[Downunder Dan]

Discussed elsewhere in these forums, here's an overview of material available online. Please add further information by way of replies to this thread, and I'll amalgamate new information into this post.

Online resources

AusReprints. https://ausreprints.net/ (beta site https://ausreprints.net.au) James Zanata’s database of Australian comics, publishers, creators and miscellanrous information. Includes cover scans and some interior page scans. Note: AusReprints has been having some issues recently, and is being rewritten. The beta site is a work-in-progress rewrite of the main site, and you may wish to use it if the main site is being problematic

Australian Comics Database is an initiative of the Australian Comics Art Awards, and is intended to serves as a 'call for entries' for the awards, with a secondary purpose of acting as a historical database of Australian comics. Site users acn add comics to the database, although the 'call for entries' aspect of the database will mean that current comics are better covered than historical entries. Note: There's a list of Australian comics reference books that may be of interest

Comicoz. https://www.comicoz.com/ Nat Karmichael’s publishing imprint website, which includes an actively updated Australian comics news blog with entries dating back to 2009.

• Comicoz hosts the text (without the illustrations) of John Ryan’s ‘Panel by Panel’ by permission of the Estate of John Ryan. You can find the introduction at https://www.comicoz.com/panel-by-panel.html, with Part One (Newspaper Strips) at https://www.comicoz.com/part-one.html and Part Two (Comic Books) at https://www.comicoz.com/part-two.html
  

Comics Down Under. https://comicsdownunder.blogspot.com/ Kevin Patrick’s blog on the history of Australian comic books. There are approximately 200 posts about different aspects of Australian comics. No new posts since 2022

DigitalNZ. https://digitalnz.org/ ‘DigitalNZ is the search site for all things New Zealand. We connect you to reliable digital collections from our content partners’

From Earth’s End. https://fromearthsend.blogspot.com/ ‘A New Zealand comics blog by Adrian Kinnaid’

National Library of New Zealand. Research guide: comics and zines https://natlib.govt.nz/researchers/guides/comics-and-zines

Pikitia Press. A blog on New Zealand and Australian comics and cartoonists. A lot of scanned images of comics covers and internal pages (including a few complete stories), as well as newspaper strips and spot illustrations. Accompanying text is often quite sparse. No new posts since 2023

Tabula Rasa. https://www.tabula-rasa.info/AusComics/AustralianComics.html An eclectic and now somewhat out-of-date site on Australian comics, rather concentrating on the 1970s through to 2011

Trove. https://trove.nla.gov.au/ ‘Search Trove to explore amazing collections from Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives. It’s free and available online all day, every day.’ Trove is an aggregator of digital information sources in Australia. Some records are digital or have been digitised, other records are physical and the digital catalogue of the physical repository can be searched via Trove. Catalogues often contain contextualising information about the items catalogued. Unfortunately, most comics are periodicals and the catalogues the run of the periodical not individual issues, although a list of issues held will be included. Collections of comics are often bequests from deceased comic collectors, although publishers may deposit a copy of the issues they publish. Very few comics are digitised.

• ‘Comic artists and illustrators oral history project’ – the National Library of Australia undertakes a range of oral history projects. Some of the comic artists and illustrators interviews can be accessed via Trove: Les Dixon, Stan Pitt, Tony Rafty, Jim Russell, Les Tanner, and Monty Wedd
• 'Heroes and Villains - Australian comics and their creators' https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20100526070038/http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/120355/20100525-2137/www.slv.vic.gov.au/programs/exhibitions/catalogues/heroesvillains/index.html (Exhibition at the State Library of Victoria in 2006)
• ‘Pulp Confidential: Quick & dirty publishing in the 40s & 50s’ https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/events/exhibitions/2015/pulp_confidential/index.html (Exhibition at the State Library of NSW in 2015 focusing on Frank Johnson Publishing – see especially the exhibition catalogue)

Facebook pages:

• Australian Comics https://www.facebook.com/AustralianComics
• New Zealand Comics https://www.facebook.com/groups/1422197274605540
• Old Australian Pre-Decimal Comics Up To 1966 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1837816613202486

Wikipedia pages:

• Category:Australian comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_comics
• Category:New Zealand comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Zealand_comics
• Comics in Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_in_Australia
• Frank Johnson Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Johnson_Publications

Miscellaneous

• A Critical, Social and Stylistic Study of Australian Children's Comics. Foster, John E. PhD dissertation. Department of Education, University of Adelaide, 1989. file:///C:/Users/great/Downloads/03whole_v2.pdf

Hardcopy resources

Bonzer: Australian comics 1900s-1990s. Edited by Shiell, Annette. Elgua Media, 1998. [not available online]

From ‘Sunbeams’ to Sunset: The Rise and Fall of the Australian Comic Book (1924-1965) : An Illustrated History. Cliffe, Graeme. Comicoz, 2019. [not available online]

Inkspot. The quarterly journal of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association. Articles range from historical to current events (skewing to current events, as the Australian Cartoonists’ Association is ongoing). [not available online]

Panel by Panel: A History of Australian Comics. Ryan, John. Cassell, 1979. [The text of this book is available via the Comicoz site, see above]

[paw broon]

A treasure trove of Info.  Thanks Dan.  I was aware and have used a couple of the sites, but so many new sources is great.

[Downunder Dan]

I've added in another exhibition catalogue, or rather the web version of it - 'Heroes and Villains', which was held at the State Library of Victoria in 2006. The essay at the end, written by Kevin Patrick, is a fairly compact history of comics in Australia. I believe the exhibition followed the donation of Kevin's comic collection to the library before his move to America. The online version of the catalogue wasn't available at the library's website, but it was captured by Trove as a webpage snapshot - hence the very long URL.

[Downunder Dan]

I'm continuing to poke around on the internet for more information on Australian and New Zealand comics.

I happened upon a list of Australian comics reference books on the Australian Comics Database site - which I didn't know existed. I can access all the books listed (well, probably - I didn't look into the Phantom Price Guide), and I can access all of them physically. I'll look at them over a period of time and add relevant ones here, in the first post.

The first reference book I looked at is 'Bonzer: Australian comics 1900s-1990s'. It includes a number of chapters which tackle a topics - it may be comics at a particular point of time, or a specific topic (like women in comics). There are chapters devoted to comics creators, to a chronology of comics in Australia, and a checklist of comics published 1900 and 1960. And lots of reproductions of covers and some small amount of comic strips and interior art. It looks so good that I immediately found a copy on eBay and purchased it! Sadly, I can't find any record of it being available online as webpages or downloadable.

The Australian Comics Database https://australiancomicsdb.com.au/ is a bit opaque as to how many comics are recorded in it. I did some searches for Golden Age titles and didn't find anything. Site users are encouraged to add data to the database, so how good it is will depend on what people add. I expect recent comics will be better covered than historical ones. The database is described as 'an initiative of the Comics Art Awards of Australia', so a bias towards comics that could win such awards is likely.

[Downunder Dan]

In looking for information on different comics, you sometimes stumble across unusual comics-related things. In this case, looking for information on Space Adventures of Grip Grantham and its creator W. Gill, I found a mention of it in a dissertation of a PhD candidate entitled A Critical, Social and Stylistic Study of Australian Children's Comics. The dissertation is quite a wide ranging in its survey of science fiction and superhero strips, including some titles not well covered in published histories of the genre. Weighing in at 442 pages, it's quite hefty. It was written by John E Foster of the Department of Education, University of Adelaide, and submitted in March 1989. It's at file:///C:/Users/great/Downloads/03whole_v2.pdf (download).