One of Those People

Page from “One of Those People” (2014)

Today I’m at this year’s Comics & Medicine Conference in Baltimore, MD, presenting the first chapter of a graphic novel I’ve been working on called One of Those People. It’s a story of illness and recovery, and is based on conversations with my collaborating author and her battle with anorexia, bulimia and depression.

The book has been something of a visual challenge. I wanted to keep the original text of the conversations we’d had intact – it meant that the author’s own voice in unfolding her story was kept intact, adding to the overall feel of the work. But conversations wander – as conversations naturally do – and so this left the text without any real sense of narrative structure, jumping chronologically and geographically from one episode to another as we talked. But what the conversation did have was thematic threads – isolation, the struggle for control, grief, etc.

So what I’ve ended up doing is producing artwork that’s much more allegorical or metaphorical in nature – still very “realistic” (I cannot, after all, entirely escape my more technical illustration background) – but working with techniques such as personification which I never get a chance to experiment with in my archaeological comics.

It will be interesting to see what the reaction is to the non-linear approach to both text and artwork. To me, this approach has worked extremely well, allowing me to create continuity through a discontinuous narrative, and to build a sort of specialised visual language that helps link disparate elements of the conversational text. It feels both a natural and common-sense way to visualise a conversational, train-of-thought or impressionistic text that lacks a strict narrative framework. I can see – and will certainly be pursuing – its application in not just other medical comics, but archaeological ones as well.

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Brighton Round-up

It’s been a week since the excellent Comics & Medicine conference in Brighton, and it feels like it’s taken that long to process the proceedings. As usual (well, I say that, but this is only the second one I’ve been to – I missed last year’s one in Toronto), it was superb – quite the model of a great small conference. Astonishingly diverse, and – without wanting to gush – inspirational in every sense of the word. The best thing about conferences on this scale is that you get an honest chance to meet and talk with people; by the end of Sunday’s sessions, I really felt like I recognised everyone in the room, and had met and talked to a good number of them. And – just as it was two years ago in Chicago – it’s a genuine surprise to see what kind of people come to these conferences. For example, I had no idea that I would end up meeting anthropologists at the conference, let alone one that made comics!

The sessions were, like the attendees, extraordinarily diverse. There was the same mixture of academic and outsider, clinician and patient, experience and reportage that characterised the conference two years ago. It’s a testament both to how widespread the use of comics in medical contexts has become, and also the number of areas of medical practice and experience that are still looking for a “voice”. The theme of the conference was ethics under cover, and just about every area of ethical concern and practice was addressed. I had the great fortune to be in a session with Katie Green, Emma Mould and Andrew Godfrey – all comics writers and artists that I’ve admired since first meeting them in Chicago. My own paper was very well received – talking about some of the ethical issues encountered in the course of my One of Those People project – and I had some really positive feedback from a number of people on the concerns I’d raised; an essay version of the paper was also included in One of Those People: Zero for sale at the conference marketplace.

Beyond the papers themselves, the rest of the conference was extremely well-organised and thoughtfully scheduled. In addition to some excellent keynote talks by Nicola Streeten and David B., there was also a great Ladeez Do Comics session on Friday evening (which made me wish I lived closer to Bristol or London!), and a lovely chilled-out party on the beach on Saturday evening. As ever with these things, it was all over much too soon, but I left with a cart-load of ideas, contacts and friendly advice on my own projects. I’ll be pushing ahead with One of Those People over the next few months, and would like to pull some kind of initial chapters together by Christmas. Inspired by all the conference papers, I’ve got a lot of new thoughts about how to structure and frame these comics and medicine projects, and a long reading list of suggested books and graphic novels to work my way through, too!

Thanks to Muna Al-Jawad and the rest of the Comics and Medicine group for organising such a great conference – and I’m looking forward to Baltimore 2014 already!

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Those Pages

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I’m going to be giving my paper at the Comics and Medicine conference later today – it’s on the ethical issues raised by one of my current comics projects entitled One of Those People: a comic about dependence.

