Last Four Days To Pre-order #takedown - My evening on a pier with pick up artists and protesters by David Blumenstein

Big thanks to all the folk who have pre-ordered #takedown - My evening on a pier with pick up artists and protesters by David Blumenstein. David's comic is at the printers right now and we'll start mailing out pre-orders over the weekend.

If you havn't pre-ordered yet, get on it now! Take advantage of our pre-order $2 postage to anywhere in the world! Here it is!

Here's that spiel one more time,

What are pick-up artists really like?

Cartoonist David Blumenstein wanted to know. In signing up for a free seminar with International Pick-up artist(PUA) Instructor Julien Blanc, David found himself witness to one of the most successful anti-PUA campaigns launched by the feminist community, a campaign that rallied behind the catch-cry #takedownjulienblanc.

This playfully drawn true account of one evening introduces you to the people on both sides of the protest line.

David Blumenstein is an award-winning cartoonist who has drawn comics for Guardian Australia, Crikey, Junkee and Australian MAD Magazine. He and his cartoonist wife, Sarah, are co-founders of Squishface Studio, an open comic artists' studio in Brunswick, Victoria which you can visit most days of the week, and which holds events and classes for kids and adults.

The David Blumenstein site

The Cartoonists Part One

The several page article 'The Cartoonists' appeared in the weekly New Zealand Heritage magazine published in the early 1970's and eventually collected as a set of Encyclopedias.

Sir Gordon Minhinnick wartime cartoon circa 1940's from The Evening Star

The Cartoonists Part One

Pen-and-ink commentators on national foibles have tended to avoid biting satire and to reflect the good-humoured, slow-to-anger temperament of their fellow countrymen.

With 20 sheep to every man, woman and child, New Zealand should have a surfeit of mutton and a scarcity of wit: pastoral peoples are supposed to resemble the goatherd of European literature in being earthy, inexpressive, dogged and slow. Yet for nearly a century New Zealand newspapers and periodicals have been able to find cartoonists of peculiar wit and artistry in spite of a steady loss through emigration.

The quality of the emigrant cartoonists is high, and the bigger audience they reach abroad makes it seem higher. Nobody is immune from judgments of power and scale, which make Britain's Guardian more important than the New Zealand Herald and London's Evening Standard of more consequence than Wellington's Evening Post. So it is that in the realm of humour and satire David Low is more of a name to be conjured with than Gordon Minhinnick, and Murray Ball than Nevile Lodge.

Two fallacies are widely held about New Zealand cartoonists. One is that those who have won high reputation abroad became good cartoonists only after leaving New Zealand. The other is that, Minhinnick possibly excepted, those who remain are not good enough to have won fame anywhere else.

The first fallacy is easily exposed. Low it is true matured partly in Australia and wholly thereafter in Britain. It could hardly have been otherwise with an artist who left New Zealand at the age of 20. But Low had been cartooning for eight years for the Spectator (New Zealand) and the Canterbury Times before he left and his art was sophisticated enough to make him welcome on the Sydney Bulletin at once.

The same is true of Low's contemporaries and his successors. George Finey, a contemporary, was a superb caricaturist before he left New Zealand, and although he never ventured beyond Australia he would have found few peers anywhere in the world. Stuart Peterson, another contemporary whose work appeared in the Free Lance and who later went to the Sydney Sun, was both subtle and unique in his style. His drawing of Johannes Andersen, the Turnbull Librarian of his day, shows how little he stood to gain (except money) from traveling abroad.

Keith Waite

As in the early years of the century, so in the later. Keith Waite and Neville Colvin, two cartoonists successful in London, developed their skills on the Otago Daily Times and the Evening Post respectively over several years. Murray Ball, whose palaeolithic hero Stanley enlivens the pages of Punch, was no less able and witty when his cartoons first appeared, years before, in the New Zealand Listener. Even Les Gibbard, who at 23 became a political cartoonist on the Guardian in 1968, had reached journeyman status under Minhinnick's tutelage on the New Zealand Herald.

Les Gibbard

Three years later, at 26, Gibbard was one of the top political cartoonists in Britain, his status confirmed by such papers as Copenhagen's Politiken, Le Monde of Paris, and the New York Times, all of which publish his work in their collections of comment from around the world.

"Our School Bored", by Arthur L. Palethorpe, published in New Zealand Punch of November 1 1879. A skilled academic artist, Palethorpe gave early expression to a favoured New Zealand form of wit, the pun. (Image credit: Alexander Turnbull)

Tony Renouf Interview Part Three

Tony Renouf explores some Treacle precursors in Egypt.

Part three of talking to cartoonist Tony Renouf about his work in the New Zealand comics scene during the nineties and what he's up to now.

Tony Renouf tumblr: boredtootone2.tumblr.com

Tony Renouf Blog Bored in a Record Shop

Read Tony Renouf Interview Part One

Read Tony Renouf Interview Part Two

Matt Emery: Can you tell me about the follow up to the Treacle anthologies, Ummph?

Tony Renouf: Ummph was the A5 photocopied follow on from Treacle. Same core group of contributors...less running after not so keen folk...3 issues I think...really only put out because I wouldn't let the publishing go. Probably sold less than 25-30 copies of each issue. I really couldn't say any more unless I had them in front of me...had a bit of a poke around and can't find copies...so they'll remain bit of a mystery till one of us goes down and looks at the "Tony Renouf Collection" at the Hocken library (yep - got an archival collection named after me!)

Emery: I recall you mentioning traveling at some point after Treacle. Did you live abroad?

Renouf: Yes I lived abroad twice...once in Jersey, Channel Islands (my place of birth) for 8 months and this last time for about 2 and bit years In Dorset,U.K...(returned approx 5 years ago). First sojourn was during a "fallow" period but the time in Dorset got me going again.

