Graphic Engine

The road to Brighton Pier

2013-07-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

It seems to be becoming a bit of a tradition that my blog comes out of it's dormant state every year in preperation for the next Graphic Medicine conference and this year is certainly no exception. Having been pretty blown away by the range of speakers and the general atmosphere in Toronto last year I have to admit I was saddened by the prospect of it potentially being in the US whilst I was in the middle of my studies and very likely to not be in a good enough place financially to attend. So you can imagine my relief when it was revealed that it was going to be in Brighton this year! Sun, sea, and sanctioned misery: what more could a boy ask for!

As the finalised timetable is not yet posted I will refrain from rolling off a list of speakers I am looking forward to seeing in action, however as per usual there is so much great stuff going on that there are bound to be multiple clashes (although I'm glad to see the organisers have taken on board the critique of last years conference and will have the workshops running separately from the talks). All I can reveal at this point is there will be a great mix as usual of medical professionals, artists/writers, and academics, new authors, independent creators, and slightly more established names (Nicola Streeton and David B are the keynotes this year). Paul Gravett will once again be opening proceedings, hopefully with more obscure examples of medical themes in comics read out in silly voices.

One thing I enjoyed about last year was the range of innovative approaches being taken to narrative and to the comics medium itself and with any luck this year won't disappoint on that front. One of the conference organisers Muna Al-Jawad is currently doing a Phd using the comic form as a research method, something that interests me greatly and seems to be slowly picking up a bit of steam in both the academic and medical worlds.

So what will I be talking about this year? Well this year I won't be the only one doing the talking, much to the dismay of the second speaker who gains no pleasure from massively editing down my words. I will be giving a joint paper with my less publicity hungry creative partner in crime, Emma Mould (the second half of Sicker Than Thou). Emma is a writer, blogger, and animal lover (amongst other things), and I have had the pleasure of illustrating two issues of her autobiographical accounts of her struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder, and her two month stay in a psychiatric ward (A Life Of Noise & Special Language). What makes this collaboration particularly interesting in light of this years loose conference theme of ethics, is that I'm not just some artist that Emma found on the street, but have been friends with her for close to eight years-whereas we only started collaborating in the last year or so. Effectively the story she is telling in these comics is one that I myself was a (partial) witness to, and that its own had effect on me, much in the same way that the story of my own illness might possibly be viewed differently through her eyes. In our talk we will hopefully address wider questions of responsibility (to friends and family as well as to other people with illnesses), the ethical implications of representation, , as well as questioning whether our collaboration has helped shape our understanding of each others illness, and finally we will no doubt be talking about that age old bugbear: catharsis. All with a splash of humour with any luck.

So if you can make it, I would highly recommend it. The Graphic Medicine conferences act as a springboard for people to tell a whole range of potentially traumatic stories, but despite this, there is usually a whole lot of happiness, humour, and togetherness to come out of this so-called misery, and I can guarantee you'll leave feeling creatively and intellectually rejuvenated.

The 4th International Graphic Medicine Conference, Ethics Under Cover, runs from the 5th-7th of July at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, for more info and for registration click here.

Sorry for Laughing: Toronto Graphic Medicine Conference July 2012

2012-09-19T04:02:00.002-07:00

(number 1&2 tourist destinations in Toronto: The Beguiling Comic Shops and Honest Ed's, weird discount store where a lot of Vice Magazine readers probably buy their clothes)

I fully intended to post this a lot sooner after the event but between preparing for, moving to, and settling in at Dundee to start my Mlitt in Comic Studies I haven’t yet found the time. So hopefully what I have written will still have some impact and not be totally redundant, especially after the brilliant analysis and reflection provided by a number of the other conference delegates. I will try my best to offer my own take on things, as usual any attempts to be brief and succinct have gone straight out the window.

First and foremost, the subheading of this years conference ‘Navigating the margins’ was extremely appropriate given the wide range of boundary pushing artists that were on show. These artists and writers did not let themselves be limited to a traditional and stilted definition of what comics should be, for them the rules were only made to be broken, and they were definitely colouring way outside the margins!(*1) I’m not sure how the amount of lesser known artists compared this year to last years conference, but personally discovering a whole body of new and exciting work was one of the best things about this conference for me.

The bar was set pretty high right from the opening reception when we were treated to a screening of the short documentary The Paper Mirror directed by Charissa King-O’Brien. The film follows painter Riva Lehrer (who does fantastic portraits of people in the disability community amongst other things) as she works on a large scale portrait of cartoonist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel (Dykes to watch out for, Fun Home, Are you my mother?). To a more casual observer it might seem like a documentary about making a painting might seem as dull as (forgive me) watching paint dry, but the film is handled in an extremely sensitive, interesting, and at times quite amusing way. There is a real rapport between Riva and Bechdel and the fact that they are both going in similar directions in their art at the time of filming (wanting to break away (in Riva’s case momentarily) from what they are both known best for) raises some very interesting questions and helps us to examine both artists motives for creating. As someone who enjoys reading comics about the process of making comics (Yoshihiro Tatsumi‘s A Drifting Life and Eddie Campbell’s Alec are particular favourites of mine) to see the amount of detail, hard work, and innovation that goes into Riva’s work was pretty awe-inspiring. In the Q+A Riva also revealed that she goes through a three year interview process in order to get to know her portrait subjects, which shows real commitment! Riva was also one of the small number of people to do a sketch of me (as well as some of the other delegates) during my talk (these pictures I will file under ‘pictures that make me look better looking than I am in the flesh’).

The first proper day of the conference started early with an opening talk from comics historian, publisher, curator, journalist, and all round nice guy Paul Gravett. Paul took us on a whistle stop tour of some lesser known and frankly quite odd examples of medical themes in comics, providing the appropriate voices for each one. As well as this he introduced us to some new and exciting work (The Nao of Brown looks great) including work the less multilingual amongst us (that would be me!) might otherwise not have as easy access to. Paul also rather kindly mentioned my own work in this talk for which I was extremely grateful as well as slightly mortified.

Joyce Brabner’s keynote presentation left me pretty speechless, as I’m sure it did a lot of people. She asked interesting ethical questions about the power we have as storytellers and what happens to us when we tell these stories, drawn mainly from her first hand experience as an activist/journalist covering the experiences of children of war.

Joyce seemed hyper intelligent, ever questioning, and a force capable of grounding us and forcing us to look at the limits (and indeed the potential harms) of what we are doing. Oh and for anyone who has been living under a rock Joyce Brabner is the widow of pioneering autobiographical comics writer Harvey Pekar creator of the series American Splendour and co-author of the ground-breaking and extremely moving memoir Our Cancer Year with Harvey and illustrated by Frank Stack,

The following two days were made up of concurrent sessions of talks as well as panel discussions and workshops. The workshops were something that I hadn’t experienced before and were a welcome addition, it was nice to give attendees a chance to be more hands on with the information they may have absorbed from the talks. This was a conference where doodling was openly encouraged as a valuable cognitive function and I was pretty happy to see plenty of people rising to MK’s manifesto (borrowed from Sunni Brown)of ‘Doodlers unite!’

I attended both MK Czerwiec’s (aka Comic Nurse) and Michael Green’s Drawing for Non-Drawers workshop, and the Cartooning Fundamentals (Mastery of time and space) workshop lead by Brian Fies. The room and the set up made me feel very much like I was going back to school/university, except that this was a lesson I was very much happy to be in!

I liked how MK and Michael’s workshop weaved the academic reasoning and (science) behind creativity in with the practical side of the workshop whilst still keeping things light hearted, fresh, and accessible. Brian Fies's workshop again was very egalitarian but the wealth of his experience and his knowledge and gentle critiquing style was highly valued by all those in attendance. With any luck some of Brian’s mastery has rubbed off on me, as panel-to-panel transitions, the passing of time, and indeed panels in a traditional sense, are the things about doing comics that scare me the most/I feel I have the most difficultly with. The sharing aspect of both the workshops was vital as it did a lot to connect people in the room and created a lot of laughter and encouragement, without making people feel pressured or worry about the quality of their work.

(the face that says it all!)

We were able to take away handouts from both the workshops (including MK’s excellent little comic which you can now view online here) which I look forward to pouring over in the future.

I would like to have gone to a few more of the workshops but there was so much to choose from that there were things that were bound to clash. Here’s some of my highlights from the two days.

Neil Phillips

Neil is an Australian travelling psychotherapist (like Australians famous flying doctors only for the mind) who gave a talk about the similarities between comics and the process of therapeutic hypnosis, a talk which contained an anecdote about a boy, his warts, and a cartoon warthog, which has probably been the most press referenced thing about the whole conferences (‘Comics cure warts!!!’ etc etc). I have to admit I thought the link might have been a bit tenuous but was curious nonetheless, however Neil presented his ideas and myth-busted hypnosis in such a way that was very easy to understand and pretty credible (he talked about hypnosis as the process of forming stories in your mind using pictures). His own life experience of living in and around various mental hospitals as a child and being taught the pleasure of art from one of the inpatients sounds like one worthy of putting down on paper, which thankfully he is in the process of doing. Neil also runs Shrink Rap Press which produces educational illustrated books on emotional and mental problems both for adults and children, a very worthy pursuit.

Dana Walworth (couldn't find a link)

The next speaker acted as a pretty smooth transition from Neil, as there were certain hypnotic qualities to the way she presented her work. I asked her afterwards if she had ever done any acting/performance as her use of repeated words, sentences, her hushed tones, singing, and acting out of conversations between her mother and herself, added a whole other layer to her work. Her memoir is entitled Alicehiemer’s and is about caring for her mother during her declining years. She uses collage, very appropriately cutting out sentences from Alice in Wonderland to use as her mother’s clothes etc, the whole thing consists of snippets, moments of sharp and powerful clarity amongst the gut-wrenching senselessness of it all. Her imagery often goes across the dividing line of the sketchbook spine and the inclusion of the visible sketchbook surface and borders is a very nice touch. Her pencilled artwork does bear a striking resemblance to Tennel’s original illustrations as well as evoking the history of other famous illustrators take on this infamous tale (I am thinking of a mix of Mervyn Peake and Tove Janson here). Her work is not comics in the traditional sense but I think that her work is capable of broadening our definition and pushing us out of our comfort zone into exciting new terrotority

Another speaker at the conference who also uses collage was Mita Mahato, and the fact that she uses a scalpel to cut out her images is very fitting. Although she sticks to a more traditional panel format she plays endlessly with the gutter space making this not an empty zone in which we must imagine the passing of events but a part of the action itself, she is very much a fan of ‘breaking down the forth wall'. She also invokes fairytale imagery to describe her state of being after the loss of her mother, which she describes as being ‘lost in the woods’ and indeed, beautifully cut trees are a big feature in Mita’s work. The child-like rendering of herself acts as a perfect representation of what happens to us, no matter what age we are, when we loose a parent. Mita’s work is very tactile, and leaps off the page, whilst the sepia and autumnal tones give it a sober and sometimes somber and wistful edge. The sparse use of words throughout her comic along with the colour scheme and the child-like perspective used in her imagery also lead me to draw certain parallels between her work and that of fantastic picture book illustrator and writer Shaun Tan at least in terms of tone.

Jenny Lin

Jenny Lin was yet another speaker who doesn’t allow rigid definitions to get in the way of her creative flow and who combines elements of the traditional artists book as well as the pop up book to tell the story of her recovery from severe injury at the wheels of a rubbish truck.

