Joff Winterhart’s debut comic, Days of the Bagnold Summer, has become, along with Mary and Bryan Talbot’s biography/memoir Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a Costa Book Award. The news was undoubtedly a significant moment for the medium, and raised a number of questions about the role of comics in relation to prose - some answered thoughtfully, some not so much - which will clearly be argued over for some time to come.
In my view, it’s a retrograde step to compare comics to a different medium. Few would argue that The Wire needs to be nominated for an Oscar, or that Newsnight‘s Paul Mason is done a disservice every time he’s not awarded a “best broadsheet columnist” prize. The best comics ought to be praised as just that.
Bagnold Summer has been thrust into a position few would want, fighting not only for itself, but also as a poster-child for an entire medium. The book covers six weeks of the summer holidays of schoolboy Daniel Bagnold, 15, and his librarian mother Sue, 52. It is as neat a slice-of-life as you will find; Winterhart captures teenage angst perfectly, as Daniel mopes around the house, daydreaming about being in a metal band (“Skullslayer”), and occasionally leaving to sit with his one friend in the park, dressed head-to-toe in black in the hot summer sun.
The book is structured as though it’s a collection of never-before-published newspaper strips. Each page stands alone as a vignette in the Bagnold’s lives, and many small events are never picked up on again. Daniel, unable to sleep, drinks a two-litre bottle of coke at 2am; Sue mistakes a page of copied-out Metallica lyrics for a heartfelt poem by her son; the pair of them discuss their memories of Sue’s American father, who left the country when she was young. But these moments build up to an impressively full portrait of the two leads.
In this way, it’s not short, so much as economical. Shorn of much of the connective tissue that bulks up more conventionally structured books, every panel is crucial, included because of what it adds to the book, rather than simply placing the characters where they need to be for an “event”.
With many slice-of-life tales, this lack of events can get wearying, as characters go about their daily routines impeccibly observed but in a manner which doesn’t say an awful lot. Bagnold Summer avoids some of that with its compactness, but also with growth. It’s not much, but Sue and Daniel end the book in a different place to where they began, and it’s watching that change, as much as their normal lives, which is rewarding.
The economy of the book extends to its art. The comic-strip-style layout leads to a deliberately formulaic page - six panels, with a one-word title - while the panels often contain nothing but scratchy headshots of the characters. Backgrounds are rare, filled in only when they are necessary for the point of the scene. The style lends an air of theatre to the whole book, as though there are stage-hands running on with the props for the next scene between each page.
It is an art style which is functional, not beautiful. That is not to impugn Winterhart’s ability as a cartoonist - his characters are far more expressive than those found in many “mainstream” comics. In fact, he appears not to know how good he is, with the odd caption being slightly overwritten. One of the best tests of a cartoonist’s ability is whether the page makes sense without words, and if it does, that might be a hint that there ought to be fewer there in the first place.
Maybe this style is what appealed Bagnold Summer to the Costa jury. It’s not a book which a certain type of comics reader - one “in it for the art” - would enjoy, but with a story told mostly through dialogue and narration, a strict visual language, and coming as it does from an “acceptable” genre, it’s as good a book as any to lead the way. It’s just a shame that the more radical elements of the book will likely be lost on that panel.
Oh and feel free to call it a “graphic novel” if you want. Not all comics are graphic novels, but this one certainly is.
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