Maori Woman, American Photographic Company Portrait

Taken from "Auckland Through A Victorian Lens" by William Main. "The best series of Maori portraits (in 1860s Auckland) came from the studios of the American Photographic Company which was managed by a John McGarrigle".

Robert Coffin, American Sailor and Fijian Beachcomber 1855

Just finished a book by one of my old English tutors at Victoria University, Susan Williams Milcairns's "Native Strangers: Beachcombers, Renegades and Castaways in the South Seas". Took the opportunity of school holidays to do this sketch of Robert Coffin, an American sailor who was shipwrecked in Fiji in 1855.

Big Ben, Cash Butcher

Butcher Boy

Inked version of pencilled frames in previous post...

Pencils

Some pencilling action from page 4.....

Te Kooti's Prayer Book

A friend of my grandmothers once told me that the Hawkes Bay Museum had Te Kooti's prayer book stored away in its vaults, rarely displayed to the public. At the moment they are displaying it as part of a current exhibition on the old colonial period cemetery on Hospital Hill. Te Kooti wrote in it during his imprisonment on the Chathams after being found guilty, without trial, of acting as a Hau Hau spy. He kept it with him during the prison revolt that he led, the hijacking of a ship back to Poverty Bay and the long period of guerilla war that followed during which the prayers recorded in the book formed part of the liturgy of the rebel Ringatu faith. The prayer book fell into the hands of British soldiers near the end of the campaign and was handed on to the missionary William Colenso. I'm planning on having the main character of the graphic novel have ongoing encounters with a number of Old Testament influenced Maori rebel groups, which were a constant thorn in the side of the colonial army, the settler militias and the land speculators of the period.

The Mole

Instead of watching more noir westerns I checked out Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo. Unfortunately my copy is knackered, skipping half way through and now unwatchable. I'm gonna have to save my slowly-falling-in-value New Zealand dollars and buy another copy. What I saw was what I remembered, a surreal spaghetti western with occult, alchemical themes. I want to take elements of this occult western and mix it up with the era of Victorian globalization in which my graphic novel takes place. What else can go in the mix?. Herzog's Aguirre, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, the Lone Wolf and Cub manga, Conrad, Melville, Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, other spaghetti westerns (the Django movies, The Great Silence), Alan Ward and Judith Binney's historical works on the time period, Vincent Ward, Ian Wedde's Symmes Hole, Maurice Shadbolt's The Lovelock Version and his New Zealand wars trilogy, Steampunk, Weird West, Deadwood....