It’s the start of November, and I’m here to report that the last couple of months have been pretty busy. Let’s recap…

In September I attended the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, where, along with a cohort of other Scottish comic creators, I was invited to pitch my work as part of the International Rights Market. This involved meeting with editors at a number of international comic publishers from France, Greece, Norway, the US, Romania, Netherlands and Czechia to discuss my work and explore possibilities for future translations. It was a really amazing experience: a chance to see another side of the publishing industry, one which creators often don’t get to see. It was helpful seeing the in-person reaction of publishers, and getting a sense of what publishers across the world are looking for, and some of the challenges they face.

At the start of October I made it out to the Isle of Lewis for Outer Hebrides Comic Con (OH!Con), a fantastically family-friendly and community-minded event that takes place in Stornoway every year. It was a heartwarming thing, run by a lovely group of volunteers, and designed to serve the community on the islands and bring everyone together in a celebration of geeky pop-culture. On the day after the con, the organisers took guests on a tour of the island, which was absolutely amazing!

I also got to see some of my work in print. This piece in Chemistry World magazine discusses my process of making a science engagement comic. And I also have a comic in November’s issue of Aquila magazine, written in collaboration with Catherine Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland! It’s all about how gold is made, but also about influencer-chef Elder Gods!

On my mind this week though is a confluence of anniversaries…

Filmish at 10!

It’s now been ten years since the release of my first graphic novel, Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film. I’ve been reflecting on this a fair bit recently, having been invited to speak about my work quite a lot over the last year. The original Filmish mini-comics have become something of a staple in the story I tell about myself at these events.

The story goes that after university I was working at the Filmhouse, and while dabbling in comics in my spare time, I was invited by the marketing team to make a comic for the Filmhouse members’ newsletter. I decided to adapt my dissertation, creating a four-page mini comic about Food on Film.

I enjoyed the process, and people seemed to like it, and so I spent my spare time creating further mini-essays, pulling them together into a 24 page comic. I cycled out to the Edinburgh College of Art, photocopied 100 copies and put them on sale at Filmhouse for £3 each. Once I’d sold the 100 copies, I took my earnings and printed 100 more, and things got rolling from there.

I tend to gloss over the next few years of making further issues, pursuing other comics work (autobio, science comics, anthology pieces), and then beginning to pitch the idea for a Filmish book to a number of publishers. In reality, that was a significant period of creative development where I developed my drawing style, learned more about communicating complex ideas to others, and discovered that there was a whole community of comic artists out there making and self-publishing their own work. As my confidence grew, the idea to make a ‘proper’ book out of Filmish grew too. And so I started pitching a Filmish book to publishers, using my mini-comics as a proof of concept. Strangely, I never really questioned whether me getting published was possible or not, or whether I was ready for what it would mean if it happened. I was driven by a sort of naive self-belief that 1. sure, why not, and 2. getting published would be VERY COOL.

Finally getting that book deal, during 2013’s Edinburgh Book Festival, was a turning point for me as a comic artist. Suddenly the wish was becoming reality, and I was going to have to put my money where my mouth was and actually make the thing.

What followed was 18 months of writing and drawing. The biggest creative undertaking of my life up to that point, and scary as hell. I quit my job at the Filmhouse to work on the book full time, riding by on a modest advance and a heap of support from my family.

When Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film came out in 2015 I had no idea if people were going to like it, or if it was going to reach beyond the lovely people who had read and supported Filmish back when it was a mini-comic series. Thankfully, it did. In the early weeks it was made The Observer’s Graphic Novel of the Month, which boosted visibility loads. In the years that followed it was translated into multiple languages, including French, Spanish, Greek, Ukranian, Korean and Chinese. I visited Toronto Comic Art Festival with it, and was later invited to Angoulême and Athens Comic Con to show off their translated editions.

Looking back, it all seems like a lifetime ago. I still love the book though. I think I did a pretty good job of it, managing to weave together a bunch of different eras of film, a huge range of film theory, and all while having fun doing it. And what’s cool is that Filmish remains popular to this day. It’s still a strong seller for SelfMadeHero, and it seems to be the kind of book people love to recommend to film fans and new film students. I recently spoke to a US lecturer who uses it in their Film Studies unit as the course text, which is something I never could have dreamed of back in 2009 when I started making these esoteric little comics about my favourite bits of film theory.

Back then, if you’d asked me where I saw myself in ten or fifteen years, I doubt I would have though ‘comics’ for a second. But that’s how life is, I suppose. You don’t always choose comics. Sometimes comics choose you.

Gamish at 5!

