Surfing about Comix Art with Andy Mason

In this episode, Glen interviews Andy Mason, comix artist, author of What's So Funny: Under the Skin of South African Cartooning (Double Storey, 2010) and surfer about his latest underground comix, Apocalypse WOW! Revisited (2025). There are several authorial identities that shadow Andy, and you may also know him as N.D. Mazin or Pooh! And Poynton Shute, as you will hear in this episode, is attempting unravel the question: Who is the real Author? While Glen seems to be on a quest to untangle the narrative web spun from Apocalypse WOW! Revisited in revealing utopian impulses. This episode opens up a means to how the South may be represented in the study of comic art.

Complicating the audio nature of podcasting, Andy reads from his comix works during the interview - describing action in panels and giving voice to characters that he was lived with for many years. This is unsettling as reading is the textual practice for comix; and it challenges the will to place content on YouTube to supplement the podcast. The enchantment is listening to how an authorial voice can translate the visual to allow an audience the imaginative space to bring to life the comic form.

The interview picks a theme that's important to The Deep Duck Dive Podcast: surfing in the South - in this case, the imagined utopia of Azania in the comix and some real surf spots in South Africa: on the Wild Coast and Muizenberg. Surfing may be a reference point in this episode but the conversation strays beyond the beach. It touches on Andy's life history, the history of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, Left politics, the Sixties and Seventies, environmental threats due to capitalist extractivism, and surfing's counter-cultural ethos and its sell-out to commodification as well as Cape Town's water crisis, living in COVD times, metaphysics, auto-ethnography in comic studies, narrativity in the comix imaginary, and today's visual argot and the possibilities of publishing on demand.

It obliquely mentions Muizenberg Beach (Cape Town, South Africa), well the episode starts there, and then only meanders back later in the conversion to Muizenberg. But it's not a Muizenberg as you may know it: rather its the site of big waves due to climate catastrophe and/or a re-imagined place seen through surf-lingo, meditative mantas, the rise of women's surfing, and surrealist art.

There are lots of intertextual references that float to the surface from Andy's comix work in this episode; which opens up a cultural history of cartooning in South Africa. Here's a sample of what you can listen out for: 100% Mambo surfwear designs from Australia; African Soul Surfer (a mid-1990s South Africa surf magazine); Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and cybernetics; the Spy vs Spy comic strip; the influence of the Black Consciousness Movement; the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972); Lenin's underground newspaper Iskra; Roger Lucey's song "Lungile Thabalza" (The Road is Much Longer album, 1979) that was banned by the apartheid state; South African Anton Kannemeyer's comix critiquing Afrikaner culture; Carl Jung's psychic archetypes; Steve Fattar of the South African Sixties rock band The Flames; Slavoj Žižek on Artificial Intelligence (AI); American underground cartoonist Rob Crumb; a quote from Ursula Le Guin's Tales from EarthSea (2001); folk-rock singer Bob Dylan; and the Silver Age of comic books.

The full oeuvre of the Azaniamania trilogy that Andy mentions in the episode, which collects his works from 1976 to 2025, are:

• The Legend of Blue Mamba (2013), Book 1.
• Apocalypse WOW! Revisited (2025), Book 2, Part 1.
• The Big Frag and Other Stories (forthcoming), Book 2, part 2.
• The Kompleat Prezanian Komix (2025), Book 3.

You can follow Andy Mason on Instagram.