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To celebrate @Good_Comics kickstarter launch - this week I’ll be tweeting about the behind the scenes making of my 1st graphic novel LDN. Today’s Topic: CONCEPT
#goodcomicskickstarter
#goodcomicskickstarter
So it’s 2016 & my 2nd comic ZORSE - some creative nonfiction based on my childhood as a Asylum Seeker - did well. Nominated for a British Comic Award, won 2nd prize at Faber’s FAB Prize and got to talk about it on BBC radio. I was itching to do something wildly different next.
The spark of LDN was reading Zadie Smith’s NW & being blown away by reading a London I recognised & seeing black working class stories that I was then used to seeing told in the broad melodrama of soaps......
....told with the same ambition of literary form & emotional depth that Flaubert, James & Tolstoy gave their middle class white characters. It was wildly thrilling seeing the environment I existed in & lives I knew being communicated in the style of those books I read at school
I was like “what if there was a comic like that? a comic that replicated how Smith flipped from one literary mode to another but with comics - flipping from Will Eisner to Liz Prince to chapter books & use them to tell a story about contemporary London? Hmmm” I thought
I was immediately reminded of studying this book of Raymond Carver short stories at school that were a movie tie-in collection to Robert Altman’s film adaptation of those stories ‘Short Cuts’ that Altman turned those stories into a braided narrative set in 90s Los Angeles
6 years later, Paul Thomas Anderson inspired by that film, took Altman’s naturalistic quotidian LA stories & amped them up to operatic levels & shot them thru with an almost apocalyptic foreboding in his movie mosaic of LA stories ‘Magnolia’
I wasn’t sure about telling a story in a specific place like NW, or making a collage comic that flipped between diff stories like Altman did or something as full on (which was great in the film) as ‘Magnolia’ but I liked the idea of a contemporary London comic & lots of stories
Then remembered reading Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Martian Chronicles’ as a teen, a set of short stories set on Mars that vaguely connect - Bradbury was inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ that was a story cycle set in a small town - story cycle was EXACTLY what I wanted!
but London is a crazy broad canvas to tell a story cycle in - where the hell do I even start? I then remembered a lesson that Quincy Jones learned when he went to Paris to study from Nadia Boulanger - the Yoda/Pai Mei of musical composition
(video: )
(video: )
Jack White said something similar about his creative philosophy behind The White Stripes - his numerical approach really flipped a switch in my head
So I broke it down to the 4 points of London - North, South, East, West and the creepy City of London at its centre. Then I thought up what each point is known for & any associated topics. N: Jewish (Religion) E: Hipsters (Class) W: ? (Race?) S: ? (Age?) CoL: Money (Culture)
Now these big multi POV,state of the nation kinda stories are queasy to contemplate coz they feel highfalutin AF,they are usually terrain of white middle class male writers - u feel like u need an oxbridge education to even try but working class POC have a keener POV on London
So the topics of Religion,Race,Class,Culture & Age - and devising scenarios & characters to grapple with those topics reminded me of this saying that always rubbed me the wrong way - i decided to explore, challenge, at times agree & show the nuances that this dumb saying ignores
So that’s enough for the concept - each day I’m gonna spotlight a different story in the book and chat about all the (over)thinking, concerns and work that went into its creation. Peace x 
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rozihathaway/good-comics-new-releases-2021
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rozihathaway/good-comics-new-releases-2021
PS: like a total doofus I forgot to mention how incredibly well the next-level illustrator @barbawk visually represented the concept of the book in her fantastic cover art. Completely captures the tone and idea of the book in the coolest way possible.
