Thumbnails #7

Hey! I was recently interviewed by Taiwanese comic critic Weng Ji'an for review site Open Book, to discuss my comics and the release of the Taiwanese edition of Gamish. It was a really thought provoking series of questions, and I was in a fairly lyrical mood, so I thought I’d share my answers here, unflitered by translation. You can also find the original post here. Also, check out the cool cover for the Taiwanese edition below.

Hello, pleased to have the opportunity to interview you. Your previous work, "Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film," received great feedback in Taiwan from readers who love movies and comics. It also showcased the possibilities of graphic novels in creative works for Taiwanese readers. Today, the interview will mainly focus on your new book, "Gamish: A Graphic History of Gaming," and discuss your career to help Openbook get to know you better.

Firstly, could you please briefly introduce yourself to the readers? I'm curious to know how you embarked on the path as a comic artist. Most readers in Taiwan mainly read Japanese or American comics, so your style is quite unique in comparison. Could you share what inspired your comic creations?

I’m a Scottish comic book artist, interested in using comics to share my interests in movies, video games and science.

As a child I was very creative, and loved reading comics and watching movies. Back then, I didn’t know that less than 100km north of my home in Edinburgh was the beating heart of British comics, in the small city of Dundee. There was a publisher there called DC Thompson who produced some of the UK’s iconic comics: The Beano, The Dandy and Oor Wullie. Of course I also loved Calvin and Hobbes, and Peanuts, but these more local comics were what spoke to me most.

Oor Wullie is a very special one - my Granny would cut it out from the Sunday Newspaper and keep them for when I visited. Oor Wullie was a Scottish comics character, who spoke the Scots language - a character that felt like something us Scottish kids could cling onto when most comics were American or British. His tagline was “Oor Wullie! Your Wullie! A’body’s Wullie!”

These children’s comics had a huge impact on me - very silly, mischievous stories about badly behaved children, exactly the opposite to the well-behaved and shy child I was! They didn’t inspire mischief, but they did get me drawing. I started making my first comics at about 8 years old, stapling together pieces of paper and drawing stories about my own invented characters.

When I was a teenager my girlfriend introduced me to a wider world of comics and I started making my own comics again. I began to see the potential for comics to do interesting things with artwork, colours, layout, storytelling and so on. I realised that this was an art form where new frontiers of style and approach and subject matter were still possible, and that I might be able to do something new and interesting with them.

My comic book Filmish started life as a self-published short comic. Just 24 pages long, hand-drawn in my free time. I rode my bike over to the photocopying shop, made 100 copies and then put them on sale in the arthouse cinema I worked at. That’s where my comics career truly began! People really responded to my short comics about film history and film theory - not just comic fans, but people who had never read a comic since childhood. Comics are a fantastic medium for expressing complex ideas, but people often dismiss them as childish. I wanted to show people that comics could discuss complex issues and appeal to a bigger audience.

Looking back, I think my biggest comic influences are Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, Chris Ware’s graphic novels and film critic Mark Cousins. Watterson’s work influenced my approach to character design, and demonstrated a beautiful mix of cartoony and realistic styles. Chris Ware influenced me in my early comics career to develop a more sophisticated approach to comic layouts - using the format of the page to help tell the story. And film critic Mark Cousins influenced my love of cinema, and his lyrical approach to describing film influences me to this day.

In the past interviews related to "Filmish" and "Gamish" mentioned that both books are "visual love letters" to films and video games. Can you talk about the influence of video games on your personal growth or creative process? Take "Gamish" as an example. How did you decide to write this "love letter”?

Speaking in terms of love, video games were always a distant crush, an affair. I didn’t have access to video game consoles at home for a long time. We didn’t have the money and my parents weren’t interested in them at all. They weren’t banned or anything, but I had to admire them from afar for a long time. I would go to friends’ houses and sit transfixed watching them play, occasionally getting a turn, and probably outstaying my welcome. In this way games like Grand Theft Auto, Goldeneye and The Legend of Zelda became sort of mythic dreamscapes. Because I couldn’t play them whenever I wanted, they would exist more in memory and fantasy than in reality. I would dream about them, counting down the days till I could visit a friend’s house and play again.

Finally buying a console as an adult came at the perfect time. Around the era of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, games were starting to enter an era of revolution, where more sophisticated stories and larger, more realistic worlds were emerging. I could see that games were something special, challenging our ideas of selfhood, exposing us to new experiences and perspectives. Independent games were starting to emerge that approaching gaming in entirely new ways - stepping away from violence as the primary mode of engaging with the digital world, and trying new ways to interact with the virtual. It was an exciting time to be engaging with games intellectually for the first time.

