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The Comics Show
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The Comics Show
The Comics Show
The writing and drawing of comic books has remained a little-known and under-rated area of New Zealand culture. Director Shirley Horrocks reveals it to us as a highly creative subculture with a rich local history.
Despite a moral panic about comics in the ‘40s and ‘50s (recalled here by Eric Resetar, the grand old man of local comics), later decades brought us the exciting counter-culture work of Barry Linton and the other artists of Strips magazine (such as Dick Frizzell and Grant Major), the new directions taken by women artists such as Coco and Pritika), and the publication of long-form ‘graphic novels’ such as Ant Sang’s Dharma Punks and Dylan Horrocks’s Hicksville. There are now comics for all ages and interests.
Comics have links with animation and with music (as shown by Chris Knox and Karl Wills among others). This highly entertaining and visually inventive film takes us from Auckland street culture, to Wellington’s ‘Eric Awards’, to a do-it-yourself comic collective (‘Funtime’ in Christchurch). This is an unexpected, eye-opening arts documentary with broad appeal.
The Comics Show screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland and Wellington in 2007.
The Comics Show also played on Artsville, TV ONE in September 2007.
50 minutesCommissioned for TVNZ's Artsville
Reviews:
The Comics Show: the Aftermath, Robyn E Kenealy's Blog, 02 Aug 2007
Yay for the Film Fest, Anarkaytie's Blog, 01 Aug 2007
Troubled Teens: Comics Show..., The Lumiere Reader, 02.08.07
The art of making it look easy, The NZ Herald, July 12 2007