The pop up elements allowed us to view things from Lin’s largely horizontal point of view, which is a great device to immerse readers in the story. Lin also tackles the subject of post-traumatic stress in her work, turning what she considers to be quite a banal incident into something worthy of our attention. However for me it was the little banal details that make Lin’s work so personal and so compelling, and she manages to add a rough sketchbook come diary feel with wonderful layered diagrams that evoke the cross section books I used to love so much as a child.

Nancy Andrews

Nancy combines gorgeous ink and wash work with animation and film to relate her experiences of ICU-related trauma. Her work to me is akin to visual poetry, with elements of calligraphy and even a hint of Japanese and Chinese watercolours. They are very often visual and not verbal but they seem to convey so much about her own experiences in such a breathtakingly succinct and dream like manner, and there is something almost soothing about her drawings. Like Dana Walworth she offers a more in depth back story in the form of personal essays and research on her website, and I think the act of separating her writing and her art is an interesting one, especially if you perhaps view her images before her writing or vice versa.

Sarafin

Although Sarafin works with a more traditional format her manga inspired fictional tales of both overcoming and embracing madness are far from conventional. The comic was started whilst coming out of a state of psychosis in what she describes as ‘a sub par Toronto mental hospital’ and follows the lives of four disparate figures with their own unique problems, delusions, and quirks. Drawn partly from her own experiences the characters in Asylum Squad are like an extremely dysfunctional (scratch that, barely functioning) version of the Justice League of America. I haven’t yet had a chance to read through the whole thing but Sarafin has cleverly printed the comic in an episodic manner skipping between incidents in the various characters lives, and from my initial reading I can tell you it is funny but also very thought-provoking. There are some hard hitting and incredibly genuine and poignant moments nestled amongst the fetish wear and zombie horse demons, and I think that exploring an often harsh and misunderstood reality through the realm of fantasy is definitely an interesting and unique approach. Having had a chance to chat to her during the conference I discovered that Sarafin is involved in the Mad Pride movement in Toronto, and whilst her views on mental health may split people down the middle, they will certainly inspire debate, which I think is defiantly the mark of a good artist/writer. Sarafin has also written some personal but well thought out essays in the back of the book, which cover her own experiences as well as the labelling and treatment of mental health which are well worth a read.

(the auditorium where I did my talk (I promise it was a lot fuller when I was talking! and me during my talk-which went down pretty well and got a lot of laughs)

So in conclusion...

In my comics as well as when talking about my illness, I have quite often rallied against the idea of building a community around illness, showing that it can have negative as well as positive effects. However, having now been to two Graphic Medicine conferences, I am beginning to see the people involved as the closest thing to a positive model of a community based around illness that I have so far encountered. This is precisely because the people I have encountered both in Leeds previously and in Toronto are incredibly open and willing to have their beliefs and experiences cross examined and challenged, and very rarely do they allow themselves the status of victim. The self-deprecation and neurosis which are often the go-to tool of defence for a lot of comic artists make up a vital part of the stories they have to tell and allow us the readers to take everything they say with a pinch of salt and draw our own conclusions.

These artists and writers may discuss their experiences in their work and when talking about their work, but they also seem to understand the importance of ‘switching off’, of not spending every moment analysing what it is they, or others like them, do, and how they live. From talking to these people the first thought that pops into your head isn’t that they have or have had some terrible illness, or have had to watch the decline of someone they love. This is something I’ve always strive for in my own life, and I am lucky enough to be healthy enough so that the fact that I have CF isn’t usually the first thing people notice about me (it’s more likely to be ‘that guy is weird, why does he rub his eyes when he’s uncomfortable?’)

I used to say that I don’t want to be defined by my illness and whilst I still believe that there is so much more to me than CF, I can’t deny the fact that it has played a significant part in the way I’ve turned out and the direction in which I’m heading now, as a semi-professional sick kid. So I guess I could settle with being the one in charge of how I am defined by my illness.

One thing perhaps that I took away from the workshop aspect of the conference is that maybe we need to look beyond comics, and also aim this kind of thing at a wider variety of people. I think it’s great that there are people out there giving doctors and medical students the tools they need to see things more clearly from the patients point of view and even to allow themselves in a safe environment to show and discuss their own vulnerability and fears, but beyond the art therapy model in hospitals I’m not sure how much this sort of thing is available for public consumption: from those with illnesses, to the family, friends, and carers of those with illness. I also think that a strictly artistic based model can and will have its limits. Despite the mantra that everyone can and should draw (and I certainly agree with the cognitive science behind it all) what is perhaps ignored is that some people simply might not want to (and not just because they have had it beaten out of them at an early age), and might wish to tell their stories in different ways, or not at all.

People have different sensibilities when it comes to these things and different means of coping, and whilst I personally am in the business of letting it all out, of making a lot of my private life public, and making light of it, there are those who will be uncomfortable about doing this, let alone reading works like these. I agree that it can be a good thing to talk about your experiences because sometimes this will help you gain some perspective on them, make you realise you are not alone, give you the opportunity to talk to people who understand. But as I mentioned in my own talk at the conference this act of separation can also be potentially damaging, it can encourage self-pity, bitterness, even a sense of entitlement and superiority. I often find myself employing a reverse tactic, I look to my so-called ‘healthy’ friends to keep things in perspective for me, and my link to ‘normal life’ is what I find helps keeps me grounded.

Something Joyce Brabner said during her keynote speech sticks in my mind here. She talked about the act of ‘turning our nightmares into a kind of entertainment’, which on the one hand can be a liberating thing, a way of owning it, even a way of defeating it. But on the other hand this can have a lingering and damaging effect, especially if this entertainment is successful and we are forced to relive these nightmares over and over (something various comic artist friends of mine have testified to). I’m not trying to be deliberately negative here, I have very much embraced Graphic Medicine(*2) and it’s positive effects, it’s sense of togetherness, it’s breaking down of hierarchies etc, but I think we better ourselves by allowing ourselves to be constantly critical, and self-aware, and so long as we don’t over indulge in the meta-fiction, to include this struggle and self evaluation in our stories can often be a useful tool for people going through similar things.

I do think that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the comics medium and that the storytelling skills and open discourse that comics teach us, I believe, can be transferred into the non-creative realm, simply as a means of talking about, overcoming, and coping with illness and trauma. Of course if you were to ask me how, I’d probably come back blank right now, maybe I’m just pulling ideas and grand theories out of my arse!

As for other mediums beyond comics, I think the cross-pollination of different approaches to comics that I witnessed in Toronto was a very encouraging sign. I’ve always thought comics was a pretty open medium that was unashamed of borrowing from other mediums such as film, prose, poetry etc. So if we were to look at other mediums alongside comics, I’m sure this wouldn’t be such a bad thing either.

For example, I think the power of comedy and of laughter is another useful area to examine, and one that fascinates me. What with the constant debates on the limits and potential damages of humour, what is and isn’t funny, what is and isn’t in bad taste, who can and can’t tell certain types of jokes, and whether or not humour can truly challenge the status quo, the potential for examining and cross examining perceptions of and experiences of illness and disability are pretty ripe.

The chasm of opinion and misunderstanding that potentially divides people like Jim Sweeney (former Comedy Store improv star and writer and performer of one man show My MS and Me), American comedian Julia Sweeney (not related), ‘stand up’ comedian Brett Eastburn, and ‘sit down’ comedian Laurence Clark, with the likes of Ricky Gervais, Robin Ince, Warick Davis, Nicky Clarke (of the campaign People Not Punchlines) and heaven forbid Frankie Boyle, is one well worth examining in further detail.

But it seems the effects of humour have been largely ignored in academia, the early writings on humour mirrored the early writings on comics by saying that comedy was trivial, throwaway, even at times sinful. There were a few thinkers ahead of their time though: first Erasmus with his In Praise Of Folly (although he would later do a U-turn on it, claiming they were not his beliefs but a fiction), later came Freud with his Jokes and their relation to the unconscious, and then a great deal of time later Mikhail Bakhtin’s study on the work of Francois Rabelais. But some people on both sides of the opinion fence have started to appear out of the wood work, from Peter L Berger’s brilliant Redeeming Laughter and Ted Cohen’s Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, through to Henri Bergson’s Laughter , Michael Billig’s Laughter and Ridicule and Sharon Lockyer’s Beyond A Joke.

I think as comics as a medium conjures up these same misconceptions, questions, and challenges it would make sense not to study it in an isolated bubble, and to study it alongside comedy seems the perfect place to start, especially considering a lot of graphic medicine uses humour as an essential narrative device. It is my firm belief that a serious and emotive message can be transmitted to a reader/viewer, whilst still making us laugh. In Toronto laughter was a big part of the shared experience and atmosphere of the conference, and through this laughter there was definitely a sense of what Ted Cohen likes to call ‘a community of intimacy’. And hey, I may be no Norman Cousins, but this can’t be a bad thing right?!

(the last supper (Jewish Deli food, bad American accents by yours truly and plenty of beer)-Susan Squier, Alex Thomas & Gary Ashwal of Booster Shot Comics, Neil Phillips (Shrink Rap Press), Joyce Farmer, Paul Gravett, Sarafin, Dana Walworth, Ian Williams, MK, Mita Mahato, Shelley Wall, Nicola Streeton and Suley Fatah (sorry if I've missed anyone out!)

(click here for the conference collective memory, blog posts by other attendees, photos, and art)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1) This isn't a euphemism for completely nuts, although....

(*2) After all I don't want to bite the hand that feeds...

Webcomic of note: Jordan Crane's The Doctor Will See You

2012-02-15T02:16:00.006-08:00

Disquieting is a pretty apt description of this ongoing webcomic from master of the form Jordan Crane. The plot of this comic is similar to one of those arty multiple narrative films (think Babel) where it all comes crashing to a head with the seemingly disparate lives of its characters becoming violently intertwined with often tragic results. In fact the cinematic comparison here is appropriate too as the whole thing engrosses you and pulls you in like a very powerful film, all the time you are waiting for the powerful moment that you know is going to happen but you aren't quite sure about how it is going to manifest itself. It also dips in and out of fantasy and reality to the point that you feel intoxicated and are never quite sure which is which. Is the protagonist paranoid and imagining all the worst possible case scenarios of what could have happened to his girlfriend, or did it actually happen and his absence from the scene leaves him to fill in the horrific details...I'll leave you to find out. Brilliantly nuanced, overlapping the breaking down of relationships with happier memories, guilt, and an abundance of medical themes (still birth, ectopic pregnancy, death), The Doctor Will See You Now is a webcomic that will literally take your breath away with its inventive brilliance (which Jordan Crane manages to make look so easy, damn gifted bastard).

Read it here.

(On another note Jordan Crane's comic/children's book Keep Our Secrets looks pretty amazing too, as it uses heat sensitive ink to hide details within the picture).

Following on from the last post. Images you can click and resize.

2012-01-27T14:48:00.001-08:00

Drawing Blood: The CF Diaries Issue 2-a work in progres

2012-01-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd post about the progress of the second issue of my comic as certain stones have started to be unturned while scripting and drawing this that I think are interesting to discuss, if not at great length.

Firstly bare in mind that most of these images are rough, incomplete, and liable to change, although it'll give you a general idea. The focus of this issue is an event in my life that happened a number of years ago which is forever referred to in my medical notes as 'massive Hemoptysis', which in laymen's terms means that I was coughing up a lot of blood, over the course of one weekend.