I had the idea of making a version of Filmish but about Video Games before I’d even produced the Filmish graphic novel. But it took until that book was done, and I was thinking of my next project for me to commit to the idea. Exploring what I wanted to do with it, it soon became apparent that a ‘love letter’ would have to be the approach. Games are a fast evolving medium and I realised early on that anything I produced would be unable to keep up with the latest releases. Instead, I needed to talk about games in a way that would still be relevant, even in 5 or 10 years when the game landscape had completely changed. So I began to explore what it is that makes us fall in love with games - why do they move us, why do we obsess, why do they bring us pleasure? And to do that I would have to go back to the beginning, to the earliest games in human culture, and explore the very nature of play.

Both your works, "Filmish" and "Gamish", are highly expository, they are more like professional academic research than normal comic books. Unlike the long history of film studies, research on video games is still emerging. Before starting to draw "Gamish," what kind of preparation did you undertake, and how did it affect the final work?

The reason for the expository and academic approach is that this is where the original Filmish came from. I really enjoyed studying film in university, and when it came time to make my first comics, I chose to continue my love of studying film, adapting my University dissertation into a short comic. From there the idea of a comic about film took off, bringing this academic approach along with it.

While working on Gamish, one of my first realisations was that gaming is still developing its academia and its canon. There is a lot of relevant work out there, but a lot of the most interesting analysis has been done by journalists, bloggers and zine makers. I had to cast my net wider, and excitingly, I had to also trust my own interests and analysis more than I had previously on Filmish.

The video game canon (the body of renowned, ‘classic’ works that represent the art form) is still emerging, and faces a fundamental challenge: while a classic movie from 75 or 100 years ago can be relatively easy to access on DVD or YouTube or at a retrospective screening, renowned games even 10 or 15 years old can often be very hard to access, trapped on old, defunct hardware that few have access to. It’s a huge problem for game preservation, but also for creating a consistent sense of shared game history. I can show my kids fantastic movies from my childhood and all that has aged are the special effects and haircuts; but try and introduce them to an old game and you might find it impossible.

In the end, I aimed to discuss games on their own terms, making sure that readers wouldn’t need to have played the game to be able to appreciate its importance or why it is interesting. And, while drawing on the academic work that is out there, I made sure to feature both the works of journalists and bloggers in the field, and also take more confidence in my own interpretations and philosophy of games.

In "Gamish," you start the discussion from the human instinct of "play" as a standard to differentiate between humans and AI. From your perspective, what importance does "play" or "games" hold for humanity or human civilization? And among the various "games" invented by humans, what makes video games, as a medium, unique?

Researching this book, I began to think of ‘play’ as the origins of everything that humanity has achieved in our journey of progress. I think this idea comes from a very personal perspective… as a child I began playing with building blocks or soft toys, then as I grew I moved on to telling stories with these toys, then drawing fantastic, silly images as a form of play. As I grew up, my hobbies of making comics were playful - done not for survival but to see what would happen, what fun I could have. As a teenager, I was given ample time to use the family computer, and began playing there, using Photoshop to create special effect images or animation software to create funny videos, learning the technology that would be crucial to my future career through play.

So for me, play has been the basis of everything I’ve learned for myself. And I could extend that concept back in time to the earliest humans, playing in the dirt with a stick and stone, seeing what they could do, what fun they could have by knocking them together, throwing them, binding them. From here we see the emergence of music, language, art, technology. All is achieved through play - it may be serious play at times, but our playful nature is crucial when inventing new ideas and coming up with solutions to living in the world.

Beyond that, play and games bring people together, allow us to experiment with new ideas, new modes of interacting. They allow us to test risky strategies away from life or death scenarios, allow us to push boundaries and survive to learn the lessons if we fail

Video games are a natural evolution of all this, but are unique in the extent and variety with which they allow us to play. Each video game can set new rules, unbound by the extents of real world physics or possibility, allowing us to play in ways impossible in real world play. And along with this, they allow us to connect across distances than normal play cannot - as real play is grounded in the physical, video games are unbound by their virtual nature.

We are curious, how would you entice or persuade people who don't play video games (perhaps due to childhood trauma, feeling too old for it, or thinking it's primarily for boys) to give them a try?

People who have disengaged with games (for whatever reason) I think would be surprised to find that the art form has changed significantly in the last decade and now much better caters to people from all sorts of backgrounds and interests. While games centred around violence and gunfights do still dominate the mainstream, it’s quite easy to find something suited to your tastes. I’ve found the Nintendo Switch a wonderful entry point - games like Animal Crossing have drawn in people who don’t normally play, and the Nintendo store is full of interesting independent games, from spooky story puzzles like ‘Return of the Obra Dinn’ to charming coming-of-age stories like ‘Night in the Woods’.

Meanwhile, I think a lot of games, even mainstream ones, have abandoned the idea that every player must beat it on the hardest mode. Accessibility options on platforms like Playstation and Xbox have grown a lot in recent years, making it possible for a larger number of people to access gaming, levelling the playing-field and drawing the focus away from extreme challenge.

