Les Gibbard (26 October 1945 – 10 October 2010)

Les Gibbard was born today in Kaiapoi, New Zealand in 1945. At 16 he was working as a reporter on the Auckland Star, after they fired him for his poor shorthand skills, he went to the New Zealand Herald, where he was taught how to draw cartoons by Low's protege Gordon Minhinnick.  after a brief period in Australia he emigrated to England in 1968.

As a political cartoonist at The Guardian newspaper in Britain for 25 years, Gibbard became the longest-serving artist of his type in the publication’s history. Across his career Gibbard worked as a British political cartoonist, journalist, illustrator and animator.

Steve Holland's Les Gibbard obituary.



Word Balloons: 51%, Hidden and Gasoline Eyedrops

Australasian Comic reviews by Philip Bentley

Four Comics by Chris Gooch

51% 1 & 2 (Optic Pop, 2013 &14)

Hidden (self-published, 2014)

Gasoline Eye Drops (self-published, 2014)

Buy Chris Gooch's comics.

Chris Gooch tumblr.

At just 20 years of age Chris Gooch appears to be a comic creator in a hurry. On top of these four books he has also had a short graphic novel 1792 in 2013. Years ago he probably would have started out by besieging whatever anthologies were around, but these days it is just as easy to publish the strips individually, either by yourself or through one of the small local publishers. Given all of these books are smaller than regular comic size I suppose you could call them mini comix, but all have design elements that lift them out of the ruck and Gooch’s work has a creative presence that is greater than that found in your usual mini.

Page from Gasoline Eyedrops.

Gooch seems to have stories he wants to tell. He seems drawn to those featuring elements of unease – often the uncertainty associated with young love, or with tropes drawn from horror genre, sometimes both in the same strip.

His art is a simple but generally well realised ‘indie style’ that seems to be still developing as he employs a number of variations on it in these various strips, although the styles are consistent within the strip. Hidden and Gasoline Eye Drops are embellished with a second colour – something of a tradition in indie circles, but not one I think works all that well most of the time. Simple grey tones would probably work better. That said the bright canary yellow chosen for Hidden does strike an effectively jarring counter-intuitive note in what is meant to be a dark and brooding piece.

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Page from Hidden.

All four of these books have had the input of others 51% being published by Brendan Halyday’s Optic Pop, the other two being financed by an RMIT arts initiative. Of note is Gasoline Eye Drops which has been mentored and edited by Mandy Ord as part of a gallery exhibition. This move is particularly heartening as I have long lamented that the absence of a local industry has deprived budding creators of the guidance of more established artists (even if it may have spared us a surfeit of commercial crap). Perhaps not coincidentally Gasoline Eye Drops is also the stand out story of the bunch. A raw and honest look at what the emotions of young love can produce told via some sophisticated continuity.

So I welcome Gooch’s arrival and will follow his future trajectory with interest.

51% Number one

Word Balloons: Rosa Goes For a Walk and Good Dog Whisky

 

Australasian comic reviews by Philip Bentley.

Rosa Goes for a Walk by Nic Lawson (self-published, 2013)

Good Dog Whiskey  by Kent Kobi (self-published, 2013)

Comics about the notion of dying are not that common – as opposed to comics featuring death which are fairly thick on the ground. I guess this is because most comic creators are in the full flush of their lives and haven’t had reason to contemplate mortality beyond its use as a plot device. Whilst neither of the authors of the above two works appear to be more than middle-aged both have produced considered, moving works on the process of dying.

Nicole (Nic) Lawson’s Rosa Goes for a Walk is a whimsical, yet thoughtful narrative concerning an old lady living alone in an outback ghost town. Her daily routine is pretty similar until one day she espies a mound on the horizon that wasn’t there previously. Recalling her past life as an adventurer Rosa decides to ‘go for a walk’ into the bush to investigate.

More a parable than drama this is a largely wordless piece illustrated in a simple, yet effective cartoony style. It is a novel take on mortality and cleverly approaches it from a pan-spiritual perspective.

This is a difference between Rosa and Kent Kobi’s Good Dog Whiskey  where the afterlife depicted has more of a standard Christian dimension, even if nothing is overtly stated. Whiskey also explores the process of dying, but beyond this is also an evocation of the deep bonds that some people have for their dogs, or in this case vice versa. Kobi manages to pluck the heartstrings in a sincere and moving fashion. Sensitive readers are advised to have a box of tissues handy.

My only beef with Whiskey, and it is a major one, concerns the artwork which appears largely to be made up of rendered photos. The use of this effect is not new (artists such as Jean-Claude Claeys and Fernando Fernandez were utilising similar methods as far back as the 1970s, probably using a light box or overhead projector), but its use has become more prevalent recently with the availability of Photoshop. I don’t want to be too hard – if the choice is between rendered photos or inferior art then the former is certainly preferable – but ideally I’d prefer to see fully drawn works where the element of craft is more to do with the artist’s drawing ability than his computer expertise. Using this process inevitably means that you produce fairly static images, whereas part of the alchemy of the figurative drawing process (both in comics and single illustrations) is to produce figures that have the illusion of movement. Further, there is often a disjuncture between the images that have been rendered from photos and those that haven’t leading to an inconsistent look to the work. Thankfully in this case the story does lend itself to the process, as there is no need for expansive backgrounds, but for me it diminished what was otherwise a commendable effort.

For info on submitting comics  for review read here:

Thrust Justice Preview (Warning Powerful Manly Images)

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Here at Pikitia Press we like to publish manly comics about manly men, by manly men, for manly men. THRUST JUSTICE is one of those comics. New Zealand's hardest working cartoonist Brent Willis (tied with Barry Linton & Richard Fairgray) has produced a powerful work of literature that we are confident will win awards and get good reviews and all the other special things one needs to enrich one's soul. Powerful with a capital THRUST.