Port Chalmers has been quietly accumulating comics makers the way it accumulates everything – without announcement, without a plan, and without anyone outside the harbour road particularly noticing. The community that’s built up around Spencer Hall and the studios scattered across the hillside doesn’t look like a scene, and that’s the point. They draw, they print, they put out small runs of hand-bound work that you’ll only find if you know where to look.
Port’s Quiet Creative Gravity
Cheap Rent and Big Rooms
Port Chalmers has always been the place you end up when you need space and can’t afford the city. A studio in central Dunedin – even in the Warehouse Precinct, even on the less fashionable side of Princes Street – will cost you. Port, fifteen minutes down the harbour road, has rooms above shops and old commercial buildings where you can spread out for not much at all. We’ve heard figures thrown around: a couple of hundred a month for a room big enough to set up a press, store paper, and leave ink drying on a bench overnight without anyone caring.
It’s not just cost, though. It’s the kind of space. Port’s buildings are old enough to have high ceilings and wide floors – they were built for storing things, not for looking pretty. That suits people who make physical work. You can hang prints to dry across a room that was once a storeroom for ships’ chandlery and nobody blinks. The mess is part of it. Try doing that in a converted Dunedin flat with a landlord who wants the carpets steam-cleaned.
The Kind of Town That Doesn’t Mind
Port Chalmers doesn’t make a fuss about its artists. There’s no banner on the main street declaring it a creative hub, no council-funded mural trail with an app. People make things here, and other people leave them to it. That’s the deal, and it works precisely because nobody codified it.
The town’s character comes from its working history – this was a port, a place where ships loaded and unloaded and people did practical things with their hands. That pragmatism never really left. When a ceramicist sets up a kiln in a shed or a comics maker takes over a back room, it registers the same way as someone opening a workshop. It’s just work. The absence of self-consciousness about it is the point. Compare that to places that have decided to be creative – where the identity precedes the activity and every new gallery opening gets a press release. Port skips all of that and gets on with it.
Not an Art Colony, Not Trying to Be
There’s a version of this story where Port Chalmers becomes a tidy narrative about artists saving a sleepy harbour town. That’s not what’s happening. Port has a school, a pub, a Four Square, a working container terminal visible from most of the hillside. The creative community exists alongside all of that – it doesn’t define the place, and nobody here would claim it does.
That suits comics particularly well. Comics have always occupied an awkward position in the art world – too narrative for galleries, too visual for bookshops, too idiosyncratic for mainstream publishing. A medium that doesn’t fit neatly into categories thrives in a place that doesn’t demand you fit neatly either. The makers here aren’t positioning themselves as anything. They draw, they print, they put out small runs, they show up to each other’s openings. If the wider art world notices, fine. If it doesn’t, also fine. That lack of striving is the thing that keeps the work honest.
Spencer Hall and What Happens Inside It
A Hall With Several Lives
Spencer Hall sits on George Street, Port Chalmers‘ main drag, looking like what it is: a community hall that’s been around long enough to have served every purpose the town needed. Built in the 1880s as a public hall and library, it’s had stints as a meeting place, a dance venue, and a general-purpose room for whatever Port required. The bones are Victorian – pressed tin ceiling, wooden floor, the proportions of a building designed before anyone worried about acoustics or air conditioning.
These days it runs as a community venue. Markets, gigs, exhibitions, the occasional wedding. It’s the kind of hall every small New Zealand town has – or had, before they got sold off or fell down. Port kept theirs, and the range of things that happen inside it on any given month tells you something about the town. A craft market on Saturday, a noise gig on Friday, a comics workshop on a Wednesday evening. Nobody’s curating a programme. People just book the hall.
Comics People in the Room
The comics gatherings at Spencer Hall aren’t scheduled like classes. They happen when someone organises one – a drawing session, a zine-making workshop, a small exhibition hung on the walls for a weekend. The format is informal: tables get set up, people bring their own materials, work happens alongside conversation. Ink pots next to coffee cups. Someone screen-printing covers while someone else pencils pages at the next table.
What makes these sessions work is the range of people who turn up. Not all of them would call themselves comics artists. Some are printmakers who’ve started doing sequential work. Some are illustrators who got interested in narrative. Some are people who’ve been drawing comics in their spare room for years and only recently found out there were others doing the same thing twenty minutes down the road. The gatherings aren’t about teaching – there’s no instructor, no syllabus. They’re about proximity: putting people making similar things in the same room and seeing what happens.
The Events That Pull People Down the Hill
The harbour road between Dunedin and Port Chalmers is a twenty-minute drive that feels like a threshold. You drop past Ravensbourne, the harbour opens up on your left, and by the time you climb the hill into Port you’ve left the city behind in a way that ten times the distance wouldn’t achieve in a straight line. When Spencer Hall or one of Port’s galleries puts on an event, that journey is part of the draw.