Gamish was that difficult second album. I was approached in about 2017 by an editor at Penguin, just as I was starting to think about what I wanted to do next. Honestly, working on Filmish had been a huge undertaking, and one (once the dust had settled) I wasn’t sure I wanted to do again. Behind the scenes, Filmish had been characterised by working down to the wire every day to hit my page targets, before rushing off at the last second to collect my kid from nursery. It was a boggling experience. Too intense. Too much whiplash to feel sane or healthy. Added to that the stress that came from that first experience of ‘being an author’ - having to give talks, visit schools, go on stage. Each of those would stress me out for weeks in advance, taking its toll on my happiness.

But come 2017 I was starting to feel enthusiastic again, and couldn’t help feel flattered that Penguin were interested in what I wanted to do next.

Gamish was the obvious next step. I wasn’t wanting to go back to Filmish just yet (though perhaps I should have, considering its success), and the idea for Gamish had been on my mind ever since the mini-comics days. At that time, video games were going through something of a renaissance, with a swell of successful titles that pushed the boundaries of what video games could be, and thrust emotion and story to the forefront. At the same time there was a growing right-wing cultural backlash to those games, to the very idea that marginalised voices deserved a place in the video game canon. In that atmosphere, my hope was that Gamish could be a champion of gaming as a very human and universal artform, found not just on the consoles of the last few decades but woven throughout human history, back to when we first emerged as a species.

Gamish: A Graphic History of Gaming came out in November 2020, right in the middle of a global pandemic. The Guardian ran a lovely article about the book, and later listed it as one of their top five books about video games. But in the climate of a pandemic, it was a book that launched without much fanfare.

It’s still done well overall, a slow-burn that has nonetheless reached readers ready to meet the book on its own terms. Going in, I knew that the challenge with a book like this was going to be making something that wouldn’t be immediately out of date. Unlike film, video games don’t have the same long history or deep canon to draw from. And every few years there are new platforms and technological developments that can leave some older work difficult to access, and seemingly redundant. I wanted the book to fight back against that perception a little, but it can’t be helped that many of the references quickly start to feel a little outdated. What hopefully doesn’t date the book are its themes: the universality of play, the importance of games as an artform, our capacity to examine ourselves and the world around us through play.

And on those levels I like to think it succeeds and retains relevance. It’s not, and never was going to be, a book about the most cutting edge gaming trends. But, especially in the last year or so, I keep thinking back to some sections of the book that feel especially relevant right now.

The above spread was written during Trump’s first term, and it feels all the more relevant now, as we grapple with rising authoritarianism in our democracies, and bear witness to genocide in Palestine and Sudan. The spreads below deal with the chess computer that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, but feels all too relevant today as tech moguls and credulous governments push generative tech like Chat GPT as solutions to problems that don’t exist, all while abusing our water supplies and stealing from human creatives.

Spoilers in the below images for the concluding pages of Gamish:

I regularly think about that Noam Chomsky quote in relation to art. Yes, AI might one day soon be able to output visuals indistinguishable from those made by a human artist… but that’s about as interesting as a bulldozer outclassing a bodybuilder. That’s not the point of art. Like play, art is a thing to be experienced, both in its creation and its reception, in a profoundly human way. Art is the experiences we bring to it. The life around it. The choices we make (consciously or not) that bring us to the final piece. To paraphrase the final lines of Gamish:

“For all of Chat GPT’s powers… it could never experience art in the way we can. Chat GPT could do art, and (maybe one day) do it well. But it couldn’t make it.”

Graphic Novel Builder at 1!

After all that reminiscing, let’s not forget that my book Graphic Novel Builder is also celebrating its first birthday! It’s been a whirlwind year of book festivals, workshops and school visits, and I’ve really enjoyed myself. Long gone is the debilitating stress that foreshadowed a public appearance back when Filmish came out, and now I can get the jitters limited to a short few hours before an event. I count that as a win. What I’ve learned is that, for all the anticipatory anxiety, I really enjoy doing talks and workshops. I’ll occassionally fumble a line or too, but I’ve discovered that it’s actually not the end of the world when that happens!

I’ve had a couple of exciting pieces of news in the last week or so. Graphic Novel Builder has been nominated for a Selkie Award for Best Graphic Novel, and longlisted for the UKLA Book Awards (Information Book 3-14+). Very cool to be getting some recognition for the book, so cross as many fingers as you can for me!

Anyway, thank you everyone who has bought the book, reviewed it, shared it with a friend, come and said hi at an event, or just generally supported me and Graphic Novel Builder over the last 12 months. You’ve been amazing!

Here’s hoping the book continues to inspire young readers for a long time to come…

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Till next time, folks!