Obsession and Unreasonable Love: Creativity and devotion in comics scholarship by Dr. Elizabeth MacFarlane

Parts of this essay are reworked from a keynote address I gave at the Perth Comic Art Festival in 2018 called ‘This is the Scholar that Comics Built: Creativity and devotion in comics scholarship’. My thanks to Stuart Medley for inviting me to PCAF, Campbell Whyte for drawing me at PCAF, Gabe Clark for conversations that helped this essay enormously, and to Ronnie Scott who I have dreamt of being edited by since 2008.

There 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.

One of the most beautiful things about comics, to me, is the way a person’s speech is linked indelibly to their body in the form of a two-dimensional balloon that exists superimposed onto the diegetic frame of the story. Such a simple, perfect way of expressing embodiment, a person’s words emitting from their mouth like breath.

So, this is my belief. One of my only beliefs that has not been shaken and transformed by the passage of time. But how to believe in it? Performing this belief takes a certain amount of risk.

One way to perform the belief is to keep doing what I’m doing now, and draw attention to the ‘I’ in public fora. To do as Jane Tompkins does in her wonderful essay ‘Me and My Shadow’ all the way back in 1989, and say

The dichotomy drawn here is false – and not false. I mean in reality there's no split. It's the same person who feels and who discourses about epistemology. The problem is that you can't talk about your private life in the course of doing your professional work. You have to pretend that epistemology, or whatever you're writing about, has nothing to do with your life, that it's more exalted, more important, because it (supposedly) transcends the merely personal. Well, I'm tired of the conventions that keep discussions of epistemology, or James Joyce, segregated from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart. The public-private dichotomy, is the public-private hierarchy […]. I say to hell with it. The reason I feel embarrassed at my own attempts to speak personally in a professional context is that I have been conditioned to feel that way.ⁱ

Jane Tompkins’s essay was about epistemology. This essay is about a nationally-funded research project I’m leading that will tell some of the stories of the last forty years of Australian comics. It’s also an introduction to the series of essays we commissioned to launch the project. I’m going to talk about them in a way that attaches my speech balloon to my body.

As I write this essay I am experiencing a migraine. Some people reading this may have direct lived understanding of what this feels like. Others have people close to them who suffer migraines, and have gained a sense of what it is like. Approximately every month I fall under the thrall of a migraine for about four days. There are medications and things I can do that quell it temporarily, or make at least the pain fade to a manageable level. But a migraine isn’t just pain, of course. It is a kind of fog. A deep cloud across one side of the brain, with pin-pricks of light at its edges. A cloud in the stomach too, that roils and makes eating impossible.

As I write this essay, Melbourne is again in lockdown due to another Covid-19 outbreak. For many, a lockdown means the loss of livelihood, a struggle to make rent, closing one’s business, caring for children at home, and separation from loved ones. The feeling of it, for me, is like another kind of migraine. A deep haze, a murkiness that casts a pall over everything. Along with the pall comes anxiety: an intense disturbance that attends not having a routine, not having enough time and space, watching work deadlines fly past, attempting to soothe my son as he sits in front of classroom zooms, missing his friends and struggling to adjust to yet another transition. This research project was meant to be up and running early in 2020. Our plan was to travel around Australia visiting comic artists in their homes and studios, interviewing them and photographing them. Our plan was to by now have a substantial database of raw material which we would begin shaping into a magnificent website: an entry point for people all over the world to access and discover Australian comics. Our plan, of course, was made before March 2020 and like many plans has been folded into a corner. In a conversation with Gary Chaloner recently, he described it using the wonderful metaphor of the project feeling like a big exciting box hovering just over our heads and out of reach. With this ‘holding site’, we are getting our fingertips on the mystery box and cracking open its lid.

