Australia needs a vibrant comic book sector but the comics community needs greater policy support and coordination from the Australian government.

Something a little different: an actual researched article. I was looking through my 'Uni Assignment Hell' archive and thought, well, I already spent so much time studying for my Masters (which mostly involved obsessively reading case studies on festivals and government arts policy), may as well put this out into the world. I don't claim expertise in this domain (especially in relation to my older friends/peers who have been in Australian comics for ages and actually study the subject!), but I hope the articles I will post in the blog will be testament to my own rabid interest and fluency in the subject. This is an ongoing life-long interest of mine, and explains why I wanted to set up Melbourne Alternative Comics Expo.

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Once relegated to the margins, Australian comics are gaining prominence in Australian public life and cultural spaces. Over the past twenty years, comic books and their creators are increasingly present in the catalogues, syllabi and programming of museums, schools, libraries and festivals. While this phenomenon arose in part due to the generosity of these established cultural spaces, it is the initiatives, resources and achievements of comics practitioners and supporters that sowed the seeds for the art form’s ongoing legitimisation and powers its momentum today, enabling Australia to progress to the point of nearly securing a vibrant, homegrown comics sector. However, the community still needs greater policy support and coordination from the Australian government in order to fully realise its potential.

The sector of comics comprises material that utilise “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (McCloud, 1993) to depict information, narrative and/or an aesthetic response. Comics generally and expansively refer to diverse publication modes such as graphic novels, newspaper cartoons, zines, comic books and webcomics, alongside each mode’s associated production and distribution processes. These processes may sometimes overlap with each other, allowing practitioners to move between modes according to their creative needs. (Beaty, 2007)

For decades, the reception of comics in Australia was dominated by foreign imports from North America, Britain and Japan. However, there was a time when Australian comics were once the only kind of comics available: for twenty years during and after the Second World War, the importation of non-essential overseas goods, including entertainment, was strictly controlled. The restriction created opportunities for publishers to produce new locally-made comics, as well as licensed publications of overseas comics, to fill in the vacuum felt by their captive youth audience. (Medley et al., 2021; Cliffe, 2019)

This era of Australian comics reached its twilight during the1960s, following the publication of psychologist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which warned against the dangers of comics in promoting juvenile delinquency—not just towards violence, but towards so-called immoral behaviour including homosexuality (Wertham, 1954). Wertham’s book instigated a moral panic across the Anglosphere that resulted in pressure from governments and a wave of self-regulated censorship on content produced by comics publishers. (Tilley, 2012) When the discourse reached Australia, publishers agreed to self-censor as well. The self-imposed censorship limited the types of stories their authors were able to explore, thus losing the interest of their readership, discouraging sales and further cementing comics’ poor reputation. The era’s death was finally reassured by the end of the importation ban, which brought into Australia foreign comics of superior quality that outcompeted local works.

From that time onwards, the independent small press and zine cultures took over as the dominant modes through which comics were made. Young comics creators, coming from diverse backgrounds and raised by a diet of diverse foreign works, began to trickle in and create independent works of their own, aided by improved printing technology and the Internet. Because of Australia’s isolation and relatively small though dense population, these creators were heavily reliant on each other for support, congregating in the virtual world and at festivals. These meetups would soon evolve into recurring collective organisations that facilitated meetups, book clubs, workshops, collaborations and all sorts of community activities, all the way up to festivals and associations. (Maynard, 2017; Medley et al., 2021) Over time, these connections formed into creative clusters.

Creative clusters are loci of activity so concentrated around a common goal that it transforms locales into sites of collaboration, inspiration, knowledge production and economic opportunity. These clusters foster interactions between different individuals and groups, allowing for new partnerships to arise and the stimulation of cross fertilisation, knowledge exchange and creativity. (Gibson & Bathelt, 2014; Marzo et al., 2020).

The community of Australian comics is typically organised into networks of such clusters (also known as scenes) that are strongly rooted to their urbanised centres (Maynard, 2017; 2021). Each cluster houses several production hubs and social networks that sustain its own mini-ecosystem of individuals, outlets, institutions and opportunities. These clusters connect with each other through interstate events and most often, on social media platforms, where national and international friendships are forged.

A prominent example of the way these clusters work is in Western Australia, specifically the cluster in Perth that is associated with the Perth Comic Arts Festival. The festival originated from the Perth Comics Maker network, which started as regular meetups held to support and celebrate comics, their practitioners and their scholars. (Medley et al., 2021) Today, the cluster is so successful that the festival it is represented by attracts practitioners from all over the country, and benefits from the support of the state government for funding and venue space.

