David Bird

Leigh Chalker (00:01):
This show is sponsored by The Comics Shop. Welcome to Tuesday Chinwag with your host Lee Chalker, writer, artist, and creator of the Comic series Battle for Basel. All right, good evening. Welcome to another episode of Tuesday Chinwag. I am Lee Chalker and I’m the creator of Battle for Bustle. Now that is available at the Comex Shop with over 100 other Australian published comic books. So the reason I mentioned the Comex Shop is because that sponsors all of the live streams and not just this show, and it keeps everyone happy, it keeps comics flowing, it gets ’em into your hands, and you can buy one comic book or you can buy all hundred of ’em. It’s entirely up to you for a flat rate of $9. Now, I dunno where you’re going to get any better than that, but hey, look here. There you go. So for any of you that haven’t seen Tuesday Chinwag, it’s a show based on who, what, where, when, how, and why.

(01:08)
And generally we cover all of them. It’s about being fluid and as chatty and talk about the history of the guest as best as we can, getting into as much detail as we can go anywhere. For anyone that’s seen the show, which is always exciting, and I like to be excited because I’m not a calm individual and sometimes I’ve just got to burn off a lot of energy. Look, the best thing you can do for Comex the community as you can like and subscribe anywhere. You can find them, YouTube’s, Facebook and all the other socials, and please share the shows because if we like and subscribe, we get it all out to more people. It builds a community even further, and that’s always exciting to bring new people and have new guests and hear their stories. Now, the other thing I want to mention before I introduce tonight’s very special guest is on YouTube.

(02:07)
We are at 499 subscribers as of today. So if there’s anyone out there that’s not subscribed, you could be the fifth hundred person, and I think that’s a pretty awesome thing for this community to get to 500 subscribers. So check your notes, check if you’re not subscribed, and press that bell. So it’s all good. And look, without any further ado, I’m going to introduce a man that he’s going to have some stories to tell us. So I’m hoping that I get to sit back and just do an awful lot of learning tonight, and I hope you do as well. Mr. David Bird, how are you mate? Good mate, how are you? I’m all right. I’m all right. I’m relaxed, but I’m excited. So I’m not quite sure what I am at the moment, but I’m ready to just chill out and do some gas bagging, man. So look, what we’ll do is to save anyone any dramas or keep, let’s not keep them in suspense. We are just going to get straight into it. David, with the existential question, who?

David Bird (03:25):
Okay, well, I’m the publisher of Paper Tableau Publications. I’ve been doing that on and off since about 19 98, 99. Prior to that, I’m part of the Melbourne scene, been around the Melbourne scene for a long time. So I helped a few people on and off during the nineties, but during the eighties, I was an assistant editor and a finished artist for Fox Comics, the anthology. But I even go back earlier than that because all the people that I know who did Ink Spots in 1980, that’s Phil Bentley vis Greg Gates and a host of other people who were contributors at the time. So I go as far as back as that. So Red Silver Age Marbles and Bronze Age, marvels and dcs in the sixties and seventies, as well as Warren Comics in the seventies. That was the springboard onto all sorts of stuff from about 1975 onwards in terms of European graphic novels to heavy metal and metal launch undergrounds, ripoff press undergrounds, as well as the classic underground in the late sixties. So yeah, that’s where my background sort of comes from in terms of things that I like and things that I inspired by.

Leigh Chalker (05:10):
Yeah, that’s cool, man. That’s exciting. I do want to touch on Fox Comics tonight. Obviously we’ll get to that at some stage, but let’s take you back to Little David and because Melbourne, man, it’s a hub of comic creators and people that have been around for, well, continually doing it and believing in the medium, which is exciting for me and the history. So let’s go back to Little David and who and what was it that, did you have it everyone seems to, did you have an uncle that introduced you to comic books or was it a mom or a dad? There’s always that stinky uncle there that flicks

David Bird (06:01):
Your book. When I was really young, when I was in six years old and grade one in primary school, so I was sick a lot of that year, so I was in bed. I had mums and chickenpox and pneumonia and bronchitis. It seemed to be I get over one thing, I get something else. So there were always books. Books were bought for me and things to keep me occupied in bed while I’m recovering from these things. So I remember some would left some visitor, the house had left a pile of old Gordon and Gotch reprints, black and white reprints, and they had two shillings on them. We hadn’t reached Decimalization yet. So that was my first exposure to Batman, Superman. Then my parents and I moved to Queensland for, it ended up being about 18 months

(07:01)
For my father’s job, and I just continued buying those up there. And then when we decided we were coming back down to Melbourne to live on the way down, they went out, we stopped at some country town called Miranda. I’m not sure whether that’s in Southern New South Wales or I think it’s in Southern New South Wales. I don’t think that we crossed the board yet. So when my folks were out getting lunch, and they came back and I bought me a comet, but it was not a Gordon Bush reprint, it was a copy of Marvel Tales with a reprint of Spider-Man, 14 and two or three other stories that I’d seen these characters on Marvel superheroes on tv, and it was in colour. So I read that. I thought, there’s no going back now out this Dax on Batman and Superman as they then were. So that was it. And when we got down to Melbourne, I said about just buying those and increasing, starting your collection. Really?

Leigh Chalker (08:04):
Yeah.

David Bird (08:05):
You

Leigh Chalker (08:05):
Still got a lot of

David Bird (08:06):
That stuff. No, I’ve purged my collection a few times since then, so I haven’t got that particular issue, even though it’s sort of like seed into my memory. I could just get a quote from it. But I was lucky when I started buying comics, new comics off the rack, I discovered a secondhand bookshop, which was an old book exchange. Yes. And I agree with you. It’s a tragedy that they’ve disappeared.

Leigh Chalker (08:37):
The magic you used to find in those places.

David Bird (08:39):
I remember past and looking in the window because there was a whole bunch of stuff hanging up the window and sort of, it was like a ladin cave. My jaw smacked the footpath, and you could buy secondhand comics for, back then the brand new comic was still 12 cents, so you could buy them for 6 cents. Right. And a thicker one for 12 cents. It sounds ridiculous now that I’m saying that, but it was just another era, really. So yeah, so I could feed my collection with new comics at one end and back issues at the other end. So that was helpful.

Leigh Chalker (09:21):
You were fill in the gaps where you could find them. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Did you know where you wouldn’t have had, were you a comic book, like a blood hound man? Did you have This shop will have this one at this point. They’re not carrying that title. I’ll head over here. Did you get

David Bird (09:40):
Yeah, absolutely. I have my favourite news agents that I would go to that I knew I would get something and doing all the Alteryx, if you didn’t have enough money, you sort of bury the one you wanted behind a whole bunch of others and try to get some money and run back and make sure it’s still there.

Leigh Chalker (09:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’d sticking behind the dud comics. I know, man, because you’d get so used to the rhythm and titles that flowed at your favourite comic, like news agents and shops and stuff that you could tell if one had been sitting there that extra month, man, no one was getting it. So you’d get just zip it in between there and it’s like, yeah, I remember being guilty of that too, mate, and being filthy the next day or two coming back. And I think someone cottoned onto me, man. Do you know what I mean? Checking all the cotton, and I was like, what? Yeah, yeah. No, they were good, man. But I often, when I get to meet people and stuff on Chinwag, I often reflect with them on the beauty of book exchanges and just how lovely they were, man, where you could go, it’s like you never knew what you were going to get. Some weeks you go in there and it’d be an empty chest and you’d just get a few things to test it, and then the next week you’d go in there and it was like,

Voice Over (11:10):
Wow,

Leigh Chalker (11:11):
I’ve hit pay dirt here, man. Yeah, each week was totally different. What were you most attracted to by those early comic books? Like the sense of adventure, the storytelling, the continuity, what sort of,

David Bird (11:30):
I guess it was the stories and the, not just what was told, but the way it was told. And I could tell even at a young age, the Marvel stories had more depth in them in terms of characterization than DC were doing at the time. Because you’re a kid, you’re not really deconstructing it at that point, but you sort of know you can sort of tell the difference. So yes, I was a big Spider-Man fan, and the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man bought was number 69 off the news agent’s rack. But I’m seeing I’m buying all these back issued di codes. I could tell there’s a lot happen between that and that. Then just try to plug the gaps as you go. Then drawing up the continuity. So all that good stuff from the sixties was just shake my sensibilities.

Leigh Chalker (12:28):
Yeah, yeah. No, my dad was a massive collector of Spider-Man. That was his as well. So very early on in my childhood, I grew up with your dip co Spider-Man’s and your John Reida Jr. I probably think that John Reida Jr. Was senior, sorry, was the first artist that I did look at as a little boy and just was like, wow, that dude’s man. He’s good. And yeah, my sensibilities sort of started with that too, but I did love Spider-Man. Did you have any of your folks or family like your comic books as well, or you sort one?

David Bird (13:19):
No, I’ve got no brothers or sisters, so it’s just me. So I think my mother regretted sort of like once I’d been bitten by the bug and there was no going back. I think she going, why did I buy him that comment?

Leigh Chalker (13:35):
I think my mum was like that too, because I was an only child growing up, and it was very much for me like that as well. It was once I started having time and reading dad’s comic books and veering out, and you’d go out shopping and you’d pester mum or dad and you’d go and get some others and things like that. In the end, I think they were like, oh my God, we’re spending more on comic books than we are putting this kid through school.

David Bird (14:11):
Fortunately, when I was a kid, you could then get deposits for soft drink bottles. You get 5 cents back. So I would scour the surrounding streets for discarded bottles and take them back, get the money that would promptly go onto the book exchange on the next trip. So it was a great dismay when they cancelled deposits for around Australia, with the exception of South Australia.

Leigh Chalker (14:43):
What happened then? Because kids have got pretty imaginative minds, David, you’d know that.

David Bird (14:52):
Well, I got a certain amount of allowance in my early teens, and then I got a job cleaning up in a butcher shop when I was in year 10, and that was then, now I had an income I could actually dedicate to spending stuff,

Leigh Chalker (15:07):
And that was all comics, wasn’t it?

David Bird (15:11):
A few records at the time. I had a radio which sort of kept me plugged into that, and I was buying books as well. So at that stage, I think I heard you mention a couple of, because we were into fantasy when you were younger, I was buying reprints of Robert Howard’s Conan and Michael MoCo re, and the rest of his eternal champion saga and Fritz Lee’s faff in the Grayer and all that sort of stuff. I know a lot of it’s still in print, but the additions that I read are really hard to come by now.

Leigh Chalker (15:48):
Yeah, yeah. I think I used to be mesmerised by a lot of them too, because of the covers as well. There’s something beautiful. Hello, absent. How you doing, Ben? How you gentlemen? Have a great night. Thank you, Ben, champion Peter Lane. Good evening, gentlemen. Thank you, Peter, thank you for watching Shawnee. Forgot the time. Hello, and you caught up with us. So all is good. No need for apologies, Jeffrey. How are you? Good to see you back. And Peter, oh, the unpredictable nature of the comic section in your local news agency.

David Bird (16:25):
That’s right. You could have runs of comics and then all of a sudden they’re just gone.

Leigh Chalker (16:30):
I know. And you’d be filthy. You’d be like, what’s going on here, man? But then you’d get some gems, Hey, weird, we’re talking about this. I’ve sort of, I dunno, before Tuesday, chin wags and stuff, my mind really just sort of wanders. And I had this weird, came out of nowhere sort of moment today that back in the early nineties, and I was heavy into the uncanny X-Men and X, the whole X world. I like the depth of that too. Sometimes. I found that comics were a little bit poppy, and when you read fantasy novels and they’re detailed and worlds building and stuff, X-Men seem to appeal to me for that, the depth of character. But I randomly came across Batman versus Predator, and I remember at the time, and I was like, wow, thinking that. So I picked that up because that was one of those occasions where nothing new was on the shelf. I used to,

David Bird (17:37):
That would have to be a dark horse book. I suspect

Leigh Chalker (17:40):
It was a dark horse dc. They’d done an amalgamation on these two characters. I’d never heard of it because obviously there was no internet back at that stage. And things like Wizard and Hero Magazine were really expensive, and I was frequenting news agents that often, David, that I would walk in the shop and they would basically say, nothing new in today, Lee. And I’d turn around and walk out. And so just this one day I found Batman versus Predator, and I think that was one of those moments where I was like, wow, okay, no worries. But I’d still love that comic book. And I just had that memory of that today, those three comic books, actually, I don’t even think they’re in print anymore. I don’t even think you can get a trade for some reason, but that was a time where I was like, wow. Because it’s like Batman was dark, but that comic book’s dark because he’s fighting predator and stuff. And yeah, it’s just cool. But the memories that come back, man on a Tuesday when you, because I’m getting into the rhythm and groove you get, Hey mate, SPIE, how are you brother?

