Talking about adapting Gatsby

Here is a short piece that I recorded for the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas a few months ago. The Wheeler Centre - wonderful people! - recently hosted a whole weekend of panels, talks and workshops about graphic novels. Unfortunately I had to pull out at the last moment due to a bout of vicious tonsillitis. By all accounts it was a fabulous weekend.

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.

"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!

Gatsby talk at The Pines Library Thursday 20 March

In all the recent rushing I forgot to mention that I'm doing another library chat-and-slideshow about making Gatsby. It's tomorrow night, Thursday 20 March, at The Pines Library in East Doncaster. The fine people from Angus & Robertson will be there selling books, and there will be snacks, I believe.

Details:
Thursday 20 March, 6.30 pm
The Pines Library
Corner Reynolds and Blackburn Roads
Doncaster East
Bus from Melbourne CBD: number 304

It's a pretty odd time to organise such an event - the evening before the Easter long weekend. But then, my last library gig was on Valentines Day... Soon people will think I have no life.

Actually, it seems quite possible that I've left some vital components of my life on one of the six budget airline flights that I've taken in the past few weeks. All that travel has worn me out, and I'm looking forward desperately to a quiet long weekend with the Big Squid. Ok, with the Big Squid and my acrylic inks.

And they say I don't know how to take a holiday...

Being green... and heading out West

Here's the fourth of my Hamlet backgrounds. While this is in some ways the simplest one so far, it was actually quite tricky to do - not least because after a few hours all those circles cease to look like cute little wasabi peas and start to pull weird optical illusion-type tricks on the eyes.

Painting all those dots gave me plenty of time to think about the connotations of particular shades of green. Green is traditionally thought to represent poison - perhaps because arsenic was used to make green pigments. And of course green is the colour of envy. It's the colour of many, many lovely things as well - not least being my first love, Kermit - but for this picture (the King's private rooms) I wanted to choose shades of green that suggested bitterness, poison, scheming, envy and unwholesomeness. So if you feel a bit queasy just looking at this image, then all is as it should be.

Here's a detail, which is quite pretty (but please excuse my blurry flashless photography):

Once again, those opaque acrylic inks amaze me. I originally painted a few other props into this picture, which took me ages because they involved lots of fidldy colour and detail. But I then decided that I didn't like them at all. These inks have such good opacity, and therefore covering power, that I just painted over the top of the unwanted items with my background green, painted some more wasabi peas over the top, and - magic!- you can't even see the joins.

However, after all that, my eyes were doing something very like this:

In other news, on Wednesday this week I'm off to the Perth Writers Festival, which is part of the Perth International Arts Festival. It looks like a fabulous program, and I've never been to Western Australia, so I'm looking forward to it very much. I'll be talking about Gatsby in a couple of sessions for older students in the schools program, and will be on two panels in the general program.

So hand me my party frock - I'm going West!

Doing anything on Valentines Day?

I'm doing a talk about Gatsby at the Port Philip / St Kilda Library this Thursday 14 February at 7 pm. So if you're not going to be sitting in a restaurant buying odourless cellophane-wrapped roses from wandering rose sellers, feel free to join me. The details (from the library website) are:

Graphic novelist talk - Nicki Greenberg and The Great Gatsby

Nicki Greenberg is a comic artist and illustrator who has recently produced an acclaimed graphic adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Join Nicki for a discussion and presentation about the process of creating this faithful adaptation of Fitzgerald's jazz-age classic.

Where: St Kilda Library
Date: Thursday, February 14
When: 7-8pm
Bookings: required - 92096655

This is a FREE event

Light refreshments will be supplied

Variety

On Saturday we had the good fortune to trip over the Linden Postcard Show in St Kilda. This is an exhibition of over 2,000 smallish-size artworks which cover every room of Linden Gallery from floor to ceiling once a year. Anyone can enter (for a small fee) and the result is a truly eye-popping variety of work. Prizes are awarded, and I was delighted to find that my mega-talented friend and fellow comic art grrl Jo (Josephine) Waite (no website, but her work is on Facebook) had won a prize for the second year in a row for one of her beautiful insect girl watercolours. Jo's painting will appear on one of Linden's postcards. Congratulations Madame Jo!

The works are all for sale, mostly at very accessible prices. I was inclined to buy something, but was too overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of pictures, and the gallery closed for the evening before I could make up my mind. Many of my favourites (including Jo's winning entry) had already been snapped up, too, within just a few hours of the show opening.

