Sir Gordon Edward George Minhinnick (13 June 1902 – 19 February 1992)
Sir Gordon Edward George Minhinnick was born today in 1902. With a career spanning over sixty years, receiving an OBE in 1950 and Knighthood in 1976, Minhinnick is considered one of New Zealand's most beloved cartoonists.
Ben Hutchings Interview Part One
This is the first part of a belated series of interviews with cartoonists working with Melbourne publisher Milk Shadow Books. If I can manage it they should all run over the course of June.
I first met Ben Hutchings almost a decade ago at a convention in Wellington where the artist's alley consisted of Ben, his esteemed colleague David Blumenstein and myself with a couple friends. It wasn't a great experience for us, it turned out all the hep comic cats in Wellington were attending a New Zealand comics weekend at a pub up the road. I always like talking to Ben, we share a bunch of similar experiences with comics in our formative years and I very much admire his passion for making comics.
MATT EMERY: What were the first comics you read? What were the comics that inspired you to make your own?
BEN HUTCHINGS: The first comics I read were all the old Whitman and Gold Key ones, who did lots of Disney and Richie Rich, Scooby Doo, all that stuff.
All the comics that used to have the ads for the X-Ray specs, and slim jims, and those bloody genuine flint arrowheads. Oh and ads for selling GRIT magazine. The ads were the most interesting things in them I think. They made you greedy with all the illustrations of great things you could buy. All kinds of weird food, practical jokes and toys. America seemed to have all the coolest stuff. The comic content of all of these was amazingly mediocre. They never made me smile or laugh. I still don't know why people fondly remember Scooby Doo, or any of that Hanna Barbera shite. They were soulless!
I was inspired to make my own comics when I discovered British humour comics. They had a lot more spirit and heart, and even though they were formulaic, I get the feeling they were done by people who cared about what they were doing. They were also strange because they used a lot of British colloquialisms and cultural details like bangers and mash!
Of course I was raised from birth with Tintin comics, but for some reason you never think of them as comics do ya. But needless to say I adored them, and still do.
EMERY: Where did you grow up? Were comics easily available to you? Where did you typically get them from?
HUTCHINGS: I was born in Moruya, NSW but grew up in Canberra. Every Saturday I'd ride my bike to the local newsagents. Aside from MAD or the Phantom, the selection of comics in newsagents was always erratic, so it was a bit exciting to see what would be there. If I ventured further out on my bike I might find a whole different bunch of titles in some more distant one! An odd Superman, or some weird Aussie comic, or maybe they'd have three different Archie titles instead of just one. It was always exciting to stumble across a newsagent I'd never been to before, and explore the comic section.
Second hand shops were, and still can be incredible places to discover hidden piles of old, obscure titles. These days they seem to have more comics than before, too. It's fun to scour the foreign sections for cheap manga, Chinese Tintins, Italian Mickey Mouses, or some risque European hard cover comics.
Once I discovered Impact Records in the city, saving up for trips there after school with my mate became my favourite ritual. We'd blow $40 on everything and anything, and as it grew dark outside we'd sit on the floor of the bus on the way home, amongst the legs of public servants, comparing our hauls for the day.
EMERY: Who were the first comic creators that you recognised by name or style?
HUTCHINGS: I reckon I got pretty good at recognising some of the artists who worked on Batman and Justice League in the 90s. I loved Adam Hughes, coz he was really good at clean, appealing faces. They didn't look like the typical rushed sort of thing, and the stories were pretty funny. I could also pick Brian Bolland pretty quickly.
EMERY: When did you first draw your own comics?
HUTCHINGS: I can't remember when I did my first comic - it must have been when I was 9 or 10. I was already drawing funny pictures but never in a sequential style. I think my first comic was about a legion of superheroes called "Mo". By Year 6 I had the patience to finish comics that lasted several pages. They were nearly always parodies. I found a big pile of them the other day! I have one called "Battyman" and I think I called the Joker "The Jokester" or something hilarious like that. It's interesting because I teach children cartooning now, and always remember myself having way more patience and care than they do, but nooooo.
EMERY: Was there a particular project where you felt you had established your own style? I always thought your work had a consistent tone of humour and I wondered if you felt there was a project where you consolidated your craft or style of drawing?