(18:53)
And yeah, good man. Just good memories. So when you came out of, I guess there comes to a time, you mentioned a ticket ago, I would say already from talking to you for this little bit and reading those books that you’ve published, which we’ll get into later, the stories that you choose are very eclectic. Each book is different. There’s a theme with some of them in a noirish sort of sense that you’ve obviously gravitated to, but some of the stories are, there’s one and you think that’s what you’re going to get. And then there’s the next one and it’s like, oh, that’s totally different from book to book, which I like. So I’m assuming you didn’t always stick with Marvel, and you probably kept your rhythm with your Spider-Man and your favourites, but what?

David Bird (19:56):
Yes, it was, I think around the early seventies that my friend who was collecting us along with it myself, we broke the taboo of buying DC because Neil Adams was going mad on Greenland. How did you walk away from those books? Because they were just a knockout. So once we crossed that barrier, well, that means it was sort of open slather, but then there was, look around about 73, I had a fortuitous meeting with, because I met Greg dates in a Frankston book exchange. Another one was my father was working then for Myers down at Frankston Bayside. So I occasionally go down with him and just to hang out and look and see what else. There’s a couple of book exchanges. So I was looking through secondhand comments in one, and there was a slightly older guy there, and he could tell from the way I was looking at back issues, this young guy’s a collector. So he saw me pause over a Barry Smith Conan, and he said to me, oh, do you like Barry Smith? And that was it. And Greg being two or three years older than me, but a much longer collector because at that stage he’d been collecting for a few, three or four, five years more than I had.

(21:23)
And his tastes were far broader.

(21:29)
So he had a copy of, you would call it a Softcore porno Magna, it was called We, but it had a three page colour Barry Strip Barry Smith strip in it, and which I was oblivious about because you’re not going to read that in your comics news on Stan Soapbox opened up doors, that one. So as I got to know Greg over the next two or three weeks, he introduced me to Richard Corbin’s, Ralph from Ripoff Press and Creepy, which was the Cater colour section, and all the Spanish artists and Richard Corbin doing colour sections. And right at that time, Bernie Wrightson had just left DC from Swamping, and he just started to do that collection of about eight stories for Warren, and they were just like, whoa, that was it. There was no going back. He showed me a book called French Graphic novel by a guy called Philippe Dier, and who I’ve heard described somewhat unfairly as the French has answer to Jack Kirby on masculine. That’s a bit unkind, but because he doesn’t really take any stylistic similarities from Kirby, but he’s epic in scale, which is the one thing he has in common. So there’s that, just looking at all this stuff, I realised, whoa, there’s so much more than just superhero comics out there. There’s tonnes of stuff out there. And that really started to reshake my sensibility of to what’s out there and what you could expect and what you could look for.

Leigh Chalker (23:24):
Yeah, no, man, there is so much hate, but you came along, you got Boom at exact Prime that exactly like an amazing moment. You know what I mean? When you were ready to rock and roll and falling in love with the medium, and then it just sort of took you off into this whole new direction. I suppose to a certain extent, even if people meet me, and I’ve said this on the show before, I don’t really tell everyone I draw, but when I do, they’re always like, oh, I like Superman and Batman sort of stuff. And it’s like, yeah, that’s cool, because it’s an easy way to introduce. But if they’re people that I eventually get to know quite well and things like that, I do. I’ve been known to lose comic books because I like to give people things that they may not have ever thought was a comic book.

(24:28)
You know what I mean? And quite often they come back and they’re like, man, I didn’t know comic books did this. Then it’s like, and then it’s like, yeah, they do perfect medium, man, but I know what you mean about, yeah, finding things that totally blow your mind, mate. In terms of comics, that for me, 2000 ad was one for me when I was young because I’d never seen, I’d come from superhero stuff and Marvel and DC and that was mainly most things on the news agent stand. And because we didn’t have a comic shop for a long time in Townsville, and then 2000 ad started appearing, I was picking them up for relatively cheap, and I was really relishing that because I mean, there’s a huge difference between Marvel and DC and what those English dudes were doing and their stories, and that introduced me to anthologies.

(25:35)
I’d never seen an anthology before. And then there’s that whole tricky buggers, hey, with you and your anthologies, it’s like you get hooked on a story and you’ve got to go back and get it for the next six or seven issues. You’ve got to see the end of it and things like that. But man, beautiful world, man, because I know you’ve published a lot of Greg’s stuff and we’ll talk about, yeah, because I’d never, I’d heard of Greg, but I wasn’t aware of any of his work. It’s not from, again, not being aware, but some things just don’t come to me or I haven’t come across them in those moments. And as we said before the show, which again we’ll touch on when we get to your publishing, I was really taken aback by his artwork in that Tired of Dreams that taught me some stuff, man,

David Bird (26:41):
In some ways it’s very traditional traditionalist sort of work, but he’s got such a feeling for classic old time comics and drawing and inking, I suppose you say, along more traditional lines, but he can create moods with all of that.

(27:06)
So back when I did reprinted tattoo managed Title Dreams, a lot of Greek stuff had been out of print for 10 years then and around about new 2000. And because he was a regular contributor to Ink Spots and Fox Comics for their durations, but then after that, it tailed off a bit in terms of regular appearances. So I thought roundabout 2000, well, there’s all this stuff here, no one can get access to it now because it’s all out of print. Because there wasn’t a massive inventory of back issues for Fox Comics because of the way we did it. I know. Can I go down a sidebar here for a minute?

Leigh Chalker (27:56):
Absolutely.

David Bird (27:58):
Absolutely. A lot of people have put out books and got them distributed to newsstand distribution in the hope that they’re going to sell enough to warrant the investment of going that direction. And watching Colin, Greg, and Phil do ink spots and the first two were nice and thick, and they didn’t use stand distribution and they weren’t taken to the cleanest, but they did not, both books were ran at a loss because in a sense in, well, it’s easy in hindsight, you can say you’ve got a niche book

(28:37)
With a mass market distribution system. So really the only way you’re going to succeed at all is if you do a mass market product, which you’ve got to be, it’s got to be, dare I say, dumbed down enough. Forget people to a lot of people to buy it. And if it’s sufficiently niche and idiosyncratic, you’re not going to get big numbers. And they try to counter that a little bit with issues three and four because they were slimmed down and they pull back the production costs in the hope that they weren’t going to lose so much in a sense. But even so, after four issues, they decided it wasn’t a mug’s game. But we’ve done the experiment now, and now it was time to move on to different equations in terms of publishing. I know Colin from when N Xbox folded Colin wanted to do a commercial comic book and distributed through American distributors, and his answer to that was getting Phil Barlow to do zooniverse, which didn’t do massively big guns, but it did okay. It broke even. So, and then with the gap in local publishing, because XPOs had folded, Dave Ika decided to, he felt that there needed to be a publication to fill that gap, but he didn’t necessarily want, he wanted to start very small and let it grow to something a bit more organic.

(30:27)
So that’s when Fox CO’s comics started up in 9 83, but around that same time, Kerry Jayla started reverie the best incarnation of Reverie, which I would see. We ran copies in the show, but I also would see it occasionally on news agent’s stance. But when Over was just got to the point where, oh, he’s been doing this for a small while with bad issue. I think it was issue seven, it disappeared. I couldn’t see it anymore. So I assumed that it had stopped coming out, but I hadn’t heard any, took quite a while before Gary reemerged on the scene.

Leigh Chalker (31:10):
Yeah, yeah. I think the one thing that I’m learning is back in that period of time from talking to Gary, it was like buying a printing thing at his house and he removed a wall. If memory serves me correctly in his garage, you put the printer in there, and there was a whole heap of story going on with that. But I think the reason why I’ve got, as a fan of comic books, particularly Australian, all comic books, but I mean, my interest is vested in Australian comic books and independent comic books. It’s just something I love. It’s something I’m part of. All of you Trailblazers man, was just based on pure passion and a desire mate, because it’s like you couldn’t just go to a printer now and print 50 copies, you know what I mean? Or rattle off 25 copies to go to the comic book convention and have things as you needed them. You had to take such a risk printing sometimes thousands of comic books, man, on just a chance. You know what I mean? And unbelievable.

David Bird (32:36):
In the early days of Fox Dave descent, having watched Greg Collin and Phil from a Far Do Ink spots, he goes, well, I’m not going to go to the news agent group because that way lies madness. So we’re going to do your dough. So he started off with very small print runs on black or white on a five photocopier from his father’s law firm. So

Leigh Chalker (32:58):
He was doing minis basically mini,

David Bird (33:00):
Yeah, basically a five plus covers a five black and white, but he wanted to get it out with a reasonable amount of frequency. He started try to get it out monthly. So for the first, I think six or seven months, he was doing it monthly.

(33:17)
And when you are doing it with that frequency, and he started off with a bunch of stuff that was sitting around on shelves and things around about the third or fourth, fifth issue, it’s starting to coalesce into something because he had Martin tr gov who did Roco, the dog and Phil Bentley who joined on as their assistant editor. So then you start applying certain sorts of sensibilities to what you are putting in the book, and then it starting to shape its own identity. So because we’re starting off with Low, he’s, he’s just doing enough to cover getting rid of them. They’re incrementally going up over time, and they’re also being sold mini books because Dave and I were working in there on weekends and during the week when it got up to about issue 12, 11 or 12, it was getting not cost effective to do photocopies anymore.

(34:22)
We were on the cusp of doing it offset. So Greg was working at a place called the Swim Shooter Union Media Office, and he was running a two colour print press there for the union, and they lost the finished artist there. So in the studio, so I got that job. So now I’m working the camera room with Bromides and that. So we are doing the artwork, pacing it up and everything from making bro much from Aboriginal artwork, Greg’s making the plates and printing them, we’re getting it bound. That was the one external cost. And then we’d go back to the shop to get sold. So we’re controlling the process all the way along

(35:09)
That by the time the deal with Fanno Graphics was done, roundabout issue 24, we were printing just under a thousand copies of Fox Comics for local distribution, not through news agents just sold through the shop. There was a little distribution, they called Manic Exposure, which used to sell north of the river, north of the Yara on Fitzroy and record shops around there. And the rest we’d sell. There used to be another comics distributor called Sticks in Canada. We didn’t go through Diamond. So between the three and those three outlets, we were getting rid of almost a thousand copies, not quite a thousand per issue. That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. It took a number of years to do that, but yeah, yeah,

Leigh Chalker (36:00):
Yeah, man, one thing that’s amazing is the amount of issues that you got through. The other thing that I love is hearing stories of how hands on and the mini comics, I so admire people that do mini comics, man, because it’s like one thing that sometimes if you want to get a comic book out, man, like Good Day, Danny Nolan, Hey, you going brother, it’s so good. Just mini comics, men, like in today’s modern age, if you can’t afford printing and that, get ’em out, do ’em. There’s amazing minis out there, man. Ryan Ballad does ’em, Neil Blandon does ’em and many, many more, and they’re beautiful. Nick May is another one. And as you said in their control, it’s what they can do and they can do it at a cost effective fashion to an extent like Office Works or work or whatever like that, but you sort of never really man from the sound of it had an opportunity not to go on any other road than comic books Young Age. You just bang, this is what I want, mum and dad, I’m making this up. I like telling stories, but they’ve probably had to go out and get six extra jobs to accommodate your comic book collecting until you got your job at the Butcher Shop, and then you took it over from there. And then you meet Greg Gates and he sends you off on this whole, whoa, there’s so much more out.

David Bird (37:39):
In hindsight, it was a life changing meeting because your life’s going along that way, then it turns, it goes along that way. And Greg’s best friend at the time was a guy called Phil Bentley. I know you’ve encountered that name a few times, a few interviews. So they also started Minute Talk books with a third friend. It was a mail order service, and then they leapt to a storefront when they had the store, and it was doing well. That’s why they wanted to, they were going to use the storefront to subsidise printing ink spots that was going to bankroll it.

Leigh Chalker (38:25):
Yeah, yeah. I see. And that, man, that’s a nice piece of history there, isn’t it? And you are in there learning, man, you’re with these kids and you are talking, working with them. You’re printing and you’re watching the art and ink spots happening and everything. I guess though, everyone learned from ink spots and stuff and had to go back and I suppose adapt to a certain extent their business, like plans and stuff like that of what they wanted to do and things as everyone has to do from time to time.

David Bird (39:01):
Look, eventually, I think they’d done the experiment and they could see that the tail wasn’t going to wag the dog in the sense

Voice Over (39:14):
That

David Bird (39:14):
The business became more important than the publishing because they sunk a bit of money into it and hadn’t got a, well, they’ve a lot of aesthetic and artistic success that didn’t a great monetary return, and that was because they made assumptions about newsstand, distribution, news distribution. And to this day, I’m leery of it because unless you’ve got a mass market product that’s even news agents now, not a shadow of their former selves, now, they’re just on the verge. All they are resist to sell to Tesla tickets really pretty much paper. That’s it.