The story branches out from there and touches a little more on how my friends dealt with it at the time, and how the way in which my friendship dynamic worked and why it was good for me in terms of my illness and how I wanted to be treated, and I indulge myself a little more in explaining my ego and my failings. Despite what could be considerably a downbeat subject I have tried to go into it with humour again, talking about my feeble attempts to wipe bloody fingerprints off the walls which still showed up weeks later, trying not to get blood on the leather upholstery in my dad's car, and (how could I forget!) having my pubes shaved by a male nurse called Moses on my birthday.

(The nurses found it very amusing that my birthday present was a dry shave and itchy balls, but they did get me two birthday cakes for after the procedure)

(I thought I was being ultra considerate trying to clean up the blood that I got in the bathroom as and when it happened, turns out I'm a pretty poor cleaner, my friends were finding blood fingerprints everywhere for weeks!)

I also try and touch upon the often conflicting memories and perceptions of the event in question by myself, my friends, and my parents.

(abstract/psychedelic representation of procedure I had done on my inflamed/bleeding arteries, it was either called (something) embolisation or bronchial angiography)

However drawing and writing this event as well as thinking about it did mean that I touched upon an issue which I know I am going to have to talk about in greater detail in the future: Death. (If your not a fan of self-indulgence I suggest you stop reading now)

(This image to be used in a later issue)

At the end of the issue I plan to relay a conversation I had with a friend following a piece of good news from my liver doctor. When I was diagnosed with CF-associated liver disease at the age of 10 I was given approximately 4 years before they estimated I would need a transplant. Since then my liver function has improved dramatically, due to nothing but oral medication (and certainly not due to my nun like aversion to alcohol *cough cough*). I was told that I would most likely never have any real trouble with my liver, that I seemed to be one of those select group of CF patients who was diagnosed young but who fully recovered. I still needed to see him every two years to be sure but everything was fine, there was no scaring at all, and the latest test results were just back in the normal range (that is the normal range for everyone not the normal range for people with liver disease). When I told this to my friend over a drink (very apt!) she was overjoyed:

This got me thinking about catharsis. For me the process of making these comics is almost the opposite of catharsis, I'm not working through things with words and pictures but rather holding them a distance. When writing and drawing these comics I am not thinking in terms of 'these are things that have actually happened, could happen, or will happen' but simply as creative problems to solve. I think about it in terms of the best way to tell a story, of the most creative and interesting way to represent it visually. It only really dawned on me lately when I was trying to think about the best way to draw myself vomiting blood at the side of a motorway and I had to stop and ask myself if that thought process was weird.

For me (and I guess I'm very lucky in this respect) and for my friends, my CF hasn't felt too real most of the time, which is why I sometimes worry that researching CF, and writing and drawing about my CF, might just be pouring salt in the wound. I'd be interested to know how other comic artists feel about this, which is why I think the whole process of creating these stories and the effect it has on yourself as well as those around you is an important thing to include in the story itself. This is something I thought was underrepresented in comics but going back through a lot of the medical themed graphic narratives I've read it does pop its head up more often than not. Sarah Leavitt reading her creative writing piece to her mum in Tangles, Darryl Cunningham talking about how the reaction to his comics online in a sense 'saved him' from depression, are just two examples I can think of off the top of my head. Of course you probably need to be sparing with this and not go into over blown self-indulgent postmodern meta-fiction overdrive, but still its something worth thinking about.

Finally to end things on a more upbeat note, I am quite flattered (but also equally anxious) to have had The CF Diaries Issue 1 selected as the small press comic to be examined and scrutinised by Mike Medaglia and Mark Haylock's monthly comic reading/discussion group Comic Gosh! in April alongside Nicola Streeton's excellent graphic memoir Billy, You, and Me. This group has been endorsed by much more heavyweight members of the small and mainstream comic press than myself and I have only heard good things about it. I intend to attend and might attend March's session as well as they will be discussing David B's Epileptic alongside transatlantic woman's comic The Strumpet. My ego will either take a bruising or will have to get it's own chauffeur, we'll have to wait and see. Read the rest of the reading list here.

(speaking of ego's, here's a funny little section I drew for my comic, not entirely sure where to place it yet)

I will also be concentrating on drawing the second issue of my good friend Emma Mould's second autobiographical comic about living with Borderline Personality Disorder in time for her presentation at next months Laydeez Do Comics alongside Karrie Fransman and Dr Ann Miller (author of the fantastic theory book Reading Bande Dessinee) on the 20th of Febuary at the Rag Factory in Brick Lane. Starts at 6.30, £1.50 to attend, homemade cookies, beer and wine, great talks, and the chance to go out for a curry afterwards.

Review: Absence-Andy Luke

2012-01-23T12:24:00.001-08:00

Absence is a short autobiographical comic about epilepsy written by Andy Luke and illustrated by Stephen Downey. Everything about its format, from its length to the style of the images, the way it's all arranged, and the various logos that adorn its pages suggest a medical information leaflet disguised as a comic. However whereas anything purporting to give information to a certain audience (especially if that audience consists of younger children and teenagers) that uses comic as a form of communication often suffer horrendously from a patronising voice and a painful attempt at 'being down with the kids' (usually through a skateboarding talking animal or something along those lines).

Thankfully this isn't the case with Absence. It skilfully weaves essential facts and courses of action for epileptics alongside more sparse and at times even whimsical reflections of Luke's childhood and beyond. Something tells me Luke would be a skilled writer of textbooks or educational DVD's for disinterested youth, because he would be able to make children learn without them knowing, this is how easily digestible the information in Absence is, even with all the jargon.

Although the visual style is for the most part fairly straightforward harking back to the angular age of superheroes mixed with the kind of visual approach that might have been adopted by the artists of spin off Grange Hill comics there are moments of McCloud-esque multi media abstraction and visual wit to bring a smile to your face. I also find the bookending of the comic both with the information on the comic and various important associations and charities, and with repetitions of the opening and closing page, a very effective advice to draw readers in.

Luke and Downey have done a great job of producing something clear and concise but at the same time enjoyable and with real emotional weight. The potential for comics to be used in this way has already been explored(*1) by the Wellcome Trust and Edward Ross with his short comic on parasitic disease (see my review here) but Luke and Downey go one better. It is the personal element that readers will really empathise with, just as Darryl Cunningham's admission to his own struggle with mental health at the end of Psychiatric Tales reaffirms the message of the book, the advice and guidance seems much more palatable coming from someone who actually knows. Absence would be a welcome addition to any library, hospital, or charitable organisation. You can order it online for free or read it online for free via the website here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1) I believe it needs to be explored more so long as these comics/information leaflets are produced by people who make or have a passion for comics otherwise the patronisation or the appalling visuals tend to rule supreme.

Animation of the week: Screenplay-Barry Purves

2012-01-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

This is another one from my Christmas wish list, this time taken from the excellent first volume of the anthology DVD British Animation Classics (featuring some top notch independent animation which doesn't skimp on the female animators either-Joanna Quinn, Alison Snowden, Erica Russell, and Alison de Vere are all represented).

Purves is a master director, writer, and animator of mainly puppet based animation and has done work with countless animation studios including Aardman, Pixar, Dreamworks etc. Despite the fact that his own independent work only amounts to six short films he has been nominated for countless awards and is highly regarded in the British film and animation industry. He embraces a strong tradition of animation that stems from the likes of Ladislas Starewicz, Ray Harryhausen, George Pal, Lou Bunin, Jiri Trnka, etc, and carries on to the present day in the works of The Brothers Quay, the Bolex brothers, and Suzie Templeton (among others).

Screenplay is one of his two works that embraces the art and tradition of the setting for the story being told. The other example being Achilles which is obviously inspired by Greek art but is also staged like a Greek tragedy.

The title 'Screenplay' literally refers to the used of traditional Japanese screen painting as part of the storytelling process. The story is adapted from the legend of The Willow Pattern, a famous British ceramic pattern designed around 1790. The story is a Chinese romantic fable invented in England which follows the classic formula of star-crossed lovers of a different class who ultimately meet a tragic end.

Purves seems to create a fantastic sense of staging. The play part of the title is also highly appropriate as it feels like this is what we are watching, and the smoothness of the action and of the transitions almost make us forget that we are watching an animation. Scenery changes are swift and inventive and movement despite being stylised (due to the obvious influence of Kabuki theatre on the film, along with the English sign language narration) is fluid and believable. The use of everything from traditional umbrellas and pieces of material to represent everything from water to blood, and the constant use of a revolving/floor set keep the action confounded to one space very effectively.

It seems appropriate that Purves's films were chosen to be shown as part of a special season on Japanese puppet master Kicachiro Kawamoto back at the Watershed in Bristol in 2008, his influence on this film is very obvious although I think Purves adds a certain amount of wit to the tradition as well as making a massive improvement on the usual pacing. The action is quite fast but still you don't miss a beat. A truly beautiful piece of film!

(watch it here)

Review: Tatsumi

2012-01-18T16:42:00.000-08:00

In his epic five hundred plus page manga autobiography A Drifting Life , Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the godfather of alternative manga(*1), talked about the profound influence cinema had on the stories he came to create, so it seems appropriate that his life and his stories should be made into an animated film.

Directed by lifelong manga and indeed Tatsumi fan Eric Khoo, the film treats the comic text, and the visual style of Tatsumi, as sacred, and the animators have gone to great lengths to make you aware that these animations are based first and foremost on ink drawings done on paper. Everything from the crosshatching, the monochrome shading, and he dotted printing effects of his first full length work Black Blizzard, are all lovingly recreated here. Not only this but the animation is deliberately rough in places, as Khoo wanted to be as faithful to the experience of reading these stories on the page as possible, which is why the movements and expressions are perhaps much more limited then your average animation, to good effect.

While colour is added to the events that happen in Tatsumi's real life, his fictional stories that are interspersed within the overall narrative are distinguished through the recreation of their colour schemes. So we get a mixture of moody purples and yellows, sepia tones, and black and whites. The general feel of these stories I could describe as being the manga equivalent of film noir. Some of the stories even incorporate deliberate cracks of age and haze around the images to add to the atmosphere.

The visual mood of course perfectly mirrors the overarching sense of doom in the stories, and like in film noir we are presented with the seedy underbelly of a supposedly affluent society. Like the 1950's crime comics we are treated to sordid sex and perversions, violence, and an easy escape at the bottom of a bottle. But one thing that Tatsumi has over those EC artists and writers is a heightened level of intelligence.

His plots have clever little twists that seem surreal but that also make perfect sense. He really seems to get at the absurdity of life and maybe it would be hyperbole to liken him to existentialist writers such as Sartre, Knut Hamsun, Jean Genet, etc. Even though his stories are short and sharp (and quite often bitter) on the screen they come across as having qualities of merit, this is indeed literature (in hushed tones).

These stories were formed out of a personal bitterness that Tatsumi himself reflects on in the film (it his own voice that narrates the events of his life). Post-War Japan finally brought itself out of hardship and started to experience economic growth, a growth that Tatsumi felt personally that he and thousand others like him, were not entitled to. Tatsumi tells us that he 'vomited out' these frustrations in his stories. Bleak allegorical tales about the dull thud of progress and modernity in an increasingly overpopulated world where no one communicates face to face must seem pretty prophetic when we look back on them now. But these were written and drawn mostly in the seventies!

The additional layer of sound is also a very important one. In the story Beloved Monkey, we are immersed in the maddening noise of the factory, we feel it thudding around us even as our hero leaves the factory out onto the sickeningly overcrowded streets of Tokyo. The moronic and slightly idiotic voice of the American G.I in 'Goodbye', all these details suspend our disbelief that this 2D world of paper figures is anything less than real life.

