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Post date: Oct 13, 2013 9:32:36 PM
Photo from the Sydney Opera House Facebook page
When I listened to this audio recording of Grant's appearance at the Sydney Graphic festival alongside Gerard Way a couple of weeks back, I was pretty surprised to find the first half hour of the panel was Grant delivering an unheralded new spoken word piece similar in scope to 'The Con' from 2012's Morrisoncon. Entitled 'Old Fox Dreaming', it's a a twenty minute monologue on Australia’s forgotten superhero history with musical accompaniment provided by cellist Peter Hollo..
I don't think it was talked up much in any of the pre-publicity for the appearance (bar a throwaway mention in an interview with the Rupert Murdoch-owned Australian Daily Telegraph a couple of days beforehand), and, thanks to the convention's location outside the US, both this panel and Grant's appearance alongside Dave McKean and Len Wein the following day seem to have been entirely ignored by the usual comic book news sites. (Relax, I've got you covered. Audio for the Morrison/McKean/Wein panel here. Deep Space Transmissions - boldly going where the mainstream news sites dare not...)
'Old Fox Dreaming' is a meditation on Australia's forgotten Golden Age Superheroes and their battle against the twin evils of a company looking to monetize and monopolize the dictionary, and the tyrannical tabloid overlord who's bitterly crushed them via the exposure of real and manufactured scandals in their personal lives. As I did with 'The Con' a couple of months back, I've had a go at transcribing it. It was a fair bit easier this time around as the recording quality was a lot better, but there was still some of it I had trouble divining. If you think you can fill in any of the gaps please let me know.
This page at the International Hero directory is an excellent reference for the various Aussie super-folks who crop up in the story, including the pre-Charlton Captain Atom.
Once again, any issues you might have with the spelling, formatting or any of that boring stuff are all down to me. Pretty happy for you to keep those issues to yourself though :)
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