Design Week Interview

I was recently interviewed by Design Week about my contribution to the CTRL.ALT.SHIFT 'Unmasks Corruption' anthology being launched at Comica this year. Here's the full interview...

DW: First, can you tell me how you came to be involved in the project?

I was invited by CTRL+ALT+SHIFT to contribute some work to the project. I get the feeling that they wanted to get me to work with Marcus from the outset.

DW: Could you give me a brief synopsis of your story in the comic, and tellme a little about how and why you came to create it, and why this subject?

Before I had any contact with Marcus I had been sent links to his photodocumentary work in the DRCongo.

I also did a great deal of research myself on the situation there, taking in all different kinds of personal and political perspectives and experiences.

The more I researched the situation in DRCongo, the more complicated and horrific I perceived things there to be. The atrocities that are taking place there still are simply unimaginable. Where a lot of the accounts of the situation were pinning some hope on the intervention of the international community and the UN and then you discover that those ‘peacekeeping’ forces were similarly being accused of the atrocities they were sent there to prevent (rape, corruption, exploitation etc) it made a desperate situation seem even more hopeless.

I also wrestled with lots of issues about my own right to any kind of comment or expression about a situation I was so comfortably removed from and horrors that are way beyond anything people in the western world could ever imagine experiencing.

I spoke with Marcus briefly and he gave me access and permission to use his images and initially I was still unsure on how to approach the project. I decided I didn’t want to pollute what Marcus had captured in his images by adding text or a any kind of personal narrative and eventually decided to try and almost ‘remix’ those images in (my own) comic book way for a comic book audience whilst also trying to express, in my approach, my own feelings of horror that I had felt engaging with the reality of the situation as I understood it.

DW: With no text, how do you feel the frames express and convey the story, and what part does Marcus's photography background play in this form of graphic expression?

I think the ‘story’ is one involving billions of people - Those who are living in DRCongo and those whose lives are made more comfortable by the resources that the lives of those people are being expended to produce. This includes everyone who owns a mobile phone, or computer or piece of jewelry or any other number of taken-for-granted luxuries and essentials. They all have a human cost that most of us never even consider. It really is Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ still happening, except on a much more horrific scale.

Marcus is the person who went there to bring back evidence of that happening. When Marcus saw the strip and commented to me that it reminded him of his nightmares I felt that I might have done a decent job of things. Just reading about the situation and engaging with it emotionally made me sick to my stomach a lot of the time. I really can only imagine – and try and convey that imagining - how it must feel to the people of DRCongo to live day-to-day with those experiences. The situation in DRCongo says such dark and terrible things about what some human beings are capable of normalizing and justifying. Unspeakable things.

DW: There's obviously a long tradition of graphic novel work that dealswith real-world issues and political corruption, exploitation etc, doyou think that as a genre it's strengthening or stagnating?

I think it’s a shame that comics can only be perceived as having any real cultural value if they deal with political subjects. But at the same time they seem to have a potency to enable people who might not otherwise to deal with political issues, do so. There is good and bad in this I think. I think the proliferation of war-reportage comics and the way they have become somewhat homogenous over the last few years does reflect a danger of (sub)genre stagnation, certainly when such a homogenous approach seems to have become the norm. But then I think that comics have always been a very conservative art form. Most creators try to fit in and be taken seriously rather than trying to express something more originally and honestly and then risk rejection by their peers. I don’t think that helps comics be taken more seriously as a form of literary and artistic expression.

DW: Finally, can you give me a couple of emerging artists working in the genre that you admire?
More than anyone I admire Sean Duffield of Paper Tiger Comix. He has been collating material for and trying to produce a high quality international anthology of work in this field for years now. The barriers and obstacles he has been presented with by the people who should be encouraging and supporting his efforts and work makes me extremely frustrated on his behalf. If there were any justice in the world someone would give him the support he needs and deserves.

