Safdar Ahmed

Minicomic.club 2017 Season

Do you keep a sketchbook? What do you fill it up with?

I always keep a sketchbook on me and at the moment I’m filling it with drawings of detention centres. In my down time I try to draw things that counter my anxiety.

Tell me about your favourite pen

I don’t know if I have a favourite. I alternate between the Unipen, Artliner and Steadler, depending on what type of feel I’m after. I also love Japanese brush pens.

What’s deader, Print or Mail?

Print is gorgeous and will never die but mail can be prohibitively costly, so it’s the deader of the two.

What’s a good comic you’ve read recently?

I recently consumed Hideshi Hino’s Hell Baby. It’s beautifully dark, scary, and twisted.

You’re a founding member of the Refugee Art Project, and recently won a Walkley award for your comic about the Villawood Detention Centre — what do you think of Comics as an activist tool / agent of social change?

Art should always be autonomous, weird, subversive and critical, and those elements are soaked through the history of cartoons and comics.

The point is not to be preachy or didactic, but there is a long history of work which is socially or politically engaged. So yeah, I think comics are an amazing tool for social critique, partly for centring often marginalised or excluded viewpoints.

You can see more of Safdar’s work here https://safdarahmed.com/my-comics-and-zines/. His Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre will be released in 2017 by Twelve Panels Press

The Minicomic of the Month Club is an annual subscription series of Australian and New Zealand Cartoonists. Subscriptions are open for the 2017 season, you should go ahead and subscribe at minicomic.club/2017.