How can you meet us and get one?
Squishface Studio’s first book, SQUISHBOOK, is now out! We’ve published it ourselves. It was created with help from a successful crowdfund and a 2023 City of Melbourne arts grant.
Squishface Comic Studio is a shared workspace for comics makers in Melbourne and I’m one of the remaining founding artists, along with Sarah Howell and Ben Hutchings. We opened late in 2011 and had to close during the pandemic as our Brunswick studio space was sold. We moved to Docklands for a period, and, during that period, we proposed the Squishbook project to City of Melbourne and were successful.
The idea was to connect with our local community and create a big fat “kids annual” type book that would jump off shelves, and look and feel very different to what comes out of major publishers. This is how I pitched it to Ben Hutchings:
I think it’s mostly FUNNY right, but there’s a place for just quiet girl and horsey stories or weird little meditative bits too I think. Like there’s scouting adventure stories and a bit of a ghost tale and How To Be Polite lists of nice things you could say to a 96 year old lady and a comic about like some modern version of The Partridge Family going on a trip to Finland, some gentle MAD Magazine type stuff… and little board games and puzzles and very silly jokes corner and a mask you cut out, and I would really like it to have some SLIGHT undertone of “really what a quite disturbing world adults have created for you to live in, maybe we can make it a bit less shit”… BUT also there’s little comic strips about a character called Plopsley on the next page y’know?
So we did workshops with the grade 2s at Kensington Primary School, and they gave us their art, and a lot of questions to answer about being a cartoonist:
How coulorfull can a CARTOON be?
do you own a bisnnes and you work with pepole to make cartoons?
are You Sceared Of CARtooNs? Do You Hate CaRtooNS?!
And the result was that the book became a lot more about comics, how we make them, why we make them, the technical aspects and the philosophy. But also with a lot of other weird and silly stuff. I think of it as Cole’s Funny Comics Advice Book, and what’s more Melbournian than that? “Kids’ annual” is a great format, especially once you take the bigotry out (I do not recommend reading all the old annuals I read for research purposes, unless you like fat-shaming, sexism and characters named “The Dolliwogs”, and “Mister Marzipan”).
Anyway, the book is done, and released, and contains art, writing and advice from these great Australian writers and comicsmakers: David Blumenstein, Sarah Howell, Briar Rolfe, Scarlette Baccini, Jo Waite, Ben Hutchings, Jin Hien Lau, Patrick Alexander, Ive Sorocuk, Alex Clark, Warwick Holt and Nicholas J. Johnson!
We’ve got tons of events coming up where you can meet up with us and get one. Best way to stay across them is to join Squishface’s Meetup page.
If you’re a member of the public you can get yourself a copy, mail-order, right here: http://squishbook.com.au. There’s also a few stores who have it, or will soon: Cockatoo Comics (Sydney, and online), and Readings, Brunswick Bound, All Star Comics in Melb.
That’s cost-effective for up to about two copies. If you’re a library, school or retailer and you want more than two, please get in touch with us directly to order: we’re offering books at 50% retail for you!
If you’re overseas: we haven’t got distro sorted yet. These are heavy and prohibitively exxo to send outside Australia. Hopefully we can work something out for you.
Squishbook: Make comics with Squishface Studio and friends!
Paperback | $29.95 | Published by Nakedfella Productions & Squishface Studio
Mar 01, 2024 | 80 Pages | A4 | Middle Grade (8-12) | ISBN 978-0-9873912-6-1