Leigh Chalker (39:59):
And a $3 50 can of Coke if you, yeah, I know know, it’s a shame, but it is what it is. So essentially, really, if you’ve diverged from that road and you’re still managing to, I guess distribute, push out a thousand copies of these comic books regularly. So you’re distributing it yourself through sticks, as you said, and at local record stores. And that would accept it. Books yourself. Yeah. Yeah. You’ve beaten Feet mate, pushing it out there and stuff.

David Bird (40:50):
So then the deal with Fano Graphics came up now, Fano Graphics, I’m not sure how much you bought independent stuff around about that time in the late eighties. So growth and Fano graphics were doing their own. They did Love and Rockets and a whole bunch of other things, which were alternative in indie comics. Hate Eight Ball. One of the coups that Dave Vica managed to do was he got a cover out of damn Clothes before he was famous. That’s Grace is the cover of Fox Comics 14, because he’d done this book called Lloyd Bolon for Photographics, and it sort of did okay, but when he started to do Eight Ball, that was it. And now he does comics for the New Yorker and God knows what else. Now he’s a well established cartoonist. So that was fun to do that sort of stuff. And to have Phil, he had a friendship with Eddie Campbell because there was a chap in England called Phil Gravette, and he published a magazine called Escape Magazine.

Voice Over (42:06):
Now,

David Bird (42:07):
It was a mixture of English comic artists and news and music and stuff like that, not light years away from the Face magazine for those who were old enough to remember the face. I remember that. And there were markets called the Fast Fiction Markets where people used to sell their A five comics, and that’s where Eddie and a whole bunch of people who were doing things for Escape met each other. And because Phil had corresponded with some of these people, we started to get work from them for Fox Comics, which was added another new flavour to it. All this stuff was sort of like, if it wasn’t weird and whimsical, that was autobiographical or biographical. So a slice of Life comics, which is what we were attracted to, because that’s what we were reading in the other people’s stuff that we liked.

Leigh Chalker (43:13):
I saw a lot of, I was also enjoying this yesterday very much, and as I was looking through this book, which I highly recommend to anyone, man, I could see things like going through Dave’s artwork and stuff. I was like, man, there’s Met Campbell in that. You know what I mean? And it’s weird that you mentioned him because there you go. So it’s all sort of interconnected and things, but I was enjoying that as well. And I liked the Slice of life, and I liked the fact that, I mean, I don’t know Dave, we can talk about him and how you get publishing and stuff later, but I noticed that he seemed to, I guess, tell his life through his stories as a detective, or he seemed to do a, is that a slice of life where you portray yourself as another character? But

David Bird (44:18):
I see Dave, Dave writes when he does, because he writes biographical autobiographical stuff as well. And that was one collection I didn’t send up called, still Truly Confused. He did a strip called True Confusions for a whole bunch of strips for Fox Convict, but that was one of them, which was basically autobiographical stories. And he’s got a self-deprecating sense of humour with lots of charm, so he won’t hesitate to take the piss out of himself if it’s going to get a laugh. So yeah, I think in Last Chance Showcase, there’s death threats from the Toast. That’s really just true confusion under another name and Walking Wounded, well, that was his band at the time.

Leigh Chalker (45:05):
Yeah, right. That’s cool, man, because I really enjoyed it, mate. The detective one Blue detective cracked me up a couple of times there too, man, because it’s like, as I was reading through that, I was thinking, I wonder if these are just little thoughts that he’s had and he’s gone home and he’s quickly done a one page story to it at that moment to, well,

David Bird (45:29):
Blue Detective actually became a single, they actually recorded his band walking Wounded, did a bunch of recordings. They recorded a song called Blue Detective. When Fanno Graphics put out a collection called Dave Hodgson’s Walking Wounded. They put a blue flexi disc bounded into the saddle stitching that you could actually have to cut it out and put it on your old fashioned turntable to play it.

Leigh Chalker (45:58):
That’s cool. As I, man, they don’t do things like that anymore. That’s like those old music magazines where what you were saying Face, and there was Select, and a lot of those magazines, there was even Mojo back in the early nineties and stuff like that. And you’d hear about a new band, you’d read about them, but you’d be like, oh, man, I got to import this. You are like 14, 15. What am I going to do? I want to hear you hear ’em on Rage or something like that. And then these magazines would come out and they’d have that free disc on the sleeve on the front and have your 20 bands with one song. And it was like, wow. So you’d be madly buying. I love Ns like that. I think there’s a certain sadness to me that people don’t get to, I guess, get that pleasure of experiencing that sort of excitement, like going out and getting those little extras that did so much. I admire the promoting. Now, when you went to Fantagraphics, so Fox had been going for, you said 24 issues, 23 issues, 23 issues, and what brought the Fano Graphics thing into Shape Man, how did that all come

David Bird (47:30):
Together? In Melbourne, we’d become a big fish in a small pond, and we thought, what can we do to get bigger? So David met Gary Roth a few times. So he rang up, they proposed an idea that it would photographics take Fox Comics on, and then they were polishing similar sorts of books, similar sorts of material, and they would get first cut of whatever money it made to pay for the, because they’re going to foot the printing costs.

(48:16)
So we would do all the finished art and all the editorial processes and the finished art and package it all up and send it to them. So they didn’t have to do any of that. All they had to do was make plates and run the book and distribute it themselves. And we thought somewhat naively, I guess as it turned out, the growth and Thompson would put as much effort into selling our book as they did their own books. And they simply did it because, not because they were mean or all malicious or anything, they just didn’t have the time. So we went from being, say, being a big fish in a small pond to minnows in a bloody big pond.

Leigh Chalker (48:56):
But learning along the way, there were lesson,

David Bird (49:00):
Get a Fox Comic Special through. That was the first issue that we printed to introduce Fox to I guess people who were buying Fano graphics books and other books through diamond distribution. And then we did issues 24, 25, 26, and 27, and by 27, and Thompson basically pulled the plug because we’re not making it, we’re losing more money than we want to now.

(49:29)
So then after issue, I think it was after issue 26, and at that stage 26 was my last issue. I’d moved to Sydney for a job and they said, Phil and Dave and that, and a couple of others said, well, do we want to go on? They asked, do you want to go on or should we leave it? If we keep going back, we’ll have to go back to a smaller version of what we were. And the consensus was let go. And I think also people say it’s the creative life of a publication or sometimes a band or, so it’s about seven years and it’d been about seven years and people were getting into relationships, and some people, the children will come along and other people were committing to full-time jobs. So it was sort of time, I guess. And Dave kept the imprint going and did some solo books through Photographics for a couple of years.

(50:38)
But when I think after the last one, which was the last book was in Eddie’s unauthorised biographies series, and they did two issues and there was going to be a third one, and they couldn’t do it. And that was the last thing that came out with a Fox Comics logo on it. But it’s interesting because right when that was happening, which was about 91, 92 and things were starting to wind down in Melbourne, there wasn’t so much a scene, there was still a scene, but that generation of people had gone through the eighties, were starting to disperse, but what was happening in Sydney, platinum grit, greener pastures hair, but the Hippo Zero Assassin, all these things started popping up almost, and I thought there was an energy shift. That’s where the next wave of people were coming from.

Leigh Chalker (51:46):
Was that timely for you when you got that job? You were mentioning you moved to Sydney at that stage? I’ve been synchronistic thing that suddenly was

David Bird (51:58):
Working as a finished artist for a number of years before then and living in share houses since the early eighties and things like that. And I wanted a change of pace. And comics and themselves were also a lot of my favourite comic books and were winding up and as well as bands. Bands I’ve been following for years, finishing their careers breaking up, and it seemed to be the time to do something different. So I was in Sydney for about seven months and I had negotiated this job and gone for an interview before I left. So when I went up there, I had a job straight to go to, and there was a few question marks over the guy I was working for. I would best describe him as the Gordon Ramsey of finished art. And I mean the Gordon Rams not the one, the sort of soft and cuddly one you see now when he first appeared on TV and he was sort of

(53:04)
Yelling and abusing his workers in restaurants, that guy. So I was there. So I was there for about seven months and the choice was either, and that was just bringing me up to the recession we had to have in the early nineties. So my somewhat naive plans were to quit that job retreat to Melbourne, wait out till things got better, then go back to Sydney. That never quite happened. So the reason why I quit the job, I thought, if I don’t quit the job, I’m going to sit this guy over the head with a chair. He was such an asshole. Excuse my French, I was just amazed that he was still walking around. I said, no one had actually given him a hiding. So anyway, so I found myself back in Melbourne in 90, April 91. It was April 91. Yeah, April 91. The recession was just about to bite. So that stuck me, and I was back in the family home after having moved out like 12 years beforehand.

Leigh Chalker (54:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that certainly that was a fair journey. Good day, Dave die. How are you mate? Legend. That’s a fair journey. You’ve gone for that new move and all that because when you do look at it that way, Melbourne was hummon at that stage.

Voice Over (54:44):
And

Leigh Chalker (54:44):
Then you’re right, there was just from talking to people, I don’t think it had just been, not really thought about it in such a succinct manner in which you’d placed, it did seem to move in the time, the vague times that I know to Sydney and Sydney was humming. So I guess in a strange way, you did have the right timing to get there. It’s just that, yeah, man, I remember that session being a young fella and aunts and uncles were moving back into grandma’s house and stuff like that, you know what I mean? Because they’d been out travelling and couldn’t get jobs and things and families were bunkering down and yeah, it was tricky time at that stage. But you still reading comics at that stage? Did you go back to Melbourne and catch

David Bird (55:41):
Up? I’d even stopped buying and reading comics just before I went up. The amount of comics I was buying on a regular basis was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking as things were finishing or being cancelled or things like that. So I think, well, I didn’t buy any comics for the seven months I was in Sydney, but I did visit a few comic shops just to visit these places that I’d heard of. I’ve never actually been to,

Voice Over (56:10):
So

David Bird (56:10):
That was Sydneysiders will know these, but the land beyond Half a Cow, King’s comics, which I know is still there, but there’s another place called Comic Kingdom, and there was a place out in Bondi where I live, which was run by a chap called Steve Smith. I can’t remember the name. It’s like a book exchange. What else? And there was a couple of phantom zones around Sydney as well. I dunno, I know Kings are still there, but I dunno about any of the others. I think half a cow and the land beyond, they’re long gone, but they were more alternative comic shops.

Leigh Chalker (56:52):
Yeah, yeah. I remember a lot of the names that you are mentioning there, because when I was buying Australian comic books back in the nineties and stuff like that, a lot of those guys were putting their ads on the back of the Sydney side of guys. You’d have a Phantom Zone ad or a King’s comic book ad at that stage. And so they were recognised, and I used to try and when you’d get comic books and you’d see the, particularly in Marvel ones, I used to do those really cool checklists and they’re cool now, but at the time when you’re a kid, you only used to get six or seven comic books, and there was another 24 comic book that you’d want to get. And I used to go to the back of the Australian comic books, man, and ring these comic book places, man like shops, and ask ’em if they had it and ask for mail order.

(57:51)
And they’d be like, they’d like, okay, no worries. Where are you? I’m in Townsville. And they’d be like, Brido. And I used to remember man asking them, how much is this, this, this, and this? And they’d go say, $24 and 55 cents, and I’d get $24 and 55 cents, put it in an envelope with a letter. My name is Lee Chalker, I spoke to, so-and-so for these comic books and mail it off. And man, two weeks later these comic books would turn up, Hey, now you just jump on the internet. But sending money around in envelopes, I don’t even know if people still do that, man with credit cards and stuff like that anymore. But yeah, I used to love all that stuff, man, like tracking things down.

(58:40)
That’s part of, like we were saying about the book exchanges and things, man, when you had that experience with Greg Gates is finding those things that really, I think that’s the other reason why I love Australian comic books so much, particularly this moment in my life, man, I don’t read a lot of the big guys because I’m constantly blown out man by the creative depth of creators in Australia. And it is just everyone, we’re all here, but everyone’s telling their own story. And because there’s an independence to it, there’s no major company like cracking whips and paying your bills and people doing these things for themselves. You get such a diverse range of stories. And I think it’s flourishing, man. I find it really vibrant, man. One minute you can get a noir and the next minute you can get slice of life and then you can get a superhero comic or you can get all these things. It’s very, very cool, man. It’s a creative garden to a certain extent, a lot of freedom. But you’re probably right about, there’s not a lot of money in it.

David Bird (01:00:17):
I think when I was thinking about one of your questions was the why would you do this? Why would you vote a lot of time? And back in the eighties and nineties, it was more like, well, yeah, I didn’t really expect to make a living from Congress because you couldn’t really, so you did it for the aesthetic and artistic enjoyment and for the glory, I guess. Do I still do do that for the same reasons? Now? I guess I’ve got a far more realistic expectation when it comes to glory, but I still, what’s the word I find the publishing and producing of comic books or graphic stories, whatever euphemism you care to use is in and of itself life affirming. That’s all the reason you need, I don’t expect to sell a million with paper Tableau. I never set out to do that. It was to satisfy a desire and an urge, almost one that I thought I’d lost at one point, because between 2007 and 2019, I didn’t publish anything.