Sid & ABBA

And so as one thing ends so another begins. As Lawrence and myselfs run of Charlie Parker: Handyman strips in The Stool Pigeon comes to an end, so another chapter of musical cartoonery begins. Starting next month, gracing the back page of the self same organ will start 'It Should Have Been a Picture! Unphotographed Moments in Rock History' thrown together by myself and beautifully illustrated by Nelson Evergreen. First up is a supposed incident that took place involving Sid Vicious and the girls from ABBA. I like to think that it's not so much whether it's really true or not; it's whether you WANT to believe...

Waiting Rooms

It’s the middle of a weekday afternoon and the Housing Benefit Office’s waiting room is too large, too quiet and too devoid of distraction. No magazines, no posters. Just a large red digital number 47 displayed on a screen on an otherwise blank wall, inevitably drawing the gaze of the handful of numberless people waiting, all wondering if they should have a number themselves or need a number or what the electronic number-board is for considering that it seems to bear no relation whatsoever to anything else going on.

When people are ready to be seen their names are called aloud and they go and sit with their backs to the rest of the waiting room, where they are interviewed by social services staff in one of the partitioned wooden booths which line two of the perimeter walls of the room. Conversations between workers and members of the public are clearly audible but remain largely incomprehensible due to the lack of appreciated background context. This is the kind of anonymity that poverty affords you. The better off you are the more private and personal you are able to keep your affairs. The poorer you are the more a spectacle for others your situation becomes. The receptionist, when talking to passing colleagues speaks in a whisper. Like many public waiting rooms it has the air of a secret shame that even the staff seem to share in.

The lower down the social ladder you get, the closer to rock bottom, the more obvious this is made to you through the kinds of waiting rooms you find yourself having to wait in. Successful people rarely find themselves actually having to want, or wait, for anything they find themselves truly in need of.

The Citizens Advice Bureau's waiting room is so small that, sitting down, your knees are almost touching those of the person sitting opposite you. The man opposite me doesn’t speak English. He holds in his trembling hands a letter in an envelope, which he constantly unfolds, looks over and stuffs back into the envelope. He is accompanied by a woman who clutches his arm and whispers into his ear in a language I do not recognise or understand. She has told the head that appeared through the hatch that opened when they rang the reception bell that the man needs an interpreter. That the courts system should provide an interpreter. That how can he be given a fair hearing in court if he is unable to understand what people are saying and no one is able to understand him. Which, as a pertinent and valid criticism of the British Justice System also goes some way to explain the mans pleading expression and incessant hand ringing.

When all the seats are taken and there is not even any room left to even stand in the waiting room, when someone opens the door to the room everyone inside has to lean incrementally to the side to allow for the small but significant reduction in available space. The effect is like being a participant in a very pathetic attempt at a kind of Mexican wave. When there is nowhere left to stand or sit new people find themselves having to wait on the pavement outside. There are twelve people waiting in the room and two more on the pavement outside. When another person squeezes their way into the room and rings the reception bell and the hatch opens and the head appears, they are told the service can only see fifteen people a day. They will have to come back tomorrow. They are advised, without irony, to arrive early in order to avoid disappointment. I suspect that most people, no matter what time they arrive, are carrying with them disappointment enough to spare. I don't think a little more is really going to make that much difference in most peoples cases.

