Art and Things

Political activism zine ctrl.alt.shift have collaborated with a exciting assortment of writers, artists and other prominent British creatives to create a really amazing comic book, featuring a true stories about the horrors of corruption wordwide. We’ve read it. It’s wicked.

Art and Things spoke to British writer and comic artist Woodrow Phoenix about his involvement in the project.

Art and Things: Is confronting serious issues in your work something you personally feel passionate about?

Woodrow Phoenix: I treat everything I do seriously, in the sense that I am passionate about doing good work that speaks for itself and doesn’t waste the readers’ time; work that has something to say and says it elegantly, energetically, in an interesting way. I don’t feel everything I do has to be “issue” based - I like lots of goofy things and a lot of my work is cartoony, silly, unreal jokey material. But I don’t feel I have to choose between being funny and being serious. I think you can be entertaining and also ask questions that mean something to you. You can use humour as effectively as drama to examine the world we live in. I like both kinds of material equally. What the message is decides how I’m going to work with it.

My most recent book, Rumble Strip, tackles an issue that I had been thinking about for a while. I drive a car. I enjoy it. I don’t change personality when I get into my car, but many drivers I know do. People feel entitled to act in the most monstrous and inhuman ways when they have a metal shell around them. Why is that? Some of it is human nature. We behave terribly when we think nobody can see us. But it’s not helped by the car industry encouraging everyone who gets behind a wheel to drive as if they are the only ones on the road. Whether you own one or not, cars define your landscape. They dominate your life because they determine the layout of the city you live in, how the streets you have to use are designed and lit, where you go and how you get there… and in some cases IF you get there at all. People need to wake up and start being conscious parts of a wider community rather than selfish, impatient me-junkies. We can’t carry on making excuses for the crazy numbers of people who die every day on streets around the world for no good reason because some driver was in a hurry or not paying attention.

Could you tell us a little about the story that you worked on?

I was given a piece of prose by Adèle Austin based on her experiences growing up in Haiti. It was about a kidnapping, from the point of view of a boy who had joined a gang that specialised in such things. Most of her piece focused on the internal struggles of this boy as he tried to justify what he was doing, so I had to find visual ways to represent what he was going through, make it interesting to look at while moving the story along. I started by breaking Adèle’s story down into pure structure: who are the characters, where are they, what needs to happen and how do they relate to each other? Once the background was worked out, I could concentrate on making the best choices for each panel of the story.

What made you want to tackle these issues in-particular?

It’s a good idea to remind ourselves that everyone’s actions have consequences for someone else. Sometimes you can see the results of what you do and sometimes you can’t, but everyone is connected. People get away with doing terrible things because nobody is watching. We need to shine some light into those dark corners!

Most of our readers will probably have encountered very well-respected works like Persepolis or Waltz with Bashir that successfully use heavily stylized animation and illustration to convey important, difficult messages. What is it that makes a medium traditionally associated with fantasy and escapism by the mainstream so useful and effective when confronting serious and sometimes uncomfortable issues?

Comics are tremendously effective communication because they are so direct. The unfiltered product of one person can reach into your brain without anybody else getting between you. It’s not a group activity like watching a film. You read a comic by yourself and that intimacy is hard to achieve in other visual media.

Think how many layers even the smallest film or television production has to go through. Every line of script has to be examined, debated, edited and agreed on by a great many people before you will get to see it. On a typical TV show it’s easily fifty to sixty people. For a film, that becomes hundreds. Invariably things get watered down. Compromises are made. Strong messages become diluted. Plus, all that decision making takes time. It can take months for the simplest TV programme to be made. But with comics one person can do absolutely everything. You write it, you draw it, there’s nothing in there that you didn’t put there and it gets printed exactly as you made it. If you have something intimate or controversial to say, that’s a pretty much ideal situation, creatively. Your message stands or falls on its own. If it doesn’t get through, it won’t be because someone else stepped all over it.

Works like this often prompt talk of comics and graphic novels ‘growing up’. Would you say that we are in the midst of a shift in attitudes about what the medium and achieve and the subject matter it can tackle effectively?

There have always been ‘grown up’ works out there, but there haven’t been the audiences ready to connect with them. Perhaps it’s just that a generation who read comics as children are now in media positions, so they are more receptive to articles in newspapers and magazines, or films and tv programmes about them. If mainstream media interest in comics continues past the moneymaking fixation with superhero adaptations It will help comics creators because if you get serious responses to what you do, you’re more likely to persevere. Of course, it takes about fifty times as long to make a comics page as it does to read it, so the first thing publishers and readers need to know is it’s not as quick and easy as it looks for comics creators to make their books. It can take years!

Do you think works like this are an important part of the future of the medium?

I hope so. I believe the comics medium can tackle any kind of material. It doesn’t have to be limited to throwaway subjects. Of course that also means people will have to be prepared to engage with a strip as attentively as they would with a film or a prose book. Most people don’t expect to be challenged by a comic so they don’t read them very carefully. But if readers and creators can continue to expect more of each other and grow together there’s a lot to look forward to.

The website for the exhibition that accompanied the release of the comic, with information about the book itself and where to buy it is here.