I won the first inaugural “Spirit of Zelda” award from the Zelda Awards. It’s for the category of 10+ years in comics, and the awards celebrates the outstanding achievements of women in comic book culture.
Congrats to all the winners. Here is the streaming video of the awards ceremony.
Of equal importance is getting “The Dreaming” v1-2 listed on the NSW Premier Reading Challenge List. These lists are screened by a panel, and once you’re on the list, you don’t really go off it, which is great. Hopefully i can leverage this and get the series listed in other Australian states too.
I’ve been nominated for the Zelda Awards! This is a prestigious award for achievement of women in comics, and I’m in the “Spirit of Zelda” category for +10 years in the biz! I realise that few cartoonists make it to the 10-year mark…
You can vote for mehere on the Awards website, no registration required.
This year, an academic website named Comic FOLIO tracked the history of Australian comics from the late 90s to the late 2010s. It included an 8-part interview with me, which you can access in full here.
It’s always wonderful to see libraries embrace graphic novels, especially local graphic novels by Australia creators. For Aussie comic creators interested in getting their works into libraries through library suppliers, here’s my guide on how to do it. Don’t underestimate the importance of libraries to books and book culture–they and librarians (whether they’re public or school librarians) are very, very important!
Secondly, the comics site GlobalComix interviewed me for Women’s History Month on “The Dreaming” and a host of my other work, so many thanks to Jackson and Nen for doing that and the live broadcast.
For those who don’t know, GlobalComix is the successor to Amazon’s Comixology, where people can read and upload their own comics/manga/graphic novels. They have an app, and Image and Top Cow also publishes on there, so it’s a great place to check things out on.
“The Dreaming” is being republished in 2023 by IPI Comics, an imprint of Australian publisher IFGW Publishing! This story is a Lovecraftian take on the Australian classic “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, about twin sisters who attend a remote Australian boarding school where schoolgirls have been known to disappear.
The original story will have some minor rewrites/updates to suit a more modern audience, so it’ll have some new pages and redrawn art. There will also be a vol4, which will be a standalone story set in the same universe involving characters connected to some of the original characters, and hopefully the main storyline can continue in a part 2 after that.
Here is an interview with Soda and Telepaths about this, thanks to Anthony Pollock.
Here’s an interview with me from a while back, by Bettina Burger who is researching Australian Speculative Fiction. This interview was done before the rights to “The Dreaming” left the previous publisher, so what I say about “The Dreaming” will be different now that the circumstances are different.
I have an interview up with ALIA CYS Scoop, a newsletter for librarians. It’s on my work and also the Australia Comics & GN Database that I set up, and which is managed by ALIA librarians. Many thanks to Petrina for organising the interview and putting it up!
I have an interview with Jun Sugawara-san (and his translator Garrett Hudspeth) of Animator Supporters, who are a charity that supports underpaid animators struggling in the anime industry. Underpaying animators has been a long-time problem with the anime industry, to the extent where the industry could collapse, so here is Jun-san explaining why that happens.
This interview was conducted with a pre-prepared, bilingual Q&A document, so here is the full transcript with the original Japanese text. We didn’t cover the political aspect of underpaid Japanese animators, but that’s in the transcript. This interview was also hosted by the ACA, at their yearly Stanley Conference, many thanks to them.
