Matthew Badham talks to Darryl Cunningham about the upcoming Psychiatric Tales on CBR:
“Matt: In terms of “Psychiatric Tales,” when and why did you decide to start making strips about mental illness?
Darryl: I worked for many years as a health care assistant on an acute psychiatric ward. Throughout this time I kept a diary, in which I gradually amassed a huge amount of material about the day-to-day workings of a psychiatric hospital. People kept saying to me that I ought to turn these stories into comic strips. I was, at that time, trying to knock the material into a prose book and didn’t think that adding drawings would enhance the work in any way. Surely, all the information you need is already there in the writing as it is, I thought.
But eventually, I did start drawing it all up into narrative strips. By this time, I’d seen Marjane Satrapi’s “Persopolis,” a simply drawn autobiographical strip about the writer’s childhood and young adulthood in Iran. This book was a big international success. I thought, “Well, I can do something like that.” “Persopolis” was a big inspiration to me in terms of what you can do with the comics medium. It was not so much that Satrapi was a particularly good artist, more that she had a dynamite subject that she told well and clearly.”
(a page from Psychiatric Tales by and (c) Darryl Cunningham, published this spring by Blank Slate in the UK & Bloomsbury in the US in 2011)
On a related note I should point you to Darryl’s blog as he has decided recently to start painting again, with the first work now available to view (and yes, he will be selling any paintings):
Thu, Mar 11, 2010
Comics and cartoons, Interviews