. I’ve got a couple of pieces in a forthcoming Eastbourne anthology – an excerpt from Dead People’s Music and a poem I wrote when I was in my twenties – and this is a companion piece to the poem. I really loved Eastbourne, and although it was great that my grandmother moved to Palmerston North when I was in my teens so we could be closer by, I did miss going for my little seaside holidays.
My two comics in the latest Metro ‘Best of Auckland’ issue came out – I got to be the grinch who didn’t believe in Best of lists, even though I made it onto the NZ Listener best books of 2013 list. I was buried deep in the magazine for my sins, but I was particularly pleased with my Lorde & Eleanor Catton comic. I really like Best of lists when I don’t have a book that may or may not make it on there, but when I do, best of lists give me stomach ulcers.
And in final news, I am going to be on a panel this week with a pair of wonder writers, Bianca Zander and Sue Orr. It’s on Thursday 28 November, 7.30pm, Devonport Community House, 32 Clarence Street, Devonport. Take a trip across on the ferry! It’s free, and there will be nibbles and wine.
Trans-movie-ogrification
This is a comic from Metro a few months back. Next issue I’ve got two pages of comics in it, which is very exciting. I was even commissioned to draw Lorde and Eleanor Catton – you’ll have to let me know if I got their likenesses!
I got back from talking at the Women’s Cartoon Colloquium on Friday night. It was such an intense and interesting day. I got to meet some other awesome cartoonists, including Robyn Kennealy, Hayley Heartbreak, Jem Yoshioka and Sharon Murdoch, New Zealand’s only female political cartoonist. Although I personally think that NZ has lots of political cartoonists – it’s just that not so many get paid to draw a frame for a newspaper.
Jem Yoshioka wrote up the event very eloquently, but here’s my brief take: we all agreed that there are lots of women making comics out there, it’s just that a lot have been forgotten or else they’re doing the menial jobs in the comics industry – for instance they are the colourists at Marvel and DC. The dominating paradigm for newspaper cartoons is the grotesque and the masculine, so it’s refreshing to have someone like Sharon Murdoch, whose comics are cutting and visually appealing. I blathered my way through my speech – I think my impulse to entertain overcame my impulse to sound intelligent and there were some formidable intellects tackling the subject. I talked about exploring the domestic as a political statement and observed that a lot of young female illustrators and cartoonists were producing hyper-sexualised, nude, come-and-get-it imagery of women. Here I betrayed my fusty, came-of-age-in-the-nineties attitudes. I am so confused about this. I can see the argument that it’s empowering to take imagery traditionally produced by men and claim ownership, just like the LGBT community claimed words like ‘queer’, but then I also think is it really empowering? The women still look so idealised, so coquettish, so arranged – to me they’re not expressing their sexuality, rather their desire to be desired.
Anyway, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Am I right? Am I wrong? Can both truths exist simultaneously? I was always struck by Linda Clark’s reasons for quitting radio and going into law – that she came to journalism seeing things in black and white, and then found that she could no longer see things so clearly – that both sides of arguments were compelling. I feel like that quite a lot.
Drawing like a girl
Tomorrow (Friday 15 November) I’m going to be in Wellington, talking in a colloquium on women and cartoons. I’m writing my speech now, about my experience as a cartoonist-for-hire, and being one of the few women in a male-dominated field. This is a slide from my talk-to-be, musing on how back in design school typography was more highly valued than illustration, a department dominated by women.
I’ve been trying to figure out why there are so few female cartoonists in New Zealand – or if that is even a valid statement. On further investigation I’ve discovered that there are quite a few women drawing comics out there, only they aren’t considered slick enough to be included in glossy anthologies or histories, or else they’ve distributed their comics through a handful of photocopied zines, or they don’t take themselves seriously enough to do the hustle required to be noticed by mainstream media. Perhaps they don’t want to be noticed by mainstream media – one of the pleasures of comics and zine culture is that it is underground.
