“The medium is an ideal vehicle for autobiography, with its distinctive utilisation of words and pictures to convey sometimes complex emotions and information in a direct and personal manner. Comics have many superficial similarities to film – the use of long shots, close-up, zooms and pans, for example – but, filtered through the perception and artistry of their authors, they are much closer to prose in the way they transmit a personal vision,” Bryan in his introduction to his graphic memoirs list in the Guardian. And again kudos to the comics-friendly Guardian for having an informed guest on to highlight different areas our beloved medium can cover so effectively and powerfully. You can read a Director’s Commentary with Mary and Bryan Talbot talking us through their own recent biographical work Dotter of Her Father’s Eye here on the blog. Any suggestions for other full-length graphic biographical works? Personally I’d add in some David B, perhaps some Joe Matt and Guy Delisle.

Bryan and Mary Talbot will be guests at Newcastle’s respected  Literary and Philosophical Society (the Lit & Phil, as it is widely known) for a special event celebrating their new book Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, just published by Cape in the UK. Mary will be giving a Powerpoint presentation, followed by a Q&A session with her and Bryan. Entry is £4/2 (concessions) and includes entry into the current Creative Passions exhibition as well. The event takes place at the Lit & Phil, 23 Westgate Road  Newcastle Upon Tyne, on Tuesday 28th February at 6.30pm.

And sticking on a Talbot theme, I see Chrissie Harper has again given us a sneak peek at the work in progress on Bryan’s next Grandville book, Bête Noire. As with the last sneak preview of a couple of panels (see here) it’s up because Chrissie is working on the colour flats for the book – the artwork hasn’t been fully rendered yet, but it is still nice to get a wee look!

Digital Story Engine has uploaded a neat short video talking with Mary and Bryan Talbot about collaborating on the just-published (and much recommended – terrific stuff) Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, which interleaves Mary’s childhood and upbringing with a sometimes distant Joycean scholar father and the daughter of Joyce himself, Lucia, and her troubled relationship with her literary royalty of a father. (thanks to Bryan for the heads-up).

(Bryan signing in the Edinburgh FP, pic from my Flickr)

For this first Commentary of 2012 I’m quite delighted to be welcoming to the blog a writer who may be making her graphic novel debut but who is certainly no stranger to other forms of writing and certainly intimately familiar with the lovely world of literature. Please welcome Doctor Mary Talbot who tells us about one of the books that has been on my Must Read radar for several month, ever since her husband and collaborator on the book, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, was kind enough to show me some pages last year. I know quite a few of you are also looking forward to reading Dotter, which is published by Cape at the start of February, so without further ado I will hand over to Mary and Bryan to tell us more about what promises to be an unusual and fascinating work combining biographical elements, literature, gender, history, society and more:

Dotter of her Father’s Eyes presents two coming-of-age stories, taking place at different points in the twentieth century. By intertwining these stories, I explore aspects of social history:  gender politics and social expectations, shifting notions about ‘acceptable’ behaviour.

The idea for the book started when I took early retirement, giving me more time to write. Bryan suggested I try my hand at autobiographical writing, producing a graphic novel script that he would illustrate. Some previous plans of his for a collaboration had sadly fallen through, with the untimely death of the Australian narrative poet, Dorothy Porter. He suggested a couple of draft titles: ‘James Joyce and Me’ and ‘What a Piece of Work’ (actually the title of one of Porter’s books). To be honest, I was a bit bemused at the prospect of autobiography. ‘Whoever would want to know?’ I thought, ‘So, my father was a Joycean scholar, so what?’ I gave it some thought anyway and, vaguely aware that Joyce had a daughter, I looked into that as a possible angle. As it happened a biography of Lucia Joyce had come out not long before (Carol Shloss’s Lucia Joyce: To Dance at the Wake, published Farrar Straus Giroux). I was blown away by the tragedy of Lucia’s story – that was what I was interested in writing about. It’s that biography that I’m reading in this train journey scene, part of the opening sequence:

As you can see, there’s a transition from present to remembered past. I love the colour/sepia contrast. In the script the description for the bottom panel was just something like ‘heap of boys playfighting’. Bryan introduced the small girl watching them. It improves the character focus a lot. He did that with quite a few panels – adding the young me as the viewing subject.