(01:01:54)
I stopped. And by that stage, I’m married with four kids, right? Well, I got two kids back in 2007 and two more game along. And the last couple of things I published in the First Wave didn’t pick many people’s interests and they weren’t selling. I think I did an Armageddon and Supernova back in the day on the table sharing a table, and they didn’t really sell much. So I thought it was, oh, okay, well maybe it’s time to let it go. Because at that stage, when you’re looking after four kids or helping look after four kids, you’ve got your work cut out for you. People may dispute me on this, and by all means, please, I know some people can actually do both halves of this equation, but I think as George Bernard Shaw said, the pram in the hallway is the enemy of art. That’s probably true, man.

(01:03:06)
Yeah. So I’d helped a few people out with the odd project here and there, but I wasn’t really doing anything myself. And I remember when I was approaching my 60th birthday, which is a few years ago, and I was basically, I was miserable because daily life was just grinding me down, been slowly grinding me down for a number of years. But what was making me miserable was basically because I hadn’t been doing anything creative for quite a while. And I sort of pushed all of that to the back of my mind, but it will take a toll of you. You suppress it, it will take a toll of you on you over time. And late 2019, Dave Hudson rang me up and we’d been out of contact for a number of years. So we were just sitting around and shooting the breeze and talking about this, that and the other, and just having a joke about one thing and another.

(01:04:17)
And I said, we should do something just for the fun of it to stop our minds from outtro amplifying. And he’d been doing this, he’d been sitting up in the Adelaide Hills doing this story called Anyhow Town, and there was more than 10 years ago, there was an anthology run out of Adelaide called Fistful of Comics by a guy called Lucas House, a young guy. And David had a few episodes of Anyhow Town published in that, along with a bunch of other people. And Lucas House was very ambitious and perhaps somewhat naive, but he decided we should get everything you’ve done up to this point and just put it in a graphic novel, right? They’re like, oh yeah, really? Are you sure? Okay. Because they didn’t have an ending, right? So they ran what he had, which was about 80 odd pages, and it just stopped. And he did a one page co of trying to mitigate that. And I said, I remember saying, how did it go? And he goes, it raised a ripple UNK without trace. Anyway, so I doing a date just keeps Beavering on up in the hills, right?

(01:05:46)
So he’s telling me this and I said, how much of that have you done now? And he goes, oh, 250 pages. And I said, you’re joking. And so I said, well, he goes, I dunno, I’ve been doing it for so long. I know I’ve lost, he’s lost total objectivity. I dunno whether it’s any good or whether it’s just rubbish. So he bundles that up and a whole lot of other stuff that I hadn’t seen in the interim and sends it to me. This is in November, 2019. So it arrives and I’ve been looking through it and I said, we should do something with this. And just as we’ve really covered that thought, now it’s like February, 2020 bang Covid gone, right? Melbourne has the clamps locked down on it.

(01:06:46)
So at that stage, my computer had been, which was on the verge of hard drive failure two and a half years earlier, still sitting in its cardon in the garage. I even hadn’t even unpacked it after the previous move. So I thought, alright, I’m going to, because I said, okay, first things first, we’ll reprint a couple of things that are long out of print, which was tired of dreams and his book truly confused. So I hauled the computer out, dusted it off, got it set up. I still seemed to want to work. Then I stripped everything off it. That wasn’t necessary for publishing. So just basically it was an operating system, InDesign, Photoshop word, and that was it. Nothing else. It wasn’t even connected to the internet.

(01:07:45)
A bo anchor, it’s 40 gig yard drive. And I remember I hadn’t done any publishing, or I hadn’t done any finished artwork for a number of years at that stage. And I opened up something and I started to refamiliarize myself when I was a bit of a light bulb moment. I thought, ah, this is what I am. This is who I am. And I was less miserable. So when I started putting together things and getting it to print, I felt heaps better. So I would suggest anyone who wants to do it, just do it for that reason alone. I guess when I’m doing this now, I did it when I was 60, so there’s a whole bunch of live experience and forces and a whole bunch of stuff operating on me there that may not be operating on a younger person. But I wouldn’t hesitate to say to anyone, do what you feel you want to do. If it makes you happy, just do it.

Leigh Chalker (01:09:00):
I don’t say this lightly because I mean, I had a different experience with Covid being in Townsville because up here in far North Queensland, to a certain extent, life sort of went on as normal. There were the restrictions and the distances and things like that, but Queensland went through that whole, you’re not coming in without staying in a hotel for two weeks. So it was basically locked down the state and the state seemed to just, you could go to the shop, you could do this, you had to take your precautions. But life still moved on. So I didn’t have the same experience as you guys in Victoria and Melbourne.

(01:09:46)
I’ve got friends obviously down there. And when Comex first started and the drink and draws and we were all meeting each other for the first time, I remember meeting guys that were discussing about how the lockdown had made them feel like they were starting to get down and depressed more and that sort of thing. And they lacked the human contact and stuff, which they realised was important. But then at the same time, everyone down there was just working their fingers to the bone man telling stories and pumping work out and doing things that maybe they’d put on the back burner before.

Voice Over (01:10:37):
Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (01:10:38):
Absolutely. It was an awful thing for people and a country, the world to go through. But in terms of this little niche comic book thing, so much, man, it was revitalised during that period I think because we’re all to a certain extent, introverted, so a lot of us, maybe to an extent didn’t mind the extended stays at home of just writing and drawing

David Bird (01:11:06):
There. That’s how I kept busy is because at one stage we were locked down that hard, that we couldn’t go five kilometres from our homes, could ever go to the local shops for shopping and back, and I thought, Jesus, I can’t even get to the bloody printer he is in Ringwood. That was about seven kilometres away.

(01:11:28)
Anyway, but all of that time, I think at the end of 2020 I put out title of dreams that was the reprint, and I still had all these covers from the first print, which were all beautifully offset printed. There was no way I was going to throw ’em out because I decided I knew I was going to use them again one day, and sure enough I did. But technology had improved in probably 20 years for digital technology and now you can get really beautiful results for not a very big investment, better than what it was 20 years earlier. Yeah, so I spent 2021 and 2022 or most of 2022 just putting together scanning artwork and putting together books. So by the time we were let out, which was roughly midway through 20, 23, 20, midway through 2022, I started to ease up the restrictions. So I put out three books in 2022, another three last year in 2023, and I’m working on the third one now for 2024. I’m not going to die wondering, mate.

Leigh Chalker (01:12:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, see, there you go. It’s like we were talking the other day and I was saying to you similar feeling for me with how with your creativity I found, and I always talk about it, about the amazing healing quality of creativity, man, and through my bad patches and things like that and sobriety and battles and things like that. I found that leaning into creativity in particular was hugely healing, and I do enjoy hearing from other people, but particularly just as you said before, you just felt after, I guess raising kids and the house and family and wife and all those sorts of things, I guess you had that compulsion that you wanted to get back into it, and with the advent of Covid, you were able to, whoa, okay, now I’m feeling good,

(01:14:00)
And then stuff has just started flowing, man, all these beautiful books I do show. I do want to show that because I was on the comics recent reads last night, and if there’s anyone watching that hasn’t seen that Tired of Dreams, which is the reprint of a Fox comics story by Greg Gates and Dave Hodson called Tattoo Man, man, highly recommend that story. That story has, I’ve been thinking about it for two days, just something about it I found quite beautiful, and I mean, if you hadn’t have reprinted that man, I never would’ve found that to appreciate the magic in that. There’s one thing,

David Bird (01:14:57):
See this, I did this back in 20, sorry, 2002, which was a compendium of Greg Gates’s stuff up to that point, right? It was about 104 pages of stories and artwork. Now that’s been long out of print. That was the book that for about 10 years afterwards, people say, have you got any you’re ever going to do that again or are you going to reprint that again? And so that’s the book I’m working on at the moment. I’m waiting for the last dozen pages of artwork, new artwork that Greg’s done in the last 20 years. So I’ve laid out 85% of it. I’m working on the editorial stuff now. I’m just waiting for Greg to supply me the new pages that he’s done in the interim to go in it. So if you’re watching this, Greg, I haven’t forgotten Greg. Get it done, Greg. You want to see

Leigh Chalker (01:15:52):
That book Greg

David Bird (01:15:54):
Can handle Greg. That’ll be great when it comes out. I think also Dylan’s got a couple of upcoming projects which will also have some artwork by Greg, so it’ll be good to see his work out there again because he’s basically living in semi-retirement now. He doesn’t stick his head over the parapet very often these days.

Leigh Chalker (01:16:15):
Oh mate. Yeah, no, it’s beautiful stuff. What I like the fact that it’s like you are collecting careers worth of work. It’s not like someone’s not giving you essentially a story they’ve done in the last six months, you know what I mean? There’s 20 or 30 years worth of their work and development going into what you’re putting together. It essentially is like an artist’s, I dunno what you call it,

David Bird (01:16:52):
The newer stuff is perspective respective. That’s anyhow, town volume one,

Voice Over (01:16:59):
It’s

David Bird (01:16:59):
About 90 pages and early this year I put out volume two, which is about 120 pages, but I didn’t send that up to you. I thought you needed to come in on other things to familiarise yourself. So yeah, so that’s new work.

Leigh Chalker (01:17:18):
We had this conversation last night. I was asked during the review show, where can people go to find these books? And I’ll always ask at the end of the show, but while we’re talking about, and you are whipping up this magic man, where would people go to get these books? PM me on

David Bird (01:17:39):
My Facebook page? There you go. When I got my Facebook page, I’m a member of Daniel Best’s page, which is history of Australian comics from so-and-so up to 2010 or whatever the date he’s got on it, or no, you can go to my Facebook page too and pm me through that just directly there. Am I going to have a website? Yes, I am. I’m currently in discussions with someone to build me one, so I’ve ed the N and thought about it and looked at templates and for quite a long time and I thought I’ll rather let someone who is totally familiar with walking around that area to make one for me. So I’m probably going to be the worst client because I’m an old grapho and an old typographer and I thought, God, and so there’s probably not going to be too many bounds for too many boundaries for free expression of creativity. I’ll be saying, can you do this and this and this and this and this and this? But anyway, look, eventually, I hope by the end of this calendar year to have some sort of website up.

Leigh Chalker (01:18:54):
Yeah, no, that’s cool, man. Yeah, the question it just got me last night, I said I didn’t even think to ask David where it was available. I mean, man, I thoroughly, man, I love them. There’s another one here. While we’re talking about this stuff, I do want to give this all a plug as well, and when you were talking about the old music magazines, like having comic books and articles and different bits and pieces in them would be I guess a similar feed of Clay, had that sort of vibe to it. I felt when you mentioned it before you, you’ve got narrative stuff with imagery like that, but then at the same time, here come your comic books and your cartooning and that sort of a vibe, but then you had these photorealistic type things in it as well. That was, man, that was a good read. And the other one I liked, which man has got some dark stuff in it was this blue smoke that got some short stories that when I read that I was like, woo, Nick may get that website up and running. Nick may I agree, Nick may cracking that whip.

David Bird (01:20:15):
I’m a big watcher of movies from the forties and fifties and also I’ve read Dashell Hamed and Raymond Chandler and a few others, and I like the visceral nature of some of the interactions in those stories. So one of my big favourite reads, and I read it when I came back from Sydney, I said, I had looked at a comic for over a year. I read seven months and I said to Greg, what’s new? And he said, oh, a whole bunch of stuff. He goes, there’s this and this and this and maybe this. You are like this, which was David Lapham Stray Bullets. If you’ve ever read any of those, just the best.

Leigh Chalker (01:21:04):
That’s a good one to get coming off a break. And then there you go.

David Bird (01:21:10):
And let me say with a lot of people who do both the writing and the art, the two categories, obviously you’ve got artists who write and you’ve got writers who draw

Voice Over (01:21:24):
And

David Bird (01:21:24):
He definitely falls into the latter. He’s a writer who draws.

(01:21:31)
There’s none of that. The artwork does not exist to indulge the ego of the artist. The art is there to tell the story in a disciplined economical way and more power to him. I would agree with that. I’ve betraying some of my prejudices there. So yeah, no, me, I love beautiful art artwork as much as the next person, but there’s so much sloppy, I’m far less forgiving for sloppy storytelling or just superficial writing. I’d rather buy something that’s well written that maybe the arts not very good because I see the germ of something really interesting happened starting to flower, right? There’s a lot of books out there with really nice artwork, but the story is relatively superficial and they just don’t my age. They just don’t engage me. I’d rather learn something which engages me, engages my emotions.

Leigh Chalker (01:22:41):
Yep, yep. I completely understand that. Is that coming from, because with being publishing, you’re also editing and stuff like that, that’s purely from you now as emotionally what you want to read or is there a hint of that, the David Bird publishing editor in that as well?

