Character development sketches from “One Girl Goes Hunting” – illustration by John S., story by Hannah Sackett.
I’ve been working recently on a very interesting archaeological comics collaboration: a graphic story set in Neolithic Orkney, entitled One Girl Goes Hunting. Written by Dr. Hannah Sackett, a prehistoric and landscape archaeologist, it’s a tale of coming-of-age, ghosts and marriage set amongst the landscape around the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness. Hannah has been one of those contacts I made via the networks that encircled the fantastic Visualisation in Archaeology conference and workshop project.
Both Hannah and I have an interest in the connections between image, narrative and visual representation in archaeology – and in the connections between landscape, archaeology and story. Comics occupies the junction between all these elements: it brings image and visual representation together to create narrative – and can be used to blend together both archaeological, object-centred and lived, place-centered storytelling. This mixture of story-telling approaches to archaeological material has the potential to challenge the way in which we both visualise archaeology – its data, practice and experience – and the way in which we understand it to be consumed. Looking at the archaeological milieu through the lens of a different medium brings – quite literally – a different viewpoint. Just as the comics work of writer-illustrators like Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has re-interpreted not only visual culture but storytelling relationships to it, so all comics have the potential to ask new questions of subject material which has for so long been referenced through clearly, cleanly and consistently (one might say, remorselessly) divided text and image.
Hannah’s approach to the story has been to create a fairy-tale like “quest” narrative threaded through some of the major sites and landscapes of neolithic Orkney. In approaching me to work on the art, she came with an unusual brief. Most graphic works on archaeological themes seem to adopt a ligne claire approach (Ben Haggarty and Adam Brockbank’s Mezolith, for example), or a somewhat more scratchy, messy approach (like Simon Bisley’s Slaine – okay, not strictly archaeology, but certainly inspired by it). In this they might be seen to represent the two major “schools” of thought that still dominate archaeological reconstruction images. The ligne claire school represents visualisations of the past that are more diagrammatic, static and which focus mainly on areas of known facts and details; the scratchy school represents visualisations which are more emotive, atmospheric and which are happy to wash great clouds of soot, smoke, rain or shrubbery over areas of doubt and uncertainty. I’m reluctant to categorise as there are no hard and fast boundaries between these approaches, but generally speaking Simon James would sit in the former, while Alan Sorrell in the latter. This stylistic distinction can be broadly observed across the spectrum of archaeological visualisation – even, as I say, in comics about the past.
But Michael Nicoll Yangulanaas’ work points the way towards other possibilities for comics. Indeed, if you scan a bookshelf of graphic novels the one consistent impression you will get is that there is no consistent stylistic approach within the medium. Sharp, clear, fuzzy, scratchy – all mixed together, sometimes within the same work. So when Hannah suggested that the artwork for One Girl Goes Hunting might head in a different direction, I was immediately intrigued. The direction she suggested was towards the studios of Hayao Miyazaki, and the production ethos that had created such films as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. The bright, clear colours and precise, simplified draughtsmanship of Studio Ghibli’s signature style might not, perhaps, the first thing you might think of when you thought of Neolithic Orkney – but…
Well, why not? After all, this is now a major style associated with storytelling in not only in Japan, but across the globe. It would perhaps seem more odd to try and insist on clinging to a style associated with a 110-year old military camouflage painter. Hannah’s point here, I think, is that storytelling – like visualisation – is a living process, adapting and evolving to meet the narrative demands and preferences of each new generation. If comics are going to do anything different to the way in which archaeology is presented and understood, then the practice might well have to begin to embrace, explore and adapt contemporary storytelling mechanics and styles – mechanics and styles which sit outside the current toolbox used for visualising the past. After all, one could argue that this is exactly what Goscinny and Uderzo originally did with Asterix.
So what is a Studio Ghibli version of Neolithic Orkney going to look like? What will it do to the stories emerging from the sites and excavations on the islands? I really have no idea, but it will be extremely interesting to find out. Work is progressing slowly – but steadily! – at the moment; Hannah has given me a completed script, and I am in the process of doing a lot of character development drawings, getting the look of locations and settings right, etc. Getting this to “work” will be both a challenge and an adventure – but I have no doubt it will also be extremely rewarding. I’ll be posting new work up here on a fairly regular basis from now on, and check out Hannah’s blog too, for more background to the project..
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