In 2008 while waiting for a gig at the Toff in Town to start, I wandered upstairs to a bookshop called Metropolis. While browsing their collection of art volumes and ephemera, I came across an oddly-shaped hardback mustard-coloured book with ‘ACME’ emblazoned in an eye-shaped ribbon-design in its centre. It was difficult to find out who had authored the book, but I opened it to find comics. The drawings were meticulous, almost diagrammatic, and coloured in a muted palette of oranges, browns and yellows. In the comics, sad people cried, or masturbated, or remembered their childhoods, or obsessed over small objects.

Anyone who is part of the independent comics community probably already knows the book I am talking about, knows its author’s work well, perhaps either deeply loves or deeply hates this author’s body of work, or (like me) used to deeply love the work and now feels ambivalent about that love.

Anyone who is not part of the independent comics community has no idea at all about any of this and why should they?¹

In 2009 I fell pregnant. In early 2010, with a pregnant belly, I attended a day of panel events at the Wheeler Centre that revolved around local comic artists. Its host was Bernard Caleo. During a break I introduced myself to Bernard and told him I was a University of Melbourne academic and was thinking about teaching comics in the creative writing program. Bernard was overjoyed and wrote down my phone number into an actual paper diary.

Later in 2010 I lost my job at the University, had a baby, and my relationship of nine years fell apart. I kept reading new comics.

Over the next year I sought out local artists. I read Mandy Ord, Matt Huynh, Pat Grant, Gregory Mackay, Nicki Greenberg, Shaun Tan, Michael Fikaris, Mirranda Burton, David Blumenstein, Jo Waite, Bruce Mutard, Tim Molloy, Ben Hutchings, and Maude Farrugia. I read their work in anthologies and zines and little books published by little presses. I went to launches at pubs. Bernard Caleo was always the host. Everyone was a shy nerd. Everyone was kind. Everyone was weird.

In 2011, on a tenuous 1.5-day-a-week contract, with my baby in a day-care centre, I attended a Creative Writing program meeting where we were asked to think about ideas for new subjects. Half-jokingly, I said “How about a subject on comics?”

Graphic Narratives ran for the first time at the University of Melbourne in Semester 2 2011, making 2021 its tenth incarnation. I’ve taught it over the years with Ronnie Scott, Bernard Caleo, Leonie Brialey and with guest lectures from Sam Wallman, Adi Firth, Kevin Patrick and Matt Huynh. The small graphic novels press I’m part of (with Bernard Caleo and Erica Wagner) published its second book, Safdar Ahmed’s Still Alive, this year. In 2020 the Comic Art Workshop I was lucky enough to co-direct with Pat Grant won an award for service to the comics community and we passed it into the safe directorship of Josh Santospirito and Eleri Harris. All these people now feel like my family.

I have this feeling that I didn’t actually do any of this. Comics did it to me.

¹ It’s Chris Ware, and the book was Acme Novelty Library #17.

The story of Australian comics is, like any good story, not one story at all. It’s hundreds of stories. It’s stories that change. It’s stories that contradict each other. It’s stories that leave things out. It’s stories that make us cringe to look back at. It’s stories that intersect. It’s stories that shift into focus. It’s stories that rail against their own centre. It’s stories that struggle for attention.

In my grant application for the research project ‘Contemporary Australian Comics 1980-2020: A New History’, I used the phrase ‘the story of Australian comics’ many times. There is a confident, committed voice to adopt when applying for grant funding from a national body. ‘Do you want the story of Australian comics?’ I asked the funding panel. ‘Well, I am the person to give it to you.’ In response, a portion of Australia’s set federal research budget of around $250,000 was committed to the investigation of its comic art. This investigation will be conducted by the research team, its Steering Committee, and by our astonishing team of Partner Organisations: the National Library of Australia, the Australia Council for the Arts, and Craig Walker Design.

But in fact, what we will give to you is not the story, but what we have been referring to as the ecology, which is another way of saying the many stories: composted, canopied, intertwined, rotting, burgeoning, choking, vying, with pockets of symbiotic pairs over here, and tall misshapen singularities over there, and clusters of close-knit spinneys, and crumbling old bones.