David Bird (01:23:06):
Yes to both in a sense, in terms of publishing, the first letter of publishing is you better be damn well happy with what you’re doing because nobody else may be say You better be happy with it. I know some people maybe will do a book or publish a book with one eye on the market where they think it’s going to go, and sometimes they’ll be right, but unless you really, I think, believe in what you’re writing and what you’re drawing, it comes from the heart or the guts. It won’t needs to have that sort of authority, that authenticity for a much abused word, but it’s still true. So I think if you play at something and it’s not really your forte, you can see it or feel it in the writing depending on the facility of the rider.

Leigh Chalker (01:24:09):
Yeah, yeah, no, I see that. Yeah, man, I agree with you with that. It’s like I don’t necessarily just as my perspective for me from me and my experiences limited in comparison to yours and stuff, I have more when I’m doing battle for bustle and these are my characters that I’ve created over my whole life, really. I feel very much at home with that, and I feel like that’s the best work I can give when I’m doing other people’s characters and things like that. Sometimes I’ve gone against myself. I’ve decided at one point, no, I don’t think I can give that the best, but then I decided, no, I’ll try. And nothing wrong with trying, but then I’ve looked back on the work and I’ve thought to myself, I should have just politely said no and kept in my lane, if you know what I mean. And that’s

David Bird (01:25:30):
When I was reading Battle for Bustle.

(01:25:33)
It was a very intense read and it really struck me because it was such an intense read. I thought, wow, I can’t really believe Lee has done this. He is such a laid back, affable sort of chat in Tuesday, chin Wags. And I thought, yeah, and I wouldn’t have picked you based on the little bit of exposure I’ve had that you would be able to write a book that intense and it’s got, notebook is perfect, but it’s got a certain something and I haven’t put my finger on it yet. I think it’s basically, it’s the passion you have for doing the project that I can feel when I read it. So that’s what I respond, I’m responding to. So which I like, that makes me overlook any potential flaws or shortcomings or anything like that because I can feel something coming through the work.

Leigh Chalker (01:26:39):
Thank you very much. That’s great. Thank you.

(01:26:45)
I certainly do give it a lot, man. Yeah, it’s much like a lot of creative endeavours that I’m sure you would’ve experienced and others have. It’s a lot of life has gone into that many experiences, both positive and negative, and I’ve had the ability to have that as my creative release. So at different times in my life, there’s lots of things that are probably intense with it, but then at other times in my life where I’ve gone back to look at it, there’s a little lightning and the emphasis is on how I feel. So in a strange way, it’s sort of been a diary of a lot of my life, but man, I’m very touched. Thank you so much. I’m very grateful for kind words.

David Bird (01:27:40):
Appreciate it. I’m not saying to Curry favour because that’s my feelings when I was reading it, so yeah,

Leigh Chalker (01:27:51):
Brilliant. That’s exactly how I hope you were going to feel when you read it, man. Like you said, battle for Bustle was for me, and I like you understand why people are do things for market and when they’re doing projects are hoping to sell whatever the figure is in their mind, or if they’re doing a Kickstarter, they want to get a certain figure in their mind. I mean, however you come to that conclusion is entirely the individual. But battle for bustle for me, and I could see it in the stuff that you are producing as well, and publishing is for the same reason. As you said before, it’s something that’s a compulsion, it’s something that I need to do. There’s times where, man, I can tell you I sit here and I wonder why as we were talking before, but I go away from it for a week or two and think to myself, I’ve had enough. And then I find myself coming back and realising there’s just no other thing for me to do. This is what I’ve got to do. So that’s my motivation, and if people get it and they enjoy it, then that is the greatest thing that compliment that anyone can give to me if one copy of it sells. And that’s still a wonderful compliment because just being able, each issue has been such a battle, man that it is, it is a journey each one. So I’m glad you could see that in the artwork and greatly appreciate it.

(01:29:49)
When you got stray bullets and stuff from Greg and he said, this is what you should have a look at, and you took to that, at what stage were you thinking then did that tweak onto another? You’d finished straight

David Bird (01:30:08):
Bullet. It’s roughly now. What time was it? What year is it? It’s 2024. Oh, yeah, no, back then I got to about 2000, no, it’s 1992. I’ve been back for a while. Greg was, I think putting the finishing touches might been 91. Greg was trying to put the finishing touches on Tattoo Man for Fano Graphics, and he goes, do you do the finished out on the cupboard for me? So I said, sure. So, and I was ran there for, I dunno, Greg’s place. He had a deadline to work to. We had a couple of days to do it and send it off, and that was bloody miserable Melbourne weather, cold and wet, not unlike the window we’ve just had. And I remember because he wanted to airbrush the blue in the background and he’d never used one. He goes, you’ve done? I said, yeah. I said, can you do that?

(01:31:19)
I said, yeah, can you cut all the masks? Yeah, alright, we won’t make it too. It was a very slight twilight blue and because of the way it was going to be reproduced, it was going to be wrapped around what was then called a drum scanner and read with a laser. So you couldn’t put it on inflexible board or even board with a bit of a light wobble. No way you could wrap it around a scanning drum. So we were going to do it on bromide paper because that remained flexible, but then if you put too much paint on Bromo paper, it’ll crack and fall off. So we mixed the paint was squash with we use, it was ox ga, which is allow it to bend and grip the paper and bend as well, as well as doing the line work was a clear acetate overlay.

(01:32:26)
And Greg was painting on the figures on the reverse of the bro, my paper. You could do a bro model, peel it away, and you could seal a faint grey outline and paint up to that edge. And then when you put the acetate overlay over the top, that would be the holding black lines between figures in the background and the foreground. Because I’m a finished artist as well. So because we understand the printing process, we can adapt to what the end point is going to be when it arrives at Photographics offices over in the States.

(01:33:05)
So we beed away for two or three days, bucketing down rain freezing in Greg Studio, and then it went off, but it came out, it seemed to come out months later. I don’t know why. Maybe I was just like, I was not aware of it so much aware of it, but that was fun. But getting onto, so I had all this stuff to look at while I was there and borrowed a few of it and there was some other French stuff he’d bought and I really liked some of the artwork and it was all sort of enough to sort of fire up the juices. So there was a book he was helping to do layouts on, a couple of young guys were doing, one was writing it, another one was drawing it. Jason Ow was the person who was drawing it from Greg’s layouts, and I think another chap called, I think it’s Rod Toley who had it was inking it. I could be wrong there. And they were stuck for four pages up the end. They hadn’t really worked out their page count very, very carefully. This is a book called Disciple. They were going to do it newsstand, I think the way to get around the printing costs. They were going to gang print it with two or three other books and split the printing costs between each of the people who were getting something gang printed.

(01:34:44)
And Greg and I had done a story just for fun called Red Dog, which is one of the stories in Blue Smoke.

Voice Over (01:34:51):
And

David Bird (01:34:51):
That was the four pages that it got bunged up the back.

Leigh Chalker (01:34:54):
Yeah, that had an orange, a

David Bird (01:35:00):
Brown sier and black cover.

Leigh Chalker (01:35:02):
Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a copy of that over there, man, in my little portal. So yeah, I remember that. Yeah. The funny thing is I very much like to one day see Dave DI’s portal. You can mention a comic book to him in passing if he’s on a live stream man. And suddenly he’ll just quite literally do this, Dave, there it is. I dunno what’s behind the computer man, but be like paradise, what he pulls out of there. But yeah, no, I remember that. Yeah, that’s wild, man. So based on

David Bird (01:35:36):
That story, and Greg was saying, why don’t you write some more? I thought, oh, okay. Yeah. So I wrote three more and then we were looked around who was around now to do any artwork. So there was three young guys, one we knew from Fox Comics who was a friend of Dylan’s and a couple of people that I hadn’t met before and they had their names passed down to Greg from someplace or another. And so we contacted them and they did the pencils and Greg did the inks and that would become blue smoke. So that feels like a thousand years ago now. That’s why the book’s only 2 75 back in the day that that’s what I was selling it for.

Leigh Chalker (01:36:30):
Yeah. And those artists were

David Bird (01:36:34):
Angelo, Malcolm, Richie and Michael Na.

Leigh Chalker (01:36:38):
Yeah. Now Michael Na, he’s a gentleman that I’ve met. He’s related to you in a particular way. He’s my brother-in-Law. There you go. And I think from the last time I was talking to him on a Friday night drink and draw about a month ago, and I said to him that you were popping on. And he was like, is it on the 17th? And I’m like, I’ll have to check my diary. It’s either the 17th or the 24th. And I remember him saying, can’t be the 24th. That’s my birthday. So yeah. So yes, Mike, if you’re watching, mate, it’s David’s here on the 17th, so 24th three.

David Bird (01:37:19):
Michael has been a stalwart of amongst the contributing artists to paper tableau over the years. So yeah, it’s been great.

Leigh Chalker (01:37:33):
Yeah, no, that’s cool, man. Another one of the things, mate, is that I love about chin wags and learning histories and the whole landscape of comic books is how connected everyone is in their own way. You know what I mean? Already. And there’s this person here that’s suddenly there and we’ve all happy birthday. Michael says Andrew law artwork, we’ve got a week early and he’s got two. But interconnected everyone is man. And how everyone, it really does give me the overall impression. The more people that I meet is there is something strangely compulsive about comic book creating man, there’s something in the blood mate doing. If you got it, you got it and you’re not going to stop for anything, man. It’s weird. I dunno what it is. I dunno whether it’s comfort or whether it’s just something that everyone’s got their creative juices that

David Bird (01:38:48):
I think it’s a compulsion because depending on whether you write or whether you draw or whether you’re a colorist or even a publisher, if you have some sort of creative impulse and you stifle it or deny it over time, it will make its presence felt right. And that’s why I think people are compelled to keep doing it, even though in the face of monumental monetary evidence to the contrary, you’re not very few people make a living from it. If you’re going to try to make a living for it, you’re not going to do it In Australia. You really have to go overseas and push and push. You’ve

Leigh Chalker (01:39:34):
Got to huff

David Bird (01:39:35):
And bad fortitude and single-mindedness to do that.

Leigh Chalker (01:39:44):
I agree with that. You are not going to make much money. But I think for me, I’ve been through that period to make where I didn’t draw for a long period of time, either I had other things going on and not a lot of it was creative. It was more self-destructive at the time. And I found that looking back on it in hindsight and with plenty of reflection over the last few years, I recognised that if I would’ve been more creative in those lulled periods, my self-destruction probably wouldn’t have been, I would’ve slow. I dunno if it would’ve stopped, if you know what I mean? It may have slowed, but there would’ve been some sort of balance, if you know what I’m saying. Yeah.

(01:40:41)
Add that release instead of not having it there. And I denied myself and I played a huge, I paid a price for that. And I think one of the things that I’ve learned over the last few years of sobriety is sometimes you’re not always motivated to do it, to sit down and do your eight or nine hours drawing and things like that, and they’re okay to have days like that, or a few days when you’re there, you get caught up and you’re bit flat, that’s okay, but man, I can’t go for too long without coming down in here and pulling out the page. You know what I mean? Even sometimes I don’t even know what I’m drawing, man. I just go stream of conscious man and just start drawing lines and then just, I feel better.

David Bird (01:41:29):
My rule of thumb since I came back to publishing was if I do only five minutes a day, if I turn the computer on, do a few odds and ends, move something, lay something out, and you may only have enough energy to do five minutes or you’ve got so many other commitments you’ve got to deal with. You can do it this little narrow window and then stop. But if at the end of the week there’s seven lots of five minutes, you’ve got something to show for it, then let those weeks tune into a month. Oh, you’ve got half a book done.

Leigh Chalker (01:42:11):
Yeah. Yeah. And you feel good because it’s like it’s, you feel good, you feel good because you’re doing something. Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I’ve got you. That’s why it’s like even if for the rest of my life, man, I made no money and I was just working, doing a job and doing my thing and stuff as long as I was drawing and I just had that release. For me personally, I can handle things if that also makes sense. But I mean, everyone goes through cycles. I mean, I don’t have children, so I don’t have the pram in the hallway. You know what I mean? Yeah. I march to the beat of my own drum essentially, man, if I feel like drawing I draw. If I don’t feel like drawing, I don’t draw. Most of the time I’m here doing it because that’s what I do.

(01:43:07)
So I’m grateful to have had the opportunity where I’ve been able to, I guess, reconstruct my life to a certain extent and compartmentalise my time so that I can release things. Hence, that’s possibly why battle for Bustle is intense. I’ve got to get that out so I can be happy here, I guess, and peaceful mate. So it all ties in. But I find too though, that what you’re saying, talking to Andrew Law last week and speaking to Dylan Nailer and varying other people, it comes by too, where they take their opportunities to create where they can. They were saying, they both said that they’ll take their kids to a sport when they’ve got 15 minutes to wait in the car, let them booked drawing desks out or the tablet and they’re finishing things, put it in the back, go home. So everyone works out their rhythm and watch’s right for them sometimes.

