Fine Lines

New Lines (iv) – John G. Swogger, 2013.

It must officially be summer (despite the grey skies) because I’m back at Fine Line tattooing again. I began this past week with some tidying-up work on the shoulder part of a Japanese sleeve – fixing some clouds and adding-in some colour that had been missed. And to celebrate my return to the studio, Rena and Stuart had bought me my very own gun – a lighter-weight liner/shader that’s a good machine to start on.

Not only has it been great to get back to work on real skin, but it’s been interesting to return to tattooing in the context of my other current projects. The whole comics and archaeology thing seems to be really taking off, which means that I’m exploring comics as a medium that bit more closely – and seeing lots more graphic and visual-communication parallels between the two. I’m also returning to the tattoo studio at a time when I’m doing more of these Japanese woodblock-inspired prints for exhibitions with the Inside Out art group, and again, it’s been interesting to explore parallel lines of praxis between the two.

Because just as each area I work in has its own separate and unique methodologies and mechanics, so they also overlap. It’s these areas of connection and contrast that I find particularly rewarding: a chance to draw lines between one thing and a very different other.

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Comics, archaeology and fieldwork

Extremely creative journal pages by Michelle Allen, via Journal Pages Group on Facebook and allendesigns.typepad.com

One of the things that came out of this weekend’s Underhill Farm Art & Wild Craft Fair was the possibility of running a course at the farm on Landscape Journaling, with Steve Evison of development company R4C. This is something that has come out of my work with comics and archaeology – specifically the Palau field journal I discussed on my SAA poster – and is an approach which seeks to better document the experience and process of fieldwork practice.

My background is in archaeology, and Steve’s is in environmental and social development work, both in the UK and abroad. We’ve both faced the same problems, however, of trying to document the practice of our fieldwork in a meaningful way. Both of us have realised that formal approaches rarely work well; both of us recognise the great value of personal journals and notebooks as a way of documenting field practice. Steve is an avid journal-keeper and sketcher, and knows from his own experience how text and image can work together as a recording tool. My work on comics in archaeology has suggested to me that using other mechanisms specific to comics – direct speech, people as agents/characters, panels & gutters, etc. – will also help capture the narrative of field practice beyond the basic recording of data.

So the theory is that using the experience of landscape as a framework, it is possible to create a narrative journal that more effectively records the practice of fieldwork. In practice this means bringing together the ideas and techniques of creative sketchbook and journal writing and comics to build a true narrative document. The aim is to create something which is genuinely useful as an archive resource, a presentation and PR tool, and as a personal record.

Together, we’ll be developing the course structure through the summer, and hopefully think about running an initial course later in the year. I’m interested to see how this course works out. It’s an opportunity for me to see how the ideas I’ve had for archaeology work out for artists, greenwood workers, environmental workers, teachers and others for whom “fieldwork” is often a major part of their professional practice, but for whom the experience of it is often poorly recorded.

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SAA Poster – available for download

Click above for a link to the pdf of “Drawn Together” – my SAA Poster on comics and archaeology.

Here’s a link for anyone who wants to download a copy of my SAA Poster: Drawn Together.

The copy here is only half the size of the one I displayed in Honolulu – 4′ x 2′ – but I think you’ll be able to see everything quite clearly, and it’ll still be readable if you want to print it out.

And yes, please do print it out – I’m perfectly happy for people to stick copies of this up in their lab, office, etc., particularly if it encourages people to get in touch and/or to start using comics in archaeology themselves.

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Drawing Together

Big thanks to everyone who stopped by my poster presentation yesterday, and apologies to anyone I didn’t get a chance to talk to. Thanks also to all the positive feedback as well – it was very gratifying to feel like I hit a common nerve with so many people.

I’m hoping that one of the things that will come out of this poster is the beginning of some productive dialogue between people who are interested in using, creating and publishing comics in archaeology. I feel like it’s beginning, and it will be interesting to see where it heads from here. I’ll keep posting comics and archaeology stuff here, and I’m more than happy to re-post stuff that other people are doing as well. Also, the SAA’s Public Archaeology Interest Group has asked me to keep them updated on developments via the Interest Group’s Facebook page.

Next planned archaeological comic stuff for me will be in the autumn, when my two archaeological web comics - Copernicus, Amy & Me and Jima San – start being published online. But conversations with people during the poster presentation may be leading to some more archaeological comic projects before the year’s end, too.

And yes, for everyone that’s been asking: the pdf of the poster will be available here sometime towards the end of next week.

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Comics and Process

I’ve been finishing up my “Drawn Together” poster for the upcoming SAAs next month. The poster looks at the work I’ve done on my field journal comic from Palau, and it’s thrown up some questions about sequence and process in fieldwork.

Recording the process of fieldwork is always difficult – it’s hard to spend too much time recording the process if you’re spending all your time and effort doing the actual process. This is why context sheets have evolved in the way that they have, and why any field processes that are introduced need to be streamlined and integrated into other elements of practice. While out at the Llanymynech limekilns, and in talks with Steve, I began thinking more about the nature of sequence and process in this context.

If comics are to be a useful addition to the process of recording archaeological fieldwork practice, then they need to also be integrated into current practice in much as surveying, site illustration, photography, environmental sampling or any other technique. Importantly, this integration needs to be not just a matter of achieving seamlessness, but in making the additional steps resonate and speak to existing practice.

It’s a question of time, a question of speed, of course – but more importantly, it’s a question of layering more into a field-based comic work than simply a record of events. The “sequence” of knowledge creation in archaeology is partly about how information builds up, layer upon layer, evolving out of field process. Rather than be simply documentary accounts of events, comics in archaeology need to embrace this broader concept of “sequence”. I’ve tried in Palau: An Archaeological Field Journal to do just this, but I think we can go further.

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Discussion and Debate

I’ve just added the text of my York Heritage Research Seminar paper from February up on the site. The video of the presentation still isn’t available on Sara’s YouTube page, so you’ll just have to make do with the old-tech written version for the moment.

Had a lot of good feedback since the presentation, and hopefully it’s sparked off some ideas in people for their own narrative images and archaeological comics. Encouraging to see so many students interested in the visualisation of archaeology and how the field is developing and adapting.

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Snow Day

From the unfinished (at the moment) “Between Trenches” – the comic I started for Mini Comics Day.

Missed my chance to participate properly in Mini Comics Day yesterday because of the snow – too much digging out of cars and driveways to be done, unfortunately. It’s a shame, because I did manage to get a fair amount of writing and some drawing done in the morning, but just ran out of time.

And as sorry as I am to have not had the time to take part properly, it was still a good chance to think about working both in very short format – just a few pages – and quickly, too. It chimes in with questions I got asked at Comics Forum back in November: How do you go about writing an archaeology comic? Is there really something intrinsic in the medium that naturally lends itself to recording aspects of archaeology, or does the way you gather data and information change if you know it’s going to be used in a comic? And if you’re working at speed, what does that do to the artwork and text?

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Comics and the landscape

I’m off down to Underhill Farm tomorrow for the Inside Out Art Group‘s sketching day. One of the things I’ve become interested in over the past few months is the use of sequential images to explore a number of different visual aspects of a single place.

Underhill Farm sits in the middle of a thousand years of sprawling industrial landscape: from a twentieth-century Hoffman Kiln to Roman lead mines. A combination of phase plans, feature illustrations and reconstructions to document and present this kind of multi-period site in an archaeological publication. Similar types of images would also be used in historical publications, with possibly other kinds of graphics such as genealogy charts or tabulations of industrial output, etc. An artist might approach the multiple visual representation of such a place through a series of prints, drawings or paintings, each one focusing on something that speaks to the artists’ particular interest and their chosen medium; an installation or landscape artist might create a work that seeks to link in various aspects, or document their own or the broader human presence within a given place.

I’ve been wondering if a “comic” approach might not lie somewhere in the intersection of these visualisations. Following my work on my archaeological field journal last year, I’m interested in the idea that comics can translate multiple viewpoints, multiple narrative threads, multiple data and visual sources into a cohesive whole. I’m interested in looking at the broader connections between narrative collages like journals and scrapbooks, and their connections to comics. I’m also interested in the way in which a narrative-based, “collage” approach to documentation better parallels the actual experience, process and practice of working in the field. And finally, I’m interested in developing ideas both in relation to archaeology, and in relation to other kinds of field work.

So, something I’ll be doing tomorrow is experimenting with documenting field-working practices (in this case, relating to art and artists) within a “comic” framework – thinking of narrative, panels, etc. and seeing how that all comes together. This is something I’ll be developing further for the exhibition at the Underhill Art & Wild Craft Fair in May.

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Comics at the Trowel’s Edge

Comics – the authentic voice of the workers?

Comics and archaeology actually have a long history together. What site hut wall or lab notice board is not complete without some sarcastic cartoon pinned on the wall, penned on the back of a context sheet? There’s always someone on site capable of wielding a pen in the cause of caricatures or terrible puns. And there are always those in-jokes on any site that end up becoming immortalised in a scrawled cartoon or single-page comic-strip – the ghost of trench five, “psychic planning”, Start Wreck, etc.

In many ways, the comic, the comic-strip and the cartoon are the authentic voice of those (to borrow a phrase) at the trowel’s edge, time and again excluded from the official archaeological record. Trent De Boer’s long-running archaeological cartoon ‘zine Shovel Bum is a good US example. Where else would you find a record of the drudgery and triumphs of a circuit digger? Certainly not in an official site report. Circulated primarily among peers, these documents are the “official” record of the overlooked heart of archaeological work. They are the visual and textual record of shared daily experience – an un-censored record of professional frustrations and successes. But their authenticity is entangled with their marginalised status – bring them into the mainstream official record and they lose much of their validity.

Archaeology needs more ‘zines and small-press publications – places where those with little voices in the mainstream account of the profession can be heard. It has been argued that by excluding and ignoring these voices, that much of the genuine context of archaeological field work is passing by unrecorded and unacknowledged. I would suggest that site cartoons and lab comics represent a slice of that context that is being recorded, just not often published beyond the site hut wall.

Is there a way to make more use of these kind of comics in archaeology without eroding the immediacy and relevance that comes with their “outsider” status?

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Mini Comics Day – coming soon…

March 24th – mark your comics diary!

It’s going to be the third annual Mini Comics Day on March 24th. Organised by the International Cartoonists Conspiracy, Mini Comics Day has now grown into a truly international event. It’s one of those events that any kind of comics artist or writer can get involved in.

I’m going to be taking part, and I’ll be uploading a Mini Comic (about archaeology, of course) made on the day to minicomics.org. This site also has all the guidelines, instructions, posters and resources you’ll ever need – including information on distributing mini-comics and the Isotope Award for excellence in Mini Comics.

Anyone interested in comics should think about taking part. There will be events organised by comics groups across the UK, or you can upload your minicomic to minicomics.org.

 

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