The comic art festival: Communities of practice… in practice!
Author Identifier (ORCID)
Stuart Medley: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7324-8494
Abstract
This chapter is a comic that tells the story of the Perth Comic Arts Festival (PCAF), its origin in an academic symposium, and the developments and challenges over six iterations from 2018 to 2024. It shows how the festival’s structure, charter, program and ethics reflect the beliefs and practices of the comics makers who run it and therein, the Australian comics community broadly writ. A lack of major industry drivers means that in the Australian context, success is generally not measured by sales and/or income, making for a community that is tight-knit and enduring. In this regard, the festival, and particularly its organising committee, represents a community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991) defined broadly as a self-formed group of people who share a passion for something and develop it through regular interaction and shared practice. We show how PCAF arose from earlier, similar communities of practice such as the Comic Maker Network in Perth and before that, the Comic Art Workshop. Through six iterations of PCAF, its organising committee learned to connect comics makers to the broader community of readers but crucially, develop professional skills to enable the festival to engage with the resources of public institutions like the State Library, State Museum, government and public funding bodies at local, state and federal levels. In short, practice made for an enduring community of practice!
Document Type
Book Chapter
Date of Publication
1-1-2025
Publication Title
Folio: Essays on Australian Comics
Publisher
Springer
School
School of Arts and Humanities
Copyright
subscription content
First Page
111
Last Page
127
Comments
Mutard, B., & Medley, S. (2025). The comic art festival: Communities of practice. . . in practice! In Folio: Essays on Australian comics (pp. 111–127). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81144-9_6