A similar backstory applies to the Papercuts Comics Festival cluster in Adelaide. In Melbourne, the comics cluster is less concentrated (powered by the Sticky Institute and Squishface Studios), though its UNESCO City of Literature designation offers Melburnian comics practitioners a wide array of institutional resources related to the literary arts, such as the profusion of publishers and libraries and outlets like The Wheeler Centre.

Australia’s improving relationship with comics follows on the heels of a period of revitalisation happening over the past twenty years across the Anglosphere. Comics are forming a major part of the literary interests of the current and later generations (Clark et al., 2024); in North America, this is reflected by the steady sales of graphic novels and manga (comics produced in Japan), with some comics series dominating the bestseller lists for years with millions in sales. (Reid, 2022)

Additionally, comics are gaining critical acceptance as cultural objects, with acclaimed, award-winning English-language titles such as Persepolis, Maus, Hot Comb, March, Heartstopper, Nimona and The Arrival exhibiting the breadth and diversity of socio-cultural, political and queer representation that connects to a more diverse and socially-conscious contemporary audience.

The revitalised image of comics, as well as its long-held relevance to youth culture, has made comics a field of interest to cultural institutions. This is especially visible in the library sector, with regional and national special interest groups being established to assist other librarians with their growing comics collection via curated selections and awards—in Australia, this is a role held by ALIA Graphic, formed by members of the Australian Library and Information Association.

Comics are also valuable to educators and librarians as pedagogical tools to support literacy. As mentioned earlier, comics are becoming a major part of the reading diet of the current and newer generations. Comics have been shown to encourage reading habits among children (Aleixo & Norris, 2007, Clark et al., 2024), creativity (Issa, 2018), recall of material (Aleixo and Sumner, 2017), and emotional engagement (Simpson, 2018). Such benefits arise from comics’ simultaneous interdependent utilisation of image and text: multimodal qualities which educators and librarians are beginning to appreciate (Jacobs, 2013; Seelow, 2018). The multimodality of comics (Cohn, 2016; 2021), that is, its application and engagement of several modes of literacy within its medium, is representative of a world where images, and the intertwining of image and message, are becoming ingrained into our daily lives. The ability to read and critically navigate these image-messages (ads, photographs, even IKEA instructions) is crucial, and comics can be instrumental to strengthening that ability.

Comics are also being utilised for more than just genre storytelling. The skills of comics practitioners in visual language, interpretation and technical ability are now being sought after by work outside the arts, from the areas of journalism, medicine and law, keen to adopt the application comics in communication, outreach and documentation (Graphic Medicine, n.d; Comic Book Contracts, n.d; Grant et al., 2021).

Furthermore, comics have proved to be vehicles of soft power and economy. Comics characters such as Herge’s Tintin, Charles M. Schulz’ Peanuts, Tove Jansson’s Moomins and Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, among many, are icons inseparable from their countries of origin. The power of these characters is backed up by major merchandising and media adaptations deals that enable these characters and their stories to become cultural exports and mascots, bringing in value to these comics as agents of image-building, tourism and cultural dominance (see Cool Japan Strategy Promotion Council (2015) as an example).

Because of comics’ ability to create iconic characters, comics—their merchandising and screen adaptations—are capable of attracting large, international fandoms. These fandoms form the backbone of some of the largest pop culture and comics festivals, drawing in attendees from across the world in the hundreds of thousands (Hodgkins, 2022; Lucca Comics & Games, 2022; Dougherty, 2022). The influx of visitors and attendees provoked by festivals and similarly scaled events triggers economic activity, via the creation of paid and volunteer work opportunities as well as additional income derived from local tax and additional expenses, plus secondary attention to the tangible and intangible arts and traditional crafts in the area. (Prayag et al., 2013). The synergy of festival with infrastructure and the cityscape also activates the potential of localised clusters, by engaging available infrastructure and thus enabling the facilitation of memorable interactions between artist, public, and venues (Gibson & Bathelt, 2014; Marzo et al., 2020).

