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  • Barry Linton 1947-2018


    Photo: Matt Emery

    The great New Zealand cartoonist Barry Linton died last month.

    Funtime Comics asked me to write something about Barry, and here’s what came out:

    BARRY LINTON 1947-2018

    I’ve been trying to write an obituary for the great New Zealand cartoonist Barry Linton, who died on the afternoon of October 2nd at Auckland Hospital, aged 71. Carefully checked facts about his life, a sober assessment of his life’s work. But I can’t. I apologise if this is rambling and inelegant. But Barry’s comics have been an important part of my mental landscape since I was a schoolboy: shaping the way I draw, the way I think about cartooning and art, the way I see my home town and the islands we live on. I’m not ready to write about him with detachment, and I’m not sure I ever will be.

    Barry’s art helped define the look of the New Zealand counter-culture in the ‘70s and ‘80s, through band posters and record covers, cartoons for the alternative press, and his unforgettable, iconic comics for Strips. He did commercial work, too. For a while, he worked as a graphic artist for the Auckland Star newspaper, drawing maps, diagrams of cruise missiles and aeroplanes, and whatever else the daily news required. Later, he drew illustrations for On Film magazine, a handful of books, and even the NZ Woman’s Weekly. But he was never financially secure, and he never stopped making his unique, intensely personal comics – even when no-one was publishing them. Occasionally he’d put out a mini-comic or self-published collection, but for years, his best work was seen only by flatmates, friends, and family.

    In recent years, Matt Emery’s Pikitia Press managed to get some of Barry’s work into print, including the first two instalments of his magnum opus: the Aki saga. Barry was allergic to computers, and too poor to buy one anyway. So Matt visited him at home with a borrowed laptop and scanner, to scan hundreds of pages of artwork, which he then painstakingly processed over several years. All of this was supposed to culminate in a glorious collection of Barry’s best work, from the 1970s to the present, with a biographical essay by Tim Bollinger, and a critical foreword by me. But small press comics is a tough grind and Pikitia has sadly, inevitably gone into hiatus, leaving that badly-needed book as yet unpublished. Hopefully, that will change before long, and Barry’s life’s work will get the treatment it deserves.

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  • Two new things

    Presenting two new things that I have made, both of which are now available for purchase:

    DARKEST DUNGEONS
    Issue no. 1
    (126mm x 71mm or 5″ x 2.8″)
    24 pages, black & white with 2-colour covers
    $10.00 (USD)
    (includes shipping worldwide)

    Two young women are unwittingly drawn into the thrilling, spiritually perilous world of fantasy role-playing. At the end of each issue, readers have the opportunity to vote on what will happen in the next instalment. The format serves as an homage to certain well-known cartoon religious tracts, frequently found in bus shelters or handed out on street corners.

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All comics are by Dylan Horrocks and are licensed under a Creative Commons License.