The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Today I’m joined by one of Scotland’s best-regarded independent cartoonists, Malcy Duff. Some of you will be nodding your heads and thinking, great, while others might not be familiar with Malcy’s work. Since Malcy has stayed resolutely true to his status as an independent creator, unafraid to push the envelope on what an artist can do with a comic rather than taking the easier, mainstream route this might be understandable. We find this approach laudable, but it does have the side effect of meaning he has flown a (home made and painted) stealth plane under the comics radar of a lot of the more mainstream comics fans. With the publication of a new comic – the Blackest Gnome, a very unusual and unique comics experience, avoiding conventional straight narrative, instead delivering imagery, experiences and emotions for the reader to assemble into meaning themselves – and the launch of a new website to support his Missing Twin publishing we decided it was time we talked to him.

(cover to The Blackest Gnome by Malcy Duff, check the Missing Twin website for more information)

FPI: Hi, Malcy, and thanks for joining us for a wee chat. You’re lining up some new comics for us through your Missing Twin publishing, with the Blackest Gnome being released just in the last few weeks, but first we should probably start by introducing you for readers unfamiliar with your work – could you tell us a bit about how you first got into comics?

Malcy: I published my first comic ‘Zero Termite’ when I was nineteen. I had wanted to draw comics for a long time but was scared by stupid guitar soloing from the elite. I related better to the caveman thud which I was taught by reading Hate, Toxic. I think I got into comics by watching The Lost Boys. Corey Haim deserved a slagging for being a fashion victim and he
got it offa two comic dirts.

FPI: You’ve published quite a range of material, from These Walls Are Made of Horsehair through Hoofprints and Eyeball on the Windscreen; humour is often a component that people comment about in your work – do you think the sense of humour is pretty important to the work and do you enjoy mixing humour with darker, perhaps more unusual or even grotesque material?

Malcy: It depends what yer sense of humour is. I fell over yesterday.

(Mhairi by Malcy Duff, reviewed on Zum!)

FPI: I get the impression that the standard comics format is not the only thing on your mind, an impression backed up by the likes of a review of Mhairi on the Zum! Site where it talks about you taking an increasingly experimental approach. Do you think being your own publisher allows you that freedom of creativity, to push style, format and story as you want to then see if it finds a receptive readership, as opposed to maybe a more mainstream publisher who has to have one eye (at least) on how many issues they think they can sell and perhaps has to tailor their output to try and match a perceived audience rather than take a risk pushing boundaries and creating an audience?

Malcy: Professionalism should not exist in the artist. I will be an amateur till the day I die. A professional lights a match to anything experimental and closes the possibilities of what can be found in making mistakes. I experiment to keep myself interested in what I’m doing and for me that is just a natural part of creating. I find people who use the word experimental too much are exposing their conservative view of art and the acceptance in the establishment of professionalism. I respect my readership by not caring what they think of my work. I believe people can think for themselves if you give them a chance.

FPI: Any media needs to explore new angles and approaches – despite the fact the mainstream can sometimes display a fair bit of reluctance or inertia to move from established genres and forms, do you think the independent creators can push them at least a bit, maybe spread some influence in larger publishers, even if indirectly by changing the expectations of readers so they demand more than the usual?

Malcy: Again, I think it is very important to keep your integrity and follow yer own path. Mainstream culture will always absorb ideas from the underground and dribble them out in a quieter form which has no resemblance to it’s louder, purer, original shape. It is sad when creators are lured away from their path because they are now worthless as artists. Their “art” has become something in inverted commas. The mainstream is a language which has and continues to be carved into the subconscious and the only way to change that is teaching yersel new languages and speaking them.

FPI: You’re involved with the Edinburgh-based band Giant Tank where you can also see more of your artwork as well as catch up on gig info and the likes; anyone visiting the Giant Tank site is going to find a shedload of material to browse through – not just clippings from the media, band info and gig dates, but a fair old mass of artwork and comics material, including Giant Tank Propaganda Magazine. For the uninitiated could you tell us a bit about what Giant Tank are about and how the comics art interacts with the music?

(Further Giant Tank Propaganda Magazine Volume 2 – more on the Giant Tank’s comics section)

Malcy: Giant Tank is the brain bairn of my best friend Alasdair Robertson, originally a band, now a label. He began Giant Tank with the cartoonist and animator Alex MacGreggor who was responsible for the propaganda. Giant Tank would play with Alex’s visuals screened on stage and the Propaganda Magazine was handed out at shows. Ali is the biggest comic nut I know and comics have been his passion alongside music the whole time I’ve known him.

FPI: Looking through some of the artwork on Giant Tank there are some images that grab you. The ‘hair’ piece (no pun intended) – see below – for instance reminds me in a bizarre way of an unkempt Dougal from the Magic Roundabout and a Highland Cow, but the text gives it a more personal meaning (unless I’m reading in more than there is) – what was going on there?

Malcy: It’s personal.

FPI: Fair enough. Malcy, despite being described as “Scotland’s greatest living cartoonist” on Strip For Me, you haven’t had a main website showcasing your wares to the world; of course there is, as we’ve said, a pile on the Giant Tank site and more spread around the web, such as the Murtha Milks strip on Bugpowder, but no one big central site someone using Google would find – I think you said that was something you were planning to rectify when you were launching the new comic? Any news on how the site is going and what Malcy goodies can we look forward to and will it be safe for little children and the delicate of nature to browse?

