Jonathan KING
Author of ‘Holiday’
Jonathan King has been a prominent New Zealand filmmaker for almost 20 years. He directed more than 100 music videos, as well as TV commercials and short films, before writing and directing his debut feature Black Sheep. He co-wrote, produced and directed an adaptation of Maurice Gee’s classic children’s book, Under the Mountain, starring Sam Neill. That was followed by Realiti, a micro-budget art-house sci-fi that Jonathan produced and directed.
Jonathan’s comics have been collected as Perplexing Stories, and have featured in issues of Faction Comics and in From Earth’s End: the Best of New Zealand Comics.
Right now he is working on his first full-length comics adventure.
'My first two Tintin books — The Black Island and The Shooting Star — set me on a lifetime love of comics – and adventure stories. Hergé’s marriage of story and picture is unmistakeable. Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories came not long after and her magical and melancholy world set a benchmark for fantasy. Narnia and Middle Earth could never touch Moomin stories. Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain was a fantastic adventure set, incredibly, in New Zealand. It dovetailed nicely with a hunger for sci-fi, kindled by a film called Star Wars… That set me on a path of wanting to create stories like that - not consume them. For some reason I thought I could actually make films … and for a time I did. But it takes significant sums of money to make films and that in turn makes difficult demands on your stories. Comics, as well as being cheaper to make, are a much freer world to play in: anything can happen – if you can bothered drawing it! I read grown up books now too, I guess, but I’m still irresistibly drawn to ripping yarns set in fantastic worlds, books for all ages - such as Philip Reeves’ Mortal Engines books, Barbara Else’s Tales of Fontania, Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter duet and comics adventures like The Unsinkable Walker Bean by Aaron Reinier and Bone by Jeff Smith.'