JULY '21 NEWSLETTER masoncomics.com.au |
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#05. Sneaky Recon...
This month sees a couple of sneak peeks into some things coming up in the year, and 2022. Hope you're all doing ok, and are staying safe :D |
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Sneak Peek 1: The Creator-Owned book FLOCK! Started in lockdown last year, this is the book you might have seen glimpses of on Instagram :) I'm almost done on chapter 1 of this 4 part, European album sized, mini-series - no spoilers yet on the content but you kind subscribers get to see the cover for the preview book below :D (Can you guess what's it's about?!). I was originally going to sit on it until the whole graphic novel was done; but Amanda is so excited to show you all that we decided to run a short kickstarter on issue 1 and see if you love it too (she has decided that you will!). Pitching it elsewhere is not off the cards; we'll see. In the meantime though, provided things go safely (and that's a coin flip it seems, with lockdowns in NSW continuing as I type this), I've been invited to Oz Comic-Con in Brisbane in September (more on this soon too), so I plan to launch a limited run, 30 page preview magazine then, before the kickstarter later this year/early 2022. The preview book will contain the first half of the first issue with its own cover, plus WIP inks, some concept art for the mini-series, the issue 1 cover reveal, and maybe a couple of black and white pages of a Frew story I've been told will be out in 2022. |
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Sneak Peek 2: Stuff for Frew Waiting on possible approvals for a few things from King Features from the last report from Frew HQ, but here's a little peek at work-in-progress on something on the to-do list. Not final, but in-progress. In the meantime, I recommend you go track down the recently released 'Rotten Apples' (The Phantom #1896) by Duncan Munro and Jeff Weigel; fun action and mystery with the Ghost who Walks! Also, a recent little short story by my frequent collaborator Andrew Constant called 'Forever' in The Phantom #1893 which I'm sure will get readers contemplating "what if?". In the meantime, link below is for other 'Nam stories that can be chased down physically via Frew, or digitally via Comixology. As you were... | | |
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Sneak Peek 3: The Deep season 4 This last week of July it was announced by online animation news site Skwigly that season 4 of the ABC co-produced kids adventure series The Deep will be released soon. Based on the Gestalt Comics series by Tom Taylor and James Brouwer, the series currently airs on Netflix, as well as network television both here and abroad.
Thanks to James (who is also art director of the series), and Avrill Stark of A Stark Productions, I was fortunate enough to have worked as an animation concept designer on a chunk of episodes.
Now this I can't share any images of concepts as its all NDA'ed until the episodes air, but if you're not familiar with The Deep, I urge you to check out the 2 graphic novels from Gestalt's website here: https://www.gestaltcomics.com/all-products/
Many thanks once again to James, and Arvill, and congratulations again to Tom, James, ASP, plus Wolfgang at Gestalt, and the whole crew who worked hard on this series, partially in lockdown too.
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Congratulations: Mr Snap! Each year my Uni job involves helping the 3rd year animation students create and develop their final year short animated films to final pre-rpoduction, ready for animating. I also have supervised a handful of those films to completion, which is always a rewarding experience to see the hard work and skill put in by these young creators, from idea to big screen.
Last year I had the opportunity to supervise production on Mr Snap, a short film directed by student Laila Schmidinger, and produced by Anna Nolan. This came from a 4 page comic Laila had written and drawn as part of my Comics course the year before. Great students and hard-working throughout pre-production to final production, the women and their team of GFS animation student classmates put together a great film which has not only recently won an award at the Gold Coast Film Festival, but, well, let me leave it to Anna herself: From the Mr Snap FB page: "Our film has advanced into the semi-final rounds of the 48th Annual Student Academy Awards! This is an outstanding achievement as this advancement puts our film in roughly the top 7% of all the films submitted this year. A big congratulations to Director Laila Schmidinger and the Mr. Snap Team for all your hard work and dedication to the film."
And this nice note from Laila's post:
"Don’t think we can do much better than this... Always feeling grateful for the wonderful people who helped this become a reality, especially my producer Anna Nolan who picked up my slack and more every step of the way and our supervisor Paul Mason who never stopped encouraging me from the start."
To beat out up to a thousand or so other films to get that far, I was very proud of the team to just complete the film while through lockdown and strange circumstances last year, so all this stuff is the cherry on top. Congratulations once again to the entire team of skills and dedicated students. As an endnote, I know many on the team are now working across animation studios in Brisbane, such as Pixel Zoo, and Ludo Studios on the TV series Bluey. Excellent work! Trailer for the Short film: | | |
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Final words for this month: For my own studies, this month I took part in a 3 part series of Zoom lectures by cartoonist Howard Chaykin, discussing his Comics page paradigm and process; a talk he conducted for Marvel Comics for a number of years. Early in comics I had the opportunity to have a 1-on-1 review of my early work with Howard (nearly a decade ago now that I think about it). Thats a profanity-ladened story for another time, but it must be said, the experience was eye-opening and I treasure the advice and recommendations to this day. Saturday, I am conducting the Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels seminar for the Queensland Writers Centre so wish me luck! Final chance for face to face or live stream tickets via here: https://queenslandwriters.org.au/events/comics-paul-mason
Will let you know how it went in next month's newsletter.
I also have the opportunity at the end of this month to chat with Zoran Illiveski, the producer and presenter of 'Graphic Nature' radio/podcast program in Melbourne. I'll let you know more when it drops, but I'd like to thank Zoran again for reaching out and allowing me to chat to him, catch up and shoot the breeze on Comics. If you are into comics podcasts, this is one of the best: Australian comic makers from all walks of life. Catch up on previous episodes at https://www.graphicnature.media
Cheers to my first comics boss Baden Kirgan of Jeffries Printing for being the best comic book printer around and for his constant support of my scribbly endeavours too in relation to the upcoming FLOCK. As always, I hope you are all safe and well, best wishes to those currently in lockdown here or abroad, and cheers for keeping on doing the right thing. Be well, and hope we all get through these crazy times OK. Chat soon,
Paul.
pmason83@gmail.com
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