Writer in Residence

It was a bitter-cold day on Wednesday at the Melbourne Writers Festival for my last session, which I shared with Gabrielle Wang. I told the crowd about my great-great-great-great-grandmother, who wrote the first children’s book published in Australia (’A Mother’s Offering to Her Children’, published in 1841) and Gabrielle talked about her new book, ‘Little Paradise’.

A historical novel for teenagers, ‘Little Paradise’ is based on the story of Gabrielle’s mother who grew up in Melbourne during the war. It is an absolutely exquisite book, conjuring up the worlds of  wartime melbourne and Shangai in vivid detail and compelling prose. I absolutely loved the book, which also contains fashion drawings by Gabrielle’s mother plus a cover of her on the front. She was gorgeous!

Gabrielle is a wonderful artist too - she showed some of her drawings to the crowd. So unfair that one person should have so much talent!

After spending the early part of the week in cold, grey Melbourne, I’ve now flown up to sunny, warm Brisbane for the Brisbane Writers Festival. The opening night party was held in a red marquee on the banks of the river, lit by the city lights. It was a wonderful night, filled with the glitterati of the Australian literary industry. The next day I had three sold-out sessions with school kids aged 9-15 - and some truly brilliant questions! Best thing of all was the long queue at the signing table (even if most of them did have bits of paper for me to sign!)

Tomorrow I have the Online Literary Festival with schools from all around Australia - it’ll be great fun!

Yesterday, at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I and two other feisty and brilliant women writers - Van Badham and Bec Kavanagh - passionately debated on the side of Stephanie Meyer and sparkly vampires against the combined might of Jeff Sparrow, Ben Chandler and ??. Astonishingly, we lost. Perhaps it was all the jokes the other side made about sparkly vampires and icy-cold private parts. Perhaps nothing we girls could say about the effect of Twilight on reading, writing, talking about books and the buying of books could sway an audience jaded with Twilight-mania. I certainly think the points we made were striking. Did you know that sales of Wuthering Heights, by the astonishing and long-dead Emily Bronte, have gone up 30,000 copies a month since they were reissued with a black and red cover and the caption ‘Bella and Edward’s favourite book’?   Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favourite books. I’m so glad a whole generation of new readers are discovering it, even if they are only lured in by the frankly awful caption (Edward actually didn’t understand Bella’s love of WH at all!) I’ll champion any book that gets teenagers reading, talking about books, arguing about books and writing - and Twilight has done this in spectacular fashion. What do you think? Is the Twilight phenomenon fading and is it still burning bright? 

SO WHAT DO I READ NOW?

Recommended by everyone, all over.

I started this little adventure both because I was reading so many YA graphic novels as I wrote my own (which is coming along very nicely, thanks for asking!), but also because it can be hard to find a good place to start accessing the massive pile of graphic novels available to eager readers. I hoped I would provide some sort of starting point - open a window in the library and let you climb in. I think though, that by recommending 31 books, I may in fact have overloaded you as soon as you set foot inside.

So, here, I present the definitive number one starting point for new graphic novel readers: anthologies. Some body else has already done the leg work to bring you a selection of the best comics they could find, so dip in and have a look - get a feel for what you like, pick up a couple of names that you can run with to track down other works. It’s the quickest and cheapest way I can think of to figure out what you like.

For those at the “Y” end of the YA scale, I highly recommend Flight, the annual collection of adventure short stories (some of them serialized). They’re great fun but, now with seven volumes, they can tend to be a bit same-samey. I would target Volume 2 (from 2005) since it has a great comic by Australian Doug Holgate in it.

For older YA readers, I can’t recommend the Best American Comics series highly enough. They put out one a year (and most local libraries have at least a couple of them). It’s a shame that the work is all American, but it’s all (usually) pretty outstanding as well. Be warned, though, there will be some fairly adult content lurking in its pages.

For home-grown anthologies - if you can get your hands on a Tango collection, you’ll see that Australians are making excellent comics themselves, although with a fraction of the recognition (and again, not strictly for a YA audience).

As for me? I never thought I’d say this, but after this month I’m actually looking forward to putting away books with pictures and picking up a prose novel. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. I’m pretty sure they were talking about novel formats when they said that, so what’s stopping you? Go get some!

Thanks a bunch to Lili and the Centre for Youth Literature for having me all month, it was truly a blast.  And thanks a bunch to those who commented and emailed with recommendations for me - I’ll be in touch with the lucky ones whose names come out of my (very stylish fedora) hat to receive a copy of my latest comic.  Cheerio, all, and happy reading!

MERCURY. By Hope Larson, 2010

Recommended by Matt L, Sydney.

Since Hope Larson’s 2005 graphic novella Salamander Dream, her stories have been getting stronger and stronger - 2006’s Grey Horses, 2008’s Chiggers and now Mercury.

