Page Five

Ephemera

The first four pages of the comic have been published in print form in a Melbourne based comics anthology called "Ephemera". If you find yourself in Melbourne this year, buy it! Alternatively some copies are available at The High Seas, Beresford Square, Auckland or at Graphic, Cuba Mall, Wellington. Above are the assembled pages, in reading order, with additional speech bubbles and word frames...

The Coromandel Occultist's Gang

From Left to Right: Jack Grimes, Falkirk and Tom O'Drone

Approaching Hotel Mesmer

So, I've plotted the first episode of the story, involving a Swedenborgian gold miner of ill defined nationality, founder of a vaguely satanic gold mining enterprise somewhere on the Coromandel peninsula, affectionately known by his cosmopolitan and native digger labour force as "The Father of the Settlement". Much ugliness results when a shark is fished up by three itinerant types, shrunken Maori heads fall from its opened belly, and the Father of the Settlement enlists Big Ben and his butcher gang to steal the heads (to be used for occult gold divining purposes) from the local Maori tribe. Into this fray wanders "Bodell" (pictured above), a lapsed Chartist, Kingite sympathiser and AWOL from the Waikato front. Now it will take me a year turn it into black and white images.

Captured Canoes

Alexandra Redoubt, at Tuakau, Waikato, was built by the 65th Regiment on a strategic bluff 300 feet above the Waikato River. Many men in the 65th Regiment were unlucky gold diggers from the Otago and Victorian goldfields who had answered newspaper advertisements placed by the New Zealand Government. Pencil Sketch

Patara Raukatauri

Patara Raukatauri, chief of the Taranaki people, who had been the principal leader in the fighting against the British at Kaitake. He was also one of Te Ua's five special disciples, and accompanied Kereopa to the East Coast. Alexander Turnball Library

The Ken Burns Ahuriri Promo

The soundtrack was originally Tom Waits' "Singapore" from the album Rain Dogs, but Youtube's supercomputers got the copyright baton out for Universal Music Group.

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....

Shrunken Maori Heads and Butcher Gangs

What gang of meat carving maniacs lurks behind these swinging carcasses?



And what bizarre McGuffin lies buried in the belly of the razor toothed beast?

Bob's Long Flailing Hair

I rewatched the classic Robert Mitchum noir western Blood on the Moon last night. It's memorable for a crazy brutal (for 1940s) fight scene where Mitchum's long hair flails all over the place and some surreal, darkly photographed cattle stampede sequences. The director of photography was Nicholas Musuraca, also responsible for the lighting in the previous year's Mitchum noir classic Out of the Past. As I'd rather keep to a limited colour palette for my images, generally a small selection of black, white and greys, I've decided to steal Musuraca's mise en scene. This means improving my use of black shadows and contrasts. I'm going to screen grab from the film and pilfer away. Similarly with other western noir classics, like Pursued, Forty Guns, the Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart Westerns and Gregory Peck's The Gunfighter. Which I'm off to rewatch now...

Barnet Gets Some Airtime

Scripting, pencilling and inking comic book art can be a very laborious and time consuming task. Listening to the radio can make it a little more interesting. Over the last few months I've been enjoying the nail-on-the-head financial punditry of Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert at Max Keiser Radio. On Saturday's show they read out a plute-bashing rant I emailed to them inspired by one of their previous shows....

Hauling Up

Elements of the third page. I've got to work out how to draw to a scale that is friendly to the computer screen, the image of the shark hunters wheeling the shark through town is too pixellated for my liking....

Shark Hunt

This is my first attempt to do graphic art after a long hiatus. The plan is to write and draw a 25 page chapter of an ongoing, episodic graphic novel by the end of 2008. Wish me luck folks!.