Zine fairs pull the biggest crowds. A hall full of tables, each one covered in hand-printed publications – comics, poetry, illustration, the uncategorisable stuff that only exists because someone had access to a photocopier or a riso. People come from Dunedin, from further south, sometimes from Christchurch or Wellington if the timing lines up with a road trip. The open studio weekends pull a different crowd – quieter, more browsing than buying, people following a printed map between studios and workshops scattered across the hillside. Both kinds of events have the same effect: they bring people into Port who might not otherwise come, and some of those people start coming back on their own.
What They Actually Make
Small Press, Hand-Printed, Staple-Bound
Pick up a comic made in Port Chalmers and the first thing you notice is the weight of it – not heavy, but present. These are physical objects in a way that most contemporary publishing isn’t. Risograph-printed covers in two or three colours, pages photocopied or digitally printed, bound with a long-arm stapler or hand-stitched with thread. Limited runs of fifty, maybe a hundred. Some of them come in hand-stamped envelopes.
The craft isn’t incidental. Otago has a deep printmaking tradition – the Dunedin School of Art has been turning out printmakers for decades, and that technical knowledge bleeds across disciplines. People making comics here often know their way around a printing press, a screen-printing setup, an etching plate. The result is work where the production choices are part of the aesthetic. A riso-printed comic with its slightly off-register colours and that particular smell of soy-based ink doesn’t look like a compromise. It looks deliberate. The medium and the message arrive together.
Not Superheroes, Not Underground
The comics coming out of Port Chalmers sit in a space that doesn’t have a convenient label. They’re not the spandex-and-capes mainstream, obviously. But they’re not the transgressive underground either – no shock value, no deliberate provocation, no posturing about being outside the system. The title of this article isn’t accidental: these are comics without attitude.
What replaces attitude is attention. Observational work about daily life in a harbour town. Landscape comics where the Otago Peninsula becomes a character. Autobiographical pieces that are quiet rather than confessional. Short stories told in ink wash. The influence is more Drawn and Quarterly than Marvel or Fantagraphics – literary comics where the pace is slow, the drawing is considered, and the stories trust the reader to sit with ambiguity. It’s not that these makers reject humour or energy. It’s that the energy comes from looking closely rather than shouting loudly. A six-panel page about the light on the harbour at different times of day has its own kind of intensity.
Comics in the Wider Port Ecosystem
Where Comics Meets Printmaking Meets Illustration
In a bigger city, comics people and printmakers and illustrators might move in separate circles – different galleries, different events, different conversations about what constitutes serious work. Port doesn’t have enough people for that kind of sorting. The person printing a comic on the riso is the same person who had etchings in a gallery show last month and is illustrating a children’s book on the side. Disciplines bleed into each other because nobody’s enforcing the boundaries.
The Dunedin School of Art, part of Otago Polytechnic, feeds into this. Graduates who trained in printmaking discover comics as a narrative extension of what they already know how to do. Students who came in wanting to make comics learn screen-printing, letterpress, and lithography along the way. By the time they’re working in Port, the distinction between fine art print and comic has become academic. A single work might be all of those things at once – sequential images, hand-printed, exhibited on a gallery wall and also sold as a staple-bound publication at a zine fair. The flexibility isn’t a marketing strategy. It’s just what happens when you let people follow their work wherever it goes.
Small Enough to Know Everyone
The Port Chalmers comics community is maybe a dozen people, depending on how you count and who’s in town. That’s small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is working on. Collaboration doesn’t need organising – it happens over coffee, at someone’s kitchen table, or because two people ended up sharing studio space and started a project together. There’s no gatekeeping because there’s no gate.
The vulnerability is obvious. A community this size loses a couple of people and it feels like a contraction. Someone gets a job in Auckland, someone else can’t afford the studio anymore, a key venue changes hands – any of those shifts the balance. Port’s creative community has survived these losses before, mostly because the conditions that created it haven’t changed: the rent is still low, the buildings are still there, the town still doesn’t mind. New people arrive – art school graduates, people priced out of other cities, the occasional returner who left and came back – and the cycle continues. It’s not guaranteed. Nothing this good and this small ever is. But it persists, and the work keeps coming out.
The comics that come out of Port Chalmers don’t ask for much. A hall to work in, some tables, a riso that mostly cooperates. What they offer back is harder to quantify – a body of work that feels like the place it was made, produced by people who chose to be there and keep choosing it. In a country where the creative economy tends to consolidate in the big centres, that persistence counts for something. Port doesn’t shout about it. It just keeps making things.