The whole shape of the book has changed quite a bit over the past two years – something I’ll be talking more about in my paper. The artwork has also changed somewhat – in that it’s a lot less like the “Tintin”-esque style I’ve adopted for much of my archaeological work.

So here’s a quick taster of some of the completed pages from One of Those People. It’s still very much a work in progress, so don’t expect to see anything published soon. But for those of you at the conference, I have a small booklet containing these sample pages for sale on my table in the marketplace.

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Doing Different

Doing Something Different – making a collaborative comic about AS. On sale at Comics & Medicine in Brighton in a fortnight!

It’s the Comics & Medicine conference in Brighton in a fortnight’s time. I’m going to have a table in the conference marketplace, and in addition to copies of Something Different About Dad, I’ll also be selling copies of this little book: Doing Something Different.

This is a little behind-the-scenes book about how Kirsti and I collaborated on the project. It’s kind of come out of the paper I’m giving, on some of the experiences I’ve had on the ethics of collaboration in comics and medicine. As I was writing the paper, I thought it might be interesting for some people to have an idea of how Kirsti and I approached our collaboration on Something Different About Dad. The book is illustrated with sketches, rough drafts and “deleted scenes”, which help to show some of the development of the book from its origins as a one-page leaflet, through illustrated booklet, to 80-page comic.

Anyway, the book will be on sale during the conference – reasonably priced!

 

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The Cage

The Cage – Rinko Endo, 2012

I’ve been reading another treat from one of the people I met at the Comics and Medicine conferences – Rinko Endo’s The Cage. One of the really interesting things about the whole genre of graphic medicine is the huge variety of texts being created. We might expect to find works on the experience of living with Cystic Fibrosis (Andrew Godfrey – Sicker Than Thou), miscarriage (Paula Knight – The Facts of Life), eating disorders (Katie Green – Lighter Than My Shadow), caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s (Sarah Leavitt –Tangles), or the experience of being a GP or a nurse (Ian Williams – Disrepute; MK Czerwiec – Comic Nurse). These are difficult topics, and these works deal with “big” themes and “serious” medical situations. Comics like these are surely what graphic medicine is all about. Comics gives these complex and difficult narratives a voice. But comics as a medium can give voice to other kinds of narratives as well, less “big”, perhaps, less “serious” – but no less significant or meaningful to their author: works about blushing, body odour, gallstones or, indeed, orthodontics.

Rinko Endo is a psychiatric nurse whom I first met in Chicago at the second Comics and Medicine conference. There she gave a paper on her comic Aggression Management Manga – a graphic guide for interns and trainees on how to manage difficult and aggressive patients. Her approach was innovative and cleverly culturally-specific. The end result was a not only a great comic, but a great teaching tool.

The Cage is her second complete comic work, and shares the same innovative approach as her Aggression Management Manga. Sub-titled “My Orthodontic Memoir”, it recounts her childhood diagnosis of malocclusion and the subsequent trials and tribulations of living with an orthodontic chin cap. I had a number of friends when I was a kid with various orthodontic retainers, braces and headgear. Beyond these, there’s a whole grim panoply of orthodontic appliances – power chains, coil springs, twin blocks, plates or retainers, facemasks, cervical headgear, headgear helmets, lip bumpers, palate expanders, elastics, bionaters, Herbst appliances, Wilson appliances, hybrid twinblocks, positioner retainers, face frames, face bows and jasper jumpers (thank you, Wikipedia for that exhaustive list) – none of which I’d ever heard of. A chin cap is another one of these devices that I’d never come across – having read The Cage, I’m glad.