Our version of the ecology will not be the definitive version either. ‘Definitive’ is a word I deeply resist. Who is to say what defines something as sprawling, as multitudinous, as a medium of art? We will map, observe, provide a platform for, engage with, and listen to the artists, organisers, retailers and scholars that have contributed to the last forty years of Australian comics – as many as we have the resources to cover.

There are other Australian comics consolidation projects that have happened before and that are happening right now. Each will have distinct sensibilities, aims, audiences, and methods of organising information. For an astonishingly comprehensive list of published Australian comics, with accompanying details of publication year, cover image and contributors, you can spend hours trawling the beautiful Australian Comics Database, curated by Daniel Best and Gary Chaloner – an ecology that demonstrates the remarkable breadth of work. For a deep dive into the thriving mini-ecology of Melbourne zines, Michael Fikaris spent part of the 2020 Melbourne lockdown documenting his archive of 60 boxes of small press comics, art objects, and zines. His next step for the archive is to collaborate with local councils to establish two reading rooms – community spaces where people can come to read, learn, and continue to document the collection. The Australian Comics and Graphic Novels database is a rich resource specifically designed for libraries and schools, and is linked with the Australian Library and Information Association network. Queenie Chan’s remarkable work in this area includes producing a yearly library buy-list of Australian comics, and is produced in association with the Comic Con-versation Library Festival.

There are others I’ve missed, which I’m sure will be pointed out to me. An ecology of ecologies, then.

All of these nodal points, these projects of gathering and showing, are, surely, borne from love. Is it crass to talk about love in a research essay? Is it nauseating? Here’s me with my speech balloon hanging from my lips like a half-spent cigarette. It reads: I fucking can’t spend a year of my life writing a grant application unless it’s for something that I love.

I have a picture that I drew blu-tacked to my office wall; it’s a picture of my friend Bernard Caleo when he was giving a lecture to my students. His (invisible) speech balloon reads, “The economy of comics is obsession and unreasonable love”.

I think we can include scholarship in the economy of comics, if we take the term ‘economy’ in its broadest sense as exchange or ideology. Obsession and unreasonable love, perhaps two ways of saying the same thing. Bernard’s comment is both romantic and deeply sardonic, tapping into a nostalgic tradition of poverty in the arts which is both valorised and pilloried. Comics are, in Australia, still often handed or mailed with love directly from artists to readers, swapped for other comics or for food or for donations to charity or for editorial feedback. Huge markets and fairs are held and artists can still catch the tram home at the end of the day with only loose change in their pockets. Artists still negotiate fiercely for appropriate freelance recompense, and then follow up invoices for months. Unreasonable love.

When commissioning the essays which you can read below, we weren’t entirely sure what we could expect to receive. We made sure to include in our request a sense that our essayists’ speech balloons would be tied to their bodies. “Above all,” we wrote, “we want these essays to represent your specific voice, and your specific experiences with Australian comics.” We wanted the essays to be a way of starting up a new conversation about Australian comics, a way of beginning to demonstrate that each individual node in this cultural ecology is connected in multilinear multiplying ways to many other nodes.

It was thrilling to receive these essays for many reasons. The most basic reason was that there simply isn’t a whole lot of reflective writing about Australian comics in a broad sense to be found anywhere at all.² Reading these essayists use the term ‘Australian comics’ over and over again shifted something in me. It’s the thing I want to shift with this project in general. I want the term ‘Australian comics’ to become commonplace. I want it to be a thing. I want it to signify, and magnetise, and gather to itself a complex, flourishing set of ideas and responses.