I have a few theories about why women’s comics aren’t valued as highly – many male cartoonists have grown up on a diet of superhero comics with its streak of misogyny, which is off-putting to a female reader. That’s the kind of art they aspire to and value, but women don’t – they’ve been looking elsewhere for inspiration. If they’re anything like me, they’ve been admiring cartoonists like Alison Bechdel, Julie Doucet and Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi and Gabrielle Bell. Sure, I read and loved Tintin as a child, but even then it bugged me that it was such a man’s world, and Bianca Castifiore was hardly a character I could relate to with her glass-breaking voice and titanic bosom. Perhaps as women haven’t seen many female role models out there, they’ve turned to illustration as a mode of expression. But illustration isn’t considered to be art, and nor is craft or many other art forms traditionally in the female domain. I have been accused a number of times of ‘drawing like a girl’ and I wonder if that’s the issue – I’m just not speaking the right visual language.
Another one of my theories is that women’s issues aren’t considered universally appealing. What’s interesting to everybody is what’s in the news – war, politics, environmental destruction, violent crime. Or city things – going out drinking and eating, going to shows and gigs and places. The domestic sphere is demarcated for women. It belongs in the ‘Women’s Interest’ section of the magazine shop. Men don’t have to engage in that kind of thing if they don’t want to, even though the dramas you find on the news play out on a small scale in the family and the community. I always find it confounding that women will read books by both men and women, but men are more likely to read books by other men. It feels a little bit like New Zealand’s relationship to the US or the UK – we know a lot about them because we are saturated with their culture, but they don’t know as much about us. They don’t need to – we’re just a place people move to if all else fails.
But listen – I’m beginning to generalise and get myself into trouble. Of course there are lots of men who engage in the domestic sphere and who want to read comics about experiences in motherhood. There’s a great new comic book by Toby Morris called ‘Don’t puke on your dad.’ And it’s probably socially irresponsible of me to concentrate on small-scale domestic dramas when I could be writing about politics and trying to enact change. The personal may be the political but the political is what gets you noticed.
So where are you, all you women cartoonists? Stand up and be counted! Leave your tumblr link in the comments! And if you have any thoughts on this topic, any theories you can add, please let me know – my speech isn’t finished yet.
Too many hats
This is an illustration that I’ve done for a children’s book, but it struck me that it was very appropriate to my life. I am trying to wear too many hats! I am trying to be a writer, a cartoonist, a freelance graphic artist, a teacher, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend, a gardener, a, a, a — it’s all too much. I keep on trying to figure out how I can take some of these hats off and simplify my life. I don’t feel like I spend enough time on anything. Everything’s rushed, compromised, pushed out by other demands.
But perhaps this is what life is like. Creative time is to be snatched at. Tolstoy wrote at the edge of the family dining table. So did Patricia Grace. Raymond Carver wrote in his car to avoid interruptions. Katherine Mansfield’s journals are full of laments at how little time she is getting to write, how disrupted she is by illness. Perhaps we don’t need great stretches of time – perhaps we only need moments of clarity. I do lots of my thinking when I’m not at my desk – when I’m biking, walking to school, stirring the porridge.
I imagine what I could produce if only I had time. I question why I’m even trying to produce anything in the first place – who cares? I’m never going to be great. Is it my ego that’s motivating me? Or am I just a compulsive communicator? If only I didn’t feel the need to write and draw – then perhaps I could get a job that would satisfy me. I wouldn’t need to do a hundred things to make ends meet.
Anyway, I’m procrastinating – I have something due today. And on Monday. I’d better get back to it. I want to write a comic for my Mansfield project – I just discovered that the painting that hung my grandmother’s wall, the one of my uncle Jim holding his teddy bear cousin Sandra as a baby, was painted by Edith Bendall, Katherine’s one-time lover. I haven’t seen the painting for 12 years but I can see it perfectly in my mind. It’s a portal. It’s a gift.
Journal pages
Yesterday, on Twitter, procrastinating as usual (it takes me about an hour to really start work), I followed this link and was enchanted by Guillermo del Toro’s sketch books. It reminded me how much fun it is glimpsing inside other people’s journals, so I thought I’d show you a few snaps from mine. Note: this is NOT my graphic novel. These are just my notes – Katherine Mansfield’s timeline, illustrated, with a few interludes from me. There’s nothing like a bit of watercolour to spruce up pencil scribbles!
Now I’ve got to stop procrastinating and go hard-out on my Metro comic, ‘best of Auckland’, which is due, um, today. Erk! Thunderbirds are go! Just when I wanted to immerse myself in my Katherine Mansfield project, sigh. Luckily Metro pays – if you look in my first journal spread, you’ll see a picture of George Banks and Henri Gaudier storming Middleton Murry’s office, demanding payment for their Rhythm drawings and slapping him on the cheek when he insists that there was never going to be any money.
