The Art of Pho – motion comic trailer from Submarine Channel on Vimeo.

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.

Jonathan Cape are celebrating 5 years of their Graphic Short Story Prize by releasing Shorties! – a 125 page e-book collecting together both the winning entries from the first 5 years and a selection of the best entries selected by Bryan Talbot.

The collection cover is of course by Adam Cadwell, whose thoughts on it, and his cover design process, can be seen at his blog. Shorties also includes Adam’s 2007 entry Spilt Soda.

Shorties! is available to read in many ways… online and iBooks version here or in full at the Guardian website here.

But first, a couple of my faves that made it into the book….

Jim Medway

Laurie J Proud

Paul Gravett kindly lets us know that the Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story competition and prize will be continuing this year, the fifth time it will have run, which is good news for Brit comics and comics creators. I did worry that in our current climate of slashing cutbacks that something like this might have been vulnerable and I am glad to see instead they plan to build on the previous years and continue with it. From this year’s description:

“For its fifth year, The Observer/Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize  has just been announced, inviting UK residents to submit a four-page comic on any theme, with the winner receiving £1,000 (the runner-up £250) and getting their story published in The Observer Review and on the Guardian and Vintage websites. This Prize has really galvanised the creative comics scene in this country, stimulating more people to try their hand at sequential art to express themselves. It has also led to several fresh British voices having their debut graphic novels published by Jonathan Cape.

Regular jury members Observer literary critic Rachel Cooke, Random House Creative Director Suzanne Dean, Cape publisher Dan Franklin, Paul Gravett, Comica Festival director, are joined this year by the pioneer of UK graphic novels Bryan Talbot, of Luther Arkwright, Alice In Sunderland and Grandville fame, and David Nicholls, acclaimed author of One Day and a writer for film, television and theatre.”

The Graphic Short Story prize is a cracking way for new talent to try their luck and also a nice boost to the profile of the British comics scene and some of the brilliant talent we have in our islands, not only offering some support to creators but raising the profile of the medium to a wider audience outside the comics community (and kudos to the Observer and Guardian, they have been very good at reviewing and supporting graphic novels for a good while, well done them).

(a page from In Room 208, last year’s winner, by and (c) Stephen Collins)

The deadline for the 2011 competition is the 14th of October – full details can be gleaned from the Cape site and you can see some of the previous winner’s works here. You can listen in to a conversation Paul had with Stephen Collins, winner of last year’s prize, here. And as always do let us know if you are entering and share your entry online, we’d love to have a round-up of some of the entrants, there are always some great short comics works and it would be nice to highlight them. As usual the winner will be announced during November’s Comica Festival in London; Paul is also telling us that they hope to have an exhibition of winners and various entrants to go along with this, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about that later on in the year.

A new collection of Daniel Clowes work coming soon from Jonathan Cape? Oh yes, indeedy! Mister Wonderful: a Love Story, collects the tale first serialised in the New York Times Magazine, plus some forty pages of new material, following Marshall: middle-aged, unemployed and divorced, waiting nervously for a blind date with Natalie, a woman his sole remaining friend (his ex-wife having taken the rest) has set him up with. Except she doesn’t appear after ten minutes, twenty, half an hour, an hour… Marshall finds himself looking at any single woman coming in wondering if one may be Natalie, wondering if the entire thing was a mistake to even try, when she finally does arrive late, apologising. And it’s then that things really start to begin.

Well, that’s what they tell us about the story, but let’s be honest -  they had us at new Daniel Clowes collection, didn’t they?

(all art by and (c) Daniel Clowes, Mister Wonderful published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in April)

Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant webcomic has long been something a lot of us have been enjoying, particularly in it’s collected highlights package from 2009 that is Never Learn Anything From History.

She’s slowly been making her name, building up fans, from in and outside comics and we all knew it wouldn’t, shouldn’t be long before she landed her first book deal, something to raise her profile even more than her self published works have managed to do.

So this week it wasn’t that surprising to hear from Drawn & Quarterly (Via The Comics Reporter) that they’ve signed Beaton to a deal for the publication of a new Hark! A Vagrant book collecting strips from the webcomic together with new material. I’d expect this one to be featuring on next years Best Of lists.

The Hark! A Vagrant book comes out in autumn 2011 from D&Q in the US and Jonathan Cape in the UK.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdBnXHD3j7Q

There’s just under a week to go until the deadline for this year’s Jonathan Cape/Observer/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize, a happening which has now become a bit of an annual event among the UK comics folks. It’s been great to see this becoming more established and it is a terrific opportunity for the talent in the UK scene to show off their skills to a wider audience. This year’s judges are Audrey Niffenegger, David Hughes, Rachel Cooke, Dan Franklin, Paul Gravett and Suzanne Dean, with the winner scooping £1000 and their four page short published in the Observer Review, while the runner up wins £250 and their work appearing on the Guardian and Vintage websites.

It’s great to have this happening again and I’m sure it has stimulated a lot of folks in the comics community to give it a try. I suppose the only drawback to this if that obviously only a couple can be in the winners and so there will inevitably be interesting work that most of  us won’t see (the Cape Twitter feed has been commenting on an ever growing in box of entries to look forward to reading next week). Some folks who didn’t win in previous years have posted their entries online afterwards and we’ve linked to them where we’ve seen them, but we were thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to bring those together into one place to celebrate all of them and let folks see those works too?

