The Nanna Project ~ Island magazine’s graphic narratives project 2022-2023

In 2022 I was asked by Island’s art editor Judith Abell to guest curate four comics published in Island magazine across four issues with funding from Arts Tasmania. An exciting opportunity as I’d been finding it difficult to cope with the fact that there is/was almost nowhere for the comics community to get their work published in the literary journal area … or anywhere for that matter, and certainly not as long as eight pages in length, and CERTAINLY not ever paid properly: but we did ALL those things.

We ran a webinar (which you can watch here) about the restrictions that comics face in the literary landscape, and we commissioned four comics from Eleri Harris, Leonie Brialey, Luke & Kelly Jackson with Thòm Nguyen, and Niki Bañados. I also contributed one comic as a round up of the project which is (Read now online at Island). Additionally we mentored a bunch of other comic artists behind the scenes. All in all it was quite an amazing project.

Excitingly Westerly magazine (over in Western Australia) got the memo and Per Henningsgaard edited a comics-only issue of Westerly, and now that magazine has committed to publishing more comics in their future print issues.