David Bird (01:44:09):
I’ve watched your interview with Dylan running up to tonight, two or three days ago, and when you asked him what he had coming down the pipeline and he answered a book of show bags and something else and something else has got on the book. One thing he didn’t mention, and he’s posted a few pages of this, he’s working on some sort of childhood memoir of growing up and family life and collecting comics and going through high school, and he’s posted three or four pages of it. I’m hanging out for that book. That is the one thing I’m really want to see. But he didn’t mention it and I thought, okay, so maybe he just wants to keep it on the boil for, I know a couple of times I’ve quizzed him and I, he goes, oh, I do a few pages here and there, but that’s all he says about it. So it’s obviously I continue to be a work in progress, but it looks great with some of the pages that he’s posted that I’ve seen.

Leigh Chalker (01:45:16):
Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Dude.

David Bird (01:45:21):
I first met him when he was a 17-year-old kid coming to a Fox Comics meeting in the middle eighties.

Leigh Chalker (01:45:28):
Yeah, see, he connected crazy. Hey, he got a lot of things on the burn, I guess, but maybe he’s just one of those dudes that just focuses on one project and just does a little bit of dabbling on the other,

David Bird (01:45:44):
Keeps his cards close to his chest, so he’s incredibly productive. Yeah.

Leigh Chalker (01:45:49):
Yeah, man, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping your cards close to your chest to a certain extent. Like God, I’ve been one too where I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that, and I don’t do any of to do something else. I just do chinwag, man. That’s what I do, and just draw away in the background and come when they come. But man, really, that’s cool. It’s like say, let’s go back to, so why Paper to Blow? What brought you, what was the first thing that you published that you decided after that lu there was the lull and you said, because Tired of Dreams is, what was that 2001

David Bird (01:46:41):
Blue Smokes? 1999 or 1998. That was the first thing. Then there was

Leigh Chalker (01:46:49):
99. Yep.

David Bird (01:46:51):
Yeah. Then there was Tired of Dreams, which I think is 2000. Then there was truly Confused, let me just grab a copy. Yeah, man. Yeah. Which was this, which was Hodgson’s then strip called True Confusions from the Fox. So there was 40 pages of that because if you enjoyed Last Chance Showcase, you’ll enjoy that. So

Leigh Chalker (01:47:25):
Yeah.

David Bird (01:47:26):
Now when I went to reprint, you’re

Leigh Chalker (01:47:28):
Going to cost me a

David Bird (01:47:29):
Fortune throwing your books up, mate. When I had to reprint it, we added 20 extra pages that weren’t in the first one because Hodson got a few solo books out of the deal with Fanno Graphics after the anthology folded. So he got Dave Ho’s walking wounded, which was only one issue had he started on the second one, but it got cancelled after one issue. So there was also Walking Window was the special true confusions and because he’d written Tattoo Man with Greg. So that was the third book of his, but there was the second issue of True Confusions that he was going to do. Well, he had all this artwork, but it never went anywhere and number one’s never been reprinted, but it’ll be reprinted next year. Don’t worry.

(01:48:38)
So we found that the 20 pages, he finished those and we put ’em at the back. They sort of pick up almost where the first 40 leave off. So now it’s a 60 page book. But that was fun getting both of those back in the print. And then what did we do? I did a little sample called Assorted hoo-Ha. Now someone, correct me if I’m wrong here, I’m just an old bugger hoo-ha is a synonym for rubbish or trash or something of no consequence. I’ve heard it’s got another meaning, but this is a PG show, but we won’t talk about its potential other meaning. I just thought when someone told me, I know it doesn’t. But anyway, so that’s what means it sort of sort of der or sort triviality.

(01:49:36)
And that’s just had some stories by Dave and one by Ian Eddie that Dave had written that had only been printed once before for 30 copies and no one had ever seen it. And because I was doing a big collection of Ian’s Lost Artwork, which was, like I said, the third book of unauthorised biographies was cancelled, and there’s two stories to why it was cancelled a, that the black and white market was contracting and it photographing decided to finally cut their losses and cut ties with Fox comics because that was the last book they were doing. And also they were all biographies of dead film stars, right? Or people culture figures.

(01:50:28)
The story I heard from Greg, and I presume this came from Ian, was FanGraphs did their due diligence on the publication and they ran it by the estate of Bruce Lee, and they said, if you publish that, we’ll sue you. So that was another reason to drop the title. Now, since we’ve done the collection, I’ve quizzed other people about this and they said, have you heard this story? I am sure Greg told me this story way back in the early nineties, and a couple of people sort of like, yeah, I think Dave Vika, who was the publisher was saying, I don’t remember that story. Gruff just said they couldn’t afford it anymore. So anyway, it’s a nice story. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know. It could be true probably. I’m not sure whether you are aware of it, but when Ian passed at 60, he laid down on the floor of his flat and watched tv.

(01:51:37)
He’s watching his Maxwell Smart DVDs, went to sleep, never woke up when his brothers were cleaning out his flat, and they found eight issues worth of artwork that was never published for his unauthorised biography series was a stack this high of art boards. And they said, and because Ian had fallen out of love with comics the last few years of his life, all his solo work, and there was an enormous inventory of his own work, he destroyed it. Anything. He collaborated with other people. He gave those people that artwork, but all his solo stuff, he destroyed it, burned it or destroyed it. I don’t know how he got rid of it, but it’s gone. It only exists now in whatever publications that it came out in. But all this stuff to do with this, the last book he did that was sitting there in a pile at the back of his wardrobe and his brother says, do you want this? And I was just, I didn’t even know it existed. So I spoke to a couple, I spoke to Lazarus, who was his main collaborator for Fox on. I said, were you aware of all this was sitting there? And he goes, no. And Dave Ika didn’t know about it, so it was just was like a lost treasure. And I thought to myself, the reason I thought, God, it’s be so wrong not to collect this.

(01:53:13)
And his parents in their, well, let’s just say I’d assume they’re still alive, but they’re in their middle nineties. They didn’t have anything when they ended past, they didn’t have any artwork of his or any of his comics or because he destroyed him, all of his own work got disenchanted with it. And which was a shame because we all loved him because he was such a talented guy and we all liked his work, but what can you do? So I decided it was really in a sense for his folks, but also I knew a lot of the other foster con contributors. I said, well, this is your last chance to get some van’s work. I’m only going to print enough to cover all the old Fox contributors and any other interested parties that have put their hand up for one. I’ve got about 14 left out of about 65 also, but his brothers and his parents obviously got a few half a dozen copies or so. So they had something, his parents had something of his before they got too much older and passed away themselves. I’m given the benefit of doubt. So they’re still there, but they’re in a nursing home, so

Voice Over (01:54:38):
Yeah. Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (01:54:41):
I was just staggered. That would’ve been, while eternally sad, that would’ve been an amazing thing to see in terms of finding out about him. But then just to have this secret stash of these pieces of work that he’d done.

David Bird (01:55:06):
I’m amazed to this day, apart from, because I’ve made up, Phil and I made up a long list about for Fox Comics and contributors to get in contact. Do you want one of these? Well, I hammered down a print run and pretty much most people said, yeah, they wanted one. But once I started selling it, the people popped up out of woodwork that I’d never seen or heard from before. They’re only looking at the Facebook page for the comics group. And I thought, I want one of those. I want one of those

(01:55:41)
Who’s this guy? There’s a chat from Rhode Island, I think Providence, Rhode Island in the States, and he was a collector of Ian Eddie stuff. I thought, how can you even collect all those little minis and stuff like that from over the air? How are you getting in contact with them? Man, he wanted one, and there’s two or three other people just popped up out of the blue that I’d never heard of, and they said, no, I knew Ian. I went into his shop. I’ll have one. There you go. It’s like throwing out a message in a bottle. You dunno where it’s going to end up.

Leigh Chalker (01:56:18):
Yeah. Oh man. That’s the whole thing. That whole story is beautiful because it’s a bittersweet to a certain extent, isn’t it? Because he’s passed away disenchanted. He’s, I guess fallen out of love with his artwork, yet left this treasure and you’ve thank goodness taken yourself, mate. Yeah, yeah. And you’ve taken upon yourself to produce this work for his family and friends because of your respect for your mate, and then suddenly out of nowhere, you know what I mean? You’ve got people from across the other side of the world and people that aren’t familiar. I want that. I want this, I want that.

David Bird (01:57:03):
I love that because you’re amazed at how bits of information can stretch through the internet and sort of like people who ask you stuff that, where’s this person from? How do they know? Where do they know me from? Well, they don’t. They just want a copy of that look. That’s good. That’s the fun of it. That’s what really makes it worthwhile for me.

Leigh Chalker (01:57:25):
Yeah, no, that’s cool, man. That’s a really cool story. I’m really happy you’re putting all these things together because like I said to you earlier, for me, I wouldn’t be able to track down any of the original Fox comics and things like that meant the

David Bird (01:57:44):
Reason why they’re so hard to get is because we used to print to pre-sold orders, so we would, based on what was the sell through of the previous issue, we would do that and a few more. And as we slowly increased it, the margin of overs remained the same. Well, we just increased the print run, but that’s why there’s not a big backlog of back inventory, back issues. We were doing that on a shoestring, so we weren’t going to blow wads of dough.

Leigh Chalker (01:58:18):
Yeah. Oh, you wouldn’t want, yeah. 20 cartons of comics sitting there forever in a day. I totally get that. We were saying before just that advantage of modern printing against the earlier versions of printing, but man, that’s like, I love hearing these stories too, man, because man, just to me, just the sheer difficulty of putting it together and doing it and what you’ve described that three days where you and Greg were like shacked up in his little studio in the freezing Melbourne winter doing all the cuts and working out colour things, and now modern technology, they go, oh, you want that colour? Tick, click, click, click. Do all that with a few things. See you later. It’s out. Then there’s so many lost arts man, and I don’t know whether it’s, I guess

David Bird (01:59:26):
When I was doing my finished art training, I was the last generation that was taught how to do the old style analogue, posting up a brain, I drawing very thin lines with the repeated graph, cutting things with sculptor blade, doing it overlays on artwork and things like that. Because within two or three years, it might be about four, three years of me getting out in the industry, computers were arriving in force and layout programmes would become sophisticated enough that once I remember Fairfax adopted InDesign for the age and the Sydney Morning Herald, right? Once big industry is adopting those, that’s it. Boom. It is here. The old ways are out. And I knew people who were, there’s a whole industry of people who were film combiners and do etches and plate makers and finished artists that if you didn’t retrain, you’re gone. So I retrained because I’d only been in it for a few years, so there was no way I was walking away from it. So

Leigh Chalker (02:00:49):
That’s fair enough too. I suppose there’s always advances in technology, isn’t there? I mean, God, we’re looking down the barrel of the whole AI revolution at the moment, things happening there and industries under fire and everyone concerning themselves with futures and jobs and things like that too. While I definitely don’t agree with ai, it’s just another fundamental change in the industrial landscape, I guess to an extent. You were just discussing with traditional printing and then computers come in and you don’t want to see anything change really. But yeah, that AI stuff, man, that’s wild. I,

David Bird (02:01:53):
I’ve got a gut feeling. I was having a chat to a couple of other people who are artists and at the moment, like industry, I suspect will attempt to sweep the cost of artists away by using AI because they just see it as a commodity. They don’t respect necessarily the integrity of a piece of original art and the fact that someone’s imagination has spawned it or if not their imagination, their facility with a particular medium, they’ll just see it as a dollar saving exercise. But I suspect after the initial rush of all of that, people will start to hunger for evidence of a human hand at work and a human mind behind that hand. It’s like when they said CDs came along, they said, that’s the end of vinyl. Vinyl will disappear. Well, vinyl hasn’t really disappeared, right?

(02:02:52)
Because people wanted to hear, and God knows it’s expensive enough now, I wouldn’t be buying, but people wanted to hear the warmth of tone that comes with vinyl as opposed to the perfect sound off a cd. It may not have that warmth like the vinyl did. So yeah, I think it’s like if you buy mass produced white bread from the supermarket, which has a particular texture and flavour, or you want a nicely baked loaf of bread from the local bakery that does their own and has their own formula, and it’s got completely different shape, texture and flavour, almost all better than the massive manufacturing one. And I suspect that’s where art is going to go. People will still want it, but I know it’s sort of people wanting to career as an art at the moment. That’s right down on the list of possible careers. But I think what no one’s really said after three years lockdown and covid, what were people doing? They were looking at art in one form or another, whether that’s movies, books and television, whatever. It’s all an expression of art, and so don’t knock it because other people would’ve gone up the wall across the ceiling and down the other side without it while they were locked down.

