DR:
Have you always been interested in comics?
PJ: That's a
great question, and it isn't always one that people ask. I guess the
answer for me is yes and no. The foundations for a love of comics and
cartooning were laid when I was young - some of the first things I
can ever remember reading are Beano annuals and Tintin books. Our
local library had a really great kids section with the Tintin rocket
bookcase, and I remember working my way through all of those. When I
was a little older, I guess it would have been 1995, I got a Sega
Mega Drive and got really obsessed with Sonic the Hedgehog, which had
an amazing series of comics attached to it. I don't think I
appreciated the power of comics at the time though, as when I hit my
early teens I wasn't really reading comics at all. I never got into
the superhero stuff, so perhaps if I had that would have sustained me
through my teens. But once I started devouring prose fiction - aged
around ten, I guess - I didn't read comics much. I liked to doodle,
but I was doing terribly at art at school, and I turned to music
instead. The focus I had on that didn't leave much room for comics!
There were a couple of fantasy adaptations I really liked - Wenzel &
Dixon's The Hobbit was one - but mostly I wasn't that bothered.
Comics were always
ticking away in the background, though. When I hit my late teens I
noticed that my dad had a lot of graphic novels around, and that was
when I started getting interested again. I got hooked after reading
issue 13 of McSweeney's, which was a comics special edited by Chris
Ware. It blew my mind. There were short excerpts from Jeffrey Brown,
Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Seth, The
Hernandez Brothers, Adrian Tomine, Debbie Drechsler. But it also had
essays on the form and its history. It was the first time I
appreciated that it was its own art form with its own vibrant
heritage.
This got me obsessed
with comics again pretty much exactly when I turned 18 and went away
to university, so that coincided with wanting to study comics but
also with a huge expansion in my reading of them - I tried to make up
for lost time! I eventually started drawing again when I was around
20, after reading people like Jeffrey Brown, James Kochalka and John
Porcellino, who didn't focus on the technical skill (which I was
convinced I didn't have and am still a bit dubious about).
DR:
Modest as ever! McSweeney's 13 was an important book. It's
good to hear the positive impact it had on you. Tell me about the
comics you've made since you started up at age 20.
PJ: My
undergraduate years (2006-2009) also coincided, I think, with a real
peak in the quality and prominence of webcomics. As well as graphic
novels, I was reading a lot of webcomics - American Elf, Scary Go
Round, Octopus Pie, Questionable Content, Hark! A Vagrant, Templar
AZ, Girls With Slingshots, etc. So my first thing was to try and do a
webcomic and to just learn by doing, after practising drawing by
making gig posters for a club night I ran in Exeter called Lofi Hifi.
I set up a shitty Wordpress site and called the comic "Low
Fidelity." It was autobiographical, mostly lame stuff about
DJing at the club night, being in bands, listening to records, that
sort of thing. I deleted the site a few years ago but you could
probably find it on some internet archive if you had the inclination
to!
I stayed on to do an
MA in Creative Writing in 2010, and was lucky enough to have a
supervisor (the criminally underappreciated novelist Sam North) who
fostered my interest in comics and encouraged me to draw a graphic
novel for my MA thesis. I did this and somehow passed, even though it
was terrible - knowing nothing about how to really draw properly, it
was all in 2D perspective and the story totally ripped off Scott
Pilgrim, which was huge at the time. It was called Small Town Heroes.
Again, the few printed/digital copies have been erased as best I can,
but I'm sure you could find one if you dug hard enough.
The next few years
were slow. I was working, playing in bands, doing other stuff, but I
knew I wanted to draw and also that I wanted to study comics. So I
started a part-time PhD in comics (technically it's in English Lit,
but hey) in 2012. It's not a practice-based PhD, but my supervisor
has encouraged me to included elements of my own comics. So through
that I started drawing more and writing more, and eventually I
deleted all my old comics and started posting new ones on Tumblr and
eventually Medium - just short stories and mostly autiobio, but some
fiction. I started taking part in challenges including #30dayscomics
and Hourly Comic Day, which I found really helpful in pushing myself
to create things. Strict constraints can necessitate great art!