Tony Renouf process drawings

Treacle #2

Emery: You've written about losing interest in drawing in the 1990's, what brought you back to the drawing board?

Renouf: I looked in my "archive" and the last finished piece in there is a reprise of the comics comics comics thing you love so well dated 2000. Didn't have time to check but I think the very last pieces I did around then were a group of topical strips for a friend who was trying to rejuvenate a small town newspaper he was being the design guy for. His editor said no thank you, his readership couldn't handle a new crossword writer and a new comic strip all at the same time. I love tight deadlines and convinced myself that I couldn't create without a mad target to aim for. I couldn't afford to publish any more anthologies. I was too far away from the publishing houses to pick up any illustration work. (As if any of them would give me money for my "individual-style"....) No deadline, no venue, no money.... I got more involved in music stuff through my job at Echo Records...specifically spinning reggae tunes on big speakers....I just shrugged my shoulders and did other stuff....my good friend Dee did a single frame cartoon of my drawing board with words "Tony used to draw here" and attached it to said board.....

Several years passed and I found myself on the other side of the world, sitting at my cousin Phil's kitchen table with a travel journal in front of me. A travel journal that I'd been obsessively jotting down my days doings every day for 10 months...and it occurred to me that I could jam out a strip every day if I tried. It would only take 5 or ten minutes and I already had the habit of scrawling in the book.....Phil & family are a bunch of very artistic/intelligent/funny folk and general conversation always devolved into some form of word play or ridiculous logic.

At the same time I'd picked up a night shift job in a sheet metal factory and had been given a notebook to write machine settings in...which was eventually near full of Yoof & Arty and Mrs. Axelgrinder shenanigans. Pretty much a similar situation to the plastics factory I worked in at night in Hamilton in the early 80's. Nice repetitive work. You can let your mind wander but this time I knew what to do with the ideas...still have approx' 75 pages of that stuff to commit to paper but newer ideas keep getting in the way!!! All the UK drawn stuff can be seen in the "UK toons" category on the blog. There is nothing like process work to free the mind for aimless wandering. I returned to finished art work some time in 2008 and for the last 2 1/2 years- post cig' quitting - I've been producing at least 3 pages of finished stupidity a week. Writing shit loads as well and still trying to find time to plot & draw all the ideas in that factory notebook.... (cue link to blog).... I find myself just doing it to please me and some close associates, I'm back to practicing a hobby that has provided me with countless hours of not getting in to trouble. No pressure to perform or earn or organise others. It's my craft for me and if the general populace take any notice, it's a bonus.

If a cheque arrives it's a miracle....

Tony Renouf: "The window display for "Only Fool & 'Toonists" a workshop I organised for the Dunedin Fringe Festival...create a page in a day...26 participants including some of the Funtime crew from ChCh."

Emery: Do you have a favorite part of the comic making process? A least favorite part?

Renouf: A favourite part of the process...Hmmm...It's a toss up between the final dark line that goes on the page before I date it and spray it with fixative and pushing the "publish" button on my blog platform....(Have I gone on&on&on about how liberated I feel now that I have transcended the printed format??...Well, let me tell you...)...I'm still in love with the whole process I guess and now that I can publish in full colour without having to think twice about cost, I'm picking I shall be enamoured of it for quite some time to come Nothing I draw ever comes out the way I was picturing it in my mind and colour has so much to do with that. The finished article is always a pleasant surprise!!!

....And my least favourite gotta be "plotting". Taking the raw ideas, more often than not a barely legible scrawl as the idea spews forth, trying to get it down on paper before my good friend Dee says something and the idea is gone. Sometimes supported by some v. patchy illustrations...And organising them into a cohesive series of panels. What words are spoken where plus stage directions, then counting up the frames and deciding how many pages and how they'll be laid out. Fine once I've started doing it but a real heel-dragger for me.

Treacle #4

Juliet Peter - The Sheep Farm

New Zealand Illustrator Juliet Peter (1915-2010) on her early art education in an interview with Art New Zealand,

We were staying with an aunt and uncle who were still farming in Canterbury, and the aunt - a practical, wonderful person - said to me 'Now dear, what do you want to do?' I mumbled that I didn't know, and she said 'Well dear, you have talent. How would you like to go to the School of Arts in Christchurch?' I probably said that would be just too wonderful. Being a busy, knowledgeable, practical person, she went off to Christchurch and then there was a free, four-year place waiting for me at the School of Art. She found a place for me at a student hostel where someone had to withdraw owing to illness. In no time at all I was embroiled in working for a diploma in fine arts, and, well, that's the end of that part of the story

Juliet Peter's husband Roy Cowan was also a prolific illustrator of the New Zealand School Journal.

Fishink blog have biographical notes and a gallery of Peter's work including some of her ceramic pieces.

Read Art New Zealand's interview with Juliet Peter here.

Below Juliet Peter's illustrations of The Sheep Farm - A Primary School Bulletin.

1984 Qantas New Zealand Press Awards

Currently known as the Canon Media Awards, the New Zealand Press Awards were established forty years ago to recognise excellence in New Zealand journalism.  They were Initially developed by two Auckland Star news photographers, Fred Freeman and Gary Fearnley, who approached the Australian international airline, Qantas, for sponsorship for an annual news photography award.

The result was the creation of the Qantas Press Awards which started with news photography but within two years expanded to include cartooning and three years later reporting. The Qantas Awards were gradually developed to include all print journalism disciplines. Examples of first, second and commended work in the cartooning category are featured below.

First Place Trace Hodgson

Second Place Chicane (Mark Winter)

Highly Commended Tom Scott