Actually I really want to find out more about Georges Banks – a woman who dressed as a man, who was an early 20th century cartoonist.
Also I’ve got to get my powerpoint together for the Ladies’ Litera-Tea, which is on Sunday. I am looking forward to that!
Bike comics and news
The latest Metro is out and I have ANOTHER bike comic in it – this time about my mum being knocked off hers and ending up with a head injury.
You can watch the film I reference in this comic here – I loved it, and it was made better by the fact that I was flatting with the film director’s sister at the time.
In other news, thank you so much to Briar who came along to hear me speak last week and then reviewed my book so generously!
Tomorrow night (Wednesday) I am going to a book launch of From Earth’s End: The Best of New Zealand Comics. It looks like a beautiful book and I am lucky enough to be included in it. Come along if you are in Auckland – it’s a free event and there will be a legion of cartoonists to draw silly pictures over your freshly-purchased book.
And finally on Sunday I’m taking part in The Ladies’ Litera-Tea. Cakes! More cakes! Club sandwiches! Bloody good writers!
Night Terrors
I’ve been having a particularly acute case of Second Rate Writer’s Syndrome (SRWS) ever since Ellie Catton won the Man Booker Prize. I’m super excited and pleased for her, and I think it’s a wonderful thing for New Zealand literature, but it also reminds me that before I started writing in earnest, I harboured Booker fantasies. Little by little I’ve adjusted my expectations , and now I’d think I’d won a prize if I got published overseas. I’m up to page 305 of The Luminaries (signed first edition!), and it is so very good, and Ellie is quite brilliant. Sigh. I went to China with her a few years back – my comics about it are here and here.
I’ve got a few events coming up if you are in Auckland. First up, I’m talking at The Resource Room in Pt Chevalier at 7pm next Thursday, 24th October. Come along to get your book signed and drink some wine. And then at 6pm on the 30th of October, I’m going to a book launch at Auckland Central Library of From Earth’s End: The Best of NZ Comics. I’m lucky enough to be included in that book, yippee! On Sunday 3rd November I’m taking part in the wonderful The Women’s Bookshop’s Ladies’ Litera-Tea. Come along!
Te Manawa
Tomorrow I am returning to the city I grew up in, Palmerston North. I am going to be artist-in-residence for a few days at Te Manawa, the museum of art, science and history. Although my parents left Palmy in 1994, I’ve been back every year to visit my grandparents and my friend Helen. I always feel conflicted returning. Growing up it seemed too small, too suffocating – I had my sights on New York City! Paris! Florence! Wellington! – but in retrospect, I see its size afforded me all sorts of opportunities. My parents took me to Saturday sports, dance classes, cello lessons, school orchestra, and to every show that came to the Palmerston North Opera House. I don’t do half that stuff with my kids in Auckland – it seems too hard and there’s too much driving and money involved. When I visit I usually think how silly I am living in Auckland. Things would be much easier if I just moved back south. I could have a quarter acre section and chickens. I would never have to bike uphill. My children would roam the streets in gangs, building huts in the cutty grass, like I did when I was a kid. But then the wind picks up and the sky presses down and I remember why I left.
I’m meant to be talking, reading and signing books. Palmerston makes it into all my work in some way or other. My short stories were littered with Palmy settings, Dead People’s Music had Palmy scenes disguised as Wellington ones. In The Fall of Light, Rudy visits Palmerston North late in the book. But I can’t read that bit – it’ll be giving too much away.
I’m also meant to be demonstrating ink wash drawings. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to draw – more comics? People who stray into the gallery? Pages for my Katherine Mansfield graphic novel? It’s her 125th birthday today. I’ve packed my suitcase with brushes and different types of paper. This year I reread Cat’s Eye, a Margaret Atwood novel that I loved as a young woman. It was all about an artist who returns to her home town, Toronto, for a retrospective. In returning, she remembers traumatic events from her childhood, in which she is bullied, and then becomes the perpetrator of bullying. Atwood says something interesting about time and memory: “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.” I’ve always liked that way of looking at it. I wonder what will surface tomorrow.
LET ME BE FRANK 