When Melbourne playwright Tom Taylor decided he wanted to turn his 2005 short play The Example into a graphic novel, he got short shrift from illustrators he sought to contact on an internet forum. They were wary of getting involved with a speculative project. Taylor finally got a sympathetic response from artist Colin Wilson.
It was stroke of luck. Wilson, an illustrator with more than 30 years of experience, has worked on cult offerings such as anti-hero Judge Dredd from British comic 2000 AD, Star Wars comics and French detective fiction.
Finding an artist with a style to match the content is not easy, says Taylor, 34, a long-time devotee of speech bubbles and the picture grid. "With comics you're trying to create a full story and you can't do a really deep, philosophical, hard-hitting piece with a guy who draws a predominantly cartoony style; it doesn't work if it's Daffy Duck."
D'Israeli, DRGBLZ . That's all you need, now make with the clicking.
Printing comics: doing the math.
Ed Piskor's varied assemblage of comics including some 'how to' stories on hacking and phone phreaking.
Computery Microfinance comic.
More from Smith Mag's 'Next Door Neighbor' stories
Patrick Farley gets all 1970s on us. In a good way
Shadowline’s online comic section has an eclectic selection that’s culled from a variety of online sources. The best known is probably Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder series, one of the earliest comics to abandon monthly print serialization for online serialization followed by printing the graphic novels as they’re completed. Finder’s a critical favorite and immediately gives the site some street cred. Platinum Grit is an Australian web comic with a sporadic print history.
Kari, Amruta Patil's story of an androgynous adwoman working in Mumbai, has unobtrusively notched up a few points for the genre in India by selling around 3,500 copies, a figure that publisher Harper Collins says, is "not bad". Patil follows in the footsteps of Orijit Sen, who wrote River Of Stories, the first graphic novel in India in 1994 and Sarnath Banerjee whose 2004 Corridor was widely marketed by Penguin India as India's first graphic novel.
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