Overview
Folio is a new website that brings Australia’s contemporary comics culture to light, for the first time, by documenting and sharing work created over the past 40-50 years.
The site makes available oral histories, essays and digitised materials that were often produced and circulated outside mainstream publishing and cultural institutions. It also includes newly commissioned works, and interviews with creators from across Australia’s comics community.
In Folio, you will find personal stories from the community on themes of identity, culture, art practice, distribution and more, alongside essays about Indigenous storytelling, place, belonging and community.
Over 2026, the site will continue to grow and expand with oral histories and ephemera from this dynamic period in Australian graphic storytelling.
Folio is led by Elizabeth MacFarlane (Creative Writing, University of Melbourne) with Ronnie Scott (Creative Writing, RMIT University), Gabriel Clark (School of Design, UTS), Pat Grant (School of Communications, UTS) and Meg O’Shea.
Image: Claudia Chinyere Akole
Imagine a comic artist carrying a folio of their work – their shiny completed projects, their drafts, their messy mistakes, their notes to themselves, their attempts and failures, a record of their relentless, exhausting labour, a testament to their love of this artform.
They spread their folio out on a table. A hidden history is revealed.
Folio was produced through an ARC-funded partnership between the University of Melbourne, UTS, RMIT, The National Library of Australia and Creative Australia, with web design support from Supermarket Design and PUBLIC digital design studio.
Watch the webinar launch of Folio
Folio: Stories of Australian comics
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