Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, the event saw teens exploring comics and biography through thirty boxes containing text and images from the life of a mysterious woman.
Over the course of a two-hour session, participants transformed the thirty boxes into individual artworks which together formed a biographical installation: a three-dimensional comic book which used perspective and storytelling to respond to the facts and feelings of a stranger’s life.
I’ll be talking about digital comics projects including the Fun Palaces Comic Maker and a new version of Comic Book Dice from Manila’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, plus my game for The Lifted Brow, “A Tear in Flatland“.
The Comic Maker is inspired by the Comic Book Dice activity I originally created for Manila’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD). The team at MCAD have created their own digital riff off Comic Book Dice which will be released soon.
The Comic Maker lets you drag and drop characters inspired by Emily Medley’s original Fun Palaces illustration into a comic-book story of your own devising.
We’ve been working on this behind the scenes for a long time, ever since I pitched the idea of an online version of Comic Book Dice for Fun Palaces 2015.
Talia Yat and Phil Gullberg of the State Library of Queensland have run with this idea and developed it into an amazing online game, as part of the Queenslanders’ contribution to Fun Palaces 2015.
It’s been a huge team effort and thanks must go to: Fun Palaces’ Stella Duffy, Sarah-Jane Rawlings, Hannah Lambert, and Kirsty Lothian; Zoey Dixon of Lambeth Libraries; Daniel Flood of State Library of Queensland; our web host Simon Appleby of Bookswarm, plus Sandy Mahal who put us in touch with him; and last but not least our digital Brains Trust of Ed Bishop, Martin Feher, Barney Lockwood, and Steven Moschidis (“I’m tempted to say I will host it just to stop the funky emails!”).
Australian arts journal The Lifted Brow has just published my review of Nick Sousanis’ doctoral-thesis-as-comic-book, Unflattening.
The review is a little different – it’s an online choose your own adventure, which sees the reader trapped in a mysterious library, trying to locate Nick’s book and escape in one piece.
The Lifted Brow piece is something special to me, though. It comes from being persuaded of Nick Sousanis’ case, in Unflattening, that the traditional priority of words over illustrations is wrong: words and images cannot be explored separately from one another.
Reading the book, it becomes difficult to feel satisfied with comics criticism that deals in words alone. Alternatives like Terry Elliot’s experiments with digital annotation of Unflattening look increasingly appealing; therefore I decided to create my response to Unflattening in the form of a game: a set of sequential incidents which the reader can navigate at will – rather like the panels of a comic book.
I had a great visit to City University in London today, talking with students on the Master’s course #citylis, convened by Ernesto Priego.
Our conversation covered everything from the art history of Aby Warburg to civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, tabletop gaming, and, of course, the inevitable zombie battles.
I often say that a neighbourhood library is like the TARDIS on your streetcorner – an ordinary box which can take you anywhere in human knowledge or imagination. If that’s true, watching James speak about the British Library’s digital innovations was like watching Doctor Who dance around the TARDIS control panel, flicking switches and levers with gleeful abandon.
I have a new piece out at the Cultural Gutter, a site which hosts essays about disreputable art in all its forms.
“The Romance of the Machine” looks at Hasbro’s Transformers toys, in particular their current comic More Than Meets The Eye. My essay explores how even big-brand media can be “rich enough to speak of loss, grief, thwarted dreams, the desire to do good in an imperfect world, and, most importantly, of love.“
Parkes High School’s teacher librarian Tracy Dawson has an article in the latest SCAN magazine about the Reader-in-Residence role which I held in Parkes across late 2013 and early 2014.
The role was designed to link the school and wider community in a celebration of storytelling, literacy, and culture in all its forms. Events included teen publishing workshops, our biggest ever zombie roleplay, urban myth writing, and the inaugural Central West Comics Fest, which will be returning in 2015. I also mentored high school students, led sessions for the Parkes writers’ group, and worked with the school’s special needs unit.
Tracy gives a teacher’s perspective on how trying new things, pushing boundaries, and reaching out to a wider community also yielded great benefits to students at the high school. You can also read her guest posts on this site about Auckland’s XXUnmasked project and the work of a teacher librarian.
SCAN magazine is a refereed journal published by the New South Wales Department of Education, focussed “on the interaction between information in a digital age and effective student learning.” You have to subscribe for recent issues, but the archive is publicly available – I’ll let readers know when the current issue moves into the free archive.
Earlier this year, I was a consultant on Write and Draw Your Own Comics, a book created by the talented Louie Stowell, plus a range of brilliant artists, for the children’s publisher Usborne. I’m very pleased to announce that Write and Draw Your Own Comics is now available for purchase. In the UK, you can pick up a copy from Amazon or other outlets; in Australia and New Zealand try Booktopia, Dymocks, and Paperplus.
Tracy Dawson of Parkes High School Library has already linked Write and Draw Your Own Comics to the Aussie curriculum, too – click the link in the tweet below to find out more.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 