Apart from the concise history of video games at the beginning of "Gamish," both books, "Filmish" and "Gamish," revolve around various topics such as self-identity in video games, liberation in virtual spaces, moral insights and significance in game choices, and the connection between games and the real world. How did you decide on these topics? 

It’s partly driven by my own interests, but my overall philosophy is that I want to shine a new light on art forms we often think about only in certain ways. Looking at movies through the prism of architecture or at video games through the prism of identity allow us to appreciate them in new ways, and come to understand their relevance in our lives.

In both books I attempt to take the reader on a journey from the personal plane (in Filmish the eye, the body) and then out into the physical, social, moral world (in Gamish, the sections on level design and the real world impacts of gaming). I think seeing how an art form relates to us personally and then on how it affects us on a more sociological level is a powerful way to do it, and allows us to see threads that link those two realms.

Through discussions of these topics, what kind of impact can video games bring on the masses? You've also mentioned in interviews that playing video games is a way for people to understand themselves and to possess universal values and influence. Why do video games have such profound effects?

Games affect us profoundly because they deal so closely with embodiment. While many art forms ask us to relate to different perspectives, games allow us to step into the shoes of others in a unique way. Our ability to choose, to act and to see the results of those actions, make gaming a fundamentally moral form of communication. In this way, I think games can allow us to close the gap between ourselves and others’ experiences.

Of course this can be troubling when we are required to do things we find morally objectionable just to play the game. But with so many games revolving around murder and crime, we don’t see any correlation with real world violence. Perhaps games offer a safe space to explore violent themes without consequence, or perhaps it’s just an extension of playground games where children chase each other down. Either way, I don’t tend to buy the argument that games are an inherently bad influence on us.

However, like all popular media, games are a part of how culture perpetuates itself - it’s how we tell stories to each other of what is right and wrong, normal and strange, and so on. So from this perspective, video games influence culture just like films, TV, music and writing - acting as part of the story we tell each other about the world we live in and what that means. This can be positive in shaping us to be kinder, more empathetic people who work to help others in need, or it can be negative, if it sells us the idea that we can solve our problems through violence or bigotry.

Since it involves discussions on controversial topics like gender or violence, how do you, as a graphic novelist and commentator, balance these sensitive issues?

It was important to me in creating these books to show how these forms of art can influence how we see the world. I think these are really important skills in a world where we are constantly exposed to media via our phones and screens. But I’m not so unaware to think that I present a neutral perspective. I step into creating these works wanting a world where people are given a chance in life and supported regardless of their race, culture, gender or sexuality. And to manage these issues sensitively, I need to be aware than many people may not have been exposed to such thinking, or be able to see the world the way I do. I try and keep my language simple and honest, and I try and feature the words of the people affected by these issues, for example quoting the ideas of Black critics when talking about representations of Black men in American video games. There are many issues that don’t affect me directly, and it would be foolish to think that I could speak about them authoritatively. My hope is that any readers will use this as a jumping off point to explore these issues further, to open their minds to exploring these ideas in their own time, and seek out authors who challenge their personal biases.

Returning to the visual aspect, as the medium of a "visual love letter," you mentioned in an interview with The Guardian that "Part of the power of translating films and games into a different medium is that you get to divorce them from the raw form they come in, and I think that helps people have more of an analytical eye." Could you explain to readers  what effects does it bring when you do the cross-media conversion, such as using illustrations to reinterpret the protagonists or scenes in video games?

One of the interesting things you discover about games when you speak to people about them, is that they reside in memory very differently from how they actually appear. Having played games like Goldeneye 007 or Half-Life as a child, these games sit in my memory like real experiences, with their locations existing for me like real spaces I have visited. But when you replay, the illusion is revealed - the graphics look aged, the spaces look fake, and everything looks out of date.

Drawing Gamish I hoped to capture that version of the game which exists in our memory, coloured in by our imaginations, and separated from the technological limitations that each generation of games fights against.

I also enjoy that I can add personality and commentary to how I draw these iconic characters, posing them in unusual situations, or juxtaposing them against each other in novel ways. It allows me to satirise, or reflect on the iconic personalities of these characters and what that says about gaming itself.

Most of your works fall into the category of "knowledge comics." What led you to focus on this field in your creations? For Taiwanese readers, our knowledge comics tend to be considered as child-oriented, enlightenment materials "for kids." This is also what makes your works particularly special. Could you share the joys and challenges of creating "knowledge comics for adults"? Do you have any advice for graphic creators or professional researchers who aspire to create similar works?