Leigh Chalker (02:04:19):
Yeah, yeah, they sure have. I think that’s really nice analogy actually how you put it there, that it is essentially going and getting your home brand white loaf or having a look at something that tastes far better

David Bird (02:04:39):
Waiting game. How long will it take for that to happen? It may be five years or so.

Leigh Chalker (02:04:43):
Man, it is a waiting game and it’s dreadful to think that it’s got here to it. I’m dead against it, man. I hate the fact I have spoken about it before. In no way am I advocating for it. It makes me sick, to be honest with you people, Nick and other people’s stuff, and just thinking they can do whatever they want to do with other people. The sad part is for me is it just feels like a product of the Times man, where that’s what people seem to be doing in life and in general anyway. They just take what they want. There’s no like recompense, they don’t care. It’s mine. It’s just a whole narcissistic mindset. And I know you get your little corporate mongers up there that are trying to save their dollars and cents and shit to make a couple of bucks. But I mean, mate, what it boils down to is you take art or you take human self-expression from a society.

(02:06:04)
There’s no culture, and I don’t know of any evidence of a tribe or social gathering or a nation that hasn’t gone real well without a culture, man. It’s just doing all this stuff. It really does. And I, I don’t get into it with people. I’m not into online stuff, but I read it and I’m just like, really? You’re trying to argue a point. It’s like, and not everyone’s good at everything. And there’s a lot of people out there like yourself, like me, other people I know, writers, man, other artists. I mean, people have put their whole lives man into getting to where they’ve gotten some better than others. It doesn’t matter. But the time, the effort, their voice, what they’ve gone through in life, man to put onto these pages, and then you’ve got some dick just comes in and in two minutes I should be able to do that. Why don’t I have a right to be like, man, do the work, dude, don’t cheat, don’t deal. But it really does make me sick. But anyway, that’s just where I’m at on it. I don’t even, there’s people around that advocate it. And that’s one of the things for me with,

David Bird (02:07:50):
I suspect we’re going to get deluge by it, and it’s just a matter of time to let that big wave die down and go back out and see what is left, what has changed or do people get, human beings have notoriously short attention spans and then it’ll no longer be the flavour of the month. People will want something else.

Voice Over (02:08:15):
And

David Bird (02:08:16):
That’s what I suspect in the medium to long-term, what will happen because human beings get bored.

Leigh Chalker (02:08:24):
Yeah, yeah, they do, man. And it is funny, as you said too during Covid, like everyone went for the creative arts, but the minute that society starts flowing again and everyone’s in their 70 hour weeks and losing sight of themselves, they all want that quick fix and they never finished that thing they started, but that’s what it is. But I just think, man, if you’ve got the compulsion and you want to learn, and being creative is a beautiful thing, man, it’s so unique to each individual. I mean, just look in the medium that we both love. It’s like we both share a love for it. But for me, I come from it from a science fiction perspective where you love it, and as you said earlier, you have it from a noir sort of

David Bird (02:09:19):
It’s slice of life stories. And if I had to go back and think of what I was reading back in the eighties, it was like Rum and Harvey P Car, and there was Eddie Campbell’s stuff from when he was living in England there. What else was there? There’s a whole bunch of others. I wasn’t a massive fan of Love and Rockets, but I did occasionally read them. But again, again, it’s all part of the same sort of grist for the same mill, and I’m sure I’m missing, I’m somebody. And there’s also, I actually feel like with biographical stuff or auto buyer stuff, it doesn’t even have to be pure autobiographical. It can be a work of fiction where you may have pillaged your own experiences in order to create something on the page. It may not actually be a record of some sort of event. It could be just hopefully the distillation of some event or how you felt about it or what truth, however subjective you may have learned about it, and boil that down into a little story.

Leigh Chalker (02:10:48):
Yeah. Yeah, man, I have a great appreciation for that sort of work too, where people have taken a particular genre, but you can tell that that’s them getting themselves out, as you said, distilling it into a particular frame of work or a genre, I guess. Because some people, I guess too, to a certain extent, don’t have the courage in themselves to tell from put them in the screen. You know what I mean? And that’s cool. You still get it across. I mean, these are the nuances, man, that the little pirate creators that we were talking about early. You know what I mean? We’ll never understand, man, is that whole, these little sense and sensibilities that everyone puts into their work, mate, the doubts and the positives, and even I’ve spoken to him about you this evening, but even Greg Gates, as much as I admire tired of Dreams, the artwork there, and it blew my mind like 20 or 30 years after he did it, I’m sure that at that stage, that man doing some of those pages would’ve had doubts about himself doing some of those lines and would’ve had those fears will

David Bird (02:12:28):
Indeed. I can say that you are quite correct in that assumption,

Leigh Chalker (02:12:35):
And you’re not going to get that from someone that types in a few words and brings up an image.

David Bird (02:12:46):
One of the things with say action stories, whether you are watching a movie or reading a book or reading a graphic story in their haste to get from point A to point B to point C and the finish, I often don’t take the time to explore moments often where the real drama is, which is why I sort of write little vignettes. So that’s really four pages is really just a vignette, just a moment. But that moment can be really interesting if you take the time to examine it. So that’s why Blue Smoke and Feet of Clay sort of exist because they’re only really just a collection of short moments. Really.

Leigh Chalker (02:13:30):
Yeah, but they’re powerful, man. It’s also a reflection of the beauty of the comics medium too, because it’s like you don’t have to make, I don’t know, a 500 page story if you don’t want to. I mean, the story in particular that really got me, and this was this Dead Stop by you and Malcolm and Incs Greg Gates with assistance from Dylan Nailer, and I don’t want to spoil it for people, but

David Bird (02:14:13):
That was a true story, a friend from high school. All of that story is essentially real,

Leigh Chalker (02:14:21):
Man. I picked that up because it came from a perspective of I thought when I read those four pages, that couldn’t have come from anything but a real moment with someone because its something already recognised in it,

David Bird (02:14:48):
If I really would say to do that story now I have all the quotes in those caption boxes in different types of typeface because they’re meant to be lots of different people’s voices, not just the one voice of talking about it. So I’m not sure whether that came across there, but yeah, so that was just due to limitations of time and effort. So it was just hand lettered instead of type set. Didn’t have the resources back then to do that.

Leigh Chalker (02:15:28):
Man, that’s such nice lettering too, the hand lettering. It’s really nice. Yeah, Greg’s done well there, but that was a powerful, really powerful resonated for me. Four page story men, great writing, great artwork, really cool. I mean, red Dog is another one completely. And

David Bird (02:15:53):
That’s the work of fiction, because none of that has actually happened that I’ve experienced. But friend who was living with for a while, living with a woman with two children from previous marriage, when I was over visiting him, the woman’s ex-husband turned up because he wanted to see his kids, and my mate said there was a bit of tension, shall we say. And my friend said to me, oh, thank God you are here. Who knows what would’ve happened if you weren’t here? And that was the springboard for that idea. What if I wasn’t there?

Leigh Chalker (02:16:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, man. Yeah. Sorry to the audience there. I’m just getting caught up. I’ve been like,

David Bird (02:16:47):
Blue Smoke’s, been out there for many years. I think it’s originally published. We did 300 copies and I’ve got about 80 left, so there’s 220 copies out there floating around Australia one place or another over the last 25 years. So, oh man.

Leigh Chalker (02:17:10):
I just want to try and help get people out there and recognise that you’ve got so much stuff, man. There’s publishers that do a lot of publishing, but like I said to you earlier, what caught me off guard, there’s a huge amount of variety in this work in your publishing house that I think anyone would find something that they would like, mate. The thing, the story with Dream of Tides I was talking about last night is there so many elements of that mysticism and mystery to it, but the darkness. But there’s also that forties, fifties sort of, I guess those black and white monster movie type vibe, HB love crafting vibes to it. So there’s that. But then there’s your short and WA stories, and then there is your slice of lifes that you’ve got that are funny, man. Some of those things that Dave was doing in that book were funny. I was chuckling, and that was like after putting one down, going back to this book and thinking, what a sad man. That story’s heartbreaking. And then finding myself like Christine away and that’s

David Bird (02:18:26):
Awesome. That’s one of Dave’s great strengths. He can write a really poignant sort of touching story, and the next one can be having you laughing out loud, usually at his own misfortune, but because which he doesn’t hold back from sharing.

Leigh Chalker (02:18:42):
Yeah, yeah. But man, that’s what I mean is the stories that you wrote in Blue Smoke affecting, as I said, that dead stop now you tell me it was a true story. I felt like it was very real when I read it, and one of my thoughts was that’s got to be based on a true story. It also, I’ve lost friends over the years and things. That’s the beauty of comics man, and the medium in itself is that, as we’ve talked about, you can start off enjoying superheroes and stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, that we’ve all done that and you both, there’s heaps of people done that because what it was available, but then as you go into the depths and you start pushing through the shelves and stuff, you start finding some voices, man, and some people that have got some shit to say that sometimes it seems that people don’t want to go there because they don’t want to go into, I think for me, I think David Lynch says it with his quote when they were talking about his childhood, where he was like, he grew up in Missoula, Montana, and everything was white picket fences and green grass and the rose bushes and everything was perfect, but then when you went into the grass and the ants and they were eating each other and as you went under the house and all that sort of stuff, there’s just all these different varieties of life and stories almost the opening, which is pretty much it.

(02:20:28)
And I greatly admire that man, that sort of storytelling. It’s very, very gutsy. And I think telling true stories and stuff and slice of life stuff is very ballsy men, because they’ve affected me with how much courage it takes for people to put that stuff out there as well. So yeah, I think that’s pretty awesome, man.

David Bird (02:20:50):
I was going to say, you haven’t reflected because on the fact that there’s four pro stories with illustrations now, strictly speaking, they’re not comments.

Leigh Chalker (02:20:59):
This is true. Yes.

David Bird (02:21:00):
And I was almost going to say something like collaboration is almost a younger man’s game these days. I find I’ve got enough energy to write the story down and hopefully cut and polish it into something, but haven’t written probably a comic script for a while now, and it’s just having the energy to sort of, what’s the word? Not explain the stories how much, but sort of to try to communicate the moments you want to explore with the artist. And they may have a completely different take, which is fine,

(02:21:51)
But as I’ve got older, I want to control the pacing and the speed of the story and what’s being observed myself. That’s why I’ve written it in prose. But look, I promise I’ll do a few more comic scripts. I’ve got, once I do the Finnish Graham’s current book, there’ll be three books next year and three books the year after. So I’ve got roughly a plan. I haven’t, just the notion, it all depends how much Hodson can done now, because he’s 75 now because I’m 65, but he’s 75, so what he can actually get done in the next five years or so, life will take its own courses. Sure.

Voice Over (02:22:40):
So

David Bird (02:22:42):
He’ll hopefully get that. He’s working on the book three of Anyhow Town, but I know he’s got plans for another couple of collections of stories after that. I think he’s written one, but he hasn’t, and he’s done notes for the other. So hopefully you will get that down on paper.

Leigh Chalker (02:23:06):
Well man, hopefully man, you’re going to cost me a fortune. Hey, it’s all those books around. It’s like, no, I’m cool man. I’m hooked. I like it all. It’s really lovely man. It’s a really broad landscape of what you’ve created and I highly recommend anyone to track these down. As David said tonight you can reach him on Facebook via messenger and stuff like that and it’s just, man, it’s just lovely to see such a wide variety of, the other beautiful thing is David, it’s like a group of blokes that met when you were younger with a passion and it all brought you together and you’re still here even though you had your time apart doing life. But you’ve all come back and you’ve all, whether you’re up, whether old mate’s up in the Adelaide Hills and he’s half retired and he’s just chilling out or whether stories are come, people are still working. It’s just, that’s the compulsive nature.

David Bird (02:24:15):
If you ask me, will I still be doing this in five years time? I’ll say, yeah, probably. Will I be doing it in 10 years time? I dunno. So I am part of that generation. We are the long timers. There’s fewer days in front than there are behind, so

Leigh Chalker (02:24:34):
Yeah.

(02:24:35)
Yeah, no, I hope you keep doing it man. Yeah, I think you’re doing really well with doing everything. Great writing, great little publishing wing man and publishing house you got and bringing back Australian classics, which as I said earlier this evening, if I hadn’t have had a copy of Tired of Dreams, man, I wouldn’t have discovered that story. And like I said on the review show last night, the stuff I like, I draw on this table and on that desk that’s there and the stuff that I like and you’re having those little moments where I should look at something, I need to get a little spark here. Tired of Dreams is on this table now mate. And isn.

David Bird (02:25:26):
Now can I make an unscheduled pit stop? I’ll be

Leigh Chalker (02:25:30):
Two minutes. Yeah man. Sure we can do that. Sorry to keep your hang up. Hey, that’s all right mate. I’ll Shane, bring up that single screen man. So if you’re there bud, or if there’s any comments that are out there, I can answer that. Well, Dave has a brief moment to himself. Shani the one book in me, people will get no satisfaction from the cheating and move on the one book in me people. That’s exactly right. AI makes my brain vomit, Andrew Law. There you go. I’m glad to see there’s other people naughties. I’m hoping AI makes paper stuff more valuable. You never know. That might be what happens in the end, Andrew. Yeah, agree. Digital was going to destroy books but it didn’t happen. Yes, it’s the industrial processes of everything and absence resonating with a piece of art is always a beautiful thing.