I really enjoyed evoking life in northwest England in the 1950s and 60s. I wanted to bring out how different it was, how much has changed. Television was still quite a novelty; not many homes had one. I nearly included my first experience of the moving image at age five: traumatised by going to see Bambi! It didn’t fit in, though. Shame.

The nuances of class differences were something else I wanted to evoke. Those fine distinctions, between people living in the same neighbourhood, must totally mystify outsiders: taste in interior décor, eating habits, the presence of books.

We added a few footnote comments. The first of them is on this page. I wasn’t keen on the way Bryan had drawn my mother – in an apron as worn by the stereotypical 1950s American housewife! So we made a joke of it. I like the way it highlights the collaboration and adds an element of meta-textual commentary.

Gender politics is a key concern of the book. In the two storylines – Lucia’s and my own – I show how gender expectations constrain girls and women. Lucia matures to become an accomplished performer of modern dance. This makes her altogether too modern for her mother, who dislikes her aspirations for a professional life and frequently belittles them. Father and daughter are closer, but he is apparently oblivious to her plans. The consequences for Lucia are tragic. In my case, the fact that boys and girls are supposed to be and do different things was first forced on me when I started school. This is what we’ve represented on Page 17 here:

It’s odd – I used to use this scenario in seminars, talking about gender segregation with students (I taught on gender and language for decades). I could have done with this page as a visual aid! At the school I went to, difference was quite literally inscribed in stone.

Bryan and I both grew up in Lancashire – Wigan, to be precise – and my schooling was Catholic. A distinctive feature of that particular cultural milieu in the 1950s and 60s was the annual ‘Walking Day’, as represented on Page 22. Here’s also some of the visual reference Bryan was drawing on to produce the page:

After scrounging old photo albums from my family, I scanned quantities of pictures that Bryan then made selections from. The collage of photo fragments is what he worked from at the drawing board.

Bryan was making scripting suggestions from the start, but it was once he started bringing the script to life on the page that his enrichment of the story really started to shine though. The staircase page is a fine example of how his visualisations went beyond my expectations. It’s a lovely piece of design, while telling the story beautifully.

I had a lot of fun researching les années folles in 1920s Paris. Lucia and her family were right there in the thick of things, living in the centre of Paris. The place must have been positively thrumming with creative activity. Lucia developed a passion for modern, expressive dancing, eventually performing it herself. One of her teachers was Margaret Morris (a pioneer of dance as therapy and still a big name today). She became something of a role model. The page below shows Lucia seeing her dance for the first time:

Lucia’s tragic story must have been getting to me, because I actually dreamed this image! What astonished me was that Bryan actually drew it, on the basis of my two or three line description (and a certain amount of arm waving).

There’s a mass of biographical material available on James Joyce and his family, but there isn’t that much directly about Lucia, apart from the biography by Shloss I’ve mentioned. I needed to maintain focus on Lucia not her father or others in the family. They were such a dysfunctional family, it was hard not to get sidetracked. Then I had decisions about how much to include on Lucia’s mental illness, incarcerations and treatments. Eventually I decided to represent them over just a few pages, as a single cataclysmic event.

Bryan adds:

I developed a style that I thought suited the material and the artwork is coded so that the reader is in no doubt as to which thread they are reading. The few present-day sequences are drawn in clear line style with flat colours. The autobiographical sequences are in soft B pencil and watercolour wash on textured watercolour paper, with touches of spot colour. In Photoshop, I made the washes sepia and the paper pale yellow. The Joyce family sequences are inked with a dip pen and shaded with a watercolour wash, tinted blue in Photoshop, on smooth paper. I used spot colour in Mary’s sections to approximate the way that memory renders some things more vivid that others.

I had to do a lot of research in order to evoke the atmosphere of Paris of the 20s and 30s, and Lancashire in the 50s and 60s. I also, of course, could draw on my own memories of Wigan and of Mary’s family home.

Regarding Page 37, mentioned by Mary above, the staircase was based on one I’d seen recently inside the Courtauld Institute of Art, where I’d attended an academic conference on comics.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot is published in February by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Dark Horse (US). FPI would like to thank Mary and Bryan for kindly taking the time to tell us more about the book; you can also learn more from Mary’s own site here and Bryan’s site here. Mary was also kind enough to share some of her favourite works of 2011 recently in our annual guest Best of the Year posts, you can see what graphic novels, books and films took her fancy here. Mary and Bryan will be doing a signing in London’s fine Orbital Comics on February 3rd at 5pm and Orbital is also hosting an art exhibition from the book from February 2nd to March 2nd.