The one thing this film could not do sadly was capture the great width and breadth of Tatsumi'sautobiography, but on reflection I realised this was not such a bad thing after all. I thought originally that this film showed a rare example of the limitations of animation but I think I was probably suffering from the old 'read the book before I saw the film' tunnel vision. I wasdisappointed by the omitting of huge chunks of his life story (although starting with the books ending, and the death of Sensie Tezuka, was a nice touch) but realised considering the pacing of this film was a tad on the slow side at times, this mammoth tale was probably best kept between the pages of a book. With 'A Drifting Life' you could dip in and out whenever you liked, and it was easy to pick up. At around about two hours in length, putting anything else in might have stretched it to bursting, and certainly a film consisting only of his life events might have been a bit boring. Intersecting his fiction into the film became a key device in the plot anyway, by helping to explain a lot of Tatsumi's own mentality when it came to life and manga.

Tatsumi is a master storyteller, a master of his craft, and upon reflection Eric Khoo has done him proud and hopefully opened up a whole new audience to his work.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1) Or as he and his colleagues came to christen it 'gekiga' (meaning 'dramatic pictures')

Review: The House That Groaned-Karrie Fransman

2012-01-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

I live in an extremely quiet block of flats where everyone pretty much keeps to themselves, so a graphic novel which imagines what our neighbours could be getting up behind closed doors is going to instantly appeal to me.

And weird goings on in confined spaces and broken down buildings has a pretty rich history in storytelling(*1), particularly in cinema. Even before setting out to read this graphic novel, going on the limited information I had, I had already made some preemptive comparisons and expectations. Knowing that there were to be surrealistic and creepy elements to the story made me think in particular of Roman Polanksi's The Tenant(*2), the fancy dress scenes from The Shining, and parts of Rosamary's Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist etc.

However the fact that The House The Groaned didn't meet many of these expectations is not to be considered a bad thing, Franman's debut is a complete unique animal.

Scratch under the surface (which in this book you literally can do, with cross sections of the house revealing crumbling and damp walls, dodgy electrics, and rats) and this book is about much more than just a story about a seemingly normal girl moving into a building full of nut jobs.

This is a book about the fronts we put up for other people, the secrets and weaknesses we hide behind our carefully presented exteriors and the way in which early experiences can have a formative effect on the way our lives turn out, and the ways in which we compensate for what is missing.

Karrie weaves moments of magic realism and pomp amongst an unfolding soap opera that is far more believable than anything I have ever seen on Eastenders. The Midnight Feast Front Woman is a voluptuous Greek goddess of excess and in her eyes she represents freedom from norms and constraints, but towards the end of the story we see the sticky end to which her excesses have truly led her and the sudden transformation is jarring, surreal, and quite cinematic(*3). But it is her and Brian (the man sexually attracted to the terminally ill and morbidly obese) that are perhaps the most over the top and cartoon-like of characters and therefore they are the ones I care for less. Their origin stories are perhaps less solid and sympathetic than those of the other characters. Although the Midnight Feast Front Woman tidily fits nicely into a triangle formed by the protagonist Barbara and the fanatical and highly disciplined dietitian Janet representing two extremes of our obsession with body image.

The use of flashbacks gives a sense of plausibility and humanity to the remaining characters and helps us to understand better their psychological makeup, the fact that all of this centres around the building of the house during Victorian times is a nice touch, obviously indicating that this is where all their lives are going to come to a head.

Moving on from the story itself, Karrie's visual style is very unique. Her iconic cartooning is perhaps most effective when it comes to the design of her main character, the vain beauty obsessed girl-next-door with a deeply buried secret, Barbara. The circular cheeks and down pointed nose make her look both plastic and emotionless (as so many cosmetic surgery/botox obsessed celebrities do) as well as slightly grotesque(*4). Although the other character which really puts her style to effective use is that of the retoucher Matt who is afraid to touch, you can see the fear and the timidness in such a small number of lines. Of course she really gets to go to town with the elderly Mrs Durbach, a character who seems to be left behind and forgotten in life due to her age and her failing body and as a consequence, she literally fades into the background (she is hidden on every page and it is up to you to find her!). The inventive moulding of her body to chairs, railings, and bookshelves is a visual treat to try and decipher.

She also makes great use of a plethora of comic iconography whilst giving it her own unique twist. Sound effects, speech balloons, and in particular the text inside the speech balloons are constantly played around with in order to fit the precise moment in the story, at times becoming an active leading device in the story itself. The pacing of the panels, the use of wordless panels, and the atmosphere created(*5) is also spot on.

It ends with a punch as well, which will probably knock the wind right out of you. Without giving too much away I would say that Karrie's Argento-like shock twist towards the end of the book is a brave and refreshing move

The House The Groaned is a story of fantasy dripped in reality and I recommend you follow the advice of The Midnight Feast Front Woman and gorge yourself on it immediately.

Check out the site for the book here. Karrie's site here. And a much more articulate and perceptive review here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*) Think Dave McKean's epic Cages, or Brecht Evens The Wrong Place

(*2) If you haven't seen this film I can highly recommend it. Insane neighbours cross dressing and attempted suicide!

(*3)I can image this sequence of the book would be pretty fantastic animated.

(*4) In a chubby-cheeked cartoony kind of way

(*5) There is a particular tense moment when the lights in the building go out which reminds me at times of Charles Burn's Black Hole

Not comics but amazing nonetheless

2012-01-11T03:01:00.000-08:00

When someone dedicates a large chunk of their lives (35 years!) to creating a toothpick sculpture of San Francisco you have to wonder if it was a colossal waste of time. But then you look at the amount of detail that has gone into it, and the fact that this is a kinetic sculpture with multiple 'tours' that can be travelled through using ping pong balls and you realise that this is a testament to the ingenuity of the human mind, a flagship of creativity , and most of all , passion and obsession. The fact that this sculpture is constantly changing, and the inventive witticisms dotted throughout, make this sculpture, 35 years well spent. Click here to view the video. View the original article on Colossal here.

(It is worth noting that the blog that hosted this article, Colossal, is a fantastic art and design blog mainly fixated with impressive scale, ingenuity, and invention, but also showcases some pretty lovely small scale design as well).

Illustrated Review: The Butcher's Wife-Li Ang

2012-01-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

(originally intended for a zine but the list of contributors was full)

The Butcher’s Wife-Li Ang

This short sharp novel has been reclaimed as a classic piece of feminist literature but its scope goes well beyond showing up the abuses of patriarchy. Based loosely on an actual newspaper report that the author had read, it imagines the truth behind the general assumption that the only thing that would drive a woman to murder he husband in rural Taiwan would be adultery on her part.

However Li Ang is careful not to cast the abusive husband as a complete two dimensional monster and instead examines the root causes of a society that would not only allow something like this to go on unchecked but would also consequently would put all the blame on the woman. Li Ang’s husband even has some, allbiet fleeting, sympathetic moments-whether recounting tales of hardship in his youth, or feeling momentary remorse for the surge of violent energy he all too often does not recognise. Although of course these are not presented as excuses but it does give an interesting insight into a way of life that cripples the vast majority.

The Butcher’s Wife is a tale of the dangers of superstition, and the desperate lenghts to which poverty will drive a person. The fact that the female protagonist’s feelings towards her husband are not always of horror is quite telling(*1). She has been through hard times and is at least grateful for the food being married to a pig-butcher brings, and even the much less frantic lifestyle and home life, and it is because of this that she quickly flicks from fear and upset to feeling self-satisfied and almost carefree.

A brilliantly layered story that paints a pretty vivid picture of rural life and mixes in some surreal and nightmarish horror in the vein of oriental ghost stories. Each of the stories settings are brought to life in all their stark duty, and the smells and tastes richly weave through to your senses. Finally the addition of the gossiping, judgmental, interfering and disingenuous Auntie Ah-Wang is an essential piece of the jigsaw, which shows that there is more than one guilty party in this tale. An essential read!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1) It is only the violence of his sexual demands that she fears at first

The death of a British institution

2012-01-03T04:13:00.001-08:00

The legendary British cartoonist/satirist/graphic artist Ronald Searle died peacefully in his sleep at his home in the south of France on december the 30th, aged 91. Only last year Searle gave his first TV interview in 35 years to celebrate his 90 years, an occasion marked by another British institution Steve Bell calling Searle 'our greatest living cartoonist'. Creator of the hell-raising belles of St Trinians (before it was given a god-awful modern makeover) and Molesworth, he has also done countless illustrations for the likes of Punch, The New Yorker, Life, Le Monde, etc.

Searle was simply following in the footsteps of the greats, like Hogarth and Gilray, and indeed produced his own legion of imitators over time, or at least people heavily influenced by him (Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe to name just two). He could turn his hand to any subject, and most styles although there was always a frantic energy in his drawings, even with his most haughty-toighty of creations(*1). But he was also a fantastically skilled artist who continued to evolve, fusing his artistic sensibilities, flitting between playful inventiveness and abstraction to joyously wiry cartooning, to straight (not to mention frightening/moving) reportage using whatever primitive tools he had to hand. For Searle was also a survivor of a POW camp during World War II and worked on the infamous 'Railway of Death' project initiated by the Japanese, an attempt to construct a railway between Thailand and Burma which resulted in the death of 100,000 labourers, including 16,000 Allied Prisoners. All this is powerfully recorded through Searle's drawings which are collected together in the book 'To The Kwai and Back. War Drawings 1939-1945' You can imagine the kind of influence this probably had on Joe Sacco (who has already acknowledged his debt to another British great George Orwell by doing an adaptation of TheRoad To Wigan Pier, which sadly is only available as a bonus when you spend over a certain amount on the Fantagraphics website).

Searle's influence will continue to be felt throughout the world of cartooning, art, design, and animation, for the foreseeable future. He is a man who has truly left a mark.

There are many tributes floating around the web, but I recommend this blog for a fantastic array of of Searle's best artwork.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1) Like Posy Simmonds, Nicolas Bentley, and Osbert Lancaster there was a particular upper-class Britishness to his drawings although Searle did it all with much less restraint and a cheerful sense of anarchy. It's also worth mentioning that Searle was one of those handful of artists who really understands the unusual relationship that British pet owners have with their pets. Searle's dogs and cats are among my favourite cartoon animals (next to B.Kliban's cats).

Find of the week: Professor Balthazar

2011-12-31T00:16:00.001-08:00

Christmas time for my family is usually a time for following the links to Amazon I provide and then on Christmas day furrowing their brows in confusion as I open my presents and they wonder what it is exactly they have bought. This year was no different.

'Thanks mum, thanks dad'

'That's ok...er...what is it exactly?'

'Oh it's an animated Croatian children's program from the sixties'

'Oh...of course!'

Professor Balthazar is a glorious technicolour invention from Croatian animator Zlatko Grgic and the famed Zagreb Films animation studio. Visually it resembles the 60's pop art and colour obsession best represented by films like Yellow Submarine and The Point(*1).

It follows the exploits of a friendly neighbourhood inventor who solves all the towns problems using his surreal looking inventing machine. When the local street car driver forms a friendship with a down and out bird, the bird teaches him to fly in return for his kindness, but his new skill inadvertently causes the driver to loose his job, that is until Balthazar invents a potion to turn his street car into a flying street car.

The lovely painted backgrounds, the jolting movement(*2), the short but incredibly upbeat and catchy theme song, the strange way in which birds are drawn (huge cumbersome legs with boots on the end that move a lot more than their actual wings) all make for a perfect package.