(02:26:26)
Absolutely man. That’s why we do it and that’s why we appreciate it and that’s why we just chug along and do what we do. K, JB evening fellas and fellow chin, thanks for coming back, KJB, it’s nice to see you again and nice to see you. Lovely comments mate. Thank you for always supporting Jeffrey. I did my training through bromide machines too. There you go. You had been sitting there like listening to David talk, like bringing back old memories, Jeffrey. So funny. It’s how everything goes. Mr. Shalin a great trip down memory lane looks to the reprint future. Brilliant stuff. Thank you for always watching and supporting the show, Mr. C and everyone that said those comments, just while you’re back, we just had a couple of comments about AI and people agreeing and stuff like that and Mr. Chaloner just sent a message in there mate, just saying brilliant stuff on thank you reprints and the publishing and all that sort of stuff and good walk down memory lane. So it’s always nice to hear from everyone out there.

(02:27:40)
It’s funny, hey, when I do this and it’s like I recognise people’s names now that give comments and stuff. It’s funny, it’s really very nice of people that watch the show and support comics and chinwag and stuff, man. And support David too, David. So man, in your extensive experience, man, for anyone out there that catches us now or in the future or anything, what are some of your words of wisdom out there for anyone that wants to get in the comic books, what you’ve learned along the way, what would you sit here and talk to me if I asked you? Okay,

David Bird (02:28:29):
Well if someone wants to put out a fairly sophisticated looking comic book, now you can do that with digital output. And when I say relatively inexpensively, say if you are writing, drawing and inking it yourself and if you lay it out on InDesign and do PDFs and you can liaise with a printer and even if you have a chat to Baden Kergan who does Jeffrey’s printing, he is more than helpful in helping you realise a finished product from artwork. So you can do that all relatively inexpensively. It doesn’t have to break the bank. You can do as good a looking a book as what the majors put out if that’s what you want to do.

(02:29:28)
On the other hand, there is a whole section of the Australian comic scene which is more slanted to fine art practise and poetry and very individual femoral sort of material. And you’ll see that at the festival of the photocopier, which is huge, absolutely enormous. And you’ll have the whole gamut of little two colour folded and hand stapled little minis, just like 12 pages or something up to someone’s done a full 46 page colour graphic novel and it’s got the whole works on it. It might have very individual sort of art style or subject matter and you’ve got every shade of everything else in between the two.

(02:30:31)
It all depends what you want to get out of it. If you want to do books like Melbourne and DC you can, I’m not sure whether people in doing that, it’s because they want to work at Marvel and DC but they haven’t decided to go over there and try or to get into that scene or whether they just want to do that sort of stuff at home. Would do whatever makes you feel happy? Do what? That satisfies your passion. I know that I’m trying not to sound cliche here, but it’s essentially true. Do it because it has meaning for you. Don’t worry about what the next person will think about it as long as you are proud of the effort. Mean I can sit back at 60 and say 65 now because I’m 65. That’s what I get out of it. I don’t need to have the next person like it because I like it and I’m doing it in such small quantities that basically a few dozen people are seeing it and that’s enough for me. Alright? And if I sell through, I’ll just print a few more off and I haven’t broken the bank or anything like that. But yeah, you can get a very sophisticated result for very little outlay. It all depends how dedicated you are and

(02:31:50)
There’s people, there’s stuff out there that you just would not believe from. I know there’s a huge gamut of stuff being put together just from the people you’ve interviewed and who are visible in the scene, but there’s still so much more out there. So yeah, look, enjoy yourself doing it right? That’s become the most important thing for me. And if there’s a small group of people that read it and enjoy it, well that’s a bonus.

Leigh Chalker (02:32:31):
Oh yeah, I think that’s pretty cool words, man. Like you got to start, do it for yourself to begin with.

David Bird (02:32:38):
I don’t dream of glory anymore. Maybe when the fox was really hitting its stride and I thought we’ve got as big as we can get, we’re going to break into a bigger audience and it never quite happened. So that was a bit of a tough pill to swallow at the time. But look,

Leigh Chalker (02:32:55):
Yeah, but you know what I was talking, as I said, I was on a review show last night, ed Kiley, same age fellow as me that does comic books and he’s done ’em since Drawn, since he was the young fella, knew exactly who Fox comics were and exactly what it had done at that particular point in time for the Melbourne comics scene and the Australian comics scene. I’m aware there’s other people I know that are very well aware of it, so much like your friend that got despondent about things, you made your mark because there’s other people out there that are very well aware of the effort and the,

David Bird (02:33:40):
Because it seems so long ago now that we’re almost like we’re well and truly slipping into the past. So there’s been a couple of generations of people have come along who are doing comics and thought, well, we had our moment in the sun and if no one’s really aware of it now, well that’s okay. Yeah, no, well

Leigh Chalker (02:33:57):
Great. I’m trying to make people aware of it that I’m aware of it. I want people to buy your books mate, and thank you touch base with this stuff because it’s beautiful stuff and I’m going to be getting, I’ll be in contact with you soon to get more of these. I’ll have to go on a bloody payment plan with you, David, the way it’s going. If pumping out those books, I’ll be paying you off for 12 months, mate, with that magic. But yeah, no, really, really cool man to have met you tonight. I know several people that I know have spoken very highly of what you’ve done and what you’re doing.

(02:34:44)
The other thing is too, with Chin wags and stuff, but anyone watching, and I’ve never really said it before, I always have at the start of the show, we always have a bit of an intro and a bit of a this and that, some of you have seen it, but Chinwag started as me just getting to self-indulgent, I guess be in front of a camera and talk to people that I wanted to meet. And then over time I realised that I was falling deeply in love with everyone’s stories and the stories and the history with Australian comics, both new and old. And through doing so many of them and having little breaks in between to re-identify and recalibrate, I and Shane wanted to identify Chinwag as we realised that to a certain extent we both had the great honour of digitally recording a library of people in the Australian comic book community per se, now in the moment, but also capturing the stories of their history and their past and their stories, which are the main reasons which are the most important stories of all.

(02:36:08)
And David, I’m really, really grateful that you were part of the Chinwag family tonight, man. It’s really, really cool. The other thing I do want to say is hopefully with time and patience and reaching out to more and more people, chinwag and Comex will be able to get out to the smaller niches of people as you were describing and be able to invite those people on the show as well. Because to me, like you were saying, I mean I started in comic books and stuff, but I’m well aware of the pros and all the things that are tied in together and creativity in general, man. And I’d very much like to push out into those areas and bring those creators on too so they can share their stories as well. Because you never know what someone’s got to say, you never know what they can say or teach someone out there.

(02:37:07)
And part of the journey is learning man, and that’s what it’s all about, man. So that’s the mission for me and Ciz moving forward with Chinwag and has been for a long while now. And yeah, it’s a great privilege man to meet you and all the other people as we wind down the show, Mr. Bird is there. Oh, Rick Smith, Mike and here saying hi. Working with Dave, Dylan and Greg in the early days of the nineties was an invaluable comic book education. Cheers to all Mike Mason, if you missed it earlier, happy birthday for next Tuesday. And Andrew Law also said happy birthday too. So you’ve got two mate. So there you go. Hadn’t forgotten and thanks for tuning in mate. As we wind down the show and you’ve said for people to keep going and not give up and do it for yourself and things like that, one more and we know that it’s a compulsion for you, then we know that you had to do it because once you got that power back to do it all again, you started feeling good and life just felt like you’re right back in there. Connections with your mates and stuff like that from a long past man, which helps and all beautiful thing, man, like comic books is how it is and everything’s connected and it’s lovely again for all the people at home. David, where can they get you? What books are available? Do they just talk to you if they message you on Facebook about what they’re interested

David Bird (02:38:47):
In? You can message me on Facebook if you trawl through a couple of Facebook pages, comic pages I’m a member of, you’ll find most things that are available mentioned or in some ways if you do a search for my entries or someone else’s, my entries mainly, you’ll see most covers of things. Oh no, I won’t drag out anymore, but, or just pm me and ask for a list and I’ll,

Leigh Chalker (02:39:21):
Oh David, you’re been pleasure to have on tonight. Chuck up a couple of covers just to entice some people’s appetites and show ’em what you got out there. You never know, man. You’re alright man. Take your time.

David Bird (02:39:39):
They’re all too, there’s a book by Hodson and one of his friends who wrote it called The Many Moods of Dr. Stupid

(02:39:53)
Has to be Read to be Believed. It was originally a collection of unconnected stories, but I did find a thread, Hodson sent ’em all over to me when he finished. He says they’d been done over a period of nine years and he said, how funny is the damn thing? I says, there’s jocks to be had. So I put ’em in some sort of order and yeah, it’s had a life of its own, it’s had more compliments than I thought it would get, but so there’s one that was the INE collection that’s unseen and uninvestigated. So it was eight issues that he’d originally done and which only two only ever saw print. So that’s all in black and white, except for the exception of a couple of colour pages showing the original covers.

(02:40:49)
That’s probably the most expensive one. That’s about $30, that’s about 220 pages. So that’s a job, that’s a Jeffrey’s printing job. Now, going back to 2007, before I suspended activity for a few years, this was the bit of bachelor book. There was a book that come out, it was a comic book that’d come out called The Girls’ Guide to Guy Stuff. And I said, oh, fair enough. But I felt that I could do an answer to it and it’s really just an anthology. There’s stories by Dave Hudson and Brendan Boyd and myself and a few other people. So I suppose it’s, how would I call it? Stories about men navigating that Tempestuous sea called relationships. You can take it from there. So yeah, I don’t retrieve from anything that’s in the book.

Leigh Chalker (02:42:11):
Yeah, if I was to write a book like that, it’d be a horror novel.

David Bird (02:42:18):
I reckon if I attempted to do a book like this now, I suspect the woke police would come after me with burning torches. Not that there’s anything particularly contentious in there, but it’s just the sign of the times.

Leigh Chalker (02:42:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, that’s cool man. Alright, so everyone Facebook, David Bird and the Australian pre-com decimals or pre 2010, stuff like that, you can track you down.

David Bird (02:42:53):
It’s Daniel Best page.

Leigh Chalker (02:42:55):
Yeah, Daniel Best Reach out to Daniel Best even he knows what’s going on.

David Bird (02:43:00):
He has been a solid supporter of Paper Tablo since I revived the label back in 2020. So

Leigh Chalker (02:43:08):
Yeah, man, Daniel Best is a champion mate. It’s no dramas with that man. I’m friends with him. Absolutely. He’s a fellow Chin Wagoner as well, mate. Yeah, he’s part of the family too, so yeah. Yeah, you found out all about Paper Tableau and you found out about David Bird, his involvement in everything and still bringing forward classic Australian comic books again that I recommend. Yeah, man, David, I’ve highly enjoyed this evening. Thank you so much again. I’m very

David Bird (02:43:45):
Great as thank you.

Leigh Chalker (02:43:47):
My pleasure, man. And I always feel I am, I’m very grateful that I get to do Chinwag Man and meet people that I greatly admire and stuff every week. So thank you and welcome to the Chinwag family man. And yeah, there’s anything I can help you with or in the future, just give me a buzz, you know where to find me. Alright, and alright, so thank you to everyone for out there watching in the past, present, and future and all the three, four and five Ds and whatever it is, and Timespace and Interface. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and share, comment on all the socials. I’m hoping this evening, I haven’t heard word yet, but I am hoping that we got to 500 subscribers. It would be absolutely wonderful if we did this evening. So that’s a goal. So hopefully we got there. Maybe someone can tell me before the end of this show and leave me hanging.

(02:44:51)
Thank you, Jeffrey. Always pleasure to have you. There you go. David, Nick has already sent you a message, mate, so Nick mucking around. Thank you. Absence for always supporting Chinwag and Comax. Yeah, so everyone, as we always say, your mission actually this week for anyone watching is there’s a lot of sadness out in the world. A lot of people doing it hard out there. Andrew Law 4, 9, 9, get over to 500. Come on people. So the mission this week for anyone that wants to accept it is to go out there and say good day to someone and make ’em smile because smiling goes a long way. And look after your brothers and sisters. Our community is unity and Chinwag is, and always we’ll be made with love. Thank you. See you next week. See you David. Be good man. See. Hello mate. Bye-Bye.

Voice Over (02:45:54):
This show is sponsored by

Voice Over (02:45:56):
The Comics Shop. Check out. Come to comics shop to pick up a variety of Australian comics from multiple creators and publishers. All for one flat postage rate. We hope you enjoyed the show.