I really did fall into doing this by accident. I was passionate about movies, wanted to make comics, and ended up combining those two things into Filmish, which I personally enjoyed doing. The secret to its success, of course, is that my passion for movies was shared by loads of people around the world, and the comics form made it attractive and accessible for people to engage with the topics I was covering. I myself was inspired by the knowledge comics of my youth (for example a series from the UK called Horrible Histories), and took that pleasure of learning into adulthood. The real pleasure for me has been getting to spend my time learning about subjects I find fascinating. The challenge is turning these complex ideas into a much more accessible and entertaining format, that will allow a much larger audience to appreciate than those who would feel able to access that same information in an academic format.

For aspiring comic creators or researchers, I think the key is finding subjects you are passionate about, sharing that passion with clear, honest language, and then making sure it gets into the hands of people who share your passion. I found that audience selling my first self-published Filmish in a local cinema. You might find your audience elsewhere, but they are out there.

On your personal website, there are also some non-knowledge comic works. Could you share with us what other themes or genres interest you, apart from knowledge comics? I'm also curious about your upcoming creation plans.

Right now I am interested in blending my love of learning with a more child-friendly, adventurous approach. I think an element of learning will always be in my work, even if it is just in the subtext. I love exploring new ideas and themes, and learning is a large part of my motivation for writing, whether that is creating a knowledge comic, or investing that learning in a fascinating storyline.

I also hope to leverage my love of film into writing some screenplays. I have always had a love of moviemaking, and while life took me down a path of creating comics, I have many ideas for stories to tell on screen. Perhaps this will just be for me to enjoy as a personal project, or perhaps it will be something more. We will see!

Based on "Filmish" and "Gamish," we can understand your thoughts on movies and video games. Can you briefly explain what comics or graphic novels mean to you in one or two sentences?

The comics page is a wonder of an artistic canvas - a montage of images consumed both one at a time, and all at once. Comic panels capture moments in time and that time moves forward at the pace of our reading. We bring comics to life in the reading, and story exists both in the panels and between them. Our drawing style is like handwriting, telling a story through the movement of our wrists, each artist leaving themselves on the page in a way that is unique and beautiful in its own way.

Lastly, could you recommend five games:

• A game that immediately comes to mind when recommending.

It may not be for everyone, but Disco Elysium was fantastic, and I rave about it to everyone I know who loves games. It’s a role playing game set in a crumbling alternative-past European-post-revolutionary country. It deals with politics, sociology and morality, and it cut through with so much dark humour and personality. What I love is that it is a game that allows you to fail, and makes that failure enjoyable. Most RPGs I’ve played encourage you to do the best, and be the most heroic. But the beauty of Disco Elysium is that being a sloppy, failure of a cop is part of the story, and any wrong turn is just another facet of your character’s strange, dark story.

• A game suitable for people who never played video games.

This is so hard, because there are so many skills inherent to gaming that need to be learned to get anywhere. So, a good choice needs to require low skill, and needs to be engaging very quickly so as not to put anyone off.

I would perhaps recommend Untitled Goose Game. You play as a mischievous goose, causing havoc in an English village. What is perfect is that for kids and adults alike it inspires a sense of fun and playfulness from the start, and even when you’re struggling to succeed there is so much comedy as you menace the local village folk.

• A game you particularly love but haven't finished playing.

Hah! It is the challenge we face as gamers. Many games are too long for all but the most dedicated. That said, when I truly love a game it tends to get finished, even if it takes me a year! Probably the best candidate is Red Dead Redemption 2. I found that world absolutely gorgeous to inhabit. The level of detail was unbelievable, and I was swept away by the grit and grain of the frontier life - tending my horse, wandering around camp eating, riding out as the sun rises. It was a victim for me of being too long and too involving. I wanted to take my time with it, but time I did not have. It would be fun to go back one day, when I have the time.

• A game you enjoy playing with family and friends.

There are so many! Me and my children have enjoyed a lot of Mario Kart over the years, but have also taken pleasure in playing Minecraft together.

I recently found Stardew Valley to be the perfect game for sharing with my partner. It is gentle and rewarding, building a little farm together and harvesting vegetables to sell in the local shop. Some cooperative games like Overcooked can lead to a bit of tension in a household, but Stardew Valley is a perfect one to chill out to.

• A game you would like to play for a lifetime.

Perhaps this is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which offered a lovely, slow paced moment in every day to build a little world of my own. If I was stranded on a desert island, this seems like the perfect one to work on every day for as long as it took to get rescued!

We would also like to recommend three excellent games from Taiwan, and we hope you can give them a try in the future.

Behind the Screen

Detention

OPUS: Echo of Starsong

Thank you for these recommendations. I have heard great things about Detention, and own a copy which I am eager to sit down with. Games are such a powerful art form, and we are lucky to be able to appreciate the artworks made by people around the world. From Scotland, let me recommend Stories Untold, a set of spooky text adventure games that will send shivers down your spine!

This text was my original response to questions from Weng Ji'an, originally published on the OpenBook website.

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