AWARDS: I won an Editorial Department Award for the Silent Manga Audition (SMA24) from Japanese publisher Coamix, where the theme was "Letters"! My story is titled "Letters in Pictures", and you can read it here, along with the other winners on the SMA24 results page, at the end of the page. Thank you for the kind words from Editor Motoda and the SMA Editorial Department, and I'm interested in entering SMA25 as well!
NEXT MANGA: With competitions all out of the way, I'm using August to get back to work and catchup on commission work I've put to the wayside. I'll restart work on "Sunset Protocol" in September, and will pencil the entire 2-vol series before I continue drawing any more finished pages. I've also discovered that IngramSpark now has a "buy direct" button which means I can directly link a buy button to IngramSpark rather than ship books myself! Wonderful! This site might see some overhaul on that front!
CONS: August is quiet for cons, but BookWeek is end of August so I've got some school workshops. I've got the printed version of "Sister Holmes", my Viz one-shot, and will be selling it at cons.
THE DREAMING: Buy "The Dreaming" v1-3 in print/ebook, via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Global Comix. Covers and revisions are here.
Awards: 2024 ALIA Graphic Notables List - YA Category, NSW Premier Reading Challenge list (vol1-2)
FREE READING: Silent Manga Audition (SMA24): "Letters in Pictures" (17p)
Thanks to Illustrate Your Life and Jakub Mazerant for organising this exhibition I was part of in Thailand, with special thanks to the Australian Embassy! Over 30 Aussie comic artists were exhibited at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and got a mention at the Bangkok Post and Coconuts Bangkok too. I was also part of the previous exhibitions in Poland and Germany too!
Here’s someone checking out my entry, with a stack of postcards featuring my crayon art of our lovely native birds.
The Jan2022 issue of School Magazine contains so of my favourite artwork that I’ve done for the magazine so far. It’s the story of the “Three Brujas”.
Here’s some artwork from the “Frog Viking”, a story that 10 year-old me would have absolutely loved. As an adult, I still like it a lot, and it was fun to illustrate too.
Happy New Year, everyone!
I want to let you know about a short comics-prose essay I wrote, called “Manga Fandom in Australia”. Click on the link to read it!
My essay, which was specifically written in comics-prose format (rather than comics format), is meant to be about the rather the under-documented Australian manga fandom. Why is it under-documented? The essay will explain why–at the end of the day, this country still maintains a fair amount of xenophobia towards Japanese-style pop culture.
This essay is part of a new government-funded Australian Comics academic project called FOLIO, which is spearheaded a group of Comics Studies academics at University of Melbourne, RMIT & UTS. This multi-year project aims to chart the contemporary Australian comics scene, and I hope to incorporate Australian game-comics like “Framed” and “Florence” into it as well in the next few years, which I am currently researching for my PhD.
Finally got around to posting my string of illustrations for The School Magazine! This is from the October 2021 and November 2021 issues, and these are not the only illustrations for them. It was great doing illustrations for some of these totally awesome stories.