These short comics
became the foundation for more ambitious work, and in 2014 I released
the first issue of my now ongoing comic series Long Divisions. It's
about millennial problems, explored through human-cat relations. And
the cats can talk. I've always been a sucker for talking cats. I'm
working on issue three right now and have no idea how long it will go
on for, which is both scary and incredibly liberating. I know the
narrative arc in my head, but it leaves a lot of room for invention.
Recently I've
founded the micropublisher Good Comics with Samuel C. Williams and
Pete Hindle. We put out the first issue of an ongoing zine called
Dead Singers Society last year, and issue 2 debuted at this year's
DIY Cultures Fair in London (with a wicked contribution from none
other than David Robertson). We're launching properly at Thought
Bubble this year, with new comics from the three of us and a whole
roster of up and coming British talent.
DR:
Sounds good. I'll hopefully see you at Thought Bubble this year.
PJ:
Yeah, hopefully see you
there! We have a full table rather than a half, so that's exciting.
DR:
How is your music going - and any other artistic
pursuits?
PJ:
Music is ticking over slowly. I've been in quite a few bands over
the years, but my most recent one (Palomino Club) is probably the
best. We released our debut EP at the end of last year and had an
amazing sold out launch show, and now we're planning a tour and a
follow-up and trying to write some pop hits. That's the hard part.
I'm also working on a concept album about the arctic, which is a solo
project. I've written about 15 songs for it but can't find the time
to record them!
I
used to write poetry and flash fiction, and once I hand in my PhD
thesis this summer I'll have a lot more time on my hands, so I think
I'm going to get back into writing prose fiction. From a very young
age I wanted to write novels, and obviously that was a big part of my
MA studies. But I'll probably just end up vegetating and watching old
baseball clips on YouTube or something.
DR:
Seems unlikely,
knowing you. How did
you find the process of drawing "Victory
Lap" for
Zero Sum Bubblegum?
PJ:
I really enjoyed it. I think, at least to my immediate memory,
that it's the only time I've ever drawn a comic that somebody else
has written. Sam and I are collaborating on a forthcoming 60s
folk/spy thriller comic that will blow your mind, but the division of
labour is more fluid with that. I spend a lot of time on writing,
thumbnailing and pencilling when I draw my own comics and tend to get
to a place where I'm happy with them, but I still think about the
writing when I'm drawing. Without having to think about the writing,
I think it made me much more able to be expressive with my drawing. I
think the quality of the lines show this, if you compare them to Long
Divisions #2 or something else of mine. I love that you provided
detailed panel breakdowns, but they didn't feel so rigid as to feel
restrictive.
DR:
I've found different artists
want different things from a writer and figuring that out with the
individual is interesting.
PJ:
Definitely. I've enjoyed
finding that out for myself!
DR:
To
finish off, I'm interested in anything else you want
to tell me about your upcoming comics projects.
PJ:
I'm really excited about
Dead Singers Society 2, having persuaded some very cool artists to do comics for
it. Sam and I collaborated on a comic for that as well, drawing
panels side by side, so that was interesting. We're each took
on a different dead member of the same cult band. I won't say which
one! As well as LD2 I have a more ambitious solo comic I'm working
on, which follows on from my #30DaysComics story from 2014 and
explores another avenue of my comics interest - the Scandinavian
landscape and the potential for magical realism there. It's vaguely
influenced by Tove Jansson, but it's a human story at heart. And it
still deals with millennial problems. I'm trying to be seen as a
talking cat guy less, but I don't think I can get away from being a
millennial problems guy.
Paddy
Johnston
is
a cartoonist from London. He is the creator of the series Long
Divisions and the co-founder of Good Comics with Samuel C. Williams.
As well as drawing comics, he also studies them and is currently
finishing a PhD on comics at the University of Sussex.
http://paddyjohnston.co.uk
Zero Sum Bubblegum is available here.
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