Another man, who looks like he might possibly originate from the Indian subcontinent - although he may just have a very deep and worked upon tan - sits sweating in a corner, cradling a bulging folder of what we have all overheard to be his ‘financial correspondences’ (sic). Upon arriving he asks the receptions head if he could be given a glass of water. The request, clearly untoward, is nevertheless acknowledged and the receptions head says they will get him a glass of water before it withdraws (the head) and the hatch is again closed. The man fidgets and tics and when eventually, some time later, the hatch is re-opened and the head re-appears to speak to another entering client and is then about to disappear without any mention of the glass of water, the clearly inwardly agitated man politely reminds the head that he would (please) like a glass of water. The hatch closes and this time soon reopens again, a glass of water appearing, held out by a disembodied hand. The man drinks the glass of water in one go and then finds there is nowhere in the room pressed full of people to put down the empty glass. He tries to balance it on the shelf beneath the closed-again hatch but the shelf is too narrow and the glass tips off, back into his hand. Thus the man, still twitching, still sweating, returns to his chair in the corner and holds the glass in his lap along with his bulging folder until he is called for his appointment. He then hands the empty glass to the CAB worker who stands in the doorway that opens outwards from the room and leads onto a corridor, off which are set a number of police-station like interviewing rooms. The worker takes the empty glass in the way all people take things they are handed that they know they must now bear responsibility for but really don’t want or know what to do with. The mans apparent lack of appreciation of the trouble his asking for a glass of water has caused is ergo also lacking awareness of it’s potential impact on the progress of his imminent interview. Which, overheard conversation between man and head in hatch has revealed, is one more in an apparently considerably far-back reaching chain of many previous interviews. The tanned mans folder, presumably, expanding with each subsequent unresolving visit.

In the GP’s surgery a touch screen appointment system allows the receptionist to concentrate on tasks more demanding and important than personally acknowledging the sick, concerned and needy. I type in my gender and date of birth and am instructed, by name, to proceed to the waiting room.

It’s first thing in the morning and the waiting room is empty. In the centre of the room is a low scuffed coffee table upon which sits a pile of magazines. The only magazines orientated towards men are dedicated to golf. Which is clearly more indicative of the surgery’s resident doctors interests than those of the men who actually live in the low-income poor-quality-housing area the surgery is situated in and serves.

In the corner of the people-empty waiting room sits an abstract sculpture of Soviet repression, designed to look like a possibly educational wooden children’s play set. Created by political prisoners in the 1960’s and exported to the West in an attempt to offset the national debt of wheat imports from America, upon the bases of these artifacts can often be found the sad carved signatures of long dead academics whom Stalin had perceived at the time of their incarceration and forced labour to be ‘dangerous enemies of the state’.

Around the walls of the waiting room are a taxonomy of ‘health information’ posters, flyers and leaflets which the long wait to see a doctor allows me to consider at length. The posters range from slickly produced propaganda for the latest government health initiatives to improve the wealth of the nation to simple photocopied advertisements for local self-help groups and drop-ins: Wednesdays Weekly Mother and Baby Wart Clinic for example or the last Thursday of every months Melanoma Lunchtime Drop-In. The dominant theme amongst this group of posters is undoubtedly that of unpleasant skin conditions. Which does make me consider standing to wait instead of continuing to remain seated. Other posters seem deliberately calculated less to scare the shit out of people and more to foster a nagging sense of your being sicker than you actually feel by highlighting vague symptoms such as getting up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and suggesting that this may be indicative of certain types of banal disease. Nothing deadly. Just stuff you don’t want and could do without knowing the symptoms of. In another category a socio-ecomonic sub-group-specific poster campaign pictures close-cropped photographs of low-income, poor-quality-housing type people who look like they have either just been or are just about to cry. Above their heads, single words in large-fonts bluntly and aggressively question the obvious, as in ‘TIRED?’, ‘RUNDOWN?’ or my personal favourite with which I identify strongly; the simultaneously unequivocal and ambiguous, ‘SCARED?’.

Eventually a door behind me opens and my doctor’s voice calls my name. I enter his office, sobbing and relieved. Upon seeing my face, my doctor, a kind if ineffectual man, looks genuinely distressed and concerned, his right hand barely able to contain itself from reaching, even before he has heard what might be wrong, for the pregnantly fat and blank prescription pad that sits on the desk between us.

The Counselling Centre’s waiting room is full, it’s palpable atmosphere of despair making a similarly full doctors surgery waiting room seem, by comparison, positively joyful. This is despite the waiting rooms abundance of natural light and well-tended houseplants and it’s lack of fear inducing posters or inappropriate reading material. The houseplants and daylight, one suspects, have been engineered into the room to bolster a sense of optimism among the centre’s clientele; messages of light, growth, life etc. Or if not bolster, then at least offset the air of mental fatigue which most of us in here emanate. I have no idea what colour a depressed persons aura is supposed to show up as in those photographs which purport to be able to capture a persons aura, but I feel sure that the aura of most people in this waiting room would show up as a sickly mustard yellow colour that gives you a kind of unpleasant childhood type feeling just to even look at.