Besides that, festivals can serve as key organisational entities wherein concrete support for comics can be built around. In Europe especially, comics festivals have played vital roles in rehabilitating the image of comics with local governments, leading to more financial support and the establishment of dedicated physical hubs such as museums, libraries and community centres. In no time at all, comics would eventually see inclusion into cultural policy and cultural life. (Lemmi et al., 2018; Lessage and Gabilliet, 2020; Marzo et al., 2020; Salvador et al., 2022)

The comics sector is undergoing an exciting period of growth and renewal across the world. In order for Australia to take advantage of this moment and elevate Australian comics to the next stage, local, state and federal governments will need to get involved with the efforts of the community.

The first step is to look at nurturing the potential of individuals: artists and writers who make comics.

Support for individual artists come in the form of grants, residencies and other forms of funding; and more of these are open to comics each year. However, a Creative Australia survey on the comics community found that half of the respondents receive any funding at all from outside sources, and only 26% of them receive some kind of government grant (Grant et al., 2021). The majority of them subsidise their comics work through day jobs and other art-related freelance work, which limits their capacity for greater creative output or greater participation in cluster activities.

The low acceptance rate for government funding either points to a problem of eligibility (whether comics are recognised as an art form by the funding bodies to bother with an application) or accessibility (practitioners not knowing these opportunities exist at all, not knowing of these until it is too late or not having the skills to craft successful applications; on the other side of the coin, funding bodies using inconsistent, confusing language to define comics), or both.

The accessibility issue can be addressed by actively targeting outreach for grant application workshops and funding avenues. Marketing materials can be disseminated through representatives of the cluster, which can be a leader, organisation or festival. These representatives will then spread the word down the chain, which will hopefully increase participation in these opportunities.

For issues regarding language, funding bodies should consult with practitioners and scholars to craft clear and inclusive language, as well as define how comics are reported to stakeholders (do comics belong to visual arts, literature or their own category?), as the category comics are sorted into may affect the quotas available to successful applicants. Ideally, these funding bodies should include comics experts (practitioner or scholar) in their board so that they can better assess the quality of the applications from comics practitioners.

The eligibility issue is more complicated, as comics are still in the early days of its revitalisation. Not every arts funding body is aware of developments, and so would not think to include comics as an eligible art form. Even then, time and momentum are key to eventual inclusion into arts policy, necessary to create the level of institutional backing required to solidify the sector’s presence in cultural life (more on this will be discussed in a later section, regarding support of clusters).

However, the issue of income is a universal issue across the arts, not just in comics. Therefore, any strategy to address income globally for the arts (or everyone in general) will also benefit comics. One possible strategy is the implementation of a universal basic income. Another is an increase in budget allocation for the arts. To be more effective though, the budget should be directed towards fellowship-like programs that support the substantial amount of time and effort required to produce art, as well as increasing allocation of quotas across the board.

A version of these strategies already exists in the form of the public lending right and education lending right schemes. These are schemes that compensate Australian publishers and creators for the loss of income from usage of their publication materials in public and educational libraries. (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communication and the Arts., n.d.) Yet, these schemes are only eligible to people with books that are formally registered in library distribution databases, which allows their books to be present in libraries. Many comics practitioners are self-published or publish their works digitally, and so do not fulfil the requirements to enter these databases, preventing them from participating in the schemes. To take into account these independent practitioners, other avenues should be made available too, whether that’s in the form of grants or subsidies for business expenses.

While grants, residencies and other forms of assistance for individual practitioners are appreciated, Australia’s comics culture is defined and led by its clusters. Because of how integral clusters are to the survivability and ongoing legitimisation of comics, governments need to pay more attention to holistic solutions that can impact and nurture comics as a whole. In other words, support has to focus on encouraging the growth of clusters, so that benefits can flow downwards to its participating individuals

Australia’s geographical isolation from the rest of the world presents unique challenges to establishing an arts practice. These challenges include but are not limited to access to pan-national resources (compared to continental regions like Europe or Asia where cross-country partnerships are more accessible due to proximity); the high cost of postage for products coming in and out of the country; and lastly, the high costs of travelling overseas to participate in international festivals and creative hubs. While practice is not made impossible, such challenges bar practitioners from fully being a part of the global market and cause them to miss out on opportunities that could inspire innovations.

Prohibitive shipping costs deter practitioners from selling their own creative works to their overseas audience, or turn interested buyers away due to sticker shock. A solution would be to subsidise postage or offer cheap shipping rates for books and printed material via Australia Post. For example, Australia could adopt France’s Tarif Livres et Brochures policy: with the goal to promote French culture overseas, cheap rates are specially applied to international shipping of books, allowing up to 2 kilograms of books to be sent out for less than 8 euros as the ceiling. The implementation of such a policy will not just encourage overseas readers to collect books from their favourite Australian comics creators, it would also free up Australian small presses to distribute more of their publications to overseas stores. This subsidisation of postage will see returns in the form of increased income which can be taxed afterwards.

