Folio: Essays on Australian Comics

How are Australian comics made and read? How do changes in comics and graphic storytelling over the past forty years intersect with our changing ideas about history, culture, community, creativity and technology?

In Folio: Essays on Australian Comics, interdisciplinary scholars and world-leading makers pose questions about Australian comics, including through visual essays, asking how comics move out into community, industry, society, and disciplines both cognate and distant.

It first examines the cultures and communities of Australian comics, from Indigenous cultural contexts to DIY zine fairs, and international markets to the graphic recording industry. It then focuses on practices and readings of individual comics, exploring individual practices and analysing Australian work, from government-commissioned comics with explicit social purpose to comics that employ augmented reality.

Chapter 2 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Ronnie Scott is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University, where he co-convenes an intervarsity comics studies reading group. His books include the Penguin Special Salad Days and the novels The Adversary, Shirley and Letter to a Fortunate Ex.

Elizabeth MacFarlane is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. She is co-director of Twelve Panels Press and co-directed the Comic Art Workshop from 2015 to 2019. Her books include Reading Coetzee and Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation (co-editor). Her monograph Comics and Creativity: Reading and Making Graphic Narratives is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

Gabriel Clark is Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at UTS, where he researches and teaches multimodal storytelling. As a Creative Producer, he develops innovative and award-winning graphic storytelling projects.

Pat Grant is Lecturer in Media Arts and Production at UTS. His graphic novel Blue was listed as one of the great graphic novels of 2012 by the US culture journal Salon. His 2020 graphic novel The Grot was in the official selection list of the 2021 Angouleme Comics Festival.

Meg O’Shea is a comics-maker featured in anthologies including Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment and Survival, which won the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Anthology.