Where as in most public waiting rooms there is at least some unspoken sense of shared experience or hardship, here such a feeling is absent. Where as in most public waiting rooms unintentional eye-contact is awkward at worst but can at least be redressed with a slight apologetic smile, raised eyebrows or shrug, here such banal responses would seem grotesquely inappropriate, no matter how well intentioned. All who pass time in this room have a personally rooted understanding that we are each of us in our own personal hell that cannot be outwardly shared or communicated, except with the help, patience and perseverance of a trained professional. A pair of raised eyebrows and a bit of good-humoured eye-rolling is simply not going to cut it.

The receptionist is, however, disconcertingly open and cheerful; broadcasting a professionally sunny outlook which she hopes communicates that she is perceptive enough to be aware that anything less than beaming optimism may be enough to unfavourably tip the psychic scales of any one of us. Let alone all of us. Those with any first-hand up-close experience of ‘the misery business’ are all too familiar with and wary of the domino effect when it comes to acute psychiatric distress and rooms, wards or any enclosed spaces full of similarly emotionally disposed people.

Which is perhaps why the waiting room for the drop-in service run by The Samaritans contains only one chair and could really only comfortably contain one solitary person. It is less a vestibule, barely a hallway and really only the space between two doors, one leading in and one leading out to a driveway whose gravels crunch in the otherwise silent courtyard signals clearly to those in the surrounding overlooking offices the arrival of yet another suicidally depressed person to the Samaritans drop-in service below. It is only after leaving, after a lot of crying and apologising and trying to articulate myself to a one-eyed woman with an eye-patch who sits listening sympathetically as she sips from a mug of tea, that I find myself feeling extremely grateful that no one else had chosen the exact same time to drop in to a service, the only service in this city at least, that openly welcomes at any time of day or night, those of us who have become all too hopelessly aware that we have reached our very own, uniquely personal, rock bottom.

On Coltrane

Like Father Like Son

Unspeakable Things

These are a few images from a 7 page strip I've just completed for CTRL+ALT+SHIFT on the theme of 'corruption'. In order to produce the strip CTRL+ALT+SHIFT put me in touch with photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale who gave me access to photographs he had taken documenting the humanitarian crisis in The Democratic Republic of the Congo in the last couple of years.

Whether or not CTRL+ALT+SHIFT will end up publishing the strip remains to be seen. They did seem to be most interested in comic strips being based on 'personal stories'. After a lot of research, I just couldn't see that working. I appreciate that using personal stories is a way to let people connect with 'big issues' but it just didn't feel like the right way for me to approach things with the materials I had been given to work with. So I've ended up with something quite different from a personal story.

I hope that what I've done says something. I hope it re-interprets Marcus' photography in (my own) 'comic strip' way for a different kind of audience than would otherwise engage with those kinds of images. What Marcus or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT will make of all this who knows.

There is a vast amount of information available on the Internet about The Democratic Republic of the Congo, but a good place to start reading is the downloadable report by the IRC here:

http://www.theirc.org/special-report/congo-forgotten-crisis.html

Day of the Jacko

Back in April I wrote the text below as a possible idea for a comic strip which I soon filed away with very little intention of ever using. As soon as I saw the headlines about Michael Jacksons death a couple of months later I consigned my memory of it away to the never-going-to-get-used pile and didn't even bother reading it again. But it sat there on my hard-drive and I re-read it again this morning as I was going through old pieces of writing. If you start to smell something sweet and sickly, don't blame me.

The Day of the Jacko (April 2009)

Nobody could have seen it coming. With the news of Michael Jackson’s suicide came what commentators described as a tsunami of grief whose intensity surpassed even that shown by the public toward figures such as John F Kennedy and Princess Diana.

