5 Questions with Can Yalçinkaya
Dr Can Yalçınkaya is a Turkish-Australian higher education worker, researcher, multidisciplinary artist, translator, editor and curator, living and working on the unceded lands of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples.
No.1
You have been a comics artist, illustrator and zinemaker for more than a decade now. What first drew you to illustration as a form?
I have very early and vivid memories of falling in love with zines and the comics medium, which awakened a creative drive in me. In Türkiye, where I grew up, we were lucky to have access to translations of comics from the US, Italy, France, etc, as well a booming local comics scene, especially in periodical satirical magazines.
I was not yet of reading age when I first encountered a Turkish translation of the Italian comic book, Diabolik (in retrospect, it was probably not suitable for a young child, but all comics were considered for children back then!) I fell in love with the storytelling possibilities specific to the comics medium, and read anything I could get my hands on. Soon, I was making my own comics—not just illustrating favourite superheroes but telling stories with pictures in sequence, on pages stapled together.
What I loved was the combination of pictures and text, and the action, drama and humour being visually represented in a reading format. It gave the reader the freedom to pause and admire a panel or page, and appreciate a different aspect of the story beyond the words.
I was still in primary school when a friend brought some photocopied pages of a ‘magazine’ he made: a montage of comics and text from other children’s magazines, as well as his own drawings and work. Being a literary entrepreneur, he was selling copies of his zine to friends. Seeing that really expanded my mind and made me aware of the power of self-publishing and DIY culture. Anyone could do that; I could do that!
The comics medium and the zine as a publication method are accessible and cheap options for anyone to tell any story they like and express themselves textually and visually. I kept making comics and zines in my teenage years in Türkiye in the 90s, and as I discovered the metal underground, where I was playing in bands, writing reviews, trading tapes and zines. These are things I continue to do now, in my 40s.
No.2
I know you’re a first-generation adult migrant too, and like me have been an active participant in the zine and underground music scenes of both home countries—in your case, Australia and Türkiye. Can you speak more to this? How do you think migration in this context changes one’s creative practice?
Yes, in Türkiye, I was always quite active in the zine scene, as well as publishing in more professional (semi-academic) film and comics journals. I was also writing for blogs and other online outlets. My involvement in underground bands and comics drawing had come to a halt after high school, as I became more focused on writing and criticism.
When I migrated to Australia in my mid-20s, I kept my connection to the Turkish scenes, but I wasn’t actively searching for the Australian comics and zine scenes then, as I was focusing on making it in academia through a PhD in media. But I struggled to find my place in an increasingly precarious higher education sector. In that context, finding the zine and comics communities in Australia in the early 2010s was life-changing. I felt encouraged and supported by my peers to make weird comics and zines on topics such as the Turkish gay E.T. movie Homoti (1987), the psychogeography of Ankara, as well as of collecting records from the Balkans and the SWANA region.
I have also become more active in these scenes in Australia than I was in Türkiye. In the last 10 years, I have been volunteering with a lot of collectives and organisations, including the Other Worlds Zine Fair, Comic Art Workshop and Refugee Art Project to support zinemakers and comics artists. And I’ve also started playing in a band again. A return to my teenage passions!
Migration has changed my creative practice, or at least the themes I explore, as my work began to delve into the diasporic condition more, increasingly becoming autobiographical/autoethnographic in nature. I think there is a shortage of works by first-generation adult migrants in the cultural scene of Australia, considering second- and third-generation migrants have produced an abundance of excellent works. That’s why reading your work was so meaningful to me, as I not only saw parallels between our experiences as kids who grew up in the underground scenes in non-western contexts, but also have taken up writing/art/music as first-generation migrants in Australia.
No.3
The Gurbet Fuzz is the first in a series of comics published by Glom Press that follows anti-racist punk band singer Savaş, as he navigates his father’s displeasure with his lifestyle and the arrival of his grandmother from Türkiye. There is a lot of joy and love emanating throughout even if Savaş encounters frustrations, and non-Turkish speakers get to learn some Turkish words too. How was it first conceptualised, and how many more volumes do you think we will get to see?
Thank you! The Gurbet Fuzz was conceptualised after I was approached by Melbourne-based publisher Glom Press a couple of years ago to pitch a limited series for their Partworks project, publishing serialised comics by some great Australian cartoonists (and me). Their idea was giving comics artists a chance to make longform comics in instalments, as this makes the process of making a ‘graphic novel’ somewhat easier (and more rewarding). Rather than working on a 150-page book for five years, you can break it up to five to six shorter books and experience a sense of achievement each time an issue comes out!
The story came from a few other existing, semi-formed story ideas I had. I like telling stories about music. I have also been working on a longform non-fiction comic book about migrants and music (the Creative Australia-funded Taksim: Our Records, Our Selves). The research I have been conducting for that book has informed some aspects of The Gurbet Fuzz: e.g. a migrant arriving in Australia with their record collection, and what vinyl records as material objects mean to migrants starting life in a foreign land.
The Savaş and father characters emerged from another story I was writing—which I later discarded—about an agoraphobic father and his son who had to drive him to Friday prayers at the mosque in Auburn every week. Of course, the anti-racist punk band draws somewhat from my own experience of playing in Hazeen, an anti-racist Muslim death metal band with Safdar Ahmed (who is also serialising his comic Space Jihad through Glom Press)!
I have planned five issues of The Gurbet Fuzz. I am currently working on Issue 2 and the remaining issues have been outlined.
No.4
You are a researcher, educator, translator and musician too. How do you think all these interests and forms come together to inform your creative practice? Besides the fact of your self, how do these intersect and relate to one another?
I see all of these different professions and aspects of myself constantly informing and feeding into each other. Being in punk/metal/DIY scenes influences the kind of educator I am, especially as one who follows Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. My research on Turkish media and the diaspora has made its way into my creative work.
I feel very comfortable writing both fiction and non-fiction on topics I have research-familiarity with. On the other hand, my zine writing has transformed my academic writing and helped it become less rigid and formal in my research publications—some of which include sections made in the comics medium. Perhaps the mindset of a translator is an overarching theme in this, where I constantly think about how to ‘translate’ or express knowledge and narratives in different forms—how one thing from one context applies to another, and so on.
No.5
What would you say to someone who wants to begin publishing zines and/or making comics?
Stop thinking about it and start making it. Maybe we’ll see you at the eleventh Other Worlds Zine Fair this Saturday?
(Credit: Gabriel Clark)
Find Out More
The Gurbet Fuzz #1 follows anti-racist punk band singer Savaş as he battles fash and gets drawn into the psychedelic world of his grandmother’s Turkish music record collection.
Get it from Glom Press here.
You can find Can and The Gurbet Fuzz at the Other Worlds Zine Fair on 2 August Saturday, 10 am–3 pm, Marrickville Town Hall.