When reading the essays, I was struck by a series of recurring themes. One of these was a micro-story. It goes like this: I was lonely/isolated, and then I found comics. The essayists describe or draw a moment when they discovered that they weren’t alone: Queenie Chan encounters the Anime Club at her university and her eyes turn into stars. Golnar Nabizadeh pinches herself as she sits in her first comics Masters class, “having been alone in comics for many years”. Eleri Harris draws a series of panels about her fleeting moments coming across comics in the wilds of new millennium Hobart. “I didn’t realise I had been lonely,” writes Rachel Ang, “until I met others who spoke the same language.” Safdar Ahmed’s autographic ‘Why comics?’ ends with a note he thinks may be a cliché: the mirror theory of art, which holds up the self to the self. But Ahmed inflects the mirror theory with a powerful call outwards: “Creating something is a communicative act for yourself, and an audience… Some experiences can be shared. Someone will get you.” These lines speak to the community that is built through a shared practice, and the relief people feel when they realise there are others to share it with, others who will “get you”.

It’s a satisfying story – I was lonely and then I wasn’t – but of course, the story doesn’t end there. In explicating a personal encounter with a tribe or community, another recurring reflection in these essays is about the edges of those communities, the ways they rebuff, intersect with, exclude, overlap, align and misalign with other communities, both within and beyond the world of comics. In what ways do Australian comics represent or speak to an idea of ‘Australia’ more broadly? What do Australian comics tell us about who we are? These essays, strikingly, speak repeatedly about difference: feeling inside and outside at the same time. Queenie and Golnar talk about their experiences as migrants to Australia and draw clear lines between being told they were ‘different’ in Australia and the passion with which they pursued different, marginalised kinds of storytelling. In a remarkable passage of analysis, Golnar makes the explicit connection between comics as a form which allows the past to remain on the page in sequence, and the act of threading together cultural and personal histories: “The moment endures, even while it is understood as a past event, and in so doing, allows the reader to remain with their fleeting vulnerability. As a migrant to Australia, textual moments such as these have helped me stitch together cultural meanings in my research as well as on a more personal level.” Queenie writes, of the appearance of anime on SBS TV in the 1990s, “While I wasn’t a science-fiction fan, it was an appetite for difference I could relate to.” I love this phrase: an appetite for difference. This same appetite is traced in a variety of ways across all of the five essays.

² There are a number of wonderful exceptions to this statement, including Kevin Patrick’s body of scholarship, Amy Maynard’s PhD thesis and chapter on ‘The Melbourne Scene’, John Ryan’s book Panel by Panel, Annette Shiell’s edited collection Bonzer, Graeme Cliffe’s From ‘Sunbeams’ to Sunset, the NLA’s blog archive, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics special edition Vol 12 Issue 1 on Australian comics, Michael Fikaris’s editorial essay ‘Down Down Under’in Kus! Baltic Comics Magazine #37, as well as the other consolidation (rather than commentary) projects, listed above.

In a passage that rang especially loudly to me as the head of this research project, Rachel Ang contemplates the impetus for naming, categorising and mapping: “Wherever there is a territory, there comes the urge to define its edges […] It’s important and commendable to recount history and record the contemporary moment – but it also makes me nervous. What is this fear? Of leaving someone out? Of stopping the flow of this stream we all contribute to just so I can count each drop of water? Of centring myself in a community which is so unusual, rich and diverse?”

In my comics classes, one of the first questions we ask students is about what comics they read as children. This isn’t usually a question I ask my other creative writing students. Gillian Whitlock writes about this in her work on autobiographical comics. The medium often has extremely powerful connotations with one’s own childhood and upbringing. Thus, it’s a natural transition from the medium to the self. She writes, “Much more needs to be said about the association of the comics with juvenilia and nostalgic memory work. By recalling autobiographically the child that comics built, they return to earlier experiences that are formative and haunt our adult engagement with comics.”ⁱⁱ

We comics writers are accustomed to the work of trying to distance ourselves from the automatic connection journalists continue to make between comics and childhood (as in the ‘Biff, bang, pow, comics aren’t just for kids anymore’ headline which we are all constantly bemoaning). I, like Whitlock, agree that in our scramble to make sure people understand comics to be a medium in which any story can be told, we have tended to minimise the often child-like way we read comics, and the child-like delight we take in them. It’s easy to slip into the pervasive dichotomy between childhood and adulthood that tells us that children and adolescents are volatile, not fully-formed, unstable. And that adults are, on the other hand, stable, mature, fixed and have finally become themselves, or formed a steady identity. That children and young people are not to be taken seriously, and adults are. Therefore, comics must be ‘grown-up’ to join the ranks of art or literature.

