Any civilian wandering into this ongoing discussion about British comics is probably wondering what the fuss is about all of a sudden – and it does probably come across as an all-of-a-sudden thing. Comics are now being nominated for Costa Book Awards, comics are suddenly invading the New Statesman from all sides – basically, the noise around British comics at the moment is loud.
But this is nothing new. British comics go through peaks and troughs, and currently we’re in a peaky bit. In the mental graph I’m going to attempt to construct in your head, the x-axis begins around 1977 and the y-axis is the amount of interesting stuff happening. Up, down, up, down. Imagine at the moment that we are up.
(NB. One line that runs through the centre of this graph horizontally, unchanging, is that of the cartoonists whingeing about the state of the comics industry – plus also their favourite pens or ink being discontinued, their lives in general and so on and so forth. Regardless of success or failure, this will remain our constant but will never be mentioned again. This is just the nature of cartoonists.)
In September 1986, when Alan Moore’s Watchmen was only four issues in, Neil Gaiman (then a starving young journalist, now not so much a starving young journalist) wrote a piece in Time Out about the rise of the graphic novel, and its growing epicentre: London. More and more shops that sold nothing but comics were opening their doors, and it went like this: by the mid-’70s, American comics had stagnated – it was the same guy in spandex punching out the lights of some other guy in spandex – and readers were bored. When the English sci-fi anthology 2000 AD landed in 1977 – with its lunacy, mutants, Judge Dredd and social commentary – British comics were suddenly something slightly more exciting than what was happening over the pond with the underpants guys. This is an “up” bit on the graph.
By the mid-‘80s 2000 AD was only one of many cool new things happening on this grey little island: there was a comic called Warrior (an anthology notable for being the first place Moore’s Marvelman and V For Vendetta appeared), another thing called Escape (run by Paul Gravett, who these days fronts Comica and turns up in the quotes of any piece on comics in the Guardian), and a handful of other mavericks who either happened or intended to happen but didn’t. There was a flurry of activity and it produced piles of UK anthology comics full of British people – Moore, Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Eddie Campbell, et al – and all of these things, bar 2000 AD, were dead by 1990. The graph goes up, the graph goes down a bit.
The 1990s had their own anthologies in 2000 AD spin-offs Crisis, Revolver, and Deadline, but the last of these died in 1995. After that it could be argued that creators were playing with the possibilities of internet, and that perhaps the internet looked like the way forward. But from the look of the shelves, the community had fractured: British creators were largely self-publishing their own comics and there seemed, at least from the reader’s point of view, to be less of a nucleus of activity. The graph goes down a bit further and flat-lines for a few years. We are at this point a bit worried for the graph.
Which brings us to 2007. While working in a comic shop across the road from the British Museum the most common question asked by tourists in oversized parkas after “Where is the British Museum?” was, “Where are the British comics?” They wanted to take something British home from Britain, something a bit less shit than a mug, a novelty T-shirt or an umbrella injury sustained while walking too slowly down the road.
We would shrug and pull faces and try to explain that aside from the shelf of 2000 AD books, a huge travel-unfriendly copy of From Hell and the handful of photocopied zines by local artists, mostly everything in the shop came from America. A lot of the American stuff featured work by British people – there was Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, Starman by James Robinson, Hellblazer by Milligan and Delano, for instance – but it wasn’t