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| Queenie Chan, Australian manga artist |
NOTE: This blog entry is a modified version of a post I submitted to the "Australian Comics History 1960-2010" Facebook group on 20 June, 2020. The questions I raised here generated a lot of enthusiastic debate and discussion, so I thought I'd share it with the readers of this blog, as it may be of interest to the broader community of Australian comic-book fans, collectors and historians.
As someone who's written about the history of Australian comics for many years - both as a fan and as an academic - I've always been interested in identifying and characterising the different historical phases of Australian comics production, especially in the decades following the commercial collapse of the comics publishing industry in the 1960s.
Earlier this year, as a member of the Ledger of Honour judging panel, I joined my fellow judges in a thought-provoking email exchange about whether American comics terminology (Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, etc) can be usefully applied to the Australian comics scene since the 1960s.
The fact that the "Australian Comics History 1960-2010" Facebook group spun off from the "Old Australian Pre-Decimal Comics Up to 1966" Facebook group suggests there is, at some level, a recognition among local comics fans, creators and collectors that Australian comics published since the 1970s are significantly different from their wartime and postwar predecessors (I would also suggest that the audience for Australian comic since the 1970s is significantly different from the largely juvenile audience that read comic books in the their millions back in the 1940s and 1950s).
Speaking personally, I think the history of Australian comics since the 1970s has been so diverse and diffuse, that it defies the kind of "easy" categorisations that have been applied to American comics history over this same time period (I address this topic in my essay, "Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics", which will appear in forthcoming collection, The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies)
I would argue, however, that the mid-late 1980s/early 1990s probably represented the last concerted effort to foster a legitimate comics "industry", through the combined efforts of publishers like Issue One, Cyclone/Southern Aurora, New Age Graphics, and Aargh! Comics (For a good visual/historical guide to this period of Australian comics, vist Tabula Rasa's Australian Comics page).
While thinking about this topic, I was reminded of a great comic strip essay by
Queenie Chan (pictured above)
, wherein she reflected on her experience, migrating from Hong Kong to Australia, and how her exposure to (and love of) Japanese manga shaped her own career as a comics artist based in Australia. But she often found herself isolated even within the local comics community, which she felt was dominated by male creators who drew in a largely Western style. Her essay was published online by ABC Radio National in October 2018, and you can read it by clicking on this link.What I especially liked about this essay was how Chan brought an "outsider's perspective" (as someone immersed in Japanese, rather than Western comics culture/traditions) in their assessment of the contemporary Australian comics "scene", or "community".
Which got me thinking about my original question - how can we define the history of Australian comics since the 1970s? Queenie Chan's own story highlights how influential Asian comics have become since the 1980s, perhaps beginning with the "Hedrax" strip by Ian Gould & Steve Stamatiadis in Eureka! (1988), and continuing through more recent titles like Azerath (2004). This phenomenon is evident throughout North America and Europe as well, where Manga-styled comics have proved especially popular with younger readers than Western-styled comics, even in countries with robust domestic comics industries.But Australian comics have always been open to foreign trends and influences, throughout the twentieth century - from British story papers in the 1920s and 1930s, to American-style comics in the 1940s and 1950s, through to new wave Franco-Belgian and British "small press" movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The influence of Manga, and other Asian comics traditions (such as Korean Manhwa), is simply the latest example of how Australian comics (and their creators) have assimilated and adapted foreign influences for their own aesthetic/creative needs
Some might argue, with good reason, that any attempt to classify, or categorize the history of Australian comics since the 1970s is an ultimately pointless task, one made impossible by the diverse and fragmented nature of local comics production throughout the last five decades (Local book publishers' belated "discovery" of Australian graphic novels since the mid-2000s arguably constitutes another distinct phase in Australian comics history).
But it's a question that continues to fascinate me, and will no doubt remain a topic of lively debate among Australian comic creators, collectors and scholars alike for some time yet.
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