When my son reads, the membrane between the real world and the story world is porous. When he stops reading, it isn’t as though the story stops. His part in the story doesn’t stop. He continues to go about his day as though the story is continuing – he will often immediately and unconsciously ‘become’ one of the characters in the story, and will interact with the world around him as though the world of the story has been overlaid onto it. It’s this kind of double vision that I’m referring to when I talk about a child-like way of reading comics; the permeable layer between what’s ‘real’ and what’s ‘story’. Obsession and unreasonable love. I have heard one narrative from my students again and again over the last ten years of teaching comics. It goes like this: I read comics as a kid, and then at some point I stopped because I grew up. It isn’t insignificant to take this gap into account when thinking about the attitudes and creativity of comics scholars, who might imbue their writing with a sense of returning to a long-lost love, of playfulness, and of freedom.

Image Credit: Henry Azzopardi. Lists of levels in an made-up platformer game in the style of Yoshi's Crafted World based on the tea-brewing system in Campbell Whyte's Home Time Book 1.

From talking to many different people who love comics I’m aware that devotion expresses itself in many different ways.

For many, devotion to comics comes in the form of finding and collecting. The thrill of rifling through a box in the dusty back-room of a country town op-shop, (or the dusty back-room of a poorly-photographed deceased estate listing on eBay), on the chance that you might stumble upon a comic you’ve never heard of, or a comic you’ve been seeking for years, or a different version of a comic you already have, or a comic that completes your collection, is intoxicating. You have plastic archival mylar-wraps ready, and boards to keep the comics straight, and the right-sized box, and a special storage place. Your love is expressed through preservation.

For my son, as I’ve described, devotion comes in the form of enactment and inspiration: he becomes part of the story-world, and in his sketches, catalogues, compositions, scripts and lists, he adds to the story-world. It’s a kind of fan-fiction. The comic enters him and pours forth from him. His devotion is expressed through his creativity and production.

For me, the unreasonable love I feel for comics, and for other kinds of books too, is expressed in the form of dialogue. In many ways, this process is the inverse of the process of preservation. Instead of finding, collecting, bagging and boxing a comic, I read it hard, until its pages are scuffed and dog-eared, until its voice has gotten inside my brain. I read it once and then I read it again. I read one page of it twenty times. I read one panel of it a hundred times. I read it alongside other books: theory, cultural studies, literary studies. And sometimes then, if it’s the kind of book that I can prise open, if it has let me in, I write something back to it. So, my love is expressed through analysis and, though this word’s double-meaning often gets it maligned, criticism.³

Creativity, production, preservation, and criticism are not the only ways to express devotion, but they are some of the most prevalent and important.

There is, of course, a danger here, of our love for comics leading to criticism that is not robust, not objective, writing that is defensive and belaboured. Pat Grant and I spoke about this during the process of formulating the Comic Art Workshop. Because the community is so small, because the artistic labour is so intense, because most of us were or became friends, would the critical discussion that needed to happen about people’s comics simply dissolve into a sort patting each other on the back and sharing only praise?

Hannah Miodrag, in the introduction to her 2013 book Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form writes incisively about this issue. She writes, and she’s quoting Umberto Eco partly here:

The belaboured alternately defensive and celebratory prose with which comics scholars have often attempted to combat this poor repute does little to improve the standing of either the medium or scholarly interest in it. Comics critics too often extol the virtues of the form to the hilt, championing their interest in comics with the aggressive attitudes of the fan becoming carried away into exaggerated statements of faith, if only to overcome a certain embarrassment they may still feel themselves” (Eco, cited in Christiansen and Magnussen).