HUTCHINGS: I reckon Lesson Master was the comic that sums up my style! Very cartoony but with lots of detail. The people looked a little goofy but the environments and objects were usually pretty accurate. That's the style I feel most comfortable working in, and the most fun. But I never stick with one style and am always figuring out the best way to draw. For example in Iron Bard which I'm doing now, I am pushing the detail way more, and trying to find the perfect mix of funny/realistic to give to the characters. Even the shading techniques change throughout it coz I can't decide. On the other hand I'm posting a few webcomics now and then which have a deliberately inaccurate and loose style that I love doing. So really I don't feel like I've consolidated my style of drawing yet, even though I think most people can recognise my art when they see it.
EMERY: A while back you mentioned to me you’d like to attempt projects outside of the humour genre, have you made any progress with this idea?
HUTCHINGS: Not actively working on anything serious yet unless you count rough story outlines and scene thumbnails. It seems to get pushed back all the time. I have a number of serious ideas which I think would be great. Ideas like that are stressful because I know I can do funny joke comics, but I think telling a poignant story will really expose my shortcomings in that area. They could be ham-fisted, or shallow, or derivative or self indulgent or unoriginal without me knowing. I am not afraid of being insincere with them at least.
New Zealand Pictorial - The Seekers
The New Zealand Pictorial magazine was published fortnightly between January 1954 and December 1955 by New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. A large format magazine, New Zealand Pictorial was filled with black and white photography and national news stories. Cartoons and comic strips featured throughout the two year run of publication with American Harold Foster's Prince Valiant a mainstay on the last page and Englishmen Syd Jordan's early work on Jeff Hawke featuring during 1955.
Local cartooning work also featured with panel gags by Auckland cartoonist Neil Lonsdale (1907-1989) and a comic strip, Nez and Zena, by recent immigrant to Auckland, Merton Lacey, (1902-1996). Several issues featured behind the scenes coverage of the first major studio film produced in New Zealand, The Seekers, based on the novel by John Guthrie (real name John Brodie).
The following comic strip adaption of The Seekers featured in the July 26th, 1954 issue of New Zealand Pictorial. Sadly the artist is not credited. It is possibly the work of an artist that illustrated some true life stories in later issues which were also uncredited.
Roger Langridge interview
New Zealand born cartoonist Roger Langridge has been especially prolific in recent years with high profile gigs on The Muppet Show and Thor The Mighty Avenger. Recently Boom Comics published a collection of Langridge's independent work from the last twenty years as well as launching a new title, Snarked!, featuring characters from the works of Lewis Caroll. I asked him a few questions about his recent comics.
Matt Emery: The Show Must Go On collects material from the last 20 years, was there any temptation to touch up any of your older work?
Roger Langridge: Oh, yes! I'm always tempted, and I was actually ready to redraw one story entirely, but I just ran out of time. In retrospect I think I was right to leave it alone - the work in that book is an accurate reflection of what I was capable of at the time, and I'm happy to send it out into the world in that spirit.
Emery: Much of the material in The Show Must Go On is in the absurdist vein that is a constant of your work going back to strips you did in New Zealand. Where did this develop from?
Langridge: I've always loved oddball, surreal/absurdist humour, ever since I was a kid - I guess it was the Goon Show that really turned me on to that strain of comedy. Spike Milligan was, and remains to this day, my favourite comedian of all time. And I've explored his influences - people like the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields - and those who were later influenced by him, which is pretty much everybody (most obviously the Pythons, but you could write a book on the Spawn of Spike). So, yeah - blame the Milligan.
Emery: Your recent all-ages material are a fine example of kids-friendly comics that adults can also enjoy. Do you find it easy to write for this combined audience?
Langridge: Pretty easy, yes; it's not like I'm gagging to write skeezy sex scenes or graphic decapitations, so any compromises I might have to make to appeal to a general audience tend to be pretty insignificant ones. And even those are arguably improving the work - for example, if I avoid having characters swearing, I'm forced to find other, more original ways to get across the same idea, and that just forces me to be more creative. The bottom line, though, is that I'm just writing the kinds of comics I want to read, and assuming that my tastes aren't so rarefied that nobody else will agree with me.
Emery: Thor: The Mighty Avenger was great example of this, do you think mainstream comics would benefit from writing for a broader audience even if it risked alienating their core fan-boy base?
Langridge: This is a big, sticky can of worms! The short answer is yes, but only if those comics are actually sold in places where a general audience might stumble across them, and I don't see any signs of that happening. My brief on Thor: TMA was to write the book for a general, non-comic-shop audience - which I did - but then they cancelled it before the book versions had even hit the general bookstores, so it was only ever available in comic book specialty stores - where, of course, it sank like a stone. There's not much point in writing for a wider audience if they can't actually find it.