(Bryan Talbot signing in the Edinburgh Forbidden Planet, pic from my Flickr)

“Den of Geek: Are artists not held in the same esteem as writers?

Bryan Talbot: That depends upon the writers and artists concerned – and the country they’re in. Writers such as Grant Morrison and Alan Moore may be regarded more highly than their artists in the American superhero genre, but in France, for example, artists like Moebius and Schuiten are valued far more than their writers.”

But for me horror has always been more than a self-enclosed genre – of course there are works that are clearly horror, but elements of the genre have influenced many other tales in various mediums. Take Fincher’s sublime Seven for instance – the discovery of the Sloth victim, or the infamous ‘what’s in the box’ scene; Seven is a crime/detective tale, but it comes loaded with elements lifted wholesale from the horror toybox. So with that in mind we didn’t restrict ourselves to picking something just from a comic that would be labelled ‘horror’, but rather picked a scene that we considered horrific, a scene that created that frisson of genuine horror in us and that has remained stuck in memory every since. I’m sure you all have some choices of your own, so by all means share them with us in the comments.

Richard: I’d be terrible on one of those talking heads, 50 best… things. Joe emailed across asking what our fave horror moments in comics were and I sat for a moment and thought… and thought … and thought…

And my terrible memory completely failed me. Blank. Absolutely nothing came to mind. I know I’ve read some staggeringly great comics, and some have had truly horrifying moments. But put me on the spot, ask me there and then what they were… and nothing. Absolutely nothing comes to mind.

Even now, an hour or so of thinking about it and I can’t put my finger on many. Various stories in Bissette’s Taboo anthology seem to strike a chord, certainly bits in Moore and Campbell’s From Hell, and there must be more, there really must. But I’m settling on the one moment from my youth that really hit me hard as I read it, one even my failing memory can vividly recall…

Although my pick probably tells you a lot about me, and my relationship with horror. For me, it’s never been about gore or visceral fear. It’s always been about a deep, creeping sense of dread, of darkness falling slowly rather than immediately. Give me The Shining over Friday The 13th any day. About the most gorey I get is Carpenter’s The Thing, and even then, it’s the slow tension of the build-up that scares an fascinates the most. And in comics I always find that a lot of the comics that try to be horror, no matter how well they’re done, aren’t horrifying at all.

Not sure if it counts or not, but the one that really, really sticks with me is in Morrison’s Animal Man run…. where an exhausted Buddy Bradley returns home, on a peyote comedown, wondering what the hell just happened to him, what he really saw when he looked out from the comic book page and connected with a whole new world, and walks into his house…

Shock hit hard when I first read this in 1990, aged 19. To say it was completely unexpected is a huge understatement. Shocking, certainly. Horrific? Absolutely. Throughout the series Morrison had made certain we knew all about Buddy’s family, empathised with them, saw the love he had for them, and they for him. And then this. I think that counts as horror.

And just to add grief and despair to the horror, Brian Bolland’s cover to the next issue still ranks as a classic, one of the best he’s ever done in my opinion, and, in its own way, just as horrific…

Matthew: The Dead Man is one of the best stories that 2000 AD have ever run. Its script was credited to one Keef Ripley — a name that would never again grace the pages of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic — and it featured sublime, ‘career best’ artwork from John Ridgway.

The plot is fairly straightforward: a hideously burnt, and amnesiac, man is found by a group of settlers in the Cursed Earth (the vast, mutant-ridden atomic wasteland that surrounds Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One). His wounds are so severe they dub him the ”Dead Man’, but despite is grave injuries the Dead Man, swathed from head to toe in obscuring bandages, is nursed back to health, before deciding to embark on a quest to recover his lost memories by revisiting the spot where he was found.

The Dead Man is full of thrills and chills, and some of the most spook-tastic art ever. For example:

and:

But the sequence from the strip that will always stay with me is the one where Yassa Povey’s eyes are poked out by the monstrous fingers of… well, that would be telling, especially as the mysterious Dead Man and his story lead directly into a much larger 2000 AD strip featuring a much better known character further down the line. Yassa is a young villager who becomes slightly obsessed by the ‘Dead Man’ and follows him on his quest, despite warnings not to:

Years later, the above image still freaks me out.