Mercury simultaneously tells the stories of teenage girls 150 years apart - Tara in the modern setting and her ancestor, Josey, in the past. Although there is a little mystery around something that happens to Josey that Tara is piecing together, the story is about so, so much more than this. It’s full of dense and rich detail (in the art, characterization, dialogue and story) that there almost isn’t a need for the “mystery” plot at all. It’s nice to have, though, as a bit of a structural anchor for everything else.

Both Tara and Josey have kind rites-of-passage type experiences in the course of the story, but I adore the way Larson keeps it low-key.  There are romantic relationships, sure, but they serve the story not as the core, but as a catalytic event for each of the girls and their familial relationships. Which is an awesome, wonderful, blessed relief.

TOWN BOY. By Lat, 2007

Recommended by E.P.

Town Boy and its prequel Kampung Boy are HUGE in Malaysia since first published in 1979. We’ve only started to see them here relatively recently in translation and shiny new packaging, but the story is timeless and unaffected by its first-published date.

Kampung Boy, the story of Mat’s adventure-filled, cheeky childhood in a small Malaysian village (or kampung) is utterly, utterly charming. The black line-work is simple, expressive and inviting. It carries the energy and humour of the writing well because it is not too polished.

Town Boy charts the now-teenaged Mat’s life in an Indonesian town (he’s moved there for school). It’s traded some of the scratchily-“amateurish” and tongue-in-cheek observational charm for something a bit more slick. It’s both better and poorer than the original story - something’s been added, definitely, but something else has been taken away. Still, it’s an amazing story about a regular teenager in a fairly extraordinary part of the world.

Woah! What happened there? I blinked (for about 24 hours) and I’d missed a whole ‘nother day’s post. I don’t even have a good excuse - it’s like I got distracted by cats on the internet for an entire day. If I’m going to make up the two days I’ve missed I’d better prop my eyes open and have no more of this blinking nonsense, eh?

THE DREAMING COLLECTION. Queenie Chan, 2010

Recommended by Ash, Sydney.

“At last!” I hear 70% of you cry, “she’s reviewing some manga!” It’s true that I’ve been remiss in covering this massively popular corner of comics, but to be honest I didn’t really feel qualified to comment. I don’t read manga and find many of it’s tropes and conventions to be a bit bewildering. But the international manga readership of 17 gabillion people (not to mention the dozen or so who have emailed me) can’t all be wrong, can they? Course not!

So in a blatantly tokenistic bid, I read The Dreaming - a moody and creepy Australian-made and -based manga about young women in a period-style boarding school. Chan not only evokes the Australian landscape and (somewhat problematically) Aboriginal Dreaming, but the classic of all Australian-bush-boarding-school stories, Picnic at Hanging Rock. The mood of the story starts off strongly, but seems to loose momentum over the course of the collection, which is a shame because I found it far more compelling than the actual mystery of the boarding school. Chan’s art is assured and beautiful - the period detail is well observed and adds to the spooky - and sometime claustrophobic - mood.

The only other manga I have read is, oddly, also an Australian book about a young woman in a boarding school where things aren’t as they seem - Madeleine Rosca’s Hollow Fields. Rosca goes for a steam-punk aesthetic over the lace and ribbons of Chan’s period setting and prefers energy and adventure over mood. But I liked it plenty, too.

TEEN TITANS. By a whole bunch of people since the 1980s

Recommended by no-one.  Ever.

Oh, man. I couldn’t even get through one trade paperback. I’m sorry, dear readers, I feel like I’ve failed you, but I just couldn’t do it.

In general I don’t like superhero comics (well, not the conventional DC/Marvel ones anyway) and Teen Titans feels just like those. Probably because it is. Batman’s sidekick Robin leads a team of more obscure sidekicks and new, made-up teenage superheroes through battles with their teenaged arch nemeses and their teenaged selves. There’s little here that doesn’t feel formulaic and the whole series reeks of nothing so much as ringing cash registers. The formula dictates enormous bosoms and rippling muscles, painted on costumes and soft-porn poses of the older superheroes these teenagers emulate, which - apart from the tepid story and not terribly interesting characters - was enough to make me want to jab a pen in my eye.

The other thing I find so distasteful about Teen Titans are the dollar signs flashing in the eyes of the studio. Not only is it a new way to package existing characters (which I find kinda lazy), but it resulted in a spin-off animated TV series, which then, get this, resulted in a spin-off comics series called Teen Titans, Go!, video games and another comics series called Tiny Titans which follows the adventures of the gang in primary school (and is actually okay for juniors, but not very interesting if you’re over 6). Seriously. How can one staggeringly conventional idea spawn that big and that uninspiring a franchise? Don’t ask me, I couldn’t even finish the one book…

Sorry about yesterday -a confluence of events conspired to make me miss a day by getting conspiratorial and confluent-y all up in my face. Too make a long story not too boring, I have three pieces (articles, mostly) out with editors at the moment and unexpectedly (in a way that I totally should have seen coming), they all offered notes with tight turnaround times ON THE SAME DAY. Not bad, though, that it’s the first day I missed in three and half weeks! I’ll make it up before the month’s out, you see if I don’t.