Emery: Is there much material left in the Langridge archive? can we expect another collection like The Show Must Go?
Langridge: Not too much. I've got a bunch of unpublished Fred the Clown strips which only ever appeared online - I'm considering doing something with the best of those, though of course the reason many of them were never previously published is because they weren't up to scratch. Some of them could benefit from being redrawn, at the very least. And I guess there's a lot of stuff from Zoot! (me and my brother Andrew's 1990s Fantagraphics series) which could conceivably be collected. Actually, yeah! There's still quite a bit of stuff out there, now that I think about it.
Emery: What inspired you to create your own story using Lewis Carroll's characters for Snarked?
Langridge: It was the result of a few things colliding together. I'd been thinking about doing a direct adaptation of The Hunting of the Snark and trying to shop it around, until it came to my attention that Mahendra Singh had just done one. And I'd had an itch (still do, actually) to attempt a daily web strip featuring the Walrus and the Carpenter as a kind of vaudevillian double-act. Also, I was quite keen to attempt writing something long-form with a definite beginning, middle and end after attempting the same with Thor: The Mighty Avenger and not getting a chance to see it through. When Boom! approached me and asked if I had any ideas for a new project, it actually took me a very long time to realise that I could mash all three of these urges together into one book.
I was tinkering around with an idea about a trio of bin-men in a dystopian future for a few weeks there until the "eureka" moment finally arrived! It seemed to make so much sense when it all came together - the Carroll characters are essentially already known to a general audience, even if my spin on them isn't quite what they expect, so my reasoning was that it would be a much easier sell with that germ of recognition already there; plus, it gives me a chance to do a lot of the stuff - silly rhymes, odd-looking animal and human characters bumping into one another - that I was doing in the Muppet Show books without having to contrive a reason for it. With Carroll, that's already there.
Emery: Did you use any visual cues for depicting Carrolls characters for Snarked?
Langridge: You mean like Tenniel's illustrations? Not really - I was quite keen to make the interpretations as much my own as I could. There are certain things you can't avoid, like the Mad Hatter having the price tag sticking out of his hat, which are so entrenched that to lose them would be to lose a part of the character. But I've mostly tried to pull the designs in my own unique direction. I suppose the Holiday illustrations from The Hunting of the Snarked were the ones I stuck to, if any - the Snark crew haven't been as freely interpreted over the years as the Wonderland characters, so there's less room to manoeuvre. Even those looked like Holiday via the Goon Show once I was through with them, though.
Emery: The world of Snarked! has a very distinctive colour palette, is there much collaboration between yourself and your colourist?
Langridge: I kind of let Rachelle Rosenberg, who does the colouring, get on with it - the editor, Bryce Carlson, sent me a few colouring samples to begin with and they were all very good, but Rachelle's really stood out, so I'm really just trying to keep out of her way! I agree it's a very distinctive palette - gives the whole book a bit of extra zing, I think. Anyway, I'm very pleased with the way it's looking. My only input was to decide the colour schemes of the major characters to begin with. The rest is entirely down to Rachelle.
Emery: What was the appeal of having characters of an unscrupulous nature as your leads in Snarked?
Langridge: Again, it goes back to my love of that early 20th-Century entertainment - Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields and Chaplin all played bums or scoundrels, sometimes both at the same time, and my all-time favourite comic characters were all deeply flawed individuals (Scrooge McDuck, Wimpy, Barney Google etc.) - so there's a tradition. Also, it gives me somewhere to take the characters - something I'm hoping to achieve as the series goes on is to show the Walrus discovering his (few) redeeming qualities through sheer force of circumstance, as he finds himself with no choice but to rise to the occasion. Starting him off as a scoundrel makes that journey a lot more interesting.
Emery: Are you satisfied with the balance you have between working on licensed properties and your own projects?
Langridge: I'd always prefer to work entirely on my own stuff, but working on corporate stuff pays the bills, so you do what you have to. I'm always striving to find myself in a position where I can just say no to all that, though.
Emery: Are you involved in any community of cartoonist's in London?
Langridge: I don't get out much these days! There's the small matter of having a family - if I do get any time away from work, I quite like to spend it with them. I find myself in the slightly odd position of only seeing people who live in London in other cities, when we both attend comic conventions away from home!
All images copyright 2011 Roger Langridge. Interview conducted via email Oct 2011
