good nic

On Wednesday 17 September, 2025, my fellow Gutter Stars and I launched Comics off the Page at Pink Ember studios in Coburg. Comics Off the Page was both an exhibition and a Speaking to Pictures performance.

Comics Off the Page exhibition

The exhibition featured work by me, Eloise Grills, Gideon Hutapea, Jenny Hedley, Caitlin McGregor, Benedicte O’Leary-Rutherford, Emilie Walsh and Reimena Yee. It may reflect our demographic, but three works included representations of cats… My work explored social isolation in the age of social media.

Speaking to Pictures

Speaking to Pictures is a poetry, comics and zine reading night, bringing the zine and poetry communities of Narrm together at Pink Ember.

Bernard Caleo opened the night with a most charismatic performance featuring his new work The Devil Collects , which “spills the beans behind the decline and fall of Marvellous Melbourne in the late 1880s.” Some tremendous crowd work had the audience howling in their seats!

Martin Huang followed with a highly peculiar tale about Cocky the cockatoo, whose crest resembles the hair of a certain US president.

Next was Leonie “Luggs” Brialey, who began with a gasp-invoking reveal: she belongs to TWO comics collectives and she’s never actually attended a Gutter Stars meeting. Until now. We didn’t mind though because her presentation was in turns moving, funny and full of other gasp-invoking reveals (for example, can Leunig pin his renown on the fact that his characters resemble Snoopy?).

After an intermission, Bruce Mutard presented his comic, which was broken down into its discrete parts. Sadly, I largely missed this performance on account of playing magician’s assistant: while holding up the comic panels for the audience, I couldn’t actually see them myself.

I’m devastated there are no pictures of Susan-Elin “Susie” Solimani’s performance because it had the crowd going wild. Accompanied by sound effects, Susie’s comic featured a man being eaten after racially abusing the comic’s young protagonist.

Aaron Billings was our MC and you couldn’t ask for more wit and charm in a host. We were also treated to an expert demonstration in how to patter for time with an impromptu interview with Walnut the sausage dog. Not to mention Billings’ closing act, which portrayed a chihuahua as God with a voice strikingly comparable to Spooky Sue.

Thank yous!

Obviously, an enormous thank you to everyone in Gutter Stars! But a special thank you to Aaron Billings for hosting Comics Off the Page at Pink Ember, and to Ronnie Scott and Melody Ellis for coordinating the program.

Thank you to Emerging Writers’ Festival for including us in your jam-packed schedule! If you would like to donate to EWF to support their work, head to their website.

Thank you to Creative Australia for the funding to support the project.

Thank you to Reimana Yee for suggesting the pink dress code 🎀.

I have been thinking intermittently about this night ever since. I am genuinely very proud of my fellow Gutter Stars and feel lucky to be in such good company 😳 👉👈 .

Photo credits
Jess Layton