Losing the plot
If you think comics are for kids or superhero geeks my sister would beg to differ.
From her days as a psychiatric nurse, through traumatic relationship breakups, to being the mum to a young son with autism, cartooning has been her way to process or make sense things.
So this July, having emerged from a particularly testing time in her personal life, she chose to exhibit some of the artworks which had helped sustain her.
We laughed about it being a ‘retrospective’, but, thinking about it now, it was a kind of catharsis - a line drawn around the past: “To be continued…”.
The exhibition, My Life in Pictures, was also a way to express her love of comics and share her belief in the power of cartooning.
Super powers
In her introduction to the exhibition Julia said:
“[Comics] have a way of making the inaccessible accessible. For example, did you know there is a graphic novel detailing the 9/11 Report? I read that in a heartbeat, but would never have considered reading the actual paper.”
As she goes on to explain, comics and graphic novels can create a ‘buffer zone’ where difficult to discuss issues can be explored.
Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus illustrates this nicely. In casting the Nazis as cats and Jews as mice Spiegelman:
“...approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive,”
as the 25th anniversary edition book jacket says. An approach the Wall Street Journal acclaimed as:
“...the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.”
That, for anyone who was in doubt, is the power of comics.
But why use cartooning on a more intimate level?
Adventures in comics
Epileptic, (L'Ascension du Haut Mal), an autobiographical graphic novel by David B, centres on the artist’s personal experience in what The Guardian called:
“...epic, domestic battles against despair.”
As brother to a boy struck by severe epilepsy David B’s Epileptic is considered not so much graphic memoir (like Maus) as:
“...the creation of an artist’s identity: how he reinvented his world as a way to ‘forge the weapons that will allow me to be more than a sick man’s brother,’”
said New York Magazine in its review.
Depicting the apparently untameable, all-consuming epilepsy as a sort of alligator-headed Aztec-esque snake creature in a style The Independent called:
“...reminiscent of woodcut illustrations to the grimmest of Grimm folk-tales.”
And the LA Times went on to say:
“... Epileptic is … a disturbingly honest story about childhood that is unable to gloss over the wars that sit, as glowering monsters...”
“David B. has written a book for the ill, for their families and for anyone who suspects that the desolation of illness is not far from that of war. Chronic illness and war are both trips too long and strange for words.”
Your life in pictures
While writing or talking about whatever it is that’s bothering us, intriguing us, consuming us, seems like the ‘sensible’ thing to do pictures can often articulate what our so-called rational minds cannot.
As Scott McCloud author of Understanding Comics - the invisible art says:
“The potential of comics is limitless and exciting!”
And, Julia hopes that in sharing her passion others will be encouraged to see where the journey takes them.
Next steps...
Read: Understanding Comics - the invisible art by Scott McCloud
Check out: The unfolding saga of a life in film and a passion for comics on the V&A’s blog by collector and writer / editor Ian Rakoff - Confessions of Collector – Misdemeanours of a Comic Book Addiction
Visit: Gosh! London or Forbidden Planet and see what catches your eye...