NB: These scans were shamelessly borrowed from the Meanwhile, on the Dark Side of the Moon blog. There’s a good post about the strip there that is worth reading but I’d advise you to track down The Dead Man and read that before you do (it’s a bona-fide classic!)

Pádraig: We seem to have a theme in common here! Here’s a page of artwork from a story called Brainworms, which was written by Matthias Schultheiss and drawn by Bryan Talbot, and only ever appeared once, to the very best of my knowledge, in Revolver Presents: Xpresso in 1991. Bryan scanned it for me from the original (thanks, Bryan!), but says:

“It’s a bit badly cropped as it was so large it wouldn’t fit on the A3 scanner and I don’t have time to arse around scanning it in pieces and putting it together in Photoshop right now but I think it’ll be ok for the FP site. It’s quite old, so needed some cleaning up, especially the lettering, which was really grubby and on a separate acetate sheet.”

As to why I chose this one: I remember reading this story, what, twenty years ago, but the imagery has always stuck with me. I’m not even going to attempt to explain why, as I think it speaks for itself. It hasn’t been in print since then as far as I know, which is a real shame.

Wim: When our dearest editor asked me to come up with my favourite comic horror scene (as in, horror scene from comics, not ha-ha-horror), I immediately thought of Charles Burns.  Then I thought, Clive Barker (In The Hills The Cities from Tapping The Vein, or Like Flies to Wanton Boys from Hellraiser – they still give me the creeps).  But in both cases, the horror was balanced out by a more rational, distancing stance – after all, I wasn’t a kid anymore.

No, for real horror, we have to go back to the late 1970′s, when my mom gave me a comic that she had read : Johnny and Anny by Flemish creator Renaat Demoen.  It’s a fairly straightforward story about two orphans who go after a gang of sheep thieves (I still wonder how it ends : my copy lacked the last two pages).   On their search, they end up in a series of caves, where they find traces of blood.  Maybe it was Demoen’s rather sketchy style, which rendered even the most serene face almost zombie-like), or maybe it was my still quite impressionable younger self, but that scene almost made me write off the book forever.

If you want to read the whole book (that is, without the aforementioned two pages), head over to my blog.

Joe: As I said in the introduction, I’ve been a huge horror fan since I was a boy – books, films, comics, from the chilling, creepy ghost story to the body horror of Cronenberg, from EC Comics to The Walking Dead. And yet despite that when trying to think on a scene I found truly horrific, I found myself looking outside of the actual horror genre. Perhaps I’ve read and viewed too much, but much as I enjoy them, few of them scare me, much less horrify me – the thing about us horror hounds is, you have to remember that even the most OTT scenes are often funny to us (I laughed my way through the Exorcist). And yes, I am aware that shows up my sick sense of humour, but that’s not a bad defence mechanism.

So instead I thought less of genre and more just of scenes that had stuck in my memory over the years, scenes of particular horror but from outside the horror genre itself, and one which leapt to my mind was from Frank Miller’s Sin City: the Hard Goodbye. While the Sin City series is about as hardboiled crime genre as you can get, it too lifts from horror in some spots, and the one which has stuck in my mind since I first read it in the early 90s is the scene where giant bruiser Marv comes to in a cell on The Farm, waking from a beating to find his curvaceous parole officer Lucille huddled naked in the corner. There’s a serial killer called Kevin, a silent, shadowy, slight figure, but so preternaturally fast he even took down the almost unstoppable Marv. But Kevin is more than just a killer, as Marv is about to find out…

Looking up he finds the heads of murdered women arranged on plaques like hunting trophies – because to Kevin that is precisely what they are. And the fact that he mounts them in the cell where his next victims wait is part of the growing sense of horror – not just that he is planning to kill them, but that he wants to instil more terror in those victims by letting them see what has happened to others first, to let it build. Lucille is wide-eyed, in shock, but seemingly calm, as she tells Marv that he doesn’t just kill them and keep the heads – he eats them. Kevin is a cannibal, cutting up his female victims, cooking then consuming them, feeding the leftovers to his pet wolf.

