At tonight’s Ledger Award ceremony in Melbourne, Neomad: The Complete Collection was announced as the sole Gold Ledger Award recipient.
The graphic novel by Stu Campbell (aka Sutu), The Love Punks and the Satellite Sisters, produced in partnership with Big hART, has won a Gold Ledger for titles published in 2015.
NEOMAD follows the story of the Love Punks, a group of techno savvy young heroes from the Pilbara who speed through a digitised desert full of spy bots, magic crystals, fallen rocket boosters and mysterious petroglyphs. The story was created with the help of over 40 young people in the Ieramugadu (Roebourne) community through a series of workshops in scriptwriting, literacy, and Photoshop over an 18 month period.
Award winning illustrator and interactive designer Sutu spent over 500 hours teaching young students to apply a complex colouring system to more than 600 scenes to create NEOMAD. These young people, aged between 7 and 14, star in the comic as the Love Punks and the Satellite Sisters and assisted with the developing the characters, the story, the script, and the colouring of the book.
NEOMAD is set around Murujuga (the Burrup Peninsula), which is home to approximately one million petroglyphs (etched rock art), some of which are over thirty thousand years old. These ancient carvings are markings of food sources, ceremonial sites and spirituality. NEOMAD is one way the thousands of years of cultural heritage associated with Murujuga are now being interpreted using contemporary tools.
The Ledger Awards were organised to ‘acknowledge excellence in Australian comic art and publishing,’ and are named after pioneering Australian cartoonist Peter Ledger (1945-1994).
The awards were first held in 2005 to help promote and focus attention on Australian creators and their projects, both in Australia and overseas.
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