SOLOMON’S THIEVES. By Jordan Mechner (writer), LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland (artists), 2010.

Recommended by P. A., California

Look at the cover of this book and tell me what you think it’s about? You’re absolutely, 100% right. (Unless you said “bunnies”, in which case you’re 4% right and quite a lot wrong). Just as the cover implies, it’s a rip-snorting, rollicking adventure not ashamed to revel in cliché’s of genre such as a climactic sword-fight atop the scaffolding in burning building.

Martin is a Templar Knight who has returned to France after the failed Crusade campaigns to take Jerusalem back for Christians. Although he’s a holy knight and brave warrior, he’s also a bit if a scallywag - kind of like Pagan from Pagan’s Crusade - he’s not merely a paragon of the historical figure, he’s a character you can relate to and like. After the knights returned from the Holy Land, the Order (at that time 15,000 people in France alone) was systematically imprisoned and killed by the king. Mechner comments in an afterward that “it’s as if the FBI were to raid the World Bank, confiscate its US assets and arrest every employee on a charge of terrorism”. Historically, it’s kind of a big deal.

Martin escapes imprisonment (after being tortured) and joins a small band of misfits to “pull off the greatest heist the medieval world has ever seen” by stealing back the Templar gold. Solomon’s Thieves reads more like a big, stupid blockbuster movie than anything else (it’s no surprise that Mechner wrote the screenplay for the Prince of Persia movie). But it’s an engaging idea, the art has a lot of energy to it and (and this is a big plus in my book) it’s not afraid to look as silly as it is.

EPILEPTIC. By David B, 2002 (English translation).

Recommended by Nick F, Keilor.

Another in the line of personal memoir comics, Epileptic tells the story of the author David’s epileptic brother and the lengths to which his parents will go to try to cure his affliction. Which turns out to be quite, quite far.

The strength of the book is in the oddness of David’s story - he spends some time living on a macrobiotic commune, for instance, and describes the personalities who live there with a cunning (but sympathetic) eye. The weakness of the story is in its repetition. David’s family try treatment after treatment after philosophy after lifestyle, and they’re all similarly presented in a seemingly endless parade.

The strength of David’s art is metaphor and design - the epilepsy is often depicted as a dragon with patterns influenced by Asian, Persian and Near Eastern motifs. It’s beautiful and terrifying as it carries David’s brother away.

Although, like Blankets, this book is a big one that was heaped with praise on its release. And, like Blankets, I can’t quite buy into it.

HELLBOY. By Mike Mignola, several books beginning 1994.

Recommended by Jayson, Cobram.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t get enough of mythology and folklore. To the point were I copied enormous tracts out of encyclopedias on my mum’s new electric typewriter (I know, nerrrrrrd). But, clearly, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola had the same issue. While my love of old and slightly spooky stuff let me to a degree in archaeology, Mignola’s led him to comic books and a character named Hellboy.

Hellboy (a creature from Hell summoned to Earth by Nazi’s during an occult ceremony gone awry and with a tangled and convoluted destiny) works for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) as a kind of secret agent monster-hunter. He’s rarely smarter or stronger than the monsters he’s sent to fight, but he has a bigger heart, more tenacity and can take a heckuva beating.

Three things make Hellboy better than your average mainstream comic:

1. The stories are classic Indiana Jones adventure stuff. Based on the kinds of myth and folklore fodder as Baba Yaga, baby-stealing fairies (that look more like goblins), and Lovecraftian space-Cthulus, they’re a whole mess of fun. Usually, though, the stories are just a set up for Hellboy to be beaten up a lot before finally prevailing.

2. Hellboy himself is a great character. He’s sarcastic, not terribly bright and sometimes petulant but Mignola clearly adores him and that affection is infectious.

3. The art! The art is amazing, especially for a major publisher. There’s not a single rippling muscle-bound boofhead or absurdly buxom bombshell in sight. Mignola’s style is kind of semi-abstract, with scratchy, rough lines and a preference for blocks of color and black over detail. It may well be an acquired taste, but it’s sensational when you get used to it.

Also well worth a look, if you can get your hands on it, is Mignola’s one-shot from 2002, The Amazing Screw-On Head. I won’t describe it to you (I wouldn’t really know where to begin), but if you like Hellboy, you’ll love it.