How can being clamped into a naugahyde, rubber and steel cage not feel like being captured by the Inquisition? Rinko’s story brings out all the physical discomfort, the skin irritation and the claustrophobia of her chin cap – but also the terrible confusion, humiliation and uncertainty that clouded all around her as she tried to figure out what it was all about. Was her chin cap some kind of obscure punishment? Even the inevitable name-calling and bullying at school was nothing compared to the ambivalence of the adult world. Rinko recounts her Mother’s disappointment, her Aunt’s judgement, her sister’s betrayal and her dentist’s disapproval to illustrate the immediacy of her own frustration and helplessness – and the gulf between that experience and the wider, more long-term concerns of her Mother. It’s a clever juxtaposition, and one that recalls some of the scenes in Aggression Management Manga.

I love Rinko’s visual style. It’s the same cross-cultural mix – shōjo meets Family Circus, perhaps – that worked so well in Aggression Management Manga. She uses this mixture once again to excellent effect, effortlessly slipping in fantasy intercuts, snatches of dream-sequences and manga iconography that push the linear narrative. Her carefully-controlled line style and panel arrangements give her lively characterisations space to bounce around and come to life. Despite all the detail, there’s a certain openness to her panels that recalls colouring-books (I couldn’t resist with the cover – above) – adding a further stylistic reference to the mixture that again, works in the story’s favour.

The Cage ends with a message, one that draws on Rinko’s experience as a psychiatric nurse. It’s an interesting conclusion to the story, wrapped up with a couple of distinctive panels that make excellent use of Rinko’s unique visual style. The cage of the visual simile becomes a personal and professional metaphor. Having to wear a chin cap is not like having cancer or dealing with depression – but Rinko makes it very clear that it’s no less a transformative experience. The Cage is a thoughtful comic that brings out an unexpectedly serious lesson from an apparently trivial childhood experience.

Rinko heads to Japan later this year, and it will be interesting to see how this affects whatever comic project she undertakes next. I’d love to see her work with some of her experiences in psychiatric nursing – there are some fascinating glimpses of this towards the end of The Cage. On the other hand, it would also be interesting to see her turn her attention to subjects outside of medicine – perhaps even this move to Japan.

The Cage is, like Aggression Management Manga, a great example of someone using graphic medicine to bring together personal and professional experience – and a great example of the diversity and distinctiveness of the voices emerging within the genre.

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Character Development

Kirsti and I are starting work seriously on “Something Different About Her”, now. We’ll be putting together a sample chapter over the next month or so, pulling together Kirsti’s thoughts and notes about content and storyline, and bringing into some sort of clarity my ideas about how everything should look. Been working off and on this week on various characters that may (or may not) feature in the book – picking out ideas from Kirsti’s storyboards and notes and working them up through a progression of sketches to try and fix the look and feel of the artwork.

I wanted to do (pardon the obvious pun) something different with the artwork this time round. In Something Different About Dad, the target audience was slightly younger than “Her”, so I tried to keep the artwork fairly open, consistent and clear. You can’t help but give a feel to anything, no matter how straight-forward you make it, but I wanted to avoid laying too much over visual characterisation on top of the drawings, so most of the characters in the story are fairly similar in appearance.

But this time around I wanted to do a bit more with the characters. Not only are we hoping to do the book in colour, but I’d like to do the drawings in ink rather than pencil – partly because the coloured-in ink drawings feel more solid and natural to me, but also because inking the drawings in allows me to play more with the pen and ink and get a wider variety of line-weight, etc.

So, to the left is one of the first character portraits I’ve worked up to anything like a finished state. I’ve no idea who this girl is, or what role she’ll play in the story, but this gives some indication of the direction the current look the artwork is taking.

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Back Home

"Internal Affairs", panel - 2010

Back from Carriacou/Mustique, now – a bit jet-lagged, but ready to turn my attention back to other projects. Lots coming up over the next few months. I’ll be starting to work with Fine Line Tattoos in Oswestry as part of the Inside Out group’s Artists At Work project; I’ve got both the Treasure From Anatolia and Missing In Action to work on, and I promised Susan Squiers at the Comics & Medicine conference that I’d work with her on a collaboration for a future issue of Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf –and speaking of which, I did eventually mange to put together a short, 4-page comic for their issue on age called Internal Affairs. 