In a time when all the beloved children's characters of our youth are being cloned Invasion of theBodysnatchers stylee using CGI its nice to look back to a time when childrens television had soul and inventive joy.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1) If you haven't seen this I highly recommend it, a fantastically animated fable about racial tolerance narrated by Ringo Star

(*2) This jolting movement is perhaps a nod to the breakaway from realist animation and adoption of modernist principles in animation that occurred during the 50's for America andBritain but started later in the 60's for Europe. In this type of animation they would deliberately highly the painterly and drawn surface and limit movements (often skipping from one side of the action to the other instantaneously) in order not to attempt to disguise the fact that these were moving drawings on paper. These principles are discussed at great lengths in Amid Amidi'sfantastic book Cartoon Modern.

Blog of the week: Surrealistic etiquette

2011-12-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

Elliot Baggot is one half of the editing team (along with fellow cartoonist Mike Medaglia)for the excellent new small press magazine Dot Comics, a glossy well designed publication that explores the links between digital comics and print. The magazine features reprints of a selection of well respected small press webcomics such as Phillipa Rice's My Cardboard Life and David O'Connel's Tozo ,creator interviews, and an insightful article on the future of digits comics from man-in-the-know Paul Gravett.

However Elliot is a talented cartoonist in his own respect and obviously has a flair for design, as the sophisticated yet deliciously simple layout of his blog suggests. His blog caught my eye because it intermingles nicely reflections on his own process of comics and his involvement with the UK small press, amongst reviews and (nicely tying in with my last post) his thoughts on more classical art, fashion, and architecture.

Elliot's writing is articulate and although slightly academic is easy to digest-which is by no means a bad thing, it makes the whole thing a pleasure to read, you can sense his passion and the breath of knowledge for his subject and it tends to rub off on the reader.

Elliot's comic he produced as his entry to the London Print Studio comics internship (sadly now in its last year I believe) is also fantastic, a brilliant example of how malleable comics is as an art form, as here Elliot follows in McCloud's footsteps and combines the academic/cultural/historical with the pictorial, giving a cultural history of the perception of comics.

Well worth a read!

Review: Asterios Polyp-David Mazzuchelli

2011-12-29T02:07:00.000-08:00

A while ago I posted a link to an interesting review of Josh Simmon's haunting wordless graphic novel House which digressed into a brief but enlightening academic discussion of the link between comics and architecture. Although Mazzuchelli was mentioned in this article it was a very fleeting mention, which is surprising given the relevance he holds with the argument. A lot of Mazzuchelli's work thus far (notably Batman Year One and ESPECIALLY his claustrophobic and innovative adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass) have explored space in a unique way. Asterios Polyp, his first original graphic novel is no exception.

But the fact that Asterios, the books protagonist, is an architect, is not the thing that makes this work immediately architectural. In the true style of some of the greats of architecture such as Miles Van Der Rohe in this graphic novel form follows function.

The experimentation with panels, word balloons, and splash pages is daring and bold at times, but NEVER at the expense of the story. In fact I would go as far as to say that I have not seen as perfect pacing in a comic as within the pages of this graphic novel. Where a panel is meant to be a punch, it truly packs a punch. You can feel it as a punctuation mark, as an overwhelming full stop. Everything adds up to the whole. Be it the different type faces, the limited and unusual colour palette (purples, blues, pinks, and yellows) or the overlapping of different drawing styles (from straight laced cartooning to pure abstraction), none of it takes away from the feel of the thing.

Mazzuchelli appropriately channels Saul Stienberg, a boundary skipping artist with a taste for the architectural. He presents people broken down into geometrical shapes, rough sketchy shading, even made entirely out of letters. It is in these moments that the visual does well to represent two people coming together, falling apart, working out differences, or allowing themselves to become vulnerable. In his more sketchy moments which are mostly wordless abstract and full of myth, symbolism, ugly surrealism, he evokes both French artist Blutch and the wordless woodcut novels of Frans Masereel and Lyn Ward (whose work often involved being swallowed up by the big city).

Scratch under the surface of this work and you have a relatively simple story, a simple relationship trope. But simple layers are added to the story such as musings on Asterio's lost twin, his constant referral to the academic world, and the introduction of jealousy into the relationship.

The Yin and Yang of Asterois and his wife/ex-wife Hanna is a chaotic balance of forms, the differences that somehow hold them together best represented by their opposing obsessions within architecture and sculpture. His is a reliance on straight lines and cold-hearted logic and analysis (although he does deceive himself at times) and hers is more about the freedom of form feelings and intuition.

Asterois uses his academic dissection of the arts as an attempt to explain human behaviour, mainly his own, through diagrams and references. It is this arrogance that quickly becomes short-sightedness.

Of course this does sadly represent the standard binary biased view of gender(*1) but Mazzuchelli does not represent Hanna as irrational and lacking control because of this, ultimately it is Asterios who has the most to lose from his behaviour.

The comparison to Yin and Yang is an appropriate one to sum up my feelings on this graphic novel. It takes a truly great comic book artist to make a graphic novel that works equally well on the written level as well as the visual level. Every element of the story is in perfect balance, the words become pictures, the pictures become words, everything is naturally interwoven. The storytelling consists of a simple thread with multiple complex threads running off of it, the style perfectly suits the characters(*2), the mood, and the pace. Another image that runs throughout the book is that of the clock or watch, often Swiss and efficient. So would it be safe to call Asterio's Polyp the Ikea of graphic novels? Well yes, but then I'd say it's a bit easier to put together than your average flat pack desk.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1) For a much more articulate examination of these ideas, including how the visual in Aesterio's Polyp reinforces certain stereotypes, you can't go far wrong reading this. Personally I think Mazzuchelli uses these visual binaries to express the limitations of acting according to apparently ingrained gender behaviour.

(*2) Asterios's sharp angular head versus Hanna's curvy doe-eyed bean head.

Comic classics: Blood

2011-12-19T12:47:00.001-08:00

Kent William's and JM DeMatteis's Blood is a visual classic even if the plot is never quite fully involved or realised. The characters drift around on a sparse almost invisible plain weaving together fantastical and mythical elements that don't quite match. The plot outline if you ignore all the meandering diversions, is fairly basic, but the structure is slightly jerky in places and feels like it has deliberate gaps, which could add to the overall mystical and ethereal quality of the story.

Visually Williams belongs to the 'painterly' school of comic artists who take a fine art approach and spin it violently on its head: Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave McKean, Ashley Wood, Ben Templesmith, and Melinda Gebbie with her magnum opus Lost Girls all spring to mind. The majority of these artists acknowledge a debt to whole range of classic artists (Sienkiewicz evokes Klimt in Stray Toasters and Williams quotes Egon Schiele (both literally and through his brush strokes) in Blood). But they also owe a great deal to master illustrator Barren Storey whose illustrated journal experiments are great insight into the huge potential for the fine arts and comics collision (as well as the extensive use of collage and the endless borrowing/stealing from a whole range of other source materials be they high brow or low brow, you can read more on Storey here).

Blood also has a striking similarity to the look of a comic from the Vertigo line (the indie offshoot of DC) even down to the limited palette of colours (flesh tones, reds, earthy yellows browns and greens) and the lettering bears a striking resemblance to the lettering used in Stray Toasters(*1)

Williams is less about the collage effects and photoshop trickery of McKean, and the schizophrenic switches in style that Sienkiewicz employs so I guess out of all the artist he would be considered the closest to a 'classicist' with his use of ink and wash and controlled but by no means restrictive watercolours, his exploration of the two main characters bodies is at times like a life drawing class/anatomy lesson. There are however moments when his art is more scratchy and free to match the internal violence of the story, splashes of paint, thinner sketchier lines etc.

It's the frequent nudity of the two main character's that help to take this vampire story out of the cliched realm. There is an Adam and Eve, beginning of the world feel to it all, and although they appear much more evolved there is something slightly prehistoric, caveman like about it all (this is probably down to the sparse landscapes and indeed the caves).

Blood is a hybrid of multicultural myth and superstition: witch doctors, Indian gurus, fantastic lands with simplistic descriptive names, an element of Greek myth, a cloud of awe around the female maternal body, a primitive brooding force, a journey, all topped up with the strange floating figure in a space suit that is a typical Sienkiewicz style device(*2). The way in which he draws the imposing force of the other vampires seems like it could have been a big influence on the way Ben Templesmith came to draw his vampires in 30 Days Of Night (particularly in the way he draws their mouths/teeth).

Stray Toasters is very dark and darkly comic at that, whereas Blood (although not without its dark undertones) tries to add love to the vampire myth, love and resistance to the hunger, without all the horrible sparkling skin of Twilight. There is a brief moment too where Blood is jarred into the real world and becomes embroiled with everyday worries including jobs, relationships, and eventually cancer, and these concerns are written and drawn about in such a way that they seem not to be a mirror to the central action of the story but a metaphorical parallel. I guess mentioning Greek myths is fairly appropriate as the whole thing does read both in its visual and written elements like a Greek tragedy about vampires. Classical yet distinctly modern, Blood is a shining example of why an injection of the fine art approach in comics doesn't always mean that comic will be stifled and boring.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1)Thanks to the magic of the internet I searched the letterer Gaspar Saladino and found out that he is a 50 year veteran of comic book lettering and his work for Dave McKean's Arkham Aslyum, Bill Sienkiewicz and Frank Miller's Elektra Assasian, and Sandman Mystery Theatre, has very much helped established the look of slightly off-kilter takes on the superhero genre.

(*2)Both Elektra Assassin and Stray Toasters feature incomplete half human half machine figures although in Blood this figure is not a threatening one but childlike and innocent.

Book cover of the week

2011-12-12T12:10:00.001-08:00

When I think about what makes a great book cover, I often like to think of the package as a whole: how it feels in your hand, the quality of the paper, how convenient it is to carry around(*1), the smell, all the kind of things that make me wonder why I still haven't won Most Eligible Bachelor award five years in a row.

Therefore manga therefore has always caused a bit of a knee jerk prejudice to surface in me. The manga section of bookstores like Waterstones are often packed full of multiple volumes of a pulpy throwaway quality with huge Japanese text on the front and characters that resemble something off Drag

onball Z or Streetfighter that tend to make my bad taste monitor go off the chart.

It is always a relief then to see this kind of material handled well. My feeling about formats means I have always had a preference for the hard or paperback graphic novel over the comic book. There are exceptions to the rule of course, if something good is done with the design, and the paper is of good quality. But generally I like comics

to be treated as books, as something worthwhile, not to be thrown away, an object of value and quality.

Certain publishers have taken this approach both to graphic novels and to manga. Drawn and quarterly did this with Yoshihiro Tatsumi's autobiogra

phical tome A Drifting life and some of the reprints of Tezuka's more adult/alternative looking work is pretty nice. In fact most 'gekiga'(*2) reprints are treated with respect to match their content.

Penguin aren't a publisher that are first and forthright known for publishing graphic novels but the ones that they have published (amongst them Ma

us, a collection of comics from Raw magazine, some great work from Indian comic artist Sarnath Namerjee) are of high quality. I suppose it helps that as a company Penguin have a history of fantastic design behind them and they known how to best to treat a book.

The 14th Dalai Lama, a manga biography by Tetsu Saiwai is certainly no exception. The design is simple yet effective, from the slightly raised and elegant text to the limited palette of colours and the sparing details on the back and the spine. This book, despite the very typical manga visual style contained within(*3), demands to be taken seriously. The way in which the acknowledgements, author bio, and bibliography are laid out within the book give the story a scholarly and authentic grounding. It also reminds me in its thinness and design of another line of books that Penguin recently designed of slightly obscure eastern European modern fiction and essays such as War of the newts by Karel Capek and The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek, although the designers were slightly more inventive and witty with these covers.

