Week 11

Get in on the ground floor of a 6-part comic affair

So I had an idea for a longer comic and was going to try do it all in one go one week, but then I remembered that this is not a full-time job but instead a free newsletter, so I’m splitting it up into 6 chapters. It’s a bit of an experiment with comics and time and so each week I will repost the previous weeks chapter and extend it downwards until the whole picture is revealed! Glad you can be here on this journey. I reserve the right to redraw or rewrite anything I like along the way. Allons y.

It’s been a strange week, mainly for Australian writers festivals. We went to Byron Bay for the Byron Bay Literary Festival, which was cancelled on the night that we arrived due to inclement weather. Rachel was due to speak on three panels—all cancelled—which was very sad for me as I was looking forward to it, and for her as she had been rushing to read all the books by her fellow panellists. On the one day we managed to get out to explore Byron I was yelled at in a vegan restaurant by a barefooted radical vegan for discussing with our friend from India the ethics of eating kangaroo. Otherwise we met some nice people and rode the only solar powered train in the world (according to the conductor), which was cute.

Rachel was also supposed to speak at The Bendigo Writer’s Festival this weekend but that has gone this way and Rachel has also withdrawn from the festival. It’s a bizarre and extremely disappointing position for the festival to take and a great personal disappointment for me, as I was hoping to get yelled at for discussing the great Italian invention of pasta while at the Chinese Heritage Museum in Bendigo.

In more positive news, Rachel’s book has been nominated for an Ignatz Award, which is the other big comics award, check out the nominations here!

And if you haven’t already bought Rachel’s book, you should! It’s really really good and I’m very proud. Buy it here or any good book store. <3

This Week I Learned…

Lots of cool stuff happening in Melbourne right now. Yesterday I went to The Spring Art Fair, which is a contemporary art fair held in a historic luxury hotel. Everything contrasts nicely and it makes every movement of the hotel staff and patrons seem like part of a vast experimental work. It’s running all weekend.

MIFF has also started and on Monday I went to see Julia Holter play a new live score she’d written for a 1928 French silent film about Joan of Arc. It was haunting and explosive and I’ve been thinking about it all week. I didn’t know much about Joan of Arc, but now I do as I’ve been listening to podcasts and I’ve gotta say: I now get why so many noughties bands were writing songs about her. She’s also said to have inspired the ‘bob’ haircut, which became popular in the 1920’s, around the same time that Joan was canonised by the Catholic Church. But strangely in the 1928 film they don’t give her the pageboy hairdo she really would have had and instead opted for this chic number:

The film itself was also a groundbreaker for its use of intense close-ups throughout. The original cut of the film was also lost until “In 1981, a janitor found three film cannisters in a closet he was cleaning out at the Dikemark Hospital mental institution in Asker.^[38][39] The canisters were sent to the Norwegian Film Institute, where they were stored for three years before finally being examined.”- Wikipedia

I love stories about film canisters being found in strange places. Why was this one in a “mental institution”? Perhaps because they were trying to posthumously diagnose Joan’s heavenly visions as mental health disorders and they wanted a text to work from.