Sam draws the line between work and art

By Mark Phillips

HOW do you turn a complex issue like the history of the minimum wage into a cartoon that people will want to read and share?

That was the challenge faced by Melbourne illustrator Sam Wallman when he agreed to produce an online comic strip for Working Life in February.

Fortunately, Wallman was able to draw on years of drawing experience along with a strong union background to produce the strip, which was published in May to much acclaim.

Over 34 frames, the hand-drawn black and white strip explains the origins of the minimum wage in Australia, its contribution to our way of life, and the role of unions in advocating each year for an increase to the minimum wage.

For Wallman, it was a dream project allowing him to combine his work as an illustrator with his passion for unionism, and he leapt at the chance to use a comic strip medium to retell an important story.

“A lot of people are grateful to see something appealing to young people,” Wallman says.

“The union movement, it’s hard for us to connect with young people sometimes because they’re not taught in school about workers’ history or industrial history and sometimes we take for granted the conditions we have, we don’t understand they are the result of years of struggle.

“So people were excited the story was in a medium that was accessible to young people.”

Wallman approached the minimum wage project as he would any other, first mapping out a script in collaboration with Working Life editor Mark Phillips, and then visualising in his mind how to make it appear on paper.

The cartoonist’s brief was to provide images that combined would be able to tell the story as a whole, but that each frame could also stand up as individual pieces of artwork.

The comic strip had to be informative, yet entertaining enough to keep the reader’s attention, fast-paced and logically structured.

Wallman says the images came to him quickly, but he spent dozens of hours perfecting the drawings.

“I do tend to think in graphics a lot.

“Having drawn so much, the world becomes a very cartoony place. I would just read every line of the script and shut my eyes and think about whether there was some visual metaphor that was a couple of steps removed from the literal interpretation; there’s no point in drawing exactly what the line says because the words say it, so the good thing about comics is you can pick away and work out what the semiotics of that line are.

“[I was] just trying to think of abstracted metaphors that are still grounded but a bit more interesting than direct depictions but can reveal some truth of the point.”

“People were excited the story was in a medium that was accessible to young people.”

In demand

Wallman, 28, is rapidly becoming one of Melbourne’s most in-demand cartoonists, but few would realise that he juggles his drawing with a part-time job as an online organiser for the National Union of Workers.

To Wallman, the job with the union is a natural extension of his own personal commitment to social change and workers’ rights, and helps to keep him grounded.

After studying at RMIT University, Wallman paid the bills by rolling through a series of jobs, including in call centres.

He is thankful that the mundanity of call centre work also gave him the time to hone his drawing skills, and it is in call centres that he first became involved with the NUW, first as a delegate and then as an organiser in the food processing and manufacturing sectors.

Despite an increasing amount of commissioned work, he has no intention of abandoning his job at the union to become a cartoonist full-time. The current arrangement allows him to combine his art with his activism, while also keeping him refreshed in a way that drawing full-time wouldn’t.

“Hopefully I will get to a point where they [the cartooning and union work] are one and the same,” he says.

“I think they satisfy different parts of my character. Drawing is a pretty isolated thing, holed away all that time. Drawing on my own is not something I would want to do all the time.

“Working in the union has taught me other skills and made me connect with people I wouldn’t normally get to meet, but hopefully there are overlaps between the two.”

Wallman’s work as an organiser brings him face-to-face with the realities of modern working life.

“There’s a lot of unfair dismissals, especially because of casualisation being the beast that it is, people just get sacked for small things,” he says.

“A lot of manufacturing jobs going offshore, people getting underpaid for a long time and not realising and then seeking back pay; bullying and not consulting people before changing OHS policies that are dangerous.”

“We try to avoid a servicing model, so there’s a lot of putting stuff back onto members and making them see themselves as the union and making the delegates equipped to have self-organised sites.

“So a lot of the conversations are about empowering members to resolve the issues on the site themselves, so it’s not ‘daddy union’ coming in to fix stuff, so that they’re self-sufficient.”

Always a pen in his hand

Although a veteran of Melbourne’s tight-knit cartoonists’ scene, Wallman first sprung to wider public attention last year when he illustrated a ground-breaking online comic strip for the now-defunct Global Mail website.

Wallman was commissioned to provide illustrations to accompany a first-hand account of life inside one of Australia’s immigration detention centres, based on exclusive interviews with a former security guard employed by centre operator Serco.

His often surreal images added haunting intensity to the words of the security guard, and had worldwide impact and was shared more than 50,000 times.

Wallman, who grew up in Geelong before moving to Melbourne aged 18, has been drawing since he could pick up a pen. Inspired by ’60s underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb, and DIY punk cartoonists of the 1980s, his work is invariably political in one form or another.

Wallman draws day and night, often taking out his sketchbook and pens in public whenever he gets the itch.

“Ever since I was a really young child, my mum would buy me paint and clay and other materials but she said I would only ever use a black pen, ever since I was four or five.

“I was kind of a weird kid and it sort saved me through school because I was the kid who could draw cartoons to make people laugh. Otherwise I would have been a bit of an outsider.

“I stuck with it and as I grew up and got a bit of politics it seemed like an accessible way to communicate those politics.”

‘Everything is political’

He admires cartoonists who “can make political work that is still really personal and actually about their lives and the way politics affect their lives; people who can see politics not as an abstraction but a personal thing.

“I would say everything in the whole world is political, so I guess [my work is political].

“I walk around the street a lot. After work, I often just walk around the city for a couple of hours, looking at faces and just watching, reading and listening carefully to the people I talk to. It sort of brings another filter to the world when you draw a lot, you start seeing cartoons everywhere. ”

Wallman, who recently edited a 175-page anthology of Australian cartoonists called Fluid Prejudice, has his hands full with numerous projects — including making his first animated film for a refugee advocacy group, RISE.

He regularly contributes to Overland magazine and is also editing a new anthology of comics about class in contemporary Australia.

He also has in mind a long-term project reinventing the colourful union banners of the past in a modern context.

“I’d love to make a long journalistic comic about what it’s life is like for poultry workers, the kind of working conditions they face” he adds.

“That industry is an intersection of so many different issues. The workers are often marginalised and based on what I hear at work, grossly mistreated. Interviewing some of these people and doing a comic about their lives could be a really good way to talk about migrant issues, industrial issues, class, all these kinds of oppressions smashing up against one other. I’d like to do more work like that in the future.”

Mark Phillips is editor of Working Life

First published on 27 June 2014.