1st Apr 2014 6:00pm
Sallis Benney Theatre
Inspire: Stimulating Public Talks
Talk
What are comics? Are they literature? How do they 'work'?
Gareth Brookes, winner of First Graphic Novel, and Faculty of Arts graduate, Woodrow Phoenix in conversation about the process of making a graphic novel.
Brookes is a fine artist and print maker. He studied Fine Art at the RCA, where he also took a creative writing course. He started making small press comics in 2006 and has since been self-publishing and working with small press groups such as Alternative Press and the Comix Reader. His first book The Black Project which won the Myriad Editions 2012 First Graphic Novel Competition, is composed entirely of embroidery and lino-cut, and delivers his reader firmly within the mind of a lonely young teenager who constructs girlfriends out of household objects using his grandmother's sewing machine and his grandfather's toolbox. It is described as a darkly funny story of obsession.
'Exquisite, excruciating and exceptional... A landmark, once read, not easily forgotten.' – Paul Gravett.
'It's a painstaking and wonderfully original artistic achievement.' – Paul Ashley Brown, Comic Bits Online
Woodrow Phoenix, who studied MA Sequential Design and Illustration at The University of Brighton Faculty of Arts is a graphic artist, writer, editorial illustrator, graphic designer, font designer and author of children's books. He describes literature as an empathy generator, a means of getting something from your head into someone else's. Whether you do this with words, or words and pictures, or just pictures, the aim is the same. But too often comics as a medium has been mistaken for the content it is so often used for: science fiction, fantasy and adventure; as a sub-genre of the cinema: just moves on a page. His work sets out to break this misconception: his giant book She Lives, a metre square comic made for his MA in narrative illustration at University of Brighton, physically forces the reader to slow their reading pace as they contemplate each page; Rumble Strip, his graphic essay on our love affair with cars, published by Myriad Editions, which was reviewed in the London Times as “an utterly original work of genius”, places the reader in the driving seat as he takes them on a car-less and people-free ride around our roads.
Both artists put their reader in the director's seat: unlike a film, you get to decide how you read it; their job is to make you a willing and active participant in their production. Event in association with Myriad Editions.
Read a Q+ interview with Woodrow Phoenix here.
Read a Q+A interview with Gareth Brooke here.
Top image: From The Black Project by Gareth Brookes.