The result, according to Miodrag, has been that formal approaches to comics have dominated current criticism, and that it is time to “address the problems endemic in this defensively inspired formalist framework.”ⁱⁱⁱ

While I agree to some extent, that comics scholarship may tend towards the blindly admiring, and that in general, comics criticism does tend to circle back to questions of definition and form with a frequency that could be considered defensive or repetitive, Miodrag’s book then goes onto speak specifically about the “cross-pollination of the field [of comics scholarship] with practitioners and academics” which she says “does not foster the kind of discourse that conscientiously speaks to and positions itself within ongoing scholarly practices.”^iv Miodrag, like many scholars of comics, is careful to state her awareness of the potential charge of intellectual snobbery, of the tension that is always present between the culture of comics-making and the culture of academic analysis. I have seen this play out on the face of Pat Grant. As Anna Poletti says in her book about Australian zine culture, “Many zinesters will no doubt agree that zines are better off in the bin than in an academic monograph.” She cites Bruce LaBruce, as portraying “the disposable, ephemeral zine and the reified practices of cataloguing and analysing which are seen to define the critical process as locked in an irreconcilable opposition.”^v

I want to offer a challenge to the idea that we only have two options here: that either we continue to wallow in a practice-led non-scholarly childish mire of congratulatory and defensive criticism, or that we, in a sense, ‘grow up’ and start using the language of the adults, start being serious, and assert our disciplinary contexts, histories, and borders, yielding scholarship that is rigorous and conceptually sound.

³ So, by criticism, I don’t mean censure, reproach, condemnation. I mean comment, I mean appreciation, I mean unpacking, interacting with, looking beneath, making connections with, I mean loving.

I think the setting up of one against the other in this way shuts off the possibilities of self-reference, of embodiment, of oscillation, of creativity which might form the most useful basis for the way comics scholarship is shaping itself. Comics itself, both in terms of its form, and in terms of the kinds of communities it tends to create, may have an effect on the kinds of scholarship it inspires.

A number of works of comics scholarship have drawn specific attention to the particular relationship between artist and reader that comics necessitates, and thus to the kind of criticism or scholarship that the medium of comics, in a sense, generates. Anna Poletti makes reference to the nature of response that reading these texts calls for. She’s talking here specifically about the zine as object, not particularly about comics as a medium, but many of her points traverse both. She speaks about the material intimacy of the zine and writes, “The reading stance(s) required by the zine draw our attention to and disrupt established methods of reading, textual analysis and critical practice.”^vi With specific reference to the reader, critic or scholar, she writes

The material and textual idiosyncrasies challenge the literary critic to practice ‘connected reading,’ which Gillian Whitlock describes as a practice which “pulls at the loose threads of autobiography, and uses them to make sutures between, across and among autobiographical narratives”.^vii

This point speaks again to the relationship between comics and childhood. This intimacy, and the particular ways in which these texts imply or produce their reader, leads to what Poletti describes as a reconstitution of the status of ‘author’ in the author-reader relationship, and of the reader’s assumptions, which become more ephemeral, less fixed.

What does creativity in comics scholarship mean? What could it look like? It might mean resurrecting the ‘I’ voice, it might mean challenging what we think the limits of critical and creative practices are, it might be interweaving theory with essay with storytelling, it might be taking notice of the leading and most exciting current bodies of theoretical research such as gender studies, queer theory, critical race studies and intersectionality, and exploring how they could be applied to comics.

Comics have developed countless strategies of solving storytelling problems; we as scholars should take this as a challenge to develop our own creative strategies to write about them. Rather than rejecting the association between comics and childhood or adolescence, I think we have the opportunity to return to that porous boundary between story and reality, capture the creativity, the flickering between self and other, the malleability, the always-becoming nature of the self-in-formation in youth. If we want to keep pace with how knowledge production is understood, I think this is less a time for firming up the boundaries, definitions, and exclusive membership of comics scholarship, and more a time for exploring the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary writing, and of learning from and with the makers, sellers, cataloguers, and educators of comics.