And sadly I note, it's one of those books that feels great to hold (yes I do need to get out more)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*1)Although this isn't a given, some of the nicest looking graphic novels (i.e Craig Thompson's Habibi) could be used to kill a man

(*2) Meaning 'dramatic pictures' a termed used to distinguish itself from regular manga)

(*3) It makes effective use of the unusual juxtaposition of slightly slapstick and hyperbole emotions and Manga iconography with a serious underlying plot such as in the classic true story of Hiroshima, Barefoot Gen by

'Depressing subject matter' (or) The stigma of graphic medicine. Leeds 17/11/11

2011-12-01T13:59:00.000-08:00

Having read a lot about the previous two graphic medicine conferences it was very exciting for me not only to finally get to go to one, but also to be able to take part.

For some people the idea of an all day conference on stigma, which covered such potentially depressing subject matter as disability, death, illness and decline, probably sounds like the precursor to a bottle of wine and a handful of sleeping pills, but the atmosphere in Leeds on the day was fantastic.

Thriving, eclectic, warm, encouraging, inspiring, and with plenty of laughs to be had, this open discourse between artists, academics, and health care professionals is surely an optimistic sign of the times.

Comics as a medium is pretty used to being stigmatised, as sub-literate rubbish for children, as well as being a dangerous influence on children's behaviour, morals, and intellectual growth. So what better medium in which to explore the different ways in which stigma works and ways in which to overcome it?

Many of the artists/authors at the conference talked about the troubles they faced trying to tell their stories in comic book form. People often found it offensive that such serious topics were to be reduced to cartoons. Even my dad when I told him that my talk had got a lot of laughs, thought that this was a bad thing, after all, surely my work was meant to be serious? There is an assumption that no humour can be found in these situations and that medical narratives are always to be dry, bleak, and depressing. As the experiences written and drawn about in these comics are very much real, and have happened, then it is safe to assume that the humour that is found in these situations is very much real as well.

Another stigma that faces the comic artist/writer of graphic medicine (and indeed in any writer who chooses to write about such things) is this idea of catharsis. A view that a majority of the speakers shared was that labelling their work as cathartic was perhaps oversimplifying things. For example Nicola Streeton does not consider her graphic novel 'Billy, You, and Me' (written about the death of her two year old son) to be cathartic. For her the catharsis took place at the time, and she wants her work to be considered simply as art, as a story. Sixteen years has passed since her sons death and while she can never consider herself to be truly 'over it' (the heading of her talk was 'The stigma of mourning too long') she is a little taken aback when the media interest surrounding her book has people asking in depth details about her son's death.

Nicola combats all these possible misconceptions by (in my opinion) exaggerating certain aspects of her personality both in person and within the pages of her graphic novel. This helps to put us at ease, and shows us that we can laugh alongside her, we become much more empathetic because of this. Despite the 'depressing subject matter' Nicola is by no means (to quote the title of the graphic novel by cartoonist Brick) a Depresso. Her talk is a performance, her slightly eccentric, cheerful demeanour reels us in. Nicola's background may be academic (she self-referentially quotes Freud and Foucalt and talks about her and her husbands unshakable belief in 'the talking cure') but she is by no means stilted or boring. Have you ever seen anyone use a tap dance routine to make a point about stigma and memory or interview themselves using a woolly hat to distinguish themselves as interviewer and interviewee? Nicola ties academia to passion, frees it from it's cage, and makes it relevant.

Sarah Leavitt talked specifically about the stigma of the caregiver and much in the same way I am trying to approach the idea of the model illness sufferer in my own comic, she deconstructs the notion of the perfect caregiver. She is incredibly open about moments of anger and frustration, both towards her mother during her decline, her father's treatment of her mother, and even her jealous rage towards the family cat. She also talked about about her sadness at the removal of boundaries not previously crossed and intimacies previously shared between her parents when helping to clean and dress her mother. Central to Sarah's story was her finding love with her partner Donimo at such a difficult time. Now without intending to put a heteronormative spin on things and thus discredit the importance of Sarah's lesbianism to the story, I would argue that this segment of the story is still entirely relatable to a heterosexual readership. Anyone going through or having gone through similar things to Sarah with her mother would probably would have had someone close to them (a partner or a friend) on whom they could unload all their ugliness, their sadness, their weakness, and frustration, without judgment and with total support.

Sarah also made one last interesting point. As a writer/artist she found herself going through these painful experiences whilst at the same time knowing she had to record them. There is a strange doubleness going on as the person living the experience and the persona already editing it down in their minds, sometimes you forgot that it might be painful for other people close to you or the person the work concerns, to read these things at a later date.

Paula Knight talked about her graphic memoir in progress The Facts Of Life, a very refreshing look at miscarriage and the child-centric view of women's role in life. Paula is clearly a feminist pro-choice, and not a firm believer in that whole anatomy is destiny stick. However she wanted children but sadly, this was not to be. In becoming a woman without purpose (as some people might say) she began to notice even more society's attitude towards motherhood and non-motherhood.

The subtle language pressed upon would be mothers, those who choose not to have children, and those who wait until it's 'too late' always point the finger of blame upon the woman (the word 'barren' certainly has judgement overtones). In Billy, You, and Me Nicola Streeton goes through the motions believing her sons death is her fault because she had an abortion when she was younger, and Paula too listed all the possible reasons she might be to blame for losing her child, including the fact that on a subconscious level she might not have been ready to have one.

Paula was self-conscious that he work was dressing, but many people reassured her that she had extracted humour from the situation, especially the awkward conversations with old friends who wondered, given her age, why she hadn't had any children yet. A wonderful device in comics is to be able to have more than one thing going on in a panel and both Nicola and Paula use this to humorous effect, projecting what they think people might be thinking whilst they are saying something entirely different. Paula's style is much cleaner than Nicola's (not that Nicola's scratchy style doesn't suit the story perfectly) but doesn't suffer from being boring because of this. There is some fantastic use of paint and collage and the symbolism I have seen of hers so far is inventive and funny. As what we were privy to at the conference was only the tip of the iceberg I look forward to seeing more in the future.

MK Czerwicz (a.k.a Comic Nurse) gave a talk about her ongoing graphic novel project, an oral history of the aids unit in which she worked for a number of years before it shut down. In her talk she tipped her metaphorical hat to Studs Terkel the great oral historian famous for the set text 'Working', in which he extracted a large amount of blood from a large amount of stones and painted a huge sociological landscape of race, gender, class, sexuality, and more. MK talked about her unit as one that broke all the rules when it came to patient care, by really emphasising the care part. Sitting on patients beds, visiting patients outside of hospital, forming close personal bonds with patients, all of the things that they were taught in nurses school, were a big no no. She came to write this history because her Internet searches came were fruitless, and she could not believe no one had done in before. She missed and wanted to make people aware of the 'community of crisis' that had formed in the unit at the time. Indeed even as a heterosexual male (watching documentaries like We Were Here and The Times Of Harvey Milk, I find myself getting nostalgic for what were incredibly painful times for a lot of people, purely because whist a lot protest these days seems to me to be without focus and to go nowhere, back then (and I know my vision is extremely rose-tinted) they seemed to be fighting for something worth fighting for, and they were actually making a difference. Testament to this is the fact that despite having the highest mortality rates in the country MK's unit was constantly referred to as a fun and supportive place. Like a lot of the other artists I've already discussed, MK's is a very personal history as well as being a straight up oral history, something which her simplistic cartoony style conveys brilliantly. I had more to say on MK's work, but realising that this is becoming a bit of an essay, I think it's best to let her work speak for herself. You can read the first part of her oral history online here and read an interesting article on a talk she gave on her talk to make World Aids Day here.

Also speaking at the conference was the cartoonist Brick ,Lu Miranda (who talked about the visually stunning La Parentheses, a graphic novel about epilepsy and memory loss, that sadly I think is only available in French) and Mita Mahato who talked about the use of silence in David Small's brilliant Stitches.

Finally fellow Bristol artist Katie Green (whom I spoke with at Laydeez Do Comics in June) talked in further detail about her forthcoming graphic novel about anorexia and sexual abuse Lighter than my shadow. In particular she opened up a little more about her experiences with sexual abuse and the stigmas surrounding it. She tapped into the patriarchal blame the victim mentality which she admitted was even ingrained into her brain as a young adult, a mentality that that is still very much prevalent in society today. I always admire Katie's bravery talking about such difficult subjects.

My own talk went pretty well, I had planned some humorous moments but due to nerves had sounded pretty robotic when running through it in front of friends, so I was a bit taken aback when I had to pause for the audience to stop laughing. The Q+A session at the end gave me a lot to mull over as well, which was good.

The day ended with a keynote speech by Darryl Cunningham (complete with irate accusations of exploitation during the Q+A session) and a final summary by Ian Williams before we went and gorged ourselves silly on Chinese in the evening.

The popularity of mine and Emma's moniker 'Sicker than thou' has also got us thinking about the possibility of maybe doing badges and t-shirts in the future.

Thanks to the two Ian's and Maria, and all the other speakers and people I met over the weekend. Probably the best academic conference I've been to (OK so I've only been to two, i may be a little bias) so let's hope they keep on going into the future!

Animation of the week-The Old Man and The Sea (Alaksandar Petrov)

2011-10-12T00:48:00.000-07:00

It's been a bit quiet here for a while as I have been busy with my own comics, but I intend to resume posting, if not at my original post, then at least a couple of times a week.

Quite a while ago I picked up a book called Who's Who in Animated Cartoons by Jeff Lenburg from The Last Book Shop in Bristol, a bookshop where everything is priced two pounds and you can occasionally find an obscure treasure amongst the more mainstream reads. This particular book is something a mammoth tome, a Bible for anyone with more than a passing interest in animation. As well as listening every single significant major or minor player from the most famous animation studios, it lists more obscure and experimental animators such as John and Faith Hubley, John Canemaker, and Kihachiro Kawamoto.

Another one of the animators listed in the book Alkesandar Petrov was a Russian animator who developed a very unique, and very tricky, animation technique that only a handful of animators ever mastered. Using a slow-drying oil paint he would paint his animation onto multiple layers of glass in order to give depth to his visuals using his fingertips instead of a brush. To have such control with his fingers is a very astonishing and enviable skill and because of the level of work you can see going into it it gives you the impression that his animation was done in the 60s or 70s when in fact he was working from the 80's until the end of the 90s.

Stylistically he employs a romantically tinted realism which suits his work as a lot of it is literary adaptions of Puskin, Platonov, and Dostoevsky. However arguably his finest work is his twenty minute adaptation of Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea with its warm colours, its shifting sense of scene and its relaxed tropical pace at the beginning. Of course this is just the impression I get from the opening clip viewed on youtube which you can view here, as with a lot of the more obscure animators in the book, his work is hard to come by and more expensive, but you can get The Old Man and The Sea for about £35 on Amazon.

Review: 25,000 years of erotic freedom-Alan Moore

2011-06-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

(WARNING. THIS POST CONTAINS IMAGES OF A SEXUAL NATURE!)

An exploration of The Pornographic Imagination:

When you read this book and then look at a picture of Alan Moore, the two things don't seem to correspond. Alan Moore is a very strange looking figure, a hairy behemoth with huge gothic rings who openly worships a snake-god/hand-puppet called Glycon. But in reality, as comes across very well in this book, Alan Moore is a person who seems well versed in everything, from history to philosophy, maths and the arts. His writing is intelligent, witty, extremely cohesive, and makes him appear very normal indeed. In fact his writing style and the way his argument flows so easily normalises the argument to the point that any other viewpoint seems ridiculous.

But I get ahead of myself. It would make sense that Alan Moore would write this treaty on the decline of pornography as art form across the ages, after all his three volume erotic masterpiece illustrated by his wife pioneering underground American cartoonist Melinda Gebbe is a definite attempt to make pornography credible and beautiful again. He is also extremely sexually progressive. Before marrying Melinda Gebbe he was in a three way relationship with his previous wife and her girlfriend, and he compiled and published through his own publishing company Mad Love a one off anthology comic called AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) which was a response to a controversial proposed government clause designed to outlaw the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities. This is a comic book I would very much love to own as it boasts a very fine line up of writing and artistic talent including Howard Cruse, Dave Mckean, Kevin O'Neil, Savage Pencil, Posy Simmonds, Art Spiegelman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Oscar Zarate, etc. One of the stories from the anthology called The Mirror Of Love written by Moore is available from Top Shelf.

What Alan Moore does with this book is put sex at the centre of a vibrant and forward thinking society and swiftly dispels all myths that an overabundance of decadence was the cause of the demise of certain famous civilisations. In fact, in the most famous case of the fall of Rome, he blames the eventually forced conversion to Christianity which meant that forgien troops who originally felt more at home fighting for the empire as they were allowed to worship their own gods and observe their own customs, would no longer be so willing, leaving the empire vulnerable to attacks from all sides.

His opening sentence sets the tone: 'Whether we speak personally or palaeoanthropologically, it's fair to say that we humans start off fiddling with ourselves'. To Moore, its pretty common sense that sex is a vital part of human existence, so its repression by religion, and its repression in art, seem absurd and illogical to him.
Moore's basic argument is very simple: Sexually open and progressive societies such as Rome and Greece gave us civilisation: philosophy, maths, running water, heating systems, roads, great works of art and literature, etc. Sexually repressed civilisations brought us back into the Dark Ages. Even at one stage the Christian church embraced erotic art but by attaching the stigma of sin and shame, and by using it as a moral lesson and a fearful warning, it has left a very long sticky residue throughout history concerning our attitude to pornography and sex. It is this shameful attachment that has affected pornography ever since, taking it down into the shadows, particularly in the Victorian period where (in Moore's opinion) the last remnants of truly great erotic art died off in a gasp of shame (Beadsley on his death bed, the trail of Oscar Wilde etc). The shame has lead to its degradation, its decline in quality and merit. In fact merit is a quality that Moore thinks pornography should try and regain, quoting the infamous obscenity trial against Alan Ginsberg's Howl where the Judge was in favour of the poem because of its 'redeeming social importance'. Pornography enjoyed a brief resurgence with high end production values during the sexual revolution of the 60's with the underground comics (although the sex in these would often have brutal misogynistic undertones) and importantly with the liberating mass viewings in cinemas of pornography, but soon it all became commercialised and crass, and with the introduction of the home video boom in the 80's, pornography was more readily available but once again stigmatised as the pursuit of the lone weirdo.
Overall this book is thoroughly well researched, well argued, and entertaining. It is difficult to get across the amount of different strains of the argument and the various references Moore makes in the space of a single review (although it is worth mentioning his discussion of the uneasy relationship between the anti-porn feminists and the Christian right) but Moore does so in such a way as to make the reading an easy experience that seems to be over too soon. Perhaps the only small hole in Moore's argument is that these sexually open civilisations were also as much war-faring ones as our modern day sexually repressed cultures, if not more so, but this is a minor bone of contention in such a pleasurable book (puns not intentional there).

Last night a comic saved my life: Comics & Medicine, a graphic revolution.

2011-06-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

Comics and graphic novels with a medical narrative seem to be to the best example of comics that can actually make a difference to peoples lives. I've always been a little weary that political comics while giving a useful insight into the life of someone fairly remote from us have an aspect of 'preaching to converted' about them. Reading them won't stop a war in some remote country, and it will probably won't shift perceptions too far as it's highly likely that if you've sought this particular graphic novel out you're already of a relatively liberal mindset. Whereas with medical comics the issues discussed are more personal and close to the bone. Cancer can happen to anyone, and is something that most people have had a degree of experience with. Mental health issues as well, although more stigmatised than most illness, are a lot more common than people think, being stressed and feeling a little bit down are things that happen to pretty much everyone, but when these things are left unchecked they can often lead to unchecked feelings and anxiety that can often be difficult to understand. Mental health issues are not a sign of a weak will and mind (and neither are they on the other hand an expression of complete creative genius or something to glamorise, we need to find some sort of middle ground).

As well as being reassuring things to be read by a person suffering from an illness, or a friend or relative of that person (Blue Pills by Frederik Peeters, a graphic novel about HIV immediately springs to mind, expect an indepth review soon) but the process of creating it for the artist can often bring them out of the very funk they are describing. For example in Darryl Cunningham's Psychiatric Tales it is the recognition he starts to receive for his strips that brings him out of isolation and therefore becomes part of the process of healing.
Katie Green, who I mentioned in my previous post, also mentioned in her talk that when she decided that when she wanted to be an illustrator, this was very much the fork in the road between her dying and her living.

Of course, you may complain, 'I don't have a creative bone in my body!', 'I can't draw!', but there are plenty of comic artists that tell their stories just as well with a slightly more primitive stripped down style (I'm thinking John Porcellino, and Sarah Leavitt's Tangles). Even the process of keeping a diary about your experiences is a useful one. To me the rising discipline of Medical Humanities which draws from literature and art when treating patients, is a highly important one. At it's roots, it seems to me to be about treating the patients as well as the disease, stressing the humanity in medical humanities (of course it would be fairly redundant without a certain degree of good medical care as well). But the fact that medical students are being encouraged to create their own comics in certain places about their own experiences (as well as thinking more carefully about what it might be like to be in their patients shoes) can only be a good thing. In my opinion I think that these graphic novels should be made more readily available not just to doctors, nurses, and medical students, but to the patients themselves(*1). Try to imagine for a second the conflicted emotions and guilt of a person suffering from mental health issues for the first time, and then imagine the relief they might feel knowing that they are not alone when reading something like Psychiatric Tales. The artists of these books often talk about creating the book they wish was there when they were suffering, it would be great to see that these books got into the hands of those who need them the most.

On a final note this post was inspired by the wide range of internet coverage of the recent two day Comics & Medicine Conference in Chigago organised by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec and playing host to the likes of Scott McCloud, David Small, Brian Fies, John Porcellino, and Phoebe Gloeckner. Personally I wish I could travel back in time and attend this.

Publishers weekly coverage.

New York Times Coverage

Sarah Leavitt's blog coverage.

Brian Fies coverage

Scott McCloud coverage.

John Porcellino's coverage.

John Swogger's coverage.

and finally:

Paul Gravett at last years London conference talking to Darryl Cunningham, Brian Fies, and Phillipa Perry.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(*1) I know that libaries of medical comics are starting to be made avaliable to medical proffesionals and students but I'm not sure if they are being made avaliable to patients yet.

Laydeez Do Comics 20th June with Katie Green, Charles Hatlfield, Joumana Medlej, and myself

2011-06-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

It's something of an extreme rarity for me to blog about something I have done rather than something someone else has done but on the 20th of June I had the extreme pleasure and the honour of speaking at the monthly event Laydeez Do Comics in London. Laydeez Do Comics was founded by comic artist and curator Nicola Streetham and artist, writer, curator, and academic Sarah Lightman. What started out as more of a reading and discussion group which set out to prove that ladies not only read but DO comics, has now blossomed into something of an institution. Dropping the book group aspect to focus more on bringing the best in speakers from the comics and illustration world, both established (Trina Robbins, Melinda Gebbe, Posy Simmonds) and non-established, male and female, LDC boasts a fantastically friendly and thriving atmosphere, which is inspiring and warm. It's a great place to meet people for whom the medium of comics is a passion, and to discover new things along the way.

I was hugely nervous about speaking myself, but having witnessed the general atmosphere of these events a number of times before, I was more nervous about the act of speaking in front of an audience than the response I would get (although I was perhaps a little self-conscious of looking like the dud in the room went put up against a soon to be published artist, a published and highly regarded academic, and a comics artist from Lebanon). Thankfully, the obligatory round-the-room introductions with the added question 'name something that has scared you recently' was a nice ice-breaker and it was reassuring to see some of my fellow speakers also admit to nerves.

I was speaking about my autobiographical comic in progress about my life with the terminal illness Cystic Fibrosis. The one thing that's always drawn me to autobiographical comics is their non-idealised humanity, and this was something that I really hoped to try and achieve with my own work. I wanted to talk about all the things that I had done, or thought, concerning my CF that didn't exactly make me the model CF sufferer (which is why I called this first issue of the comic The Selfish Gene). I wanted to offer an alternative to what I like to call (in a typical nod to my Cultural Studies background) 'the poster-child syndrome', the image of the angelic smiling child with a terminal illness which to me is completely devoid of personality and places the person with a terminal illness way too easily into the role of passive victim. My biggest inspiration since the age of 17 is a guy called Bob Flanagan (I showed a clip from the documentary film Sick, which is about Bob, during my presentation). Bob Flanagan was an American performance artist, poet, and writer who at the time of his death at the age of 43 was the longest living survivor of CF. He was also a masochist, a submissive, and a prominent member of the S+M scene who combatted the pain of his illness, with more pain, but ultimately pain he was in control of. He was also an incredibly intelligent, warm, and funny figure whose gallows humour*(1) (along with the discovery of the hilarious and inappropriate gag cartoons of John Callahan) helped me determine the way I wanted to write and draw about my own experiences. After all, if you can't laugh about terminal illness what can you laugh at? I finished off my presentation by talking about another comic that I am working on, the semi-autobiographical 'Confessions of a self-hating male' which was inspired by my best friend calling me a self-hating male after spotting that I was reading a book called Women without men. This collection of strips is a chance for me to have fun by exaggerating aspects of my personality as a 'cowardly feminist', a straight white male who often gets mistaken for being gay because he doesn't like football or making noises like a baboon when he's drunk. A man ashamed, fearful, and disgusted by traditional masculinity, but also finds it difficult to stand up to it, and who is also very much afraid of women. A man who doesn't really identify himself as a man. These comics are going to explore this mainly through trivial events such as getting the train home from London after a big football match, somehow always being the target for blokes who like to shout stuff out of cars at strangers, and that grey area I like to call sex. I've got lots of ideas for this comic, as stuff that happens in my day to day existence tends to inspire it.

The response was far better than I could have possibly imagined, it was slightly surreal and astounding but a massive confidence boost as well. I'd been a little worried that my style was slightly too rough around the edges, but judging by the response, I needn't have.
There were many routes suggested to me but I think perhaps the first one I aim to explore is to tweak to perfection the pages I've got so far (I think there's about 28) because they are a perfect lenght to enter into the Myriad editions First Fictions Graphic Novel competition. In the meantime I'm going to work on developing it into graphic novel lenght, which is a very exciting prospect.

