100 Days Project, 1,050 days later...

Day 89 of 100.

  If someone asked me what the one thing that kickstarted my career making comics, I'd have to say without a doubt that it was my involvement in the 'Hundred Days Project'.

Set up by comedian Josie Long, the project ran from December 1st 2009 through to March 10th 2010.  For those one hundred days each person pledged to the project had to do one thing once a day that would hopefully make them a better person.  Some took up an exercise or a craft, learnt a new word, made more of an effort to talk to strangers, or deleted a friend from Facebook(!).  Many others took on a creative project, writing poetry or taking photos.  I chose to create a daily webcomic.

On Science and Comics

Science finds itself in a tricky position when it comes to reaching out to the public.  To most people, science is seen as almost untouchable, a field that few can participate in or even have a say in.  There’s so much required knowledge, so much specialist training, so many facts and formulas, that to interact with and question science feels daunting.

From Hope Beyond Hype.

Maps to Live By - Making of

Solipsistic Pop vol. 4 is just about to be released to the public.  We received our advance copy the other day and I have to say it's more wonderful than I imagined.  Editor Tom Humberstone has crafted a top class anthology, and the artists involved have all pushed their work into new and interesting places.  It's on a par with any comics anthology I've ever seen, reminding me of the quality seen in the pages of Best American Comics or RAW, and it showcases a breadth of talent that evinces the healthy state of U.K. comics today.

I'm really proud to be a part of it.

I thought it would be nice today to talk about the making of my own piece for the anthology.  For most of my comics career so far I've been creating documentary style comics, mostly about film theory and parasitology.  It's an exciting niche to work in, but one that trains certain tendencies and neglects others.  My work up until this year had generally been very un-sequential and has had very little storytelling in it.  This year I decided to work those other muscles, first with my wordless piece for Paper Science 5, and then with this, my short story Maps To Live By.

The story was sparked off when I met up with Tom in May while he was planning this fourth volume of the exemplary anthology.  Over a game of the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame (honestly, it's amazing) he talked about his idea for the volume.  The theme of maps struck me straight away, as well as his insistence that the artists should explore more complex formal and narrative themes than in the previous kid friendly edition.

I started to see in this a story of my family's complex maps: my Grandfather's childhood in India, the son of a Scottish man and an Indian woman; my father's childhood in Scotland, with his Anglo-Indian father and Swiss mother.  It wasn't just the idea of physical maps of course, but those deeper, more complex maps we experience: the maps of race and culture and identity that we're expected to read, follow and understand every day.  It was the idea of receiving a map you're not sure what to do with, or a set of maps that conflict with each other, and show you there's no simple route to follow.

This family history I'd explored before in my autobiographical project '100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future', and it was a theme that I felt and still feel has more to be said about it.  These are ideas and debates that sit right at the heart of my family's experience of the world, and I wanted to look at them through this comic book lens.

I immediately knew as well that this story needed to be told by both myself and my father, Peter.  It's his story at the heart of all this, and his voice that told the tale to me.  These events have been part of the family oral history.  Very little of this is written down, and what was interesting is that as we compared notes with the documentation that does exist, we found that not everything added up.  Thus, this story is not so much a factual reconstruction of events, as a continuation of that oral history, complete with those half-truths, grey areas and convenient fabrications that exist in every family's story of itself.

The writing process was a fantastic experience.  Peter and I would meet up with these half formed ideas and chip away at the scenes we'd imagined.  We work well together, and it was amazing confronting all these pieces of family history, and getting to know each other better in the process.  I'd say the writing of it was more like sculpture than anything.  We started by trying to put it all into words, soon finding that a better way was to piece together the pictures and words simultaneously.

We actually moved the writing into the physical space, printing off the sketches I'd done in Photoshop and re-arranging them on the carpet, re-writing them as the pieces slowly sifted together.

Then, I'd work up a more finalised composition of panels and content..

Before moving on to the digital pencilling process.  A lot of these images were based on real family photos, hopefully giving the scenes an air of authenticity.

Finally I inked and coloured the piece.

I don't want to give too much of the piece away, so I'm going to leave it at that.  It was certainly the most complex and challenging comic I've ever written, in so many ways.  From the layouts and narrative structure, through to the content itself, I've tried to do my best to live up to both the nuance and complexity of the story we took on, and to the quality of the artists on show in this latest edition of Solipsistic Pop.

I definitely recommend ordering a copy when it comes out, so keep your eyes on the website here or on my twitter, since I'll no doubt talk about this once it's out.
 

I should also finish by saying thanks to everyone who helped in the making of this short comic, which was such a big undertaking:  Mary and Margaret for checking it over and making sure it made sense, Tom Hunt for his input and advice on the story, and Anita for digging around the family history.

Solipsistic Pop Volume 4 and Why We Need Anthologies.

Anthologies are important.  When I first became seriously interested in comics it was An Anthology of Graphic Fiction edited by Ivan Brunetti, that really began to open my eyes to the true breadth of creative innovation being done in the form.  From within those pages I first discovered everything from the twisted worlds of Kaz and Gary Panter, to the unsettling work of Henry Darger, and the sweet and evocative autobiography of Jeffrey Brown and James Kochalka.

I mean, I knew about a lot of fantastic artists already - Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine - but this volume opened things up, bringing a whole range of artists together in one place, defining a moment in comics history, while delving back into the geology to show where we've come from.  Sure, I didn't like all of it - some of the artists I found to be too willfully obtuse and 'underground' for my liking - but that's not the point.  Anthologies are necessary because they open things up.  In a culture where increasingly we're asked to narrow our tastes down to a specific trend, and buy into niche fashions and ideologies while writing off others, the anthology threatens to push back against those narrowing influences, and challenge us with something new.

My encounter with Solipsistic Pop did the same for me three years later as Brunetti's anthology had.  It opened things up and showed me a whole mess of comics I wouldn't have encountered otherwise.  Tom Humberstone, editor of Solipsistic Pop, brings together artists from across the UK, working in a number of styles and with a number of voices, and is putting them in one place.  Each volume is like the ring in a tree trunk, an exciting and fascinating moment in UK comics history.  Through Solipsistic Pop I got to discover Luke Pearson, Kristyna Baczynski, Stephen Collins and Mark Oliver to name just a few.  And from there I went on to investigate more and more.

Autobiographical Comics and Constructions of Happiness

I was recently asked to write about my '100 Tiny Moments' project in relation to the concept of 'Construction of Happiness', which is an arts project by Astrid Bussink.  It's been a year and a day since I started the hundred days project so I thought it would be a timely moment to post the piece.  You can explore Astrid's project here.

Comics are simply the meeting of words and pictures.  But as the great comics autobiographer Harvey Pekar once stated “You can do anything with words and pictures”.  There’s something sweet and childlike about this philosophy - the idea that by matching words and pictures we can create a new more perfect artform, full of possibility.  It suggests that the comics artist is a pioneer, constantly able to reinvent visual language through new combinations of word and image.  Because comics utilise these two factors of visual communication (two factors, incidentally, that stimulate different sides of the human brain), the comics artist is free to shape representation in a way unparalleled by any other medium.  And when we shape representation, we can shape our own realities, constructing a vision of our world more perfect and more desirable than the real one.  As a result Comics are perhaps one of the artforms most suited to the construction of happiness.