It seemed that the tragic demise of the star whose bizarre life had been so luridly documented by the worlds media had touched a great many more people than anyone could have foreseen.

Michael had hung himself from his favourite tree in the silent ghostly grounds of his private estate on the morning of April 1st, apparently the tragic victim of an ‘all the children in the world are dead Michael!’ April fools hoax gone terribly wrong.

“I was going to tell him I was kidding but he just ran off so fast…” Said the security guard responsible for the fatal jape.

The hastily arranged funeral had been attended by tens of thousands of fans travelling in from all over the world. It was also to play host to Jackson’s final surprising artifice – a eulogy written by Michael himself, publicly read out by a young look-alike that Jackson had personally groomed to be his spokesperson in the event of his death.

Jackson's last recorded words: “I want you all to know that I will live forever in your hearts” struck a motown sized chord with the public. Billions of people around the world reported weeping as they watched Michaels see-through-candy-coffin trundling on a dozen steel rollers toward the roaring flames and whining high-powered gas-jets of pop star immortality. In the deluge of tributes and testimonials that followed, those present all recalled how from that day on they would forever associate their memories of Michael with the delicious smell of burning caramel.

Meanwhile, though many of the thousands attending the funeral had been sighted adopting a range of Jackson’s famous affectations in tribute to their idol, it had been those wearing life-like latex Jackson masks who had drawn the most media attention. A few months later it had become apparent that rather than dissipating, the phenomena of wearing Jackson masks was becoming epidemic and what was initially perceived as tribute began to be described as revolt. As with many cultural and political revolutions, the origins were diverse and uncoordinated. Simply a handful of unrelated incidents involving a handful of individuals from a number of unconnected protest groups who all happened to have the same idea at about the same time. The media picked up on a few of these cases, tied them together and before long it was being reported as a full-blown phenomena. This was before they realised what it all meant of course. How far it would go. But who could have guessed the implications back then?

I personally saw my first jackson mask one afternoon in my local supermarket, a few days after the funeral. I dismissed the wearer as simply one more Jacko fanatic and thought of the incident little more. But the next day I saw another. And then another. Before long I was even wearing one myself.

As improbable as it seemed, the ‘Live Forever’ rhetoric of Jackson’s delusional psychology had sparked a revolution. Jacksons back catalog was plundered and politicised. Wherever you went it became impossible to avoid the sound of ‘Can You Feel It’ playing on a radio or stereo somewhere close by. Those old enough to remember them said it was like the sixties all over again. Only this time they pledged to get it right. And all of this, largely beneath the noses of those who thought they were in control. It was only when the first crimes were committed by Jackson masked perpetrators that the authorities first sat up and took note.

But by then it was already too late. The wearing of Jackson masks had become widespread. Rapidly the distinctions between pop-star fanatisism, everyday crime, civil disobedience and terrorism were lost. Everybody was a criminal. Everybody was a Jackson.

On the day the governments tried to push through a bill criminalizing the wearing of Jackson masks, millions of Jackson masked demonstrators rioted in the streets of national capitals, and when police forces and armies were called in to crush the groundswell, Jackson’s visage had no less a presence within their number either.

It was the end. Governments toppled like dominoes as all political systems collapsed and anarchy ensued. And for a while things were pretty bad and a lot of people died. But then everything just kind of levelled out and calmed down and the world settled itself into a new order. Of course, it was all basically the same old system but only this time it was dressed up in a sequined glove. Which somehow made it palatable for the people of the world, whom history has determined will pretty much buy anything as long as it’s celebrity endorsed.

The new world wasn't a whole lot different to the one before. But it was different enough that people felt that they had regained a little hope for themselves and future generations. Even if those generations would have to spend their lives wearing Michael Jacksons face.

But if that was the cost, they said, then that’s what they will have to pay. If Michael could do it for the sake of a better world, they said, so can we.