But even this isn’t the most horrific element of the scene – as Lucille calmly explains this to Marv she hold up her arm. It ends in a bandaged stump where her left hand should be. He cut it off, she tells Marv. He cut it off and ate it – right in front of her eyes. He made her watch as he dined on her severed hand. The fragile calm suddenly breaks and Lucille screams at the horror of what Kevin has subjected her to, the scream echoing around the cell and out the barred grille, where, unseen by her and Marv, Kevin stands stock still, enjoying the screams, a small smile on his face. It isn’t enough to kill and eat his victims, the terror, the horror is what he wants to create and what his twisted soul feeds on.

I’ve seen much gorier and more contrived scenes of mutilation in horror films and comics over the years, but it is the cold, calculated, deliberate deployment of brutal, sadistic acts to create fear and horror by the protagonist that has lodged this scene in my head for so many years.

Chrissie Harper has been working on some of Bryan Talbot‘s next Grandville album,  Bête Noire, the third in the series (both of the preceding volumes, Grandville and Grandville Mon Amour made my Best of the Year lists in their respective publication years, wonderful stuff). Chrissie has been involved in doing some of the colour flats for the book and notes that Bryan, with his son Alwyn, has just posted up the finished version of one page she worked on at his site, so you can not only have a glimpse of some new Grandville, you get to see the in progress transition, from the colour flat by Chrissie above to the finished page by Bryan and Alwyn below. I love the fun Bryan is having with some of the background characters in this series and I’m glad he’s continuing it – witness the Paddington Bear like figure happily swigging from a brown-bagged bottle of booze in the street scene here. (Grandville by and (c) Bryan Talbot, to be published by Jonathan Cape next year)

Karrie Fransman drops us a line to alert us to the Big Draw’sBig Splash, a really fun-sounding event for kids and adults alike that is coming up in King’s Place, 90 York Way, London on Sunday September the 25th as part of the Big Draw, taking in the worlds of children’s illustration, comics and more and includes as a guest the great Quentin Blake. From the description:

“Join Quentin Blake and a crew of top-notch artists for amazing canal-side adventures – at the drop of a pencil. Conjure up your own magic. Try Hervé Tullet’s Doodle Cook recipes for ‘scribble delight’ and ‘chef’s surprise’ – seasoned with humour and large dollops of fun. Spark your creative imagination with Marion Deuchars and her inspiring new book Let’s Make Some Great Art.

Emblazon a jacket with badges, create a jazzy pattern for a new hat, and design a giant interactive fashion fanzine with Nina Chakrabarti. Make your own watery animation strips and spin them into life in the House of Illustration zoetrope. Build paper boats, join a bubble-writing master class to produce ‘underwater’ cartoons with Linda Scott, or create miniature marine masterpieces in a matchbox with Sarah Bridgland. Be the first to contribute to Momentum’s Visual Census: re-mapping the capital by drawing the faces of Londoners. Make a Comic in a Day with graphic novelist Karrie Fransman and discover the history of animal stories in comics and illustration with Bryan Talbot, award-winning author/illustrator of the Grandville series.”

Sounds like a great day out, especially for families, and even better it is free, although you should book yourselves a slot as spaces are limited, which you can do via the site here. You can also follow this and more Big Draw events via their Facebook and Twitter, while the Big Draw site has details of the events that run through October.

Dr Mary Talbot, wife of Bryan, is an internationally acclaimed scholar with published works on language, gender and power. But more to the point for our readers, she’s the author of the forthcoming (Cape – Feb 2012) graphic novel “Dotter Of Her Father’s Eyes”, which we’ve already mentioned a couple of times here on the blog.

Dotter is her first graphic novel, and is illustrated by husband Bryan. It looks rather brilliant.

From her new website:

Part personal history, part biography, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes contrasts two coming of age narratives: that of Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce, and that of author Mary Talbot, daughter of the eminent Joycean scholar James S Atherton. Social expectations and gender politics, thwarted ambitions and personal tragedy are played out against two contrasting historical backgrounds, poignantly evoked by the atmospheric visual storytelling of award winning comic artist and graphic novel pioneer Bryan Talbot. Produced through an intense collaboration seldom seen between writers and artists, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is intelligent, funny and sad – a fine addition to the evolving genre of graphic memoir.

Mary adds, “I think what’s been most distinctive about this project is that I haven’t just completed a script and then passed it over to an artist. We’ve been able to work on the book together, with an intensive and ongoing creative interaction that’s usually missing from writer/artist collaborations.”

Here are the preview pages from Dotter from Mary M. Talbot’s website, copyright  © 2011 Mary M. Talbot: