Richard III – Comic book hero!

“So Who Was King Richard III?” – introduction page.

My comic about Richard III – along with a host of others – has been included in an article about the discovery on the University of Leicester’s website. The article is about the response of artists, writers and comics creators to the story of the discovery of the remains of Richard III.

It’s notable how diverse the comics response to the story has been – both among the commissioned and non-commissioned works. My interest was primarily the discovery’s contemporary connections – the various political and regional responses to the question of where the remains should be buried, for example. Other writers and artists were interested in the discovery’s historic and dramatic context.

What’s clear, however, is that all of these threads were equally capable of being narrated through a comic or graphic format. Maybe the very nature of archaeology – the fact that even on a small scale it brings in a wide and diverse range of narrative elements – makes reporting it particularly suited to a a multi-varied visual medium such as comics.

So can we perhaps see comics – or indeed, any presentation format where information is presented as interrelated image and text – as the natural medium of archaeological reportage?

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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 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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Days of the Archaeological Summer

After my lecture in York, I stopped in on Travelling Man the following morning and treated myself to a copy of Days of the Bagnold Summer, Joff Winterhart‘s Costa-nominated graphic novel.

It’s easy to see why it made the Costa shortlist: the human scale of the story, the clever economy of narrative, the use of a vignette-based structure to suggest rather than direct a reader’s attention – these are literary devices that work particularly well in comics. The storytelling in Days of the Bagnold Summer unfolds here much more like it does in real life, as a series of barely-connected events whose collective impact is only realised in retrospect. Too often, comics push and pull a reader towards a carefully-constructed finale; Joff Winterhart’s real trick here is to make this story seem as if even it doesn’t know where it is going to end up.

Inevitably, the book made me think of how an archaeological comic might look if the narrative unfolded in just such a way as this. Professional experience as a series of seemingly unconnected vignettes parallels much of our experience as excavators, researchers or even managers. Archaeology is predicated upon not really knowing what might happen next: you may turn up barrow-loads of late mediaeval pottery – or the body of a missing English king. Days of the Bagnold Summer suggests one way in which one might tell archaeological stories with similarly uncertain conclusions and directions.

A review in The New Statesman described the Days of the Bagnold Summer as being structured “as though it’s a collection of never-before-published newspaper strips”. It made me think how nice it would be if more newspapers carried strips just like this. The Guardian, perhaps? Or Antiquity?

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