So if you have taken part this year, once the competition is over and the winners are announced and shared with the world perhaps the other comics creators who entered would like to share their entries with us and we could post them here on the blog with links back to your own site? Obviously this would have to wait until after the winners are announced and published, but it would be nice to gather some of the other entries together and display them in one spot after that so we can all enjoy them and show them off a bit. If you’re taking part this year and are interested let us know via the comments or email me at joe.gordon (at) forbiddenplanet(dot)co(dot)uk

by Julian Hanshaw

Jonathan Cape

Julian Hanshaw’s The Art of Pho is his debut graphic novel, reward for his beautiful winning piece for the 2008 Observer/Cape Graphic Short Story - Sand Dunes And Sonic Booms. It draws direct inspiration from Hanshaw’s time in Vietnam, a time he obviously loved, and every bit of that intense emotion finds it’s way onto the pages of The Art Of Pho. It’s a gorgeous, sumptuous book, and Shaun Tan’s back cover quote really rather sums it up rather well:

“Part travelogue, part dream, park cookbook all wrapped in an intriguingly designed rice paper roll: The Art Of Pho is deliciously surreal.”

Except, there’s a problem. If anything, it’s just a little too surreal and what starts beautifully and intriguingly ends up as a slightly unsatisfying experience. The art is gorgeous throughout but the emotion Hanshaw is obviously trying to impart in his work; a love of a place and culture through it’s food tied to a realisation that a relationship with a city is no substitute for relationships with people – that falls somewhat short in the end.

And it’s a terrible shame. Because as a purely visual thing, it’s lovely and clearly shows us the beauty and surreality of Vietnam that Hanshaw wants to convey. His style is cartoon surrealism, with lush earthy colours of yellows, oranges and browns filling the pages, each crammed with design quirks and surreal dreamlike illustrations. Yet throughout it all, Hanshaw keeps the reader with him. Or at least Hanshaw’s art does, sadly the story works very well for most of the book but really loses it’s way at the end.

(The Art Of Pho features several pages of recipes for the dish, all lovingly illustrated by Hanshaw. From The Art Of Pho by Julian Hanshaw, published by Jonathan Cape)

Hanshaw takes us through some of the images and his thought processes over on the Guardian website. And there’s one particular quote that made me realise what one of Hanshaw’s problems with The Art Of Pho may have been:

“I drew up the whole book on great big A2 pads and then brought them home and scanned them in. Here I was experimenting with tone and atmosphere, wondering whether black and white would make it a more serious piece of work.”

It’s that last line “make it a more serious piece of work” that jars. Perhaps Hanshaw concentrated just a little too hard on making this a book he considered worthy of Cape, worthy of those Guardian readers (and reviewers) he knew would get their hands on this? Perhaps the self imposed pressure to give it a weightiness and serious tone towards the end hampered his natural storytelling just that little too much?

(Little Blue’s introduction to Pho and to his own future. From The Art Of Pho by Julian Hanshaw, published by Jonathan Cape)

But back to the beginning…. The Art Of Pho is obviously Hanshaw’s love letter to a moment in his past. And Little Blue, his central character, the strange little creature with a big nose (Hanshaw from the explanatory text in that Guardian piece: “His nose grew as he spent more time in Saigon, purely to suck in the smells around him”) is obviously Hanshaw putting himself into his own story.

Little Blue is dropped off by a mysterious man in an ominous red car in the Vietnam countryside and told to count to 500. He closes his eyes, does as instructed and finds himself alone and lost as the city grows around him. From there he makes his way as best he can and discovers a passion for Pho, the spicy noodle dish that’s the national dish in Vietnam, consumed for breakfast, lunch and dinner, served up from countless mobile Pho stands across the city, each taste a slightly different experience.

(That crucial first customer…. Little Blue’s Pho selling career hangs in the balance. From The Art Of Pho by Julian Hanshaw, published by Jonathan Cape)

With his own Pho stand proving increasingly successful Little Blue finds his heart stolen away by a traveller, gets poached by rural Pho loving customers and ventures out into Vietnam, collecting recipes and honing his art as he goes. Along the way he starts to question his identity and rather accidentally discovers more creatures like himself and almost uncovers the link with the man in the red car.

The moments where Little Blue realises his love is never to be reciprocated, and the loss and isolation he feels as a stranger in a strange land are perfectly written by Hanshaw and I can’t help but feel there’s a stunningly emotional story in here somewhere. But when it takes a wrong turn towards the end with the questions over identity and family it left me as a reader slightly disappointed that the promise of the story and the wonderfully surreal and delightful artwork weren’t given the ending they deserved.

One thing is certain, Julian Hanshaw is a talent and one I hope to read more from in time (his next book is due out in 2011, a short story collection, details at his website). That The Art Of Pho, such a prestigious and high profile debut is a small let down shouldn’t put you (or him) off too much. There’s greatness here that will take a little honing, but the greatness will out in the end.