Camberwell Haul #10

It was cold and misty last Sunday when I made my way to the Camberwell Markets. Biked around a smashed up television pushed off Punt Rd onto the underpass. It hadn't shattered everywhere just crumpled which I'm sure was a disappointment. Further down the road I spotted a spotted a Helicopter hovering about five metres above the tram tracks on Commercial Road. Alas I forgot my camera.

It was pretty early when I arrived so did a few rounds of the whole market and glad I did cause I found a bunch of these on the second and third time around.

5 English kids annuals for fifty pesos each. 

An Black N White Indie Anthology 'Steel Dragon' for one clam. There was a copy of The Protectors #1 for 1 clam, a really terrible looking black n white book, I didn't buy it but remembered Dash Shaw talking about it here. if you have a look at the link it's worth reading the comments section.

How to Read Donald Duck for five clams - heard about this for many a year, thought it was time to give it a read. 

 A book of George Carlin's, Last Words, for four clams from the local bookhouse. Carlin created an amazing body of work in his lifetime and is one of the people who shaped my beliefs regarding religion. This reminds me I have hours of his stuff I still haven't listened to. No time!

The real find of the morning was an autobiography of Leo Baxendale that I had no idea existed for ten clams.  I read a lot of Baxendale's work when I was a lad and this book recounts forty years of his career as a cartoonist. I've only skimmed through it but was thrilled to find a pic of Ken Reid in there. Ken Reid is one of my all time favourite English cartoonists, I loved his work on Face-ache, Frankie-Stein and others. Baxendale also recounts his friendships with other DC Thomson cartoonists Davey Law and Dudley Watkins.

 

Camberwell Haul #7

A nice stash of French comic albums...A Massive Moebius collection and an equally massive Druillet one. Lots of amazing Sci-Fi and fantasy artwork, Psychedelic colours, Mind bending futuristic city-scapes, and a steal at 5 Bananas a book. Also a couple Druillet Hardcovers from Dargaud, there were more there but i was trying to exercise restraint. 

A book of Fonts for Showcards and ticket writing from ye olde days for 2 pesos.

Ballantyne #1, 64 page collection of Australian newspaper strips for 5 rubles

A beaten up Dell comic, The Outer Limits #11, 4 shillings, Something to remind me that I have the complete original series of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone lying around here waiting for me to watch them.

A hardcover collection of Richard Corben's work including a biography, flicking through it I noticed a section on his working processes which looks very interesting. love Corben's work, when I was fifteen a fellow was advertising comics for sale in the local paper (waaay pre-internet). I went, picked up a few goodies with my paper run wages including one of Corben's Den albums. He told me he was a drug dealer in Australia and was visiting his parents in Napier. He had laundered his money by spending $50,000 on comics. "The cops would never believe comics could be worth $50,000!!" he told me. Then he shipped them over to Napier. This was in the eighties and from the amount and quality of comics he had I believed him. I visited him one more time at his parents house were he had stashed all the comics in their attic. I can't remember for the life of me remember where that was though. I often wonder if the guy ended up a casualty of the gang wars in Australia and maybe those comics are still there.

Mackillop Lane

Yarra River

Little Brown Bear Sleeping

Mitch, Dom and Troy the handsome men at All star Comics

 Some Impressive Druillet Splashes

A bunch of books from 25 cent bins. Loved Peter MIlligan's work for 2000AD, his Human Target revamp for Vertigo, and also his collaboration with Michael Allred on X-Force and X-Statix. Duncan Fegredo's no slouch either so looking forward to reading their collaboration on Enigma. Also a bunch of Comikers I dig, Cam Kennedy, Eddie Campbell, Steve Rude, Hembeck, Mike Mignola, on various projects. Also some...ahem...supey-hero comics.

Charles Altamont Doyle's Sketch Diaries

 

  

Excerpts from a reproduction of Charles Altamont Doyle's sketchbook diaries, I recently picked up for three clams at the Salvation Army store. The Father of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles was admitted to a nursing home and asylums late in life with depression. In Charles own words:

"Keep steadily in view that this book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? Of Depraved taste? If in the whole book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me."

 Written in 1889 in the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, the ailing and epileptic Doyle would spend his last years institutionalised, passing away in 1893. His sketchbook diary was long forgotten by the family and eventually auctioned off amongst a job lot of books in 1955. From there it was stored in a child's playroom for twenty years before being discovered and reprinted as a hardcover reproduction in 1978. 

 

  
The Diaries are filled with line drawings in the vein of Punch Magazine and beautiful watercolours depicting fairies, children and surreal environments that bring to mind the work of Henry Darger. Quips and puns line the pages and add to the sense of mystery about a man history has largely forgotten.

Camberwell Haul #6

Just a baby haul from Camberwell last weekend. There were a few old Alfred Bester paperbacks I could have picked up but geez I already have half a dozen i haven't read so i had to use restraint. Picked up 3 of the 5 discs that come in the Alejandro Jodorowsky Box set for the bargain price of 12 bananas. I rarely ever buy DVDs but I had to check these out as they have a bunch of special features. I first encountered Jodorowsky's work when I was playing a gig in Wellington and they had The Holy Mountain playing on loop all night on the big screen. I think I still have a video of that night somewhere around here. Anyway I've read a bunch of his comics work over the years and they are amazing.

