by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

When Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, the breakthrough full-length album for local turntablist extraordinaire Kid Koala, came out in 2000, it featured a cool bonus - a 32-page comic by Koala himself. His latest release, Nufonia Must Fall (Ninja Tune/ECW Press), is the exact opposite, a 300-page, black-&-white comic-strip novel with a bonus CD.

At the time of Carpal Tunnel, shifting to comics was, for the DJ who confesses he never read comics that much as a youth, "really just a survival tactic, because that album was such a mind-melting, total-breakdown experience. I didn’t really know where I was going. I knew for a fact that at the end of it, it would be a learning experience that I needed to go through. But whether the execution of it, the musical execution, was on the level, that was causing me anxiety. I started drawing the book because it took me away from the studio and also helped get those demons out."

They hung around, too, although "demons" might be too strong a term for the cute little bonhommes that spring from Koala’s Fineliner. Koala says there’s a bit of himself in all of Nufonia’s characters - even if the central protagonist, a plucky, romantic, sample-obsessed robot without a name, seems the most like him.

"I can’t put a percentage on how much, but I do feel endeared to him in a way. From the initial sketches I thought he was a funny character, awkward, had potential to do good - if not always in the execution."

Way without words

"It’s not autobiographical though," Koala continues. "When ECW first asked me to do a book, they showed some others they’d published. Autobiographies, unauthorized biographies, real documentary, weird life-story kinda books. I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I didn’t think I’d gone through enough to warrant that. The initial pitch was a 10,000-word book, 100 pages minimum. It seemed like a lot to me.

"Words fail me sometimes. They carry a lot of weight. I respect anyone who has a command of words, all the semantics and history and trends and slang, the shape of a word and whether it’s actually going to say what you want it to. I don’t think I could write this story in words. It would come off, I don’t know, trite."

As it is, Koala’s Nufonia, which hasn’t a single word of dialogue, plays out as sweet-natured tragi-comedy in the silent-film tradition of Chaplin and Keaton (a nice corollary to the "vinyl Vaudeville" of his music). "That’s what it is," he says, "storyboards to a film. It’s cheaper than doing a film, a lot more fun, too."

Grey areas

Once he’d settled on doing a comic, it remained for Koala to actually draw it. In that respect time, if not experience, was on his side. "Most of Nufonia Must Fall was done on tour. There’s a lot of downtime - soundcheck for an hour, eat for two, play for two. The rest of the day, you’re stuck somewhere, in a van or the venue or whatever. I’m sure I would have hit my limit on the road a lot earlier if I hadn’t had this to focus on."

Louisa Schabas, whom he’d befriended at his local copy shop, stepped in as what would be called "colourist" in comics parlance, were there colour in Koala’s comic. "I like her style, and we have the same sense of humour. There are things in there where the jokes were already there in the black and white, but then she hammered them home with the greys."

For a relative novice at the comics game, Koala shows remarkable skill in capturing a character’s mood, in his musical pacing and clever panel arrangement.

"It was all new to me, a lot of trial-by-fire stuff. I just went with it. It was a really naïve thing, but I was learning a lot. I was watching a lot of film, picking up on things like focus and composition. It’s a feeling and then you discover the science behind it."

And that science, he realized, was already kinda familiar. "It’s all storytelling, for me," he says, "even music." :

Book launch with slide show, with guests P-Love and Jester, at Cabaret on Tuesday, March 11, 7pm and 10pm, $15