Bernard Caleo

The strength of comic strips, like poetry, can derive from concise language and startling images. With Bulk Nuts, the latest addition to Mandy Ord’s long list of autobiographical comics and graphic novels, the Melbourne cartoonist attains a new level in her work. One of the ways she does this is by cutting back on words and presenting more considered, finished drawings. Through verbal economy and graphic surety, this collection of comic strips directs our flow of reading deftly from word to image and back again. Several stories end with the light gravity of a haiku or the hesitancy of e.e cummings.

The covers of comic books/graphic novels/sequential narratives, call them what you will, have a fundamentally different relationship to the contents of their books than the covers of ‘ordinary’, text-only works. For the latter, the cover image is usually produced by a designer whom the author does not know and may never meet. In the case of comics, however, the cover image is made by the same hand that creates the images that proliferate within the book. The cover of a text-only book is communicating a sense of what the book is like through the totally different language of images. For the browser, that’s like trying to decide whether to attend a concert on the strength of a billposter. With a comic book, the sort of thing you see on the cover is the sort of thing you get inside. A comic book begins before you even open it. Basically, you can judge a comic book by its cover.

Sam Wallman’s graphic novel Our Members Be Unlimited – ‘a comic about workers & their unions’ – recalls the past victories and the present importance of unions but is haunted by an increasingly attenuated spirit of collectivism. These ‘good ghosts’ of unionism appear halfway through the book during a conversation between two friends, both union members but engaged at different levels of activism. The sequence ends as they watch a fellow worker, oblivious, push his trolley through the trailing ectoplasm of one of these ghosts of collectivism. The two friends look on, bug-eyed, willing him to turn around and notice. So do the ghosts.

Editorial cartoonists gamble their all on a same-day art, their work created, read, and discarded on the day of publication. The makers of graphic novel journalism use the language of cartooning, too, but in their case it’s a marathon, not a sprint: they spend years arranging thousands of images and tens of thousands of words across hundreds of pages in order to create their books. Two new graphic novels cast a picto-critical eye on the war in Vietnam and show how it came home to roost, bringing death and imprisonment to suburban streets in Australia and the United States.