not so novel anymore!!!! (Patreon)

i contracted the novel coronavirus fkn woops as. i got it just TWO DAYS before my booster shot appointment was scheduled. i was so excited i had even drawn this in preparation:

the ppl i have been spending time with who had already had their booster seem to have dodged the bullet, which is a pretty concrete vindication of the vaccine. my first two shots earlier in the year are also holding me in good stead so far - my symptoms are very mild, feels almost certainly omicron, thankfully. the first 36 hours of symptoms involved a bit of a fever, i felt cloud-brained and had a mild cough, but now i'm feeling almost totally back to normal 3 or 4 days in. will keep isolating and looking out the window and drawing at this highway-side motel for the full ten days tho...... even tho yesterday the CDC ("Centre for Disease Control" or "Cant Disrupt Commerce") suddenly halved the isolation period to 5 days, and didn't even recommend ppl do a test before they head back out into the world :-V :-V

only 62% of ppl in the US are vaccinated, and omicron infections are doubling almost every day. if pulling the rip cord and rly leaning into the "everyone is going to get it" rhetoric has eugenicist undertones, i can't help but think that this might also:

"nurses drinking purple cocktails, the morning after nightshift 19/12/21":

been watching lots of stuff cos im fritzled indoors with this virus, last night i finished the second season of Total Control which i hiiiighly recommend. u can watch the whole thing on iview or if ur not in australia u can stream it on Goojara (an amazing streaming website that is keeping the piracy dream of the early 2010s alive, seems to have just about everything on it)

my time in the US has been rly great so far for the most part, finally got to meet my partners family n see them all reunited, and then maybe infect some of them with a disease????remains 2 be seen. hoping to get up to Buffalo to visit the first unionised Starbucks (!) when i'm back outside again. may have a small voluntary mural project lined up at a special place down in Matewan, fingers crossed. if anyone has any other leads for walls i might be able to paint here plz lemme know, anywhere around north-east of the country, im especially interested in walls that happen to be indoors (easier in winter, more able to control the light to do w a projector, less $ needed for undercoats of paint and graffiti protection etc). my old dream of being a travelling labour agitator like someone from the early 1900s is half cooked but still stuck up on a wall in my brain. a woman at a picket line a couple of months ago was asking me lots about what i do, and after i tried explaining she said "oh so you're just a shit-stirrer" which made me feel weird, took it as both a compliment and an insult which i think is how she intended it.

there's almost exactly one month left for entries into ‘The Struggles That Made Us’, the MUA's poster design competition, as part of their 150th bday. $5000+ in prizes for artworks that celebrate maritime workers history. pls let any artists / illustrators know and encourage them to enter!! http://mua.org.au/struggles-made-us-design-prize

the above drawing is my last drawing for Overland for the year, which i drew thanks to the suggestion of Lachlan Musicman. it is based on a quote from an old leaflet from the 1970s that pops up on social media from time to time. it might seem tangential, but to me it represents an attempt to explore a bit more specificity around what a 'just transition' might involve. i think that's gonna be a big focus of my work over the next year, as ppl fight to limit the fallout of climate change and also prepare ourselves for what effects we are already locked into.

was stoked to work with Alex McInnis and United Workers Union on a drawing about how low-carbon care work might relate to the climate crisis, and what members rights and obligations are, not only to the people they support through their care work, but to themselves and their co-workers. 

the "right to strike" is today ofc severely curtailed in australia, but there are real protections for workers who walk off the job due to health and safety concerns. UWU have been proactive in educating their members about this, and as such we have seen workers exercise their walk-off rights during heatwaves and other climate related threats to health. there are hopes that we might come to see these strike provisions expanded outward.

i worked as a disability support worker for almost a decade, and remember vividly how employers moralise and weaponise the care you feel for the people you work with, and use it against you, in order to protect their status quo. hoping to work on more stuff the fact that articulates that care for clients and care for yrself and your co-workers throughout supply chains (and the environment?!?!) are indivisible and all smooshed together.

drew the below pic for the health workers who walked off the job at Royal Adelaide Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in SA, fed up with understaffing, safety issues, job insecurity and attempts at privatisation.

im obsessed with those bots that automate art for you if u just provide them with a few keywords.... convinced that they're gonna compete with us illustrators for a lot of our work soon enough (fair enough i spose!!!?!!?). i typed the title of my book "our members be unlimited: a comic about workers and their unions" into https://app.wombo.art and it came up with these very good alternative covers, oop

happy 2 say that the 'make the yarra swimmable' poster has been selected as part of next years CLIMARTE project, which means there will be 100 or so giant prints of the piece stuck up in the streets around the place. if u want to print sum yourself feel free, u can download a PDF from here. 

im still working on that long form comic about the yarra river seal, i'm in the process of pitching it to an outlet, will see how that shakes out and keep u posted.
also working on another piece about harm reduction stuff, a piece about abortion freedoms and the Red Cross's ban on gay blood 👻

also these two very undercooked drafts :

ok i think i will leave it there! thanks for the support and for helping to pay for the motel room while i exorcisism!!!!!! fuck coronavirus!!! pls get your booster shot!