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.