On the variety theme (sort of), last week I received copies of the Canadian edition of Gatsby! The book is published over there by Penguin Canada, and they have produced it in paperback rather than hardback. And it looks fabulous! They've used a slick, slightly glossy paper for the pages (Allen & Unwin produced the book with a lovely creamy matte paper). I had no say in Penguin's design choices, as I have not dealt with them directly, so this was a surprise for me - and as it turns out, a very pleasant one.

Glossy paper is not something that I would have thought to choose - I would have imagined it would be all wrong for the vintage photo album feel. But in paperback format it actually works really well - perhaps because it makes the pictures look so crisp and solid, and makes the pages feel very substantial. When you open the book, the extreme blackness of the black and the vividness of the sepia (colour is more vivid and bright on the glossy paper) really jump out at you. They've also given it a matte cover, which I like very much.

So I am very happy with it - though there is one little aspect that could perhaps have been done better. Some elements of the design on the back cover have been jostled around to fit the marginally smaller cover size, and this looks like it was done in a bit of a rush. Zoe Sadokierski, the superb designer who did the original cover, took the most wonderful care over every aspect of the design, but some of her beautiful work has been treated a bit carelessly by whoever did the rejigging - there are chunky drop-shadows, a "ghost" shadow that has appeared on top of an image, and some odd resizing. I suspect that noone will actually notice these things (especially if they haven't seen the original Australian edition), but it does alert me to the need to keep an eye on such changes! Call me picky, but I think it's important to treat design with care.

Spot the difference:

Finally, before I get back to work on the Hamlet backgrounds, an event coming up this week:

This Thursday 7 February the Belgrave Library is launching their new graphic novel collection, with hundreds of just-purchased volumes available for borrowing. I have been asked to come and launch the collection, and to give a talk about Gatsby and the process of making a graphic novel. Slow Glass Books will also be there selling various comic delights. Belgrave is a fair hike from the city, but for those who fancy a trip, the details are:

Thursday 7 February, 7pm
Belgrave Library
Reynolds Lane, Belgrave, 3160.
Melways Ref: 75 F10 (map here)

Right, now back to work!

Jordan Baker

Over the past few months, it has been fascinating for me to hear people's reactions to my non-human interpretations of the characters of The Great Gatsby. In interviews and reviews, in questions after panels and presentations, and in emails from friends and complete strangers, I've received a lot of comments about how the various characters resonate with people. But of all the character portrayals, the one that has attracted the most surprising and varied responses is Jordan Baker.

Jordan is a bit of a mystery - a cool, jaded and casually dishonest golf champion with whom our narrator, Nick, begins a largely "off camera" romance. I've never felt very much for Jordan Baker, perhaps because she is so unemotional and distant. By contrast, Daisy captures my heart, despite her extravagant flaws, largely because of the maelstrom of frailties, charms, failures and human(!) warmth I see tumbling inside her.

So I drew Jordan as a squidlike creature: cold, inscrutable and sleek with her sinuous tentacles always under control. The interesting thing is that this portrayal has given rise to reactions that I did not contemplate or expect. In hindsight, this makes perfect sense though - Jordan is a rather "blank" character who presents a deliberately smooth, guarded face to the world. This means that we are almost obliged to paint our own interpretations onto her, according to our own feelings and predilections.

During one radio interview, the interviewer said he felt I'd dealt too harshly with Jordan Baker, making her more unpleasant than the original book intended. And it is true, I feel little sympathy for Jordan. For starters, she is an inveterate liar, which immediately loses her many points with me! So I can certainly accept that I've portrayed her in an unflattering light. Whether it is any harsher than Fitzgerald's depiction is hard for me to say.

What intrigues me more, though, is the people who tell me that they are attracted to my version of Jordan. One lady told me that her daughter, who was studying The Great Gatsby at school, thought that my Jordan was lovely - and "much prettier than Daisy". More startlingly, one gentleman asked if it was "wrong" that he "found Jordan erotic". This question was asked in a public forum, and I have to admit, I was not sure how to answer! I have always found Jordan's disdainful, downturned mouth and half-lidded eyes very unattractive (contrasted with Daisy, whom I find beautiful and sweetly seductive). But, as they say in Spanish, sobre gustos no hay nada escrito - when it comes to taste, there is "nothing written".

Perhaps the most thoughtful and most deeply engaged response to Jordan that I have heard came from the Australian poet, Robert Adamson. Robert has permitted me to quote his response here, and I do so at length because it is both lovely and amazing. Who would have thought that someone would relate so personally to Jordan the squid?

I forgot to mention you made Jordan sympathetic. I hadn't really thought much about her, in the novel or the two movies, until your version of her. She might even be my favourite character now!

