The Four Color Media Monitor

Aussie Theater says there's a demand now for cartoonists and artists Down Under:

New research shows how the skills of cartoonists, illustrators and comics-makers are being applied to communicate ideas across a diverse range of industries such as health and education.

Graphic Storytellers at Work: Cross-industry opportunities for cartoonists, illustrators and comics-makers was commissioned by the Australia Council and shows demand for graphic storytellers is growing, with 41% of those surveyed reporting increasing demand for their skills.

Graphic storytellers make complex ideas easy to understand. Their technical and interpretive skills help to illustrate abstract concepts and transcend language barriers. Artists surveyed described using their skills to communicate important health information to culturally diverse communities, translate complex legal documents, or create tools and resources for psychologists and surgeons.

I'd like to think this was sincere research. But then, when they list a number of leading insights, they needlessly bring in political correctness:

The face of graphic storytelling in Australia is changing – Older artists are more likely to be male (85% of artists over 60 years), and younger artists are more likely to be female (54% of artists between 18–29), non-binary or transgender (19% of artists between 18–29).

Do we really have to keep hearing this laughable PC narrative about alternate lifestyles and supposed multiple genders? All that does is take away the seriousness from the subject. Yet that seems to be just what the writers had in mind, when you see how The Sydney Morning Herald took the same PC approach in a report that revealed more:

New research commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts shows more than half of artists aged between 18 and 39 are women (54 per cent) and one in five identify as non-binary or transgender (19 per cent).

Men account for 27 per cent of this young talent pool, compared to 85 per cent of all male cartoonists and illustrators over the age of 60.

The internet kickstarted the change, with many novices upskilling using do-it-yourself web resources. Online magazines or zines published with low-tech printers and disseminated on social media are giving voice to women, people with disabilities, and those that are gender diverse.

Propaganda making it sound like there's millions of different genders, which again, takes away from the study's seriousness, and makes it sound more like a joke. Interestingly, it also says:

“Pay can be poor, with the life of a graphic artist and illustrator a balancing act between personal projects, freelance work day jobs, and side hustles,” the report found. One in three artists live close to or below the poverty line. Only a small number make a full-time living from their creativity.

The researchers surveyed 260 graphic storytellers and provided in-depth case studies showing the industry to be increasingly inclusive and the skill set of these artists in growing demand.

To be quite honest, I doubt the past several decades in Oz lacked inclusivity, any more than the US. It's troubling to think that, if the artists in question are living on low income, they'll turn out to be liberals who make that sound like some kind of great role model. If the wages are low, that actually proves why some people aren't taking up the career, if they want to make more money in jobs. They even cite an art teacher who says:

She puts the gender revolution down to “the ever-rising popularity of in-person zine fairs, like Other Worlds Zine Fair, that autonomously insist on inclusive lineups along their tables”.

“With Other Worlds Zine Fair I spotted a self-motivated committee of gender diverse people who made me feel confident about modes of visual self-expression that are outside the world of galleries and biennales,” she said.

The environment of Comic-Con, an annual international comic book convention, “values mastery in a way that embeds tropes of masculinity – that you should pursue the practice until you are technically perfect,” Nagy says.

Women brought more nuanced storytelling to the medium and comics lent humour, sweetness and understanding to that storyelling in unexpected ways, she said. These alternative perspectives across fiction, non-fiction and memoir were building a more inclusive fan base. “It feels like home,” Nagy said.

Something not mentioned in many of these puff pieces is that these ideologues are some of the most self-important, self-interested people around, with no interest in bettering the world, calling for Iran and Turkey's regimes to be defeated, or even improving the poorest districts of Africa stricken with poverty; all they care about is promoting their ideologies to the level of sainthood, at the expense of today's younger generations. The implication something's wrong with masculinity, or that men have no ability to convey humor as well as women, is also hopelessly silly.

“These kinds of communities provide an alternative space to a comic convention, which is a more professionalised event for marketing and trading pop-culture merchandise as well as comics,” Dr MacFarlane said. “Another reason for the greater numbers of women and non-binary people demonstrated by our research is that the comics-making skillset is something that can be utilised and applied across all sorts of different industries.

What's being utilized is propaganda, plain and simple. All that talk of "non-binary" is atrocious and demeaning.

The comic world of Marvel and DC Comics dominated public understanding of what is actually multiple independent underground comic scenes. “This comes back to a core misunderstanding that comics are a genre when it’s a medium,” Akole says. “The hypermasculine and hyper-sexualised superheroes are one genre of an almost limitless medium.“

They just couldn't resist the temptation of tearing down on Stan Lee and Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster's creations, could they? But that's decidedly something they're doing, however indirectly, and it's offensive to veterans past who're sadly no longer around. Of course superhero fare is just a drop in the bucket. But that doesn't mean they should imply it's not as worthy as the propaganda these cartoonists are pushing at the expense of sanity and cohesion. A real shame these are the mindless causes taken up by such liberals these days.

Labels: comic strips, Europe and Asia, msm propaganda, politics