Small Comics – Campbell Whyte

TALE TOWN is the annual comics publication, curated by Elizabeth Marruffo for the Perth Comic Arts Festival. Each issue commissions works from comics-makers, focused on a different theme. The works are single, full-pages in the tradition of golden-age of newspaper comics.

Crashing Waves is a short comics work made for the West Coast Anthology by Neighbourhood Press. This two-colour, riso-printed comic explores the impact of Sailor Moon on my early teen years

Take My Bones is a short comics work commissioned by the City of Greater Geraldton for the annual Big Sky Festival. The multi-frame light-box installation explores the wishes and hopes we have for the future, after we are long gone.

What sort of legacy do we want to leave behind? How do we want our descendants to reflect upon our lives? How do we make sense of the time we have and the time we are responsible for?

How to Survive a World on Fire is a collection of 100 comics poems that seek to find spaces of comfort in this confusing, isolating and hyper connected world.

The stories feature spirit dogs, the sins of fathers, broken hearts, ruptured ear drums, lucid dreams and worn out albums. Buried wetlands and skipping radio waves all come together and pull apart again in this collection of loose thoughts and tight realities.

It was nominated for a Ledger Award.

Raymonde is a 30 page comic that tells the true story of a young girl whose life briefly intersected with Pablo Picasso’s back in 1907. It was commissioned by the Minicomic Club and was nominated for a Ledger Award.

Welcome to Whispering is a 12 page Dungeons and Dragons zine that details the charming coastal town of Whispering and it’s unusual inhabitants. The zine is designed as a storytelling resource, where dungeon masters can set their stories or get inspiration for future adventures.

This project was created in collaboration with Elizabeth Marruffo and Nazario Whyte.

Bodies of Water is a comics installation that draws on my memory of growing up along the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River). Trying to make visible the way thoughts flow together, past, present, future. The physical world around us and the internal world blurring and connecting. Bodies of Water is a work that tries to connect my life on this land with the life in the land.

The installation is made up of printed acrylic panels of different sizes, suspended in layers.
It was commissioned by the City of Manning, was re-exhibited in the Any Reading Order exhibition as part of the 2019 Perth Comic Arts Festival, was performed as a part of Read to Me events, adapted for radio by All the Best Radio and was nominated for a Ledger Award and now is on permanent display at the Seasonal Brewery.

Pink Skies is a short comic while at the Comics Artist Workshop on Maria Island. The short comic was collected in the publication from that year, ‘Frightful Irregularities’.

The text of a comic is an excerpt from a letter by Charles Condor to Tom Robert, expressing his feeling about the Heidelberg School disbanding.

It is such a beautiful letter, and I found myself thinking about it while on the island. Experiencing the terrible pain of what Elizabeth Marruffo describes as ‘nowstalgia‘. Where you are in a place of such happiness that you know you will mourn its passing and forever long to return.

Talgard is a fantasy antholog of short, four-page stories, written by Gary Proudley, coloured by Justin Randall, lettered by Wolfgang Bylsma and illustrated by Australian comics makers. Published by the fine folks at Gestalt, I illustrated the story titled “Talgard an the Lesson”.