I've been wading through a pile of old comics journals and recently reading an interview with Barry Windsor Smith. Smith rails against the comic industry of the time and was a little way into publishing his Storyteller series through Darkhorse. He was moving about 50,000 copies per issue which are figures publishers would kill for now. I feel sorry for folk like Windsor Smith, he was around when comics work paid a pittance and were not really appreciated outside of fandom. If he came out now with his Storytellers series and didn't have his marvel/superhero baggage I think he would be greatly appreciated by graphic novel savvy audiences of today. For 10 coconuts I picked up 100 pages of early Windsor Smith on Conan. Love these huge old treasuries. I heard the same thing mentioned about Steve Ditko's recent work. Ditko's in his 80's and basically self publishing works  of his personal vision these days and has completed over 300 pages in the last few years. He is cranking right now. Read Jog's great essay on latter day Ditko work here! Buy Ditko's books here!

Why would you put your dumb tag over Bill's face?

Saturday I popped down to the Monthly Melbourne comic meet. Chatted about comics with the fella's for a bit before heading home to do some serious drawing.

My dear friend Jason Franks bids me farewell as he is off to Japan to live for a while. Meanwhile, Big Tough Paul Bedford was recording an album of his romantic love poems.

Paul had them enthralled with his tender emoting. Franks was on the verge of tears.

The outside of Hell Gallery in Richmond

Camberwell Haul #5

Another Sunday trek to Camberwell. Not a huge haul but some interesting things. An old couple had a huge pile of Pictorial Social Studies Comic albums for $2 each. Published in the Fifties and Sixties, these were used as teaching aides for history lessons I presume. Covering a whole lot of Australian history I picked out a couple that were New Zealand centric. Never made it all the way through a Salmon Rushdie book but for a dollar I'll have another try at The Satanic Verses. William Gibson and E. L. Doctorow books were a couple dollars each, I'll add them to the thousands of other novels on the to read list. Maybe I'll get Miss Mai to read them and give me the cliff notes version.

There were comics here and there throughout the markets but I only picked up three for a dollar a piece.

Hot Stuff - I pick up cheap Harvey comics when I can to see what I can glean from them for my own comics.

The Jetsons - A Hanna Barbera Aussie reprint - again for drawing reference and also I've been thinking about doing some more futuristic gags/stories. The Garish re-colouring reminds me of reading these as a kid. I always remember the Superman editions where everyone had very pink skin pallor.

The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera TV STARS #1 - Another Hanna Barbera reprint. This one is a great anthology of short strips based on Saturday Morning cartoons. Solid line up of cartoonists with Steve Shaw, Will Meugniot, Dave Stevens, Dan Spiegle, and an Alex Toth Space Ghost story.

Here's The Herculoids by Will Meugniot and Dave Stevens.

GRAAARRR!!

All manner of things turn up at Camberwell

The Corner Billboard

Under an Overpass by Punt Road Bridge

Camberwell & Box Hill Haul #4

After a Saturday spent fine-tuning my pushbike I stumbled out of bed last Sunday to get out to the Camberwell market and the formerly Camberwell now in Box Hill Record/Comic Fair. Got to Camberwell, had a quick nose around and picked up 3 annuals Lion 1966, Lion 1967, and The Big Battle Annual for $4 a pop. Old adventure comics from the glory days of English comics. Also an Ayn Rand book I hadn't read, The Virtue of Selfishness, for $4. Then I jumped a train for a few stops to Box Hill.

Box Hill Record/Comic fair was quickly filling up when I got there. I slipped into the Comics room and picked up a few neat things. A couple Johnny Ryan books for $10 each from Mr Daniel Best and I took a punt of an English translation of a European album, Roxanna, for $5 from Mr Philip Bentley.

A bunch of other books I picked up for 40 cents to $2 each.

I'm probably the only person in the world that wants it but if someone started publishing everything Sergio Aragones has done in his prolific career I'd be in for the haul.

I picked up a Hanna Barbera Aussie reprint of Korg: 70,000 B.C in the back of a second hand book shop on Phillip Island last year and found another issue this weekend. These books are great, i think there are two of the original Charlton issues reprinted in each issue beautiful Pat Boyette work and garish recolouring. I'm a sucker for cavemen stories with Sci-Fi elements.

A few random Charlton comics and some funny animal and big foot cartooning books. I've been picking up the odd book of these here and there to pick up some flourishes for my own work.

An X-men annual that I really dug when I was a kid and could actually follow what was going on in these comics.

I liked Howard Chaykin's character Dominic Fortune from the few appearances he made when I was a kid and glad to pick up an issue of his precursor character The Scorpion for a $1.

I probably have a bunch of these already but for $1.50 they'll be good bedside reading/ birthday presents for my Nephews when they are a bit older.

A couple original cartoons by Neil Mcbeath at the Camberwell markets

A french man was selling half a dozen of these colour strips on thick card for about $500 the lot. Not sure of the artist but one of them was signed 'Peter'.

Record and Comic Aficionados at Box Hill

Camberwell Train Station