I’m currently fortunate enough to be working with Australian artist Stu Campbell on a one-off comic short for national zine Oi Oi Oi!, and here’s a tease/process glimpse of the lovely W.I.P. (unfinished) for the first page.
Stu, who works under the alias of Sutu, is really cutting it at the moment with his art, doing some wild things like The Gatecrashers, and has just been nominated for an Eisner Award for his interactive piece These Memories Won’t Last.
He was also a member of the posse behind Neomad, which won the Gold Ledger at Australia’s recent Ledger Awards.
So, yep, I’m honoured and more than a little chuffed. Stay tuned for more updates – and thanks to James Picton for the intro!
Comics-wise, 2016 is shaping up as a lucky year, since I’m also working with fellow Aussies Frantz Kantor (on our quarterly strip Magpie) and Graeme Jackson (the upcoming Crash Soirée), and a short I did with Chris Wahl was just snapped up by Alterna Comics in the U.S. for inclusion in their IF anthology.
As reported in a prior entry here, Graeme additionally did the superb wraparound cover for a new Bullet Gal trade (all 12 issues) that makes its debut at Planet Comicon in the U.S. on May 20th – thanks to Project-Nerd Publishing.
And Frantz did the cover painting that graces my new novel, out next month via Open Books.
It’s called Black Sails, Disco Inferno, and was written with American writer Renee Asher Pickup – and some of you might recall that it not only novelizes our 15-issue comic run of Trista & Holt, but deconstructs the medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult… with a noir bent.
I think I count my blessings everyday that I’ve been fortunate enough to collaborate with all these creators.
There are so many different niches of “art”; I’d never even compare Graeme and Stu, Frantz and Chris, or Renee. They’re each brilliant in what they do.
Then there are the people who take time out to offer up support of the comics and novels or whatever – such as Jay Slayton-Joslin and Jimmy Donnellan, who put together a spotlight on Black Sails, Disco Inferno for Cultured Vultures.
Let’s also not forget the publishers placing faith in the material. In my case lately, Nat Karmichael at Comicoz, Iggy & Galo at Project-Nerd Publishing, and David and Kelly at Open Books. Hats off also to Alterna Comics in the U.S. and Dirty Rotten Comics in the U.K.
Anyway, everybody rocks. So there!
Andrez Bergen / Little Nobody 