Mandy Ord is one of the cartoonists we focus on in Graphic Novels! Melbourne!. Her thick black linework and one-eyed ‘Mandy’ character in her mostly autobiographical stories make her comics ‘voice’ instantly recogniseable. With Rooftops, her first graphic novel, published by Finlay Lloyd in 2007, she takes her readers on a walk (and sometimes a run) through the streets of Melbourne and up to the Rooftop Cinema where we watch ‘Ghostbusters’ with the background of the Melbourne skyline stretching behind the screen.
This event is the beginning point for a series of ruminations on the nature of coincidence, the career of Bill Murray, the way the that the books you read can affect your life, and the scary library ghost in ‘Ghostbusters’. The book is very much a love song to Melbourne: its buildings are depicted with care and wonder; its relationship to other cities is pondered; and the way that a city might shape our lives is explored in every frame.
In 2011, Allen and Unwin released Sensitive Creatures, a large-format collection of many of Mandy’s autobiographical comic strips.