Malcy: When I set up Missing Twin I felt like Chevy Chase at the end of National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. The site has been put together by ace Ben Kuberek and it’s looking barry (Edinburgh term for ‘great’, ‘fab’ – Joe). I am a computer retard and can only understand wood and trees. I said seven years ago “I’m just off down the shops to buy a website, shouldn’t be too long.” I just got back a week last Friday. Children are humans and can look at my website. I have heard that they can find dead bum holes quite sad, so parents, just explain it to them.

FPI: I reckon if the kids can deal with picture books like The Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business (genuine children’s picture book in which the mole goes round trying to find out who did a smelly poo) they can deal with bum holes, sad or otherwise. They need to learn sometime.

The other thing that struck me was that much as I enjoyed browsing the work on Giant Tank I could really have used a wee bit of text just to set some context to what I was looking at – any likelihood of a purpose-built Malcy online gallery featuring some of those works with a bit of text from yourself discussing them?

Malcy: No.

FPI: Shame – I like to dive into material and figure it for myself usually, but sometimes a piece in isolation needs a bit of context, still I suppose the reader can always invent their own. 2007 marks the beginning of a brand new comic from you, the Blackest Gnome, from your Missing Twin publishing – care to talk us through a bit of what we can expect and how the new work came into being?

Malcy: The Blackest Gnome was inspired by the cancellation of the last Black and White Minstrel show in Scotland after one complaint. Gnomes sit in suburban gardens all around the country and people think they are tables. They’re not. Expect paper, staples, and sport.

FPI: I enjoyed Blackest Gnome, although I’ll admit I’m still going back to it and thinking – or re-thinking – what some sequences mean. Which makes it very rewarding as a reader since you feel more involved in the process of interpreting the story, which is something I think a reader always has to do with any books or comics to some extent, but here they need to put a lot more effort in. I do like writers who will push the reader this way instead of spoon-feeding them a simple narrative, but that means each person’s reading will be even more subjective than usual which, while great from the reading perspective is a real bugger when you are trying to describe it (as I have been trying to!).

The comic is also largely wordless, which means there is even less text to ‘anchor’ the meaning for a reader – was that a deliberate move to put more on the reader’s initiative for interpreting the images or was Blackest Gnome pretty much wordless in you head anyway and that’s more of a by-product effect?

Malcy: My comics tend to be mostly wordless because I find reading images more interesting than reading words, but it is not wholly a conscious decision one way or the other. Stories come to me in a form and I just draw them on sheets of paper, and sometimes they’ll have words and sometimes they won’t speak.

FPI: Looking at the Black and White Minstrel fellow as his head slumps after being told of complaints – one panel conveys the sense of dejection beautifully – also made me think on other casualties of political correctness over the years, such as the Robertson’s Jam Gollywog image which suddenly became cultural persona non grata. Obviously imagery and symbols can change their meaning to different people over the years, but do you think an artist should be constrained by those sorts of changes in public interpretation or should they challenge them?

Malcy: Political correctness is just another attempt at mind control. Artists should create like they sneeze.

FPI: Amen (or if I am being Politically Correct I guess it should be Aperson). As well as the dejection of the Minstrel I had a real sense of distance and alienation while reading this – the sequence with the curtain going up in the theatre, a safety curtain giving way to another curtain and another and another until we finally have tiny, distant figures far away at the back of the stage, for example, or the long corridor with the lone figure turning one way and then the other repeatedly – is that the sort of impression you were trying to create?

Malcy: Distance, yes, definitely.

FPI: The theatre auditorium, seemingly deserted except for rows of seats which have simple faces on them was an interesting image, left me feeling both amused since it is a kind of ‘cute’ image on one level and slightly disturbed on the other hand because there is something indefinably creepy about it. I could be wrong, but I’m guessing you might have enjoyed creating such ambivalent reactions?

Malcy: This is why I love individual interpretations because I didnae draw faces on those seats.

FPI: Hahahah, that’s a damned-near perfect example of the individual nature of interpreting something then! First time I read this I didn’t see faces, second time round I was sure I saw a basic ‘Smiley’ type face (except not smiling) on the seat backs. Of course, now I’ve seen it that way it is hard for me to ‘unsee’ them, my brain’s decided that’s a face and that’s that.

You stick with black and white (rather appropriately given the Minstrels connection) for almost all of the book, but towards the end there is a tiny bit of colour glimpsed – red on a ravaged face beneath a scalped hairline, an almost shocking image, made stronger by being set in the mundane scene of domestic television viewing. Ironically the television is showing snooker, a game which is rather hard to follow in black and white – I’m assuming that these were pretty deliberate moves on your part playing with the notions of colour and perception?

Malcy: Yes. Me and my gran used to watch snooker on a black and white
television and we always knew who was winning.

FPI: For local readers (including me) I have to ask, is the closed theatre glimpsed on page 44 based on the Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre?

Malcy: Yes

FPI: Although it might not always be obvious to the mainstream readers, we are lucky enough to have a diverse pool of talent in the UK small press comics scene – is there anyone there who is appealing to you at the moment?

Malcy: Alex Mazhari is killer.

FPI: Something I usually ask our guests – what comics and books are you enjoying at the moment? Anyone you would recommend?

Malcy: Comics by Douglas Noble (strip-for-me.com) and John Miller, books by Macaulay Culkin and Laura Hird and anything on Feral House Press.

FPI: Following on from this can we ask what’s next on the comics front for you?

Malcy: ‘A 52 Second Silence For Topsy’, a comic based on a description of the 1903 film ‘Electrocuting An Elephant’.

FPI: Malcy Duff, thanks very much for taking some time to chat with us; you can check out Malcy’s new Missing Twin website (complete with some small but nicely done animations) for more information on how to get hold of the Blackest Gnome, which is available now. It is an unusual read, but that’s a good thing to any serious reader, so please do check it out.