A few weeks ago Dave railed against the idea of posts about women in comics, “Let’s stop focussing on women in comics” he said, “Women are comics right now”. That’s as may be but how come only 10% of Graphixia posts are about women creators? If there are as many great comics being produced by women as men, why is Graphixia not covering them? For me the problem isn’t that we are focussing on women in comics but the fact that the default is focussing on men in comics. How about we stop focussing on men in comics? How about we stop focussing on white men in comics? How about we stop focussing on straight white men in comics? How about we stop focussing on cisgender straight white men in comics? And so on. This series of posts may go some way to redressing this imbalance but we have to keep it up, and not fall back on the default.
The first panel from GAST by Carol Swain.
Carol Swain’s GAST starts with the swallows. One panel across the top tier of a page, two swallows on a telephone line and a open sky of sparse clouds. The next two tiers are three panels each, closing in on the swallows as they build their nest on a barn. The second page is a 9-panel grid in which we see a child with binoculars watching the swallows and noting their activities. This is Helen and we will follow her (and the 9-panel grid) for the rest of the book as she investigates her new surroundings, having recently moved from London to Llanparc, a village in North Wales. Llanparc is the fictional setting of many of Swain’s stories and lies not far from the border with England, a bus trip away from Oswestry, the (very real) market town in Shropshire that draws some of her characters away from Llanparc.
Swallows in GAST by Carol Swain.
Swain’s swallows are completely believable as swallows (or gwennol in Welsh), and her pencil lines and shading allow us to be drawn into the story, unlike the inky crow in Jeff Lemire’s Essex County that I mentioned in my last post. Lemire’s bird only served to distance me from the story. Like Lemire, Swain has been described as ‘The Raymond Carver of (British) comics.’ As Paddy noted recently in reference to Carver “looking at and understanding Essex County is as much about what is not said and what is not told, as what is” and this could also be said to apply to Swain’s work. Helen’s investigations lead her to the neighbouring farm to try to find out what happened to the ‘rare bird’ mentioned by Bill the eggman. An occurrence that has caused his hens to stop laying. Swain slowly reveals details but never the whole picture and we have to read between the panels as much as Helen reads between the lines of what is said.
Silence and Helen in GAST by Carol Swain.
There is also the silence, the first chapter as Helen follows the swallows has no speech balloons, just an inference of meaning from Swain’s atmospheric pencil drawings and the occasional sentence in Helen’s notebook. With the silence there is also space. Swain evokes the wide open spaces of the North Wales border country even when the strict grid structure of the comic closes in on Helen as she walks around exploring. The silence is broken when Helen hears shouts of “Hey! Hey!” coming from a farm outbuilding, inside she is confronted by two sad-faced dogs. She stares at them for a few panels, having not quite expected what she sees. Eventually the dogs speak “Well? Got any food for us?” Helen is unperturbed by this turn of events which may initially seem odd to the reader, but like a frog being slowly boiled we accept the touches of magical realism and continue with the story.
Helen is a fairly androgynous child, as many 11 year olds are, and the dogs are curious about about whether she is a ci or a gast – the Welsh terms for dog and bitch. They want to know whether Helen is male or female, and the book explores themes of gender, identity and growing up as Helen investigates the fate of the ‘rare bird’. She finds a make-up bag in a skip on the farm and is fascinated by the contents, which she logs meticulously in her notebook along with other items of her investigation and her growing Welsh vocabulary.
Helen opens the make-up bag in GAST by Carol Swain.
Helen’s inquiries takes her to the local cemetery and on a bus trip to Oswestry, journeys she undertakes on her own. There is an amount of tension in these journeys, Swain donates many panels and several pages to each, showing the time they take up in Helen’s world. This conjures up my own memories of childhood summers when days seemed much longer, a sense of endless time lost in the adult world. The tension comes from Helen’s own timetable, she needs to attend a funeral and catch a bus, and as an adult reader I worry that she will arrive in time. Time in Helen’s world is slower than time in mine.
While writing about the book I don’t want to say too much about the story, I want to allow the reader the same experience that I had when reading for the first time with very little idea of what was happening. To allow the quiet power of Swain’s writing and drawing to pull the reader in. Swain has been producing comics for around 25 years. She trained as a painter and apparently turned up one day at a workshop run by Paul Gravett and just started making comics. Then she kept going, first self-publishing her own book Way Out Strips before Fantagraphics picked it up, and then producing several works such as Foodboy, which explore the worlds of people on the fringes of society, punks, skinheads, hippies, and others who don’t fit in.
Pencil textures on a night scene in GAST by Carl Swain.
Swain’s artwork is mainly black and white and made with soft pencils so that we see the texture and grain of the art on the reproduced page. She has occasionally produced strips in colour, again in pencil, but she mainly saves colour for book covers. The beautiful cover to GAST has an almost Impressionist look as it evokes autumnal colours and an overcast sky, themes of change again, in season and weather. It also brings to mind the work of Raymond Briggs, another British comics artist who comes from the art school and illustration world and makes comics without being imbued in the world of superheroes or the Beano and Dandy. Briggs’ characters such as Ug, Jim and Fungus are not very far removed from Swain’s such as Gar in Foodboy. Many comics artists make work that is so invested in previous generations of comic making and it is refreshing to see artists create work from the fringes, or even outside, of that sphere of influence.
UG – Boy Genius of the Stone Age by Raymond Briggs.
A work often left out of Swain’s bibliography is the once banned SKIN by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy. SKIN is the story of young skinhead boy in the 1970s whose mother was given Thalidomide during pregnancy. He grows up with shortened arms “seal boy Martin ‘Atchet”. The art is by McCarthy, and Swain is credited as colourist but with the bright, swirling, pages produced in paint, pastel, crayon and pencil it is difficult to see where the line is drawn between the two occupations. One can certainly detect Swain’s hand in the textures of the pages and it would be interesting to hear how much of it is her work. She is appearing at the Cult Comics event next week as part of the Comica Festival, perhaps we will find out there.
Swain’s appearance at that event is slightly odd given that her work didn’t make it into the recently published Mammoth Book of Cult Comics which it is promoting. Not many women did (less than 10%), and in his review Paul Gravett looks forward to the potential second volume “in which [editor] Ilya plans to feature more than just two women participants”. In his introduction Ilya defensively puts this down to there not being enough good work available, but maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough. He gives “honourable mentions” to a few including Myra Hancock, Kate Charlesworth, and Megan Kelso, but claims to have omitted Carol Swain (who he does deem of sufficient quality) due to the inconvenient size of her comics pages! If we don’t want to focus specifically on women creators, as Dave suggests, but include them as default then we need to change the default. I’ll start (and it is only a start) by suggesting cartoonists such as Julie Hollings, Roberta Gregory, Julie Doucet, and Jeremy Day, as well as the aforementioned, for volume two.