Maybe it's because I love squid.

[...]

In your book I find Jordan more interesting, she seems interested somehow in Nick in a real way. I almost think that if I met her, in your book's world, I'd want to shake her, though also I think I'd want to show her that there's a more interesting life away from her crowd. I'd take her fishing and show her the swamp harriers circling, and the mullet jumping , I take her out on the river on a full moon, and then in the morning cook her a sand whiting in a campsite. I'm sure you could make her see the light and change her ways.

How fabulous! The thought of cooking a sand whiting for a squid tickles my fancy very much!

Gatsby in the garden

Here are a couple of beautiful photos taken by the lovely Catherine Padmore. See, as well as being a novelist and super-academic (that's Dr Catherine Padmore when she's wearing her university hat), Catherine is obviously a great photographer. She sent them to me in an email because the delicate forms of these little garden treasures reminded her of my Gatsby creatures. What a gorgeous thought.

I especially love the photo below, because it suggests a fragile being, poised on an even more fragile sparkling thread. And if that aint a visual representation of The Great Gatsby, I don't know what is!
Catherine and I met at this year's "World Matters" conference, an annual event run by the Eltham Bookshop (check it out - it's great). She was chairing a panel of three very different authors - John Charalambous, Antoni Jach and me, and somehow managed to find all kinds of connections and parallels in our work and keep the conversation flowing at a vigorous pace.

As part of her closing words to the audience, Catherine read out that amazing final page of The Great Gatsby, where Fitzgerald's magic just leaps off the paper. I have to admit that, even after having read them so many times, hearing those words spoken aloud brought tears to my eyes.

(Boy, I really should create a label called "I am a big sap"...)

Whoops! Forgot to mention...

...that I'm giving a talk about Gatsby tonight in Melbourne at the North Fitzroy Library:

North Fitzroy Library,
240 St Georges Road, North Fitzroy
6.30 pm
Bookings essential, please call 1300 695 427

...and also participating in a panel on adaptation as part of the Latrobe University / Eltham Bookshop "World Matters" program this Saturday 27th at 10.30 am. Here's the program for the World Matters festival.

And this time I'm going to tie my data stick around my neck.

A Handbag??

Last night I did a talk about Gatsby at the Avid Reader bookshop in West End, Brisbane. It's a gorgeous shop, run by the equally gorgeous Fiona and her lovely crew (special thanks to Anna Krien and Ben), and I had a wonderful time.

The experience was all the sweeter for the fact that it came after an extremely stressful day. I am usually a very organised person. I am also not generally much interested in handbags (unlike my buddy Scootergrrl). But in a brief lapse of judgement when packing on Wednesday night, I decided to transfer all my girly junk from one handbag to the other. All dandy... until two hours into my (delayed) flight, I realised with a sensation not unlike unexpected turbulence that I'd left my data stick - with my Gatsby presenation on it - in the Other Handbag. Cue Lady Bracknell. It didn't just look like carelessness - it looked like a fkn disaster!

There ensued a epic scramble to convey this enormous file (100mb) from a handbag in Fairfield, Melbourne, to a data stick in Brisbane. This involved getting my neighbour to break-and-enter (well, sort of), after which our internet, then hers, failed. She took the stick to her husband's work (is this going beyond the call or what?) where he managed to upload the file to the publisher's ftp site (which took 2 hours) after which the wonderful people in the IT department of my work very, very kindly downloaded it for me and sent it to Brisbane. This entire process took almost seven hours. During which time I also had to do a full day's work at the office. At 5pm on the dot I had my presentation on a borrowed data stick, and I needed a drink.

I left the office, still a bit goggle-eyed and quavery, and who do you think was standing just outside the building? In a beautiful bit of Brisbane serendipity, I almost fell over my favourite cranky bastard, Eddie "thanks for roning" Campbell, patron saint of forgetting stuff when you catch a plane, along with his lovely wife Anne.

Eddie and I then walked to the Avid Reader, where the wonderfully calm and friendly atmosphere of the shop instantly smoothed the day away. I was really tickled that Eddie wanted to attend this talk. We've presented together a few times and both enjoyed it very much, but I've never done a solo presentation with my sometime sparring partner in the audience. Anne had previously said that if she were doing the talk, she'd have him removed from the room before it began, so I have to admit to some trepidation. One mention of the words "graphic novel", I feared, might send him into a frenzy of objection and correction - or worse, he might just look at me from the back row with that pained rictus of horror on his face.

But no. I was very happy to note Eddie nodding in agreement and smiling throughout the talk. Afterwards, over a much-desired glass of pinot gris at a lovely West End bar, he said "That was great. You talked about your book without saying 'graphic novel' once, or getting into the whole business about what these things are called". Well, of course! It's not a topic that I tend to talk about anyway (!), but with Eddie in the audience, well, I'd have to be completely stupid to venture into those waters!

A particularly delightful aspect of this event for me was that it was held outside on the back porch of the shop, in the balmy Brisbane evening. The audience was friendly and enthusiastic and gave some great feedback. I was especially touched by the super-excited reaction of the charmingly-named Lucia Bee of the Somerville School, who asked me if I'd like to be their writer/artist in residence for a few days next year. You bet I would. I love Brisbane.

***

PS - also received this lovely review recently. Beam!

brush pen + wrestling + comics + brisbane... it has to be good

Yippee! My new brush pen with ink cartridges (Pentel GFKP) arrived from Will's Quills in Sydney today. I'm still enjoying its less fancy sister, the Pentel Aquash, too. Mmmm... Very big thanks to Matt Huynh who put me onto this shop, which specialises in nibs and calligraphy brushes.

A bit slack with the blogging this past week, and we can blame that on mister J and the Fabulous Sebastian, whose emails are truly a force to be reckoned with. In between emails, I managed to turn 33 and the Big Squid turned 40. Food played a large part in our celebrating.

The next week includes events of all flavours:

Friday 12 October, 8 pm (in Melbourne)

The fun continues at the Aggressively Strange Fables exhibition, at North Bazaar, 222 High Street Northcote. North Bazaar is a great bar with good beers on tap, comfy chairs, pizza, and some very, very fine drawings on the walls.

This Friday night, the inimitable Bernard Caleo will chair a session about the new bloom of graphic novel publishing in Australia. His guests are the wonderful Erica Wagner, publisher at Allen & Unwin, cartoonist Bruce Mutard, whose book The Sacrifice is due out next year, and me.

Last Friday night, Bernard chaired a session on animation, where we were treated to some wonderful works by Pick Nick, Kirrily Schell, David Blumenstein and Mandy Ord. The films were spectacular (and sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes hypnotic), the conversation was scintillating, and Mr Caleo suffused the whole event with his characteristic warmth and enthusiasm. So I think this week's session will be fun too.

Sunday 14 October - all day (in Melbourne)

On Sunday, Station Street Fairfield goes carnival. This is our local shopping strip, and they turn on a fantastic street festival. Fairfield is a very food-oriented kind of place (for those not familiar with the area) and the eating side of things is well taken care of.

But the BEST thing about the fair is, of course, the wrestling! The past two years they've had a ring set up in the middle of the street. Dodgy costumes, trash talk, outrageous moves and hilarious commentary - it had me grinning like an idiot for days, and not-so-secretly wishing that I could do that. And not just on the page.

So I won't be in the ring this year either... just watching wistfully from the sidelines and trying not to drop souvlaki all down the front of my top.

Next week - Thursday 18 October, 6.30 pm (in Brisbane)

The lovely people at The Avid Reader bookshop have invited me to do a talk there about The Great Gatsby graphic adaptation.

The address is 193 Boundary Street, West End. I'm looking forward to this, because I love going to Brisbane, and the bookshop is, from all accounts, excellent.

This Is Not Art - Newcastle rocks out

Ok, before I forget, here's a link to Chewie's photos from the Sydney Kinokuniya gig.

I'm just back from Newcastle, and the carnival of delights that is the This Is Not Art festival (TINA). Once a year, Newie is overrun with crazy Young People - scribblers of all kinds, zinesters, music-merchants, performers, ranters, thinkers, bloggers, electro-gadgeteers, spectacular costume-wearers, and every other flavour of artist and fancier you can think of- and the result is... kaleidoscopic. Sadly, I took very few photos - too busy having fun.

This year TINA was organised by a very talented crew (Tom Doig, Nic Low and Kelly-Lee Hickey were the big three, I believe) who packed the program with an amazing array of fabulous stuff. Just as exciting was the social buzz of the fest - at every turn you end up bumping into old friends or making new ones. In amongst some much-needed aimless drifting in the sunshine, I caught some great panels. A real stand-out was one called "Untold Stories", featuring (among others) super-author Anna Funder (of Stasiland fame), super-sharp-penned writer/journo Anna Krien and super-dooper artist and writer, Shaun Tan.


Speaking of whom, in the photo above you can see Shaun and me, revelling in an exhibition called Taking Eye-Candy From Strangers. It was in a little shopfront-turned-gallery, packed with amazing comic art, much of it painted directly onto the walls, and I believe we are pictured having a good laugh at a piece by the highly talented Pat Grant. Shaun is speaking, which generally means that he is saying something fascinating, and opening up a previously undiscovered door in his listener's head - in this case mine.

Shaun and I did an "in conversation" panel on Friday, titled A thousand pictures tells a million words, and I found it a fantastic experience. It's quite rare that Shaun and I get to sit down for an hour together and have a proper talk, because we're often both rushing in seven different directions at once. So it was a real treat to have this chat, and share some thoughts about the interaction between words and pictures, the structure of strips and pages, language, suggestion and symbols and the process of working on a long, long graphic novel. I always learn something when I talk with Shaun, and this was no exception. We had a friendly, appreciative crowd, and the conversation felt almost as natural as if we were just yakking together over a cup of tea.

There was a very healthy cartoonist contingent at TINA, including such luminaries as David Blumenstein (whose latest Nakedfella comic is so hilarious, I made a complete fool of myself reading it in a cafe), Jo Waite, Pat Grant, Matt "Stikman" Huynh, Leigh Rigozzi, Sarah Howell, Ben Constantine and Mel Stringer. The promised event involving a comics jam with images projected live onto a wall never happened, but there were plenty of opportunities for impromptu jamming. Must admit that I didn't draw much at all. Mostly I was just chilling out after a pretty hectic few days!

On Saturday night the phenomenally energetic Tom Doig hosted the "Mega mega launch" in which 30-something (that's number, not age) participants launched their book or other baby into the world. I gave Gatsby its second launch, without any tears this time! The Mega mega launch was a great event, and it was fabulous to see how enthusiastic and generous and encouraging the TINA crowd was. Everyone got lots of applause, and there was a feeling of genuine celebrations of works of all shapes and sizes. Fuzzy warm glow all round - which pretty much sums up the mood of TINA.

Sunday was the zine fair, which is shorthand for "massive festival of cool art stuff on trestle tables". The zine fair was spread out in the park, with a stage for music, lots of picnicking on blankets (TINA was amply supplied with delicious vegie food at all times) and... zombies! Oh, joy! Those who know me, know that I looooove zombies. Those who don't, check out some of my zombie comics here. And here are a few of the stylish Undead, out for a day in the park:


And thank YOU, nurse!

Fabulous Sydney! Brilliant bookshops and fine, fine folk

It's been a very busy few days! I came up to Sydney on Tuesday for a combined work/work/fun trip: two days of work at the office, plus a bunch of bookshop-related events in the evenings and on my "days off".

Sydney has turned on the beautiful weather, I've met wonderful people, and the speaking gigs have gone off a treat. There's hardly been a moment spare in amongst all this activity, but I did manage to fit in an early (and I do mean early) morning walk through the Botanical Gardens, along the water and up to the Opera House. Yeah, I'm a tourist - and loving it.

On Tuesday night I entered the Den of Temptation that is Gleebooks. I wish I'd had a proper chance to explore this fabulous shop and get lost among the head-high stacks of books piled up on the tables, but I was rushing like mad, and made it just in time to do the presentation. Gleebooks runs a regular program of bookish events (big thanks to the lovely Morgan), and draws a terrific audience. There were loads of questions, lots of signings, and I had a great time. Can't wait for my next Sydney trip so I can go back and completely blow the budget in this great shop.

During the day on Thursday Allen & Unwin Publicist Extraordinaire and top chick Renee Senogles whizzed me around to a radio interview and then to visit a bunch of other great bookstores, including Better Read than Dead in Newtown (more temptation - and thanks for the delicious pineapple-mint frappe!) and Abbey's Bookshop in the city, where I met the lovely Sofia. Sofia was the first kind stranger to contact me "out of the blue" by email after Gatsby came out. She wrote me such a beautiful letter that I ended up sobbing in front of the computer. So it was great to meet her in person. We both managed not to cry like idiots.

At The Children's Bookshop in Beecroft (Beecroft - what a cool name) I met Paul Macdonald who owns the store and runs a whole raft of programs and workshops for kids, and also for teachers and librarians. We discovered a shared passion for The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, and T.S. Eliot's box-of-marvels-in-a-poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. What we didn't agree on was Daisy Buchanan. Paul described her as his most despised character in literature - whereas she is, of course, my favourite! We had a great chat about this, and I've promised Paul that I'll send him copies of some of my early "dirty" Daisy character sketches. I'll post them on the blog, too, once I get back to Melbourne. She started out as a really dirty bird!

Last night I did another talk, this time at wonder-emporium, Kinokuniya. The first thing I saw when I raced into the shop was the huge display of Gatsbys right up the front. The clever person who put this display together had also included little stacks of various editions of the original novel, which I thought was excellent. Again, a great audience, which included the fabulous W. Chew "Chewie" Chan, who is Kinokuniya's Comics/Graphic Novels Consultant (They have a consultant for this! They are so cool!!). Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Chewie nodding enthusiastically throughout the talk, which made me beam! Chewie has promised to put photos from the event up on Kinokuniya's Facebook page (naturally I left my camera at the hotel). I've resisted thus far, but I think I'm going to have to join Facebook now... As if the internet were not already eating my life.

After the gig I also had the pleasure of meeting the "Fabulous Sebastian" (this is his preferred name). This fine gent is the wrestling commentator sidekick of my buddy mister J, wrestling cartoonist extraordinaire. Truth in advertising - I found him to be fabulous indeed.

Something else quite mysterious and lovely happened at the end of the Kinokuniya presentation. A lady came up to have her books signed - and she'd bought four copies. We had a little chat, but she didn't tell me her name. After she'd left, Chewie appeared with a Kinokuniya bag, and told me that this lady had given me a present - a copy of Norton Juster's 1961 novel, The Phantom Tollbooth, with illustrations by Jules Pfeiffer. How sweet and generous! I don't know this lady's name, and I would have so much liked to thank her. If you are reading this, mystery gifter, thank you so much - and please do get in touch!

Now, Friday morning, I'm just waiting for Kinokuniya to open so I can snap a photo of that great display before hauling my overstuffed bags down to Central Station and catching the train to Newcastle for the National Young Writers Festival. It's going to be a BIG weekend...!

More - with pictures - soon.

Aggressively strange fables

Another one for the diary - here's a whole bundle of events celebrating the amazing world of Melbourne's underground comics and animation scene. They're all in one location in fabulous Northcote, at a bar called the North Bazaar. And they're free!

There's an exhibition, a launch of some cool anthologies, panel discussions (I'm in one of them), animation displays and loads of gorgeous stuff all over the walls.

Aggressively Strange Fables is part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, and it's on from 26 September to 14 October. Check out their website or have a look at the very cute flyer (click on the pic to enlarge) by superstar artist Jo Waite, who is also the curator of the show.

Sadly I will have to miss the opening night party, which is also the launch of the latest issue of Tango (excellent comics anthology). I'll be in Newcastle for the Young Writers Festival at the time (see the last post below). How did this happen? How did the Fringe and the NYWF get scheduled for the same time, I ask you??

Now, I believe that Mr Baba Brinkman, rap artist and performer extraordinary, is also going to be doing some shows at the Fringe. I had the pleasure of sharing a stage with Baba in Brisbane recently, and his rap performance of the Canterbury Tales just blew me away. Very much hoping to catch one of his gigs in Melbourne. I've got the CD on the stereo right now, and it's making me nod my head with pleasure, Rikishi style. For those unfamiliar with Rikishi, I recommend this clip. Aggressively strange indeed.

A bunch of events - Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle

A bunch of Gatsby-related events coming up in the next couple of weeks - all open to whoever would like to come:

Sunday 23 September, 4pm - Melbourne
Speaking at Robarta, at 109 Fitzroy St St Kilda, courtesy of Chronicles Bookshop

Tuesday 25 September, 6.30pm - Sydney
Speaking at Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe. Details here.

Thursday 27 September, 6 pm - Sydney
Speaking at Kinokuniya bookstore, Level 2, 500 George Street, Sydney (The Galeries Victoria Building). Details here.

Friday 28 to Sunday 30 September - Newcastle
Various events at This Is Not Art / National Young Writers Festival. See program for details.

...and I promise I'll do the "Myrtle" as pictured on the last blog entry.

Whew! Busy times!

"I counted the tits, and there's fourteen"

Back in Melbourne, having just repaid my first instalment of the gigantic sleep debt incurred at the Brisbane Writers Festival. And what a festival it was! Beautifully organised (by possibly the friendliest staff and volunteers in the world), packed with enthusiastic festival-goers, drenched in sunshine and perfectly located at the new, super-cool State Library complex at Southbank by day, and at the Powerhouse by night. I had a ball.

But in my rush to pack and get on the plane up to Brissie at some hideously early hour of Thursday morning, I managed to forget my camera. So I can't post any photos of the raucous evening with the other words-and-pictures merchants at the Powerhouse, nor of my various panels - including those with Eddie Campbell, Leigh Rigozzi and Baba Brinkman.

Presenting with Baba was a brand new experience for me. In stark contrast to us practitioners of the silent art of little pictures (how's that, Eddie?), Baba's work is BIG, and it's LOUD. He's a rap artist and performer, and he's written an extraordinary rap adaptation of the Canterbury Tales. Our session was titled "What a Classic", and we'd been asked to talk to an audience of high school students, about adapting classic works of literature into new forms.

Baba performed an absolutely mesmerising - and hilarious - rap of the tale of the Wife of Bath, and the kids were clearly captivated. The story was well-spiced with clever innuendo and naughty asides, and you could see the ripples of smirks and giggles and nudges-in-the-ribs going through the audience when he gave them lines like "[her] eyes kept climbing his thighs in a slimy way" or described the hero as "stiff as a wooden lance".

So you can imagine that Baba was a pretty hard act to follow - especially since this was the only session where I didn't have access to a data projector, so couldn't show any cool pictures to accompany my talk. But it actually worked out fabulously. I talked about Gatsby and passed around a copy, and the audience seemed really interested and engaged, with plenty of questions. The description of Myrtle Wilson got a particularly good response - nothing like the words "she's got these huge boobs, with twelve nipples" to get a marquee full of kids laughing. Not having any visuals available, I had to demonsrate like so:

But the funniest response happened during my solo talk about Gatsby in another session earlier that day. The auditorium was quite full, and included several school groups of much younger kids (grades five and six by my reckoning) who were not actually meant to be attending this session about a decidedly grown-up book. Realising that the audience contained some very tender young minds, I adjusted the tone of my talk so that (a) they'd understand it, and (b) there wouldn't be too much talk about sex and death. Myrtle's twelve nipples, however, got their usual airing.

Anyway, after the talk was finished, one cute little boy about eleven years old put his hand up with a question. He pointed to the montage of characters projected on the screen and informed me of my crucial mistake. "I counted the tits," he said, "and there's fourteen"!


Go Brisbane!

Glamorous windows!

Well, this had me absolutely goggle-eyed with amazement. It's the window display at Readings bookstore in Carlton. It wasn't there at the time of the launch but has magically appeared since, when I wasn't looking. When I saw it this afternoon, I sat down on the bench outside with my mouth open like a goldfish and just gaped. Amazing.

And below is a little picture of my drawing room with a whole bunch of large, expensive TV equipment crammed into it. The ABC are doing a short segment about graphic novels for their Sunday Arts program (date TBA), and have interviewed Eddie Campbell, Shaun Tan and me. The interview was a lot of fun - can't wait to see how it all comes out.

The black box on a long stalk is a very impressive light which imitates daylight. Ordinarily the light in my studio is quite poor, so things looked altogether different when it was filled with pretend sunshine. I am now coveting this device. Actually, it looks a bit like a pair of alien creatures are cautiously inspecting my desk for signs of earthling life.


Just a few more days until the Brisbane Writers Festival, where I'll be presenting quite a few times, on panels and solo, as part of their graphic novel program. Looking forward to it very much indeed.

Why I drew them this way

On Thursday I gave a bunch of presentations and a comics workshop for students at Melbourne High School, a state school for boys which selects its students on the basis of academic ability. The workshop in particular was great fun - the students were enthusiastic, engaged and willing to have a go - and they came up with some terrific, original and very accomplished stuff.

A couple of the guys were drawing really impressive architectural backgrounds with wonderful fluency. I find architecture very challenging. It is something that I had never attempted before The Great Gatsby, and therefore something I had to consciously work at learning. When I commented on this, the archi-talented student seemed surprised. He said that backgrounds and buildings came very naturally for him, but that he found facial expressions very hard.

I have always taken for granted the fun and ease of creating lively, emotionally resonant facial expressions and the characters that use them. So I wonder what sort of "learning" is involved if you want to become more fluent in this aspect of creating characters. To a very large extent I think it is intuitive - which is not to say that such intuition can't be developed and improved.

Probably the most important thing, if I try to analyse my own scribbling experience, is learning to fully inhabit your character. By really exploring and getting to know the creature you're drawing, you have a sense of how they move, how their face expresses emotion, how a twist of an eyebrow conveys a particular attitude and so on. And when the pen is in my hand, I find that I also inhabit the character physically: my face will always take on precisely the expression that I'm trying to draw. Lots of other illustrators have told me that they do exactly the same thing.

In The Great Gatsby, I've taken the expression idea one step further, and tried to make each character's entire physical form embody the complex personality bestowed on him or her by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Just before the book came out, my wonderful publisher at Allen & Unwin suggested that it would be a good idea if I also wrote a few lines on each character to explain why I drew them this way. It was an interesting exercise, trying to concisely summarise the long, complicated, delicate and largely intuitive process of interpreting Fitzgerald's written characters in visual form. The one I find most difficult to summarise in words is Daisy. Daisy is my favourite character. She took a lot of thought and preparation and experimentation, but once I got her as I wanted her, I really do believe I got her just right.

It is hard for me to explain in words why Daisy looks as she does, but happily enough there is another picture that can help - and it's at the top of this post. About three years into the project, when I'd already finished a large slab of the book, my mum sent me a newspaper article which included a photograph of Fitzgerald's first love, the gorgeous debutante Ginevra King. It is said that Ginevra appeared in almost all of Fitzgerald's beautiful, unattainable female characters, and particularly in Daisy Buchanan. When I saw the photograph, I was overjoyed. Ginevra King, a woman deep in Fitzgerald's mind and heart, bore an uncanny resemblance to my version of Daisy.

And, for those who are interested, here are the very brief explanations that I wrote for Allen & Unwin.

Daisy Buchanan: Daisy is a complex character: charming, careless, morally compromised - and disappointed. Her feather-light flightiness and air of luxury are conveyed by her white, fluffy round head, while her slender, elegant neck and hands suggest both seductive charm and vulnerability.

Tom Buchanan: Everything about Tom’s personality is overbearing, arrogant and brutal, as embodied in his big, hulking, hyper-masculine body and brutish face. He occupies more space than anyone else, suggesting substantial social and financial power.

Nick Carraway: Our narrator is a gentle, somewhat ambivalent person, so I picture him as a smaller, soft-bodied creature. Nick’s expressive feelers give form to his sensitive ‘moral antennae’ which, although finely tuned, are also susceptible to swaying.

Jordan Baker: Cool, slippery and not to be trusted – Jordan is a slim, haughty squid-like creature, difficult to pin down and emotionally absent.

Myrtle Wilson: Poor Myrtle Wilson is all vulgar, overripe sex and loud, ugly pretension. She is unsophisticated and inelegant, but oozing sensuality: one big eye, an indiscreetly wide mouth, and enormous, multi-teated breasts. A bad end is almost inevitable…

George Wilson: Myrtle’s downtrodden, cuckolded husband is a nervous, sickly-looking, hand-wringing creature. But his tail looks a little like a scorpion’s, foreshadowing the violent consequences when George is pushed to the limit.

Jay Gatsby: Gatsby is a self-made enigma, a mystery deepened by its contradictions. He is simultaneously heartbreakingly sincere and utterly fake, noble and corrupt, glamorous and gauche. His form is inspired by the seahorse – a gorgeous, impossible-looking animal that seems to have been put together from bits of other creatures.

On famous editors, and editors-to-be

Today I gave a couple of talks at Chisholm Institute of TAFE, on the subject of making and reading graphic narratives, with reference to Gatsby.

The audiences were all students of professional writing and editing, and it was an absolute pleasure to talk with them. They all seemed so engaged with things like graphic narrative devices and the process of adaptation, which are topics dear to my heart, of course. And because they were also studying editing, it was the perfect opportunity to mention one of the best books I've read in a while: a biography of Fitzgerald's editor, the extraordinary Max Perkins (Max Perkins - Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg). This book actually gave me more of an insight into the creative processes behind The Great Gatsby than anything else I've read. And more importantly, it was a wonderful, fascinating look at a very private, very understated man who had the subtle-but-great talent of nurturing and shaping the talents of others.

More recently I've been reading some other graphic narratives (comics, graphic novels, whatever - I am way too tired today to buy into the "what do we call them" debate!): Eddie Campbell's beautifully painted, super-suspenseful and texture-filled detective story, The Black Diamond Detective Agency and French-Canadian Guy Delisle's Pyongyang, which was fabulous, funny /sad and a truly eye-popping peep at the weirdness of life in North Korea. Guy, Eddie and I will all be on a panel together at the Brisbane Writers Festival... I am pretty thrilled to be in such illustrious company.

One of the things that really grabbed me about Pyongyang was that Mr Delisle must surely take the prize for using the fewest possible lines to create incredibly relateable (and funny) facial expressions. I laughed out loud quite a few times, and was irresistibly carried along on the character's strange travels.

Mr Campbell has very kindly written a piece about Gatsby on his blog today, and it seems that he shares my passion for bizarre-looking monsters. But then - what's not to love about monsters?