Next up was Katie Green who is also from Bristol and who is currently working on her graphic novel about recovering from anorexia and sexual abuse entitled Lighter Than My Shadow due out sometime in 2013. I admire Katie's bravery to be so open about these very painful experiences in her life, not just on paper, but in front of a room full of people. Katie's talk was very enlightening, and she peppered it with humour to put everyone at ease (talking about the surreal nature of these experiences being talked about in an editorial fashion, her editor at one point saying 'there are too many suicidal moments'). Katie said some very interesting things, for one thing, we often assume that the process of writing something like this is cathartic, but Katie questions this assumption herself, wondering if rehashing these events over and over again really is the healthiest thing. But then Katie has made a wonderful sacrifice in this respect because her intentions with this book is to write the book she wished had been there when she was suffering. I think the decision to make this book more aimed at secondary school children and beyond, as a realistic manual on recovery, is a fantastic one. The pressure on women to loose weight far outweighs realistic depictions of eating disorders in the media. As for the artwork Katie's childlike and naive characters perfectly juxtapose the dark underbelly of the story and I love the fact that something that was purely accidental (a crease in the paper she was scanning for her background) has become a crucial element in the structuring of her work. Katie you see doesn't like to use panels or speech bubbles(*2), so this crease became a way of separating the images although her splash pages and double page spreads are defiantly a thing to behold. Her representation of her eating disorder as a dark forboding shadow with whom she can have conversations is also a brilliant idea. I for one am highly looking forward to when Lighter Than My Shadow comes out.

After Katie's talk was American professor of English and published academic Charles Hatfield (he wrote Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature). A highly articulate and energetic guy Hatfield talked to us about his job teaching comics based courses at Calafornia State University and for one thing it was refreshing to have an academic openly demystify the process of academia. Hatlfield who was in the UK partly as a research trip (lucky man!) broke down his ideas into several areas which I'll try to remember off the top of my head (I was still in a post-nervous haze and foolishly didn't take down any notes). First and foremost Hatfield confessed to being a formalist at heart, encouraging his experiences to take from the formalists toolbox of terms. Hatfield talked about the influence of Thierry Groensteen's semiotic study The System Of Comics (which is one of the academic books on comics I've struggled with the most).
He then went on to talk about cartooning, and interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary being the area that most interests me. Comics more than any other medium seems to be able to borrow from a whole range of other mediums, and cross other into respected disciplines, such as medicine, history, sociology, anthropology etc. It was also interesting to hear him discuss certain limitations in alternative comics, mainly that culturally it is something that it is created in the majority by middle class white males (although I think this is changing quite rapidly) and creators of colour are still something of a rarity. I look forward to hearing Hatfield talk again at the Manchester conference and picking his brains afterwords.

To finish the night we had Lebanese comic artist Joumana Medlej who is the creator of Lebanons first superhero. Inspired by the her childhood in war torn Beirut and taking the city as her main setting Joumana's presentation was a testament to the fact that you can get used to anything if it is part of your everyday life (something I myself am very much aware of). For Joumana the reality of war was simple: bombs meant no school, and no bombs meant school. Surprisingly life during wartime could be boring and Joumana took to drawing as a means of escaping that boredom. Her superheroine Malaak (Angel of Peace) is by day your average teenage Lebanese girl but by night is an ass-kicking bringer of a justice with a bumbling male side kick who thinks he is stronger and more fearless than he actually is (a nice touch). Also a nice touch is the creation of a league of civilians who help Malaak along her way (which Joumana confessed, was an easy way to meet the demand of friends begging her to put them in the comic). Malaak, Angel Of Peace is a refreshing reinvention of the superhero genre which far outweighs some small press attempts I have seen her in the UK (which tend to follow the superhero soap opera line) by being firmly placed in a reality familiar to Jouamana.

So overall the night was fantastic, and if there are any budding comic book artists out there or simply if you have a passion for the medium, I highly recommend you get yourself down to a Laydeez event in the future.

The general euphoria of getting a good response however could not match the hilarity of me falling down the gap between the platform and my train home. Pure class!

Expect a blog post from Mike Medaglia soon on the Laydeez Do Comics blog, and you can read Katie's two part summary of the evening here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(*1) For example singing 'um diddle diddle I'm gonna' die to the tune of supacalafragolistic
(*2) This is something I can sympathise with having put off starting my comic for so long perhaps partly out of an unnatural fear of square boxes and sraight lines.

Blog of the week: Paralellograma

2011-06-23T23:48:00.000-07:00

This weeks blog of the week has nothing to do with comics, book covers, animation, or graphic design, but don't be disheartened, its still a very good blog! Parrellograma (the blog name being taken from an excellent album by folk singer Linda Perhacs, which happens to be the blogger's favourite) is a fairly neat representation of the interests and talents of one Emma Mould, and if you are into the cult and unusual, or wish to broaden your intellectual palette, this is certainly the place to go. With film and book reviews, snippets of gender and post-colonial theory with one foot firmly in the world of reality and popular(ish) culture, and examples of Emma's excellent creative writing (both published and unpublished) Parrellograma is certainly a 'variety is the spice of life' kind of blog.
I would also highly recommend reading any music related article she has written, as she does so with a love and a knowledge for the subject that far outstrips any hack NME journalist. She tackles bootlegging, confessional singer-songwriters, and writes a really interesting article on the disease that is record collecting that manages to reference Walter Benjamin along the way.

Find of the week: Dark Side Of The Moonies-Erica Heffmann

2011-06-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

Ok so technically I found this quite a number of weeks ago but I'm running a bit behind with these and therefore have a ready made stockpile to take from.

It's quite a rarity here on Graphic Engine for me to do a find of a week that didn't grab my attention for its visual proprieties. This book's cover is nothing special but the book itself is something I am very much looking forward to diving into headfirst.

Dark Side Of The Moonies by Erica Heffman is a first hand true account of one woman's brainwashing and involvement in The Moonies cult (or The Unification Church), written after her deprogramming and liberation. Heffman since her liberation became fascinated by cults and the use of power in an academic and a 'I need to make people aware of how this works' kind of way. This book was first published in 1982 so if you think cults were just a phenomena of the 60's think again (read:Scientology).

Here's a qoute from the back if that doesn't get you interested.

'I was a Moonie. When I regained my mind, I looked back at the horror of it. I was haunted by the need to understand how and why I had been transformed into what I hated most'.

Comics & Academia: Where we are now, where we are going, and some great conferences to look out for....

2011-06-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

It seems that something has defiantly been brewing in the world of comics and graphic novels which certainly seems to be reaching a new level of intensity in the last year or so. With more and more glowing reviews of comics in the mainstream press (although papers like The Guardian and The Times are still slightly more switched on than the rest) as well as interviews with UK creators such as Darryl Cunningham appearing everywhere from the much respected Comics Journal in America to BBC Radio 4's mental health and brain focused programme All In The Mind, it seems like the only way is up. Not to mention the fact that Dundee University have just announced that from next year they will be doing an MA in comics studies, focusing on the medium academically as well as creatively and helping to push potential comic academics, creators, and publishers into their chosen careers through work experience, guest speakers, expert knowledge, and the building up of contacts. Comics have been called by one particular online literary journal 'the only true new art form of the twentieth century' and while it isn't really as new as they may think (there are people that argue the roots of comics all the way back to cave paintings and the Bayeux tapestry) what the medium is beginning to do is certainly new. For me there hasn't really been much in the way of truly great, groundbreaking modern literature or modern art recently. Modern art especially (I find) is derivative, pretentious, and doesn't really tell us much about us or the world we live in (even if it claims to do so, the message is so detached and distorted as to be rendered useless) . Whereas comics for the most part are all about us and the world we live in and not just us specifically but a multiplicity of us from all around the world, we now have access to a wide range of experiences we know nothing about and may never come into contact with. For me comics are literature, but they also are art, these two things work together and feed off each other in comics. But it's because comics are so versatile that I like them so much. I believe it was Scott McCloud the great sage wisdom of comics theory that was very fond of pushing this particular line: comics is a medium, NOT a genre. Within comics you get a wide range of different approaches. From history to philosophy, journalism, autobiography, political commentary, satire, allegorical or just plain off the wall sci-fi, fantasy, horror, thriller, literary adaptations, I could probably mention more if I wanted to. It seems people are constantly reinventing what we can do with comics, not just artistically and formally but it terms of narrative as well.

So it gives me a great thrill to see some really interesting academic conferences popping up across the UK.

The first of which is the Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Bandes Dessinees and Comics 2011 to be held at Manchester Metropolitan University between the 5th and the 8th of July. This four day conference will be split into two parts, the first two days focusing on Anglophone comics and Manga, the last two days focusing on European comics. It will feature some fantastic keynote speakers such as women's underground comix legend and co-conspirator behind Alan Moore's Lost Girls, Melinda Gebbie, as well as British underground staple Hunt Emerson and French artist Edmond Baudoin. But for me it would be equally exciting to hear talks from critics such as Ann Miller and Bart Beaty who have written some fantastically indepth books about European comics, and American academic and editor Charles Hatfield (who I had the pleasure of speaking alongside at Laydeez Do Comics last Monday). Flying the flag for the UK will be academics such as Chris Murray (who will be running the MA in Dundee) giving what looks to be a fascinating talk on pyschogeography in comics, Melanie Gibson a consultant who gives training to libraries and schools on how to stock graphic novels and comics (amongst other things), Studies In Comics editor Julia Round, and Graphic Medicine guru and comic artist Ian Williams. This event is probably really only for real die-hard enthusiasts as (a it's quite expensive and (b four days of academic talks might get a bit much, but for me I approach it with as much anticipation as someone might await something like Glastonbury Festival. Check out the full programme here. Expect a report and a selection of interviews with some of the speakers on this blog.

Next up is the Comics and Conflict Conference taking place at The Imperial War Museum in London between the 19-20th of August as part of their Children's Literature Festival (although I'd hardly call the way some of the authors/artists speaking choose to tackle war child-friendly) Again featuring some fantastic guests in the form of 2000AD writer Pat Mills who created his own World War I series Charley's War, Mikkel Sommer writer/artist of Obsolete (which I reviewed here), Francesca Cassavetti who has turned her mothers wartime diary into a comic, and academics Roger Sabin and Martin Barker who will be discussing the long-running Doonsbury series.
Sadly French comic artist Jaques Tati who was going to be one of the keynote speakers is no longer on the bill, for reasons I do not know. Tati created a fantastically bleak and human tale of trench warfare in It Was The War Of The Trenches (which you can now buy as a hardcover book published by Fantagraphics as part of their Tati reprint series). Comics/graphic novels about war and conflict appeal to me as a pacifist because they look at the very human toll of war, not just that of civilians but the people fighting as well(*1), of course if you seek it out a lot of classic fiction does this as well, but comics of course have the bonus of interesting and expressive artwork.

Next up is the second Transitions Comica Symposium chaired by Dr.Roger Sabin, on the 5th of November at the School of Arts, Birbeck, London University. This conference will be look specifically at new emerging research in comics studies spanning across multiple disciplines and featuring work from postgrad students and early career lecturers alike. An event without the restrictions of theme, this promises to be a melting pot for new ideas, and they are calling for papers, so budding comics theorists apply!. (Deadline 31st July)

Finally, following on from a highly successful conference in London last year (and an even more successful one in Chicago this year, but I'll post about that later) Leeds Thoughts Bubble will be playing host to a one day conference on Graphic Medicine subtitled Visualising The Stigma Of Illness, on the 17th of Novemember. Again there is a call for papers, so you know what to do! (Deadline 18th of July) There are two other conferences, one on scultpure and comics, the other on the way in which the material form of comics affects our reading experience, but fo my money the Graphic Medicine one looks the most interesting.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(*1) An early example of human tales of war in comic book form would be the classic EC series Frontline Combat which managed to be historically accurate while carrying a strong anti-war message and featured the artwork of such luminaries as Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, and Jack Davis.