Introducing: Oswestry Heritage Comics

This week, the Oswestry Advertizer is featuring a full-page comic introducing the Oswestry Heritage Comics project. I talk about how I got into using comics in archaeology, and why I thought using them in a local newspaper to shine a bit of a spotlight on local history, archaeology and heritage might be a good idea. It’s a very quick introduction to everything I’ve been doing with comics, information and public outreach over the past ten years – right back to the Çatal Nedir? comic I did way, way back in 2005.

My basic argument has always been that when we talk about the past – history, archaeology or heritage – we use a very specialised language full of concepts and assumptions that most people don’t recognise. This is because these concepts and assumptions don’t feature a great deal in the day-to-day of ordinary life. So public outreach has to provide a context for these things in order for them to be best understood by an audience unfamiliar with them: and the narrative and visuals of comics do that very well indeed.

Over the next twelve weeks, the Oswestry Heritage Comics series will hopefully demonstrate how this can be done even with a subject as rich and diverse as “heritage”, and within the confined parameters of a four-panel strip. It’s an artistic and informational challenge, certainly – but it’s an opportunity to really test the idea that comics can be effective as a means of communicating information about the past.

The comics are only part of the package. There’s a Facebook page which will provide onward links and additional information based on the subjects of each week’s strip. Plus, over the course of the twelve weeks the comic series is running in the newspaper, I’m going to be hosting a professional-level workshop and a family activity on comics and heritage at Underhill Farm during Heritage Open Days, a kids activity on comics and family history at Oswestry Library, plus a Learning at Lunchtime talk about the project, also at Oswestry Library, a mini-exhibition of the comics and preparatory artwork at The Willow Gallery in September, with an introductory talk on the process. If funding materializes, there will also be a pop-up exhibition of some of the comics at venues around Oswestry during Heritage Open Days, plus I’ll be giving a talk to the Chirk History Society which will be about public outreach in heritage, which will draw on (no pun intended) the comics project. I’ll put links to each of these events up here, closer to the time. I’ll also put up posts here about each weekly comic strip in turn, discussing some of the “behind the scenes” process, as well as talking in more detail about the way each of the strips was written.

I’m extremely excited about this project. If it proves to be successful, I’m hoping it might provide a model for other comics and local heritage projects – both in Oswestry, and beyond!

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Penycloddiau (ii)

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I went to Penycloddiau hillfort for #dayofarchaeology back in July, and had a great time being shown around the excavations by Rachel Pope, Rich Mason and the team from the Liverpool University Field Archaeology School. Since then, I’ve produced a short series of four-panel comics about the project, highlighting a few of the themes that are important to the site, the project and British hillfort research.

The comics have been doing the rounds on Twitter for a while now, and the reaction to them has been gratifyingly positive. It was an interesting challenge to do much shorter comics – although it has to be said that writing for four panels wasn’t necessarily any more difficult than writing for half a page or a whole page. And it was interesting to be doing comics about sites in the UK again. I’m often told “I have it easy”, since I get to make comics about doing archaeology in “exotic” places like the West Indies and the Pacific. In fact, by any method of counting, I’ve actually done more comics about British archaeology than anything else.

These comics were just a taster for a much wider use of comics as part of the Penycloddiau project’s public outreach strategy – using them to link to local communities and promote the connections between research and archaeological training at the site. I’ll be working on new material through this winter, and I’ll be out on site again (hopefully for longer this time) next season.

 

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Draw It Yourself

Comics and archaeology workshop day at the Grenada National Museum!

I recently did a series of morning workshops at the Grenada National Museum, using the comics I have made over the past few years to introduce children to the prehistoric archaeology of both Grenada and Carriacou. The workshops are part of a local summer school programme which the Museum helps run. During the workshops the kids used both my comics and actual artefacts to then draw their own pictures and comics about the Caribbean indians and the archaeology on the islands.

There’s an interesting connection between comics and teaching during workshops like these. When the children are encouraged to draw the subjects being taught to them, it gives them a “hook” – even when the subject matter is completely unfamiliar to them. I hadn’t really appreciated that drawing might help make the subjects feel more real to them. Perhaps I’ve been missing the point of the comics I’ve been creating about archaeology in the Caribbean. Perhaps their real value lies not in what information they contain, but in what they prompt their audiences to create themselves. Maybe it’s this that might help stimulate a sense of connection to the archaeology and the science depicted in the comics. As one of the staff at the Museum said to me:

Anything that helps show these kids that there’s more to the world than what they see out on the streets has to be a good thing […] Maybe, by just drawing these comics and these objects, they can see that [archaeology] is something they can be part of as well.

Games, colouring-pages, etc. – I’m going to start looking at more ways in which comics like these can not only help us as archaeologists “reach out”; but ways in which comics like these can create avenues for our audience to “reach back” to us. Surely the best kinds of outreach should work in both directions?

 

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