What Hamlet really needed:

To be... or not to - Oh you adorable little pupster!!
Right now (when I can get the doggie's tongue off my eyeball) I'm working on Hamlet's encounter with the ghost. And I'm doing all the voices in my head as I work, of course. My invaluable Shakespeare In Production book (Robert Hapgood), which gives you the play together with commentary about how various actors and directors approached each line (so footnotes usually take up three quarters of the page), describes many interesting options used by different actors. Descriptions of the ghost's voice include "deep sepulchral tones", "a graveyard voice", a "spectral wail", "slow, solemn and under", "still seared with purgatorial fires", and - my favourites: "tones [that] seemed to come from another world... without resonance" and a voice like "the wind in a chimney". I prefer a quieter, colder, more distant and imperious dead king who commands Hamlet from a height. No shrieking or wailing for my ghost.

Doing voices is a great challenge on the silent medium of the page. The faces and postures have to do a lot of the work of suggesting the tone of voice, but the shape and position of the speech bubbles and the shape of the words themselves lend a hand as well. One more reason why computerised fonts are generally disappointing in comics - they lack the expression and flexibility of hand-lettered words.

And now I've got to get back to it. Got to work out what "the wind in a chimney" looks like!

Melbourne is such a comics town!

Ok, we have the sort of winters that fill the trains with hideous bronchial choruses, but we also have veritable explosions of comix goodness here in Melbourne (or MelBOURNE, as our American friends call it).

A small sample of recent newslets:

Queenie Chan, graphic novelist, is doing an appearance and signing at Borders bookstore on 25 June - click on the image of the invite to see the details. Queenie has moved to Melbourne from Sydney - a natural progression!

Does two artists make an exodus? Pat Grant has also moved from Sydney to Melbourne. Pat does some of the funniest comics I've ever read, and he's got a new, very spunky website. Check it out here. Pat is also part of the rude-sounding Special Friend Brings Exciting project

Bernard Caleo, the big, big heart (and hair) of Melbourne comics, and editor of the wonderful Tango anthologies, has a new blog dedicated to the local scene. It's called "An Island Art", and it's here. Bernard has also become the roving comics reporter for Triple R radio's art show, as well as appearing on 3CR's The Comic Spot with John Retallick and Jo Waite.

And of course all of us scribblers are here, working away at our little pictures... and trying to keep the heater close enough to defrost the knees, yet far enough away not to dry out the ink.

Tales from inner and outer suburbia...

It's been quiet on the blog front once again, because we've had some drama here at the Bughouse. Our darling pup Horace has a broken front leg, so there's been a lot of nursing going on. It breaks my heart to see the little thing all splinted and bandaged and wagging his tail so hopefully, because all he wants to do is frolic and play - but of course he can't.

Right, better change subject before I cry all over the desk and short-circuit something. That tiny pup is braver than us big humans. He's wonderful. Get well soon, little Horace.

On Friday night Shaun Tan's new book, Tales from Outer Suburbia was launched at Readings bookshop in Carlton. It really goes without saying that it's another piece of brilliance from the phenomenal Mr Tan. It's gorgeous. It's wonderful. It's published by Allen & Unwin (yay!). Go out right now and get yourself a copy. The beautiful cover, designed by Inari Kiuru (Shaun's partner and super-designer) is shown here.

Traveling further back in time... Sydney Writers' Festival came and went - great fun, and very busy. We got to stay at a wonderful spot right under the Harbour Bridge, with water all around - a bit of a thrill for a Melburnian. I did a couple of talks for high school students and two workshops for kids, followed by one longer workshop for adults. I especially enjoyed the adult workshop, because the participants were all so keen and motivated and engaged and talented ! There was a terrific buzz as everyone exchanged ideas (and email addresses) and sketched out some fabulous stuff.

This Thursday I'll be doing another talk about Gatsby at Northcote library. Details of the event are here, or:

Thursday 5 June
6.30pm
Northcote Library
32-38 Separation St, Northcote
Melways Map 30 F8

Righto. Back to pupster and Hamlet now.

Gatsby shortlisted for ABIA award!

Recent good news: Gatsby has been shortlisted for an Australian Book Industry Award for best illustrated book! Yippee! I'm very thrilled about this, because the ABIA awards are voted by an "academy" of booksellers and publishers, who obviously look at the books from within the industry. It is especially exciting to hear that booksellers like Gatsby, because I appreciate that it can be a challenge shelving, displaying, promoting and selling books which don't easily fall into obvious categories - an issue that pops up all the time with picture books for adults. So big warm thanks to those fabulous booksellers, and fingers crossed!

The "illustrated books" category is separate from the children's books categories, and apparently (or so a publisher friend tells me) it tends to include mostly non-fiction books, with the illustrations being largely photographic. Gatsby does seem to be the only one this year in which drawings play a very large role. So it will be interesting to see what happens.