The costs to participate in overseas festivals, residencies and other programs are also quite high and time-consuming. For Australian comics practitioners, to get to the global comics centres of Japan, France and the United States require at least 10 hours of flying, and there is no other mode of transportation besides air and sea. Although the problem of reach is circumvented by virtual platforms, many opportunities are held in-person, which means that Australian comics practitioners rarely meet their international peers and are rarely exposed to different culturally-based modes of comics production or organisation, which severely limits their ability to cross-network. Though this could also fall under solutions that provide for individual artists, governments could set up travel grants for individuals or groups to attend these international opportunities. Alternatively, the federal government could actively sponsor cultural delegations to various comics centres. For example, an Australian delegation made up of representatives of each cluster could be sent off to France to promote Australian comics, forge diplomatic connections, and study France’s matured institutional comics environment. A delegation like this will bring Australian comics to the attention of the world, and in return knowledge will be brought back that could inspire innovations within the clusters.

A lot of the organisation within clusters are ad hoc and grassroots, catered to fill specific, localised needs and be achievable within the realistic scale of a small volunteer group of artists. This situation means Australian comics are still missing many of the institutions and systematic features that are present in established artistic sectors. Missing features include a consistent presence in the collections of national art museums and galleries, laureates and prizes, systematic archiving, and formal arts training. Much of this absence by omission is due to the newness of viewing comics as a legitimate art form, and just as many funding bodies do not think to explicitly include comics as eligible for application, so too do other cultural institutions fail to provide space for comics.

Comics festivals tend to fill in the missing gaps of institutional features and policy, such as exhibition space, educational programming, a market, and avenues of financial support and cultural affirmation through awards and partnering fellowships. Festivals had historically proven themselves to be instrumental in the development of mature comics centres (see Lessage and Gabilliet (2020) for a history of Angoulême and how it facilitated the establishment of comics in France culture during the late 20th century), so they are important as strategy to show councils and governments that comics are valued, vibrant, well-received and in demand. Still, festivals are irregular, limited time events, so anyone who is unable to attend a festival that year will miss out on the programs and social networking opportunities specific to that year. Something regular is much needed.

Very few formalised training is available for aspiring comics creators. The options in tertiary education are often folded as a single semester subject under Creating Writing programs (such as the Graphic Narratives subject in the University of Melbourne), which are focused more on theory and criticism rather than art-making. There is currently no Bachelors or Masters program dedicated specifically to comics. Additionally, there are little to no internship programs which pairs novice creators with established practitioners or production houses to learn the trade. However, independent schools are present, such as Milktooth School of Art and Stories, and Conjuring Creativity, both in Perth, but they are limited to being extracurricular programs for school-aged children. Adults (young, middle-aged and seniors) are left bereft of any means explore comics as a craft and creative outlet. The majority of practitioners resorted to self-education, informal peer-to-peer learning and participation in community to gain the skills to create comics, which is reflected in the Arts Council survey (Grant et al., 2021).

Governments could potentially coordinate with practitioners to offer comics courses and related workshops for adults in TAFEs. This would be both an employment opportunity that also allows practitioners to pass down their expertise, establishing an ecosystem of knowledge sharing. Additionally, governments could help formalise the already-existing informal avenues of learning comics, through the establishment of a studio space where such mentorship can be regularly hosted. This studio space may be provisioned with utilities such as photocopiers, a cutter and desktops to facilitate comics making (the studio might be connected to a public library’s makerspace, if the governments are not keen to spend extra).

Comics are becoming more present in the daily lives of Australians. With the critical success of Australian comics on the international stage, the sector is heading towards a future where legitimisation into cultural policy is fully possible. In the meantime, the sector is still emergent, meaning that it is missing many of the institutions and resources already found in established art fields. Support and coordination from government bodies is crucial in order to supply the kind of organisational change that would guarantee the sector’s preservation and presence as an established art world (Becker, 1982). That support may come in the form of assistance on an individual level, but the most effective strategy may be to support clusters holistically. Clusters are the collective, passionate force through which Australian comics channels their ideal self, and it is by nurturing these forces that could see Australia as one day becoming the newest comics centre.

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