When we published our ‘Graphic Storytellers at Work’ study, and sent out a media release, we were surprised (though perhaps we shouldn’t have been) by the singularity with which journalists approached their headlines. “Is this,” one journalist wrote to me in an email, “the final nail in the coffin for the stereotype of the Comic-Con geeks? Why are we seeing the gender gap turn around in graphic storytelling and why does one in five identify as transgender or non-binary?” Clearly, the media found these demographics the most interesting or at least saleable part of our study: the stereotype is shifting, a new era is dawning. Perhaps they were looking to stir a bit of controversy.

With this essay series, written by artists and scholars whose current practice and attention is deeply grounded in the contemporary Australian comics scene, what we hope is to draw more readers to the flow, not to stop it. To hold it up so more people can dip their toes into it, and to discover what the essayists will hold up in order to challenge and deepen the scope of our research. With our Folio project, we want to make Australian comics a phrase people say, to raise the odds of chance encounters with Australian comics for a broad readership, like the one Golnar had with Shaun Tan or the one Rachel had with Raw Feels or the one Eleri had with Two Minute Noodles. More eyes on the scene means more ways to love, more ways of expressing devotion.

When I think about contemporary independent Australian comics in 2021 the joyful thing is that there are now layers upon layers of artists – from those who have been making comics for decades and who are still producing some of their best work, to those in the middle of their careers, building their practice and experimenting with form, and those who we might call “emerging” artists, who are making some of the most exciting and innovative work in the country. I think about the remarkable cluster out West – Gestalt’s exciting partnership with Stick Mob, Brenton McKenna and the Indigenous Literary Foundation, and the PCAF team. I think about some of the independent comics-makers I’ve met in Sydney – Meg O’Shea, Claudia Chinyere Akole, Jin Hien Lau, Lizzie Nagy, the glorious energy of the Read to Me live reading events. I think about those who Michael Fikaris calls “the elders” of Australian comics – comic artists like Gary Chaloner and Tim McEwen, whose blazing 2020 Adventure Illustrated #1 anthology reprises beloved series and characters like Greener Pastures from the 90s. The Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane ‘clusters’ are all thriving too. Of course, I can’t list it all. The breadth of Australian comics right now makes it unwieldy in the best sense. The scene cannot be summed up neatly. There is always more. It is always bigger. We will never be able to count every drop of water.

i. Tompkins, Jane. 1989. ‘Me and My Shadow,’ in Leitch, Vincent (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York and London: W. W. Norton, p. 2131.

ii. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. ‘Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics,’ Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, p. 967.

iii. Miodrag, Hannah. 2013. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, p. 4.

iv.Miodrag, Hannah. ibid p. 5.

v. Poletti, Anna. 2008. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, p. 3.

vi. Poletti, Anna. ibid p. 11.

vii. Poletti, Anna. ibid. p. 11 – citing Whitlock, Gillian. 2000. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London and New York: Cassell, p. 204.

The views expressed in this essay are the author's own, and don't necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Universities, Partner Organisations or other parties involved in the Australia Research Council project.

Dr. Elizabeth MacFarlane

Author Bio

Elizabeth MacFarlane is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne where she teaches Short Fiction, Graphic Narratives and Thinking Writing: Theory and Creativity. She is co-director of graphic novel publishing house Twelve Panels Press, and co-directed the artists’ residency Comic Art Workshop from 2015 to 2019. She writes short fiction, experimental fiction, and autobiography, and has published several articles and a monograph on the work of J. M. Coetzee. From 2016 to 2019 she was a Chief Investigator on ARC Linkage project 'Superheroes: Creative Force, Cultural Zeitgeist and Transmedia Phenomenon’ with project partner the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. As part of this project, she organised two international conferences, a major exhibition on Cleverman, and edited a scholarly collection for Routledge press called Superhero Bodies. Elizabeth lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne, on the sovereign unceded land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Essay, ResearchAustralian Comics Folio9 December 2021Comic Studies, Comics, Comic, Australian Comics