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Interview

Brisbane comics p2

Ashcan Comics and Groovy Gravy, a couple of Brisbane comics anthologies...

Ashcan Comics anthologies started in 2010. Their latest is Issue 10, featuring true stories.
In Dean Rankine’s story Nits, he tells of a working in a Salvation Army crisis centre. A man would come in occasionally to use the phone. He would bring his daughter. One day the girl came in with a shaved head because she’d had nits. But she told her friends she had leukemia and they all bought her toys as a result.
D. C. Fisher’s story The First Time, relates a bad drug experience.
Comics artist Darren Fisher liked Magician by Raymond E. Feist. Published in 1982, Magician started a series of fantasy novels by Raymond Feist. It tells the story of Pug, who at Crydee, is apprenticed to a master magician. Then the Kingdom is attacked by invaders. Pug and his friend Tomas join the conflict. Pug’s destiny leads him through a rift to a new world.
Darren Fisher also enjoyed the Isaac Asimov detective series. These include The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn. These novels feature Elijah “Lije” Baley, who is a plain clothes homicide detective in the New York City Police Department, 3000 years in the future.
He liked Preacher comics, created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. A preacher in Annville, Texas, is possessed by a creature called Genesis, which is the offspring of an angel and a demon.
Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark was another good reading tip. This comic is set in the future when the world is shattered into fiefdoms controlled by high-tech mob families, and each family as a Lazarus to do its dirty work, eg killing. Forever “Eve” Carlyle is the Lazarus for the Carlyle family.
Blankets was another recommendation, which was an autobiographical coming of age story by Craig Thompson about being raised in an evangelical Christian family, his first love and early adulthood.
Another of his picks was Craig Thompson’s 672 page graphic novel Habibi, which is set in a fictional Islamic fairy tale landscape. It tells the story of the relationship between two escaped child slaves.
Brad Daniels is a graphic artist who started the comic anthology Groovy Gravy in 1994 or 1992, he said. Groovy Gravy has been in the magaazine shelves in Brisbane record stores and comic shops for years. For the first six months of the magazine he was living in a house in Annerley with three or four other artists, he said. For eight years there were no comics at all. Then eight or nine years ago he restarted the comic at one a year.
He liked Arthur C Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendevous with Rama. Set in the 2130s, the novel tells of a 50 km cylindrical space ship that enters Earth’s solar system. A group of human explorers go to investigate.
Other favorites included Jack Kirby’s comic The Demon, Neil Gaiman’s short story A Study in Emerald, and Ghastly Beyond Belief, a 1985 anthology of stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman.
He also liked Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, published 1992, which is the first novel in a series of alternative history novels about what would have happened if Dracula had defeated his enemies and ended up taking over Great Britain.

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-copyright Simon Sandall