Comics from earth’s end

15 May 2014

For the past 15 years, Adrian Kinnard has charted the course of NZ comics through his blog and now book, From Earth’s End: The Best of New Zealand Comics. He speaks this weekend at the Auckland Writers Festival. Renee Liang interviewed him about the fall and rise of comics.
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Comics, or graphic novels if you want to feel literary, are everywhere these days. Crossing boundaries between visual art, graffiti, film and fiction, it’s both a versatile and adventurous form, with writers like Dylan Horrocks and Ant Sang gaining an international following. Adrian Kinnaird’s book From Earth’s End: The Best of New Zealand Comics is the first book to look at the history of NZ comics.

You've been a champion of NZ comics for over 15 years, investing tremendous energy into blogging, reviewing and promoting your fellow writers. What drives you to do this?

I'm driven by the belief that there is a wide audience in New Zealand for well produced local comics, we just need to let them know they exist! Starting my blog in 2009 was really the first stage in a multi-year plan to reorganise - and in a way re-brand - the NZ comics scene into something more approachable and user-friendly. At the time the community had become quite insular; we talked about our work and shared comics on a private message board, there was a NZ comics database which was sporadically updated and a nightmare to navigate, basically you really had to go out of your way to find local comics and their creators.

The blog was an effort on my part to add to the infrastructure that fellow cartoonists Isaac Freeman, Claire Harris and Robyn E. Kenealy had started building around events and distribution. I aimed at promoting our comics to the general public and getting them re-engaged. There was so much great material around at the time, that it was very easy for me to hold up a great example of NZ comics and treat it like a publishing event. As the blog continued year to year, I was able to build up a considerable resource of online NZ comics articles and material, which I think really helped our visibility, so you could actually track what was going on in the local comics scene. It also helped me to connect with the wider NZ community and fellow creators on a more personal level - and through those relationships, made it possible for me to tell the story of New Zealand comics.
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