Australia’s graphic novel love affair

In Australia, sales of graphic novels grew by 34% in 2022, according to Books+Publishing. Their commercial success is mirrored by critical acclaim, with graphic nonfiction especially well represented in our major literary awards.

Last year, Eloise Grills made headlines when big beautiful female theory was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. And Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System by Safdar Ahmed was named Book of the Year at the 2022 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

So why is there a relative scarcity of book-length comics by Australian comics makers and publishers?

Review: The Islands Where We Left Our Ancestors by Joshua Santospirito (Scribe Publications); Making the Shrine: Stories from Victoria’s War Memorial by Laura J. Carroll; A Home in Her by S. Win Searle (Gestalt)

The explanation is straightforward, if not easy to resolve: few people working in Australia possess the requisite combination of skills to create book-length comics. And because of the labour involved, they take a long time to produce. This means, among other things, reviews like this one often bring together books with very little in common.

The three recent full-length books by Australian comic-makers I looked at could not be any more dissimilar.

Joshua Santospirito’s The Islands Where We Left Our Ancestors would be right at home alongside Australia’s rich history of literary memoirs that explore family heritage. Laura J. Carroll’s Making the Shrine: Stories from Victoria’s War Memorial provides a welcome refresh of the dated trends of local history writing. And S. Win Searle’s A Home in Her is a Japanese-style graphic novel that is filled to bursting with Australian flora and fauna.

A memoir of ancestry and belonging

The Islands Where We Left Our Ancestors is a graphic memoir about Santospirito’s visit to the Aeolian Islands of Italy, to wrestle with issues of ancestry and belonging. Josh is the protagonist, but his parents feature prominently too, as does the Greek god of the wind, Aeolus, who adds a bit of levity (not to mention a clearly fictional element) to the narrative by mooching beers and ferry tickets.

This is Santospirito’s third book. His first two – The Long Weekend in Alice Springs (2013) and Swallows, Part One (2015) – were self-published, while The Islands Where We Left Our Ancestors is published by Scribe. It is just the third book-length comic from this traditional publishing house.

Santospirito’s illustration style can be described as loose and playful. For example, the book is entirely hand-lettered and drawn with a dip pen, and while the colouring has been done digitally, it has the effect of watercolour. There are a lot of unframed images and white space, too.

Stories from Victoria’s war memorial

Making the Shrine: Stories from Victoria’s War Memorial is also a work of creative nonfiction, but that’s where the similarities to Santospirito’s work end. Carroll’s book is a sequence of illustrated stories associated with the history of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.

Some of these stories depict the shrine’s design and construction, while others capture smaller moments, like the break-up of young lovers on the steps of the shrine, or more dramatic moments, like protests on its grounds.

This is Carroll’s first book, and it is self-published. Of course, self-publishing has a long and distinguished history in the world of comics, and it does not come with the same stigma that can accompany it in some other sectors. The production quality is certainly equal to any traditionally published book – an achievement no doubt assisted by a City of Melbourne Creative Grant.

Carroll might be early in her career as a comics maker, but her illustration style is remarkably mature. Whereas Santospirito’s illustrations are open and free-flowing, Carroll’s are painstakingly detailed, sometimes to the point of overwhelming the reader’s senses. Carroll also adds watercolour paint to the hand-inked and hand-lettered panels.

An otherworldly fictional love story

A Home in Her is a work of fiction ­– a true graphic novel, in every sense of the term. Its protagonist, Aoi, is a Japanese–Australian transgender man with family connections to the fictional town of Illyarrie in regional Western Australia.

Aoi has spent much of his life overseas, but the story kicks off shortly after the 24-year-old’s arrival in Illyarrie to figure out what to do with his parents’ home after they have died. There, he meets and falls in love with Eerie, a delightfully mischievous woman who both Aoi and readers slowly discover to be some sort of otherworldly being.

The author’s name, S. Win Searle, is a pseudonym of Sarah Winifred Searle, who has published under a variety of names, consistently using their given name for their graphic novels for young adults. A Home in Her is recommended for mature readers, as it contains light nudity.

It is published by Gestalt, a Perth-based publisher that bills itself as “Australia’s premier publishing house of comics and graphic novels, since 2005”. However, Searle’s many previous book-length comics have been published by major American comics publishers, such as First Second.

Searle is clearly a more established comics maker, compared to Santospirito and Carroll, as evidenced by them winning numerous awards, including the Young Adult prize at the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Like most of their previous works, A Home in Her is digitally drawn and lettered – another point of contrast that yields a more polished aesthetic. Searle’s style, influenced by Japanese manga in interesting ways, is also unique. A final point of difference is that risograph printing provides the book’s only colouring, and it is limited to a single colour per page, which Searle uses to great effect.

Structural strengths

It would appear that the only feature uniting these three book-length comics is their timely publication, but that is not entirely true. Perhaps their most remarkable commonality is the strength of their structures.

The Islands Where We Left Our Ancestors is organised into seven chapters, with one devoted to each of the seven Aeolian Islands. Meanwhile, Making the Shrine: Stories from Victoria’s War Memorial depicts 25 moments in history, organised chronologically. It is interspersed with 14 single-page drawings of models of the Shrine of Remembrance, created using materials as varied as needlework and margarine.

The regular, predictable structures of these two books successfully create narrative momentum and serve to unify their potentially episodic undertaking into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A Home in Her is not episodic, but the structure is nonetheless a masterclass in narrative storytelling: there is no fat to trim, and the reader is gripped.

The structural strength of these three book-length comics is a testament to the skill of their makers – and the maturity of the comics scene in Australia. It gives reason to hope that eager readers will soon be met with rapid growth in book-length comics by Australian comics makers and publishers.