Other, archaeological projects include finishing the Lepenski Vir reconstructions – adding the remainder of the people; and the cover for Scott Fitzpatrick’s edited volume of papers on the use of hallucinogens in the ancient world – now that should be fun!

I’ll also be heading up to Leeds for Thoughtbubble for the Comics & Medicine session, and to London before that for the Comics & Conflict conference at the Imperial War Museum, plus hopefully meeting up with Cathy Leamy, Peter Stringham and the Comics Roundtable crowd in Boston in October.

Looks like a busy – but fun – summer ahead!

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Comics, Medicine and Archaeology

Unfinished panel from "Archaeology of the Caribbean" Pt. 3 - People still to be added. Sort of a metaphor for what I'm talking about with comics & archaeology, I suppose...

The New York Times has just today published an article about the Comics and Medicine conference under the title “A New Therapeutic Tool in the Doctor’s Bag”, highlighting the diverse nature of the genre and the eclectic nature of the conference.

The article not only calls attention to the variety of uses of comics, graphic novels and cartoon-illustrated texts are being put to in medicine, but also the variety of subject matters talked about. Shelly Wall, Sarah Leavitt, MK and Ian get particular mentions, as do Stuart Copans and Mark Dworkin – citations which serve to illustrate the range of topics comics, graphic narratives and cartoons are being used to address. From Alzheimers to Parkinsons, AIDS to alcoholism, the experiences of doctors to the experience of caregivers – all these are flagged up as being not just addressed, but crucially, better addressed by comics than ordinary text.

And this is the important point – and one that forms the central thesis of the argument I’ve been trying to make in the context of archaeology: that the use of comics and graphic narratives should serve a critical function, not just a stylistic one. This is something that graphic medicine has addressed almost naturally – people are using comics not because they look good, but because they allow them to tell stories which otherwise might not be told.

In medicine, these untold, hidden stories abound in every context – witness how much graphic medicine revolves around the experiences of doctors and caregivers alike. The desire to tell these stories and address the issues they bring up has pushed people into looking for a new medium in which to express themselves.

In archaeology, these stories also exist, but there is a lack of willingness at professional levels to tell them. But archaeology, like medicine, needs to recognise that these stories are a valid and true narrative not only of archaeological experience, but of archaeological practice and process. An artist friend of mine described these stories as “the oral histories” of archaeology. They are: they are the vernacular narratives which are (despite the post-processual work of people like Ian Hodder, for example) still excluded from formal documentation. But these vernacular narratives – these everyday stories of how we do our work, why and how – are not incidental to the formal documentation of archaeology: they inform every aspect of our archaeological lives. From why we chose to do archaeology in the first place, to how various professors and lecturers influenced us, to the experiences of our first excavations and our first research projects, to the multiplicity of professional dilemmas and choices we make on a daily basis – these are the stories that really matter in archaeology, and they are not being communicated effectively and meaningfully. As well-intentioned as the Çatalhöyük excavators’ journals are, for example, they hide at the bottom of a vast database, and are quoted only in the context of expensive, specialist publications. This is not the way to show how archaeology is really done. It frustrating to see how little guidance there is for students and post-graduates entering the field in dealing with these issues.

Archaeology remains very much a “closed-shop”, and it does itself no favours as a result. In failing to bring these narratives to light, we are failing some of the best in the field. I have seen too many good archaeologists abandon their careers, frustrated and isolated, unable to unravel complex ethical, inter-personal or professional issues, unable to find a way of discussing the difficulties – and, indeed, triumphs – of working as an archaeologist. Comics and graphic narratives may be one of the ways in which we can open the experience of the discipline up and make it much more clear what we do and why we do it.

Archaeology needs illustrators like Ian Williams to address the complexities and limitations of our profession; it needs writers like Sarah Leavitt, David Small and Brian Fies to take difficult narratives about the impact of archaeology and make those meaningful to a wider audience; and it needs a forum like Comics & Medicine to bring people interested in telling those stories together.

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