Speaking of pictures, here's a little Hamlet detail of some poisonous morning glory (at right). I'm getting very into the creepy flower paintings at the moment, rolling up the sleeves and splashing around liberal amounts of those acrylic inks. The pics are inspired by illustrations from the fabulous Taschen Book of Plants. Hamlet is cracking along fast and furious, so I'm very pleased.

It's been a busy time generally, with lots of speaking gigs - not to mention puppy training! I'm gearing up for a jammed schedule at the Sydney Writers Festival next week. By all accounts it's a great festival, and the program is enormous. I'll be doing a few workshops and a couple of talks, mostly for the secondary schools program. Should be fun.

"Graphically speaking"

Yesterday I had the pleasure and privilege of being on a panel at the Children's Book Council of Australia Conference with Neil Gaiman and manga artist Queenie Chan. The topic of our panel was "graphically speaking - the challenges of reading graphic novels", and it flew by all too fast. We each had ten minutes to race through our material at lightning speed, and then a tantalisingly brief few minutes for discussion and questions. So many interesting issues had just started to unfurl when the bell rang (ok, there was no bell, but there was a distinctly school-like flavour about it!) and we had to stop.

Neil talked about graphic novels in general, giving a neat introduction to the form which would have been a great help to the uninitiated. Queenie followed with "Manga 101", which was fascinating. I don't know much at all about manga, so it was very interesting to take a quick tour through the main categories (manga for teen boys, teen girls, adults, kids etc) and note some of the stylistic differences. As she explained, it's not all "big eyes small mouth" stuff. I talked a little about my favourite topic - the adaptation process, the alchemy of words and pictures, and some of the ways that pictures, panels and pages work as narrative devices.

I'm particularly interested in those devices that are unique to sequential art narrative - things like page layouts, the use of frames-as-objects and frames that "talk" to one another in multiple directions. These are things that I'd been working with long before I ever had to articulate in words what I was doing. It was only when I started giving talks like this that I had to sit down and find the words to describe the techniques that came intuitively. Right at the end of our session, in response to a question, Neil explained another of those special things, and my heart leapt to hear it: he talked about the wonderful device of the silent panel. Panels that make us pause and think and question and fill out the meaning for ourselves. Moments that hang and quiver, the way time can stretch and stop. Despite drawing many a silent panel in my comics, and very much relishing this device, it had never occurred to me how particular to comics it is. As Neil explained, you can't get the effect of a silent panel in prose writing - and he's tried! Brilliant!

It was great to meet these two comic stars - one very high in the sky, and one rising. We had much to talk about, and I'm sure these conversations will continue in the future. Invigorating stuff!

We've got a puppy!!!!

Meet Horace, the newest addition to our menagerie. He's a red toy poodle pup. HOW CUTE IS HE??!!

Humans/squids: ecstatic
Cats: curious/contemptuous
Pup: mad with delight and very hard to photograph because he never keeps still!

Awwwwwww!!

(My theory confirmed: cats are all Hamlet, doggies are Laertes. Maybe older dogs could also be Horatio.)

Slings & Arrows

Thanks to my buddy Greg, recommender of good things, I recently had the great pleasure of watching the first season of Slings & Arrows, a Canadian mini-series set in a provincial theatre company beset by more dramas than they ever bargained for.

In season one, the company is attempting to mount their flagship production, Hamlet. Prominent among their many problems is the grudging return of Geoffrey Tennant (the absolutely enormous spunk pictured here), an actor who lost his mind while playing the Dane seven years earlier. He's back to fill the position of artistic director, not to play Hamlet, but in real life he is the truest of Hamlets, antic disposition and all.

Although he's not actually performing the role, his character was the best Hamlet I've ever seen. He was precisely my idea of what Hamlet should be like, with just the right mix of ballsy-ness and sensitive melancholy. Oh, and he's a big hottie. I mentioned that, right?

Anyway, as well as being a rollicking good show to watch, and hilarious in parts, I found it very instructive. It's been said a million times that Hamlet is a role that can never be exhausted and whose mysteries will never be fully plucked out. So I gobbled up this take on the character, and learned a lot from it.

Another thing I really enjoyed was the way the show looked at the enormity of the role, how daunting it can be for an actor, and how attempting to encompass it can drive a person mad. This certainly resonated with me yesterday. Of course I'm playing all the characters' roles on paper as well as directing and bloody well drawing the thing, but without a doubt the hardest part is "playing" Hamlet. The other characters fairly leap from my brush, but I really have to sweat to get Hamlet's expressions, posture and timing right. Having laboured over his first appearance and dialogue with King and Queen for two consecutive days of 12-hour desk marathons, by the end of day two I was feeling pretty wild-eyed and crazy, let me tell you. Fortunately, though, I went easier on myself today and spent the day reviewing and redoing some of that work, to good effect.

All good fun. Whoever said we scribblers were obsessive, eh?