FOR more than 30 years, Ballarat’s Dillon Naylor has been drawing distinctively sinister album covers, band posters, and cartoons out of pure love for comic art.
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Now, for the first time, his artwork that was typically found staple-gunned to a pole, duct-taped to a wall or stuffed into a magazine rack has been collated and published in a 200-page book.
A Brush With Darkness is a collection of Naylor’s music-related work documenting the Melbourne band scene from the 1980s to 2010.
The book features close to three decades worth of work with most of the art scanned from original copies and still in its original black and white glory.
Naylor said it took about two months to track down the pieces he needed to create the book.
“A lot of it was buried away in different locations and some had been given away so I had to borrow it back and re-scan everything and lovingly reassemble it all,” he said.
Although the book includes flyers, posters and CD covers of bands such as Beastie Boys, Area 7 and Powderfinger, Naylor said at the heart of the publication was his lifelong love – comics.
Having self-published comics throughout art school, the now 44-year-old struck a deal with a Wangarratta showbag company that saw his comics printed in the hundred thousands and distributed all over the country.
This massive exposure led to high-profile gigs in kids magazines K-Zone, Mad Magazine and even a colour strip in The Sydney Sun Herald comic section right next to Ginger Meggs.
Naylor said the book was the first of a number which would be published in the future documenting more of his artwork.
A Brush With Darkness will be launched at Babushka Bar on Humffray Street North on Saturday, March 9 from 5.30pm. Naylor will be signing copies of the new book at 11am that same day at Heroes HQ comic shop, 1 Shepperd St, Ballarat.
