y name is Pat Grant. I live in Melbourne. I make comics. My work has popped up in an assortment of fine publications like Australia’s Surfing Life, Tracks, Beat, and 3D World. I’ve also blackened the pages of a few hoity-toity literary rags like Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, Lifted Brow, and some others.

I regularly present my work in smallish comic books and zines which you can get your hands on at my online shopfront.
I’ve got a Bachelor of Arts in Communication with honours from the University of Technology in Sydney which, like all arts degrees, has been indispensable as a place-mat. My thesis was a comic book about surf localism and its connection to the riot at Cronulla.

With comics we get the benefit of embodied storytelling arts like mime, oral storytelling or dance, which are really visceral, emotive artforms, and we combine it with language based storytelling, like prose fiction, that can handle extreme complexities and abstract ideas. It’s a heady combination.

fun thing for us to do is to work out how much money I would have made if I had chosen to work, say, as a dishwasher instead of as a cartoonist. Here for example, I spent approximately 3200 hours working on Blue, which amounts to 86.5 weeks of full time work, which amounts to one year and 8 months. A dishwasher working at a minimum wage in Australia would earn $15.95 per hour, so the dishwasher would earn a before tax total of $51,400 for the same amount of time. In the unlikely event that I sell 100% of the print run of Blue in the next two years my profit on the project will be $2,152 which will be a 16% return on my capital (not so bad) and a rate of just over 62c per hour on my labour (not so good).

Another interesting thing to look at is the contribution that the project might make to the book industry. The total revenue generated by the project will at most be around $49,900 of which I will personally see 4.3% (an author’s royalty is usually around 8-10% when they are properly published).