About The Project

The official name of our 2020 Australia Research Council-funded Linkage Project is ‘Contemporary Australian Comics 1980-2020: A New History’. In collaboration with our amazing Partner Organisations the National Library of Australia, Australia Council for the Arts, and Craig Walker Design, we will map, archive and promote Australian comics and graphic novels produced in the last 40 years, and the artists who created them.

Since its inception in 2018, the team of investigators on this project has been calling it, simply, ‘Folio’. The word Folio, for us, stirs up a powerful series of images and impressions which lie at the heart of what we want this project to do. Imagine a comic artist carrying a folio of their work – their shiny completed projects, their drafts, their messy mistakes, their notes to themselves, their attempts and failures, a record of their relentless, exhausting labour, a testament to their love of this art-form. They spread their folio out on a table – a hidden history is revealed. 

Australia’s best comics creators make stunning work, but many are undiscovered by the general reading public. Folio aims to present Australia’s contemporary comics scene in the most accessible way, making these often rare and ephemeral works available for generations of readers and scholars.

As an introduction to the medium, we will organise art, information and the stories of Australian comics with a focus on accessibility, simplicity and clarity, using interactive media that makes it easy for newcomers to navigate and explore. 

Our project will unearth the portfolios of our world-class artists, archive their back-catalogues, and articulate the work with essays, interviews and multimedia readings. 

During the project we will spend time unpacking, reading and responding to Australian comics in the National Library of Australia. We’ll also acquire new and historical Australian comics for the NLA’s collection.

We will interview and photograph some of Australia’s comic artists, asking them to tell us the story of their intersections with the Australian comics scene and what it means for them.

With Craig Walker Design, we will create a beautiful website where anyone in the world will be able to discover, explore and study the complex interwoven network of Australian comic artists, publishers, community organisers and booksellers.

At the end of the project, we’ll be holding a series of launch events, panel discussions and exhibitions with the Australia Council where you’ll be able to come and hear from local artists, look at their original work up close, and talk to us about Folio.

Folio opens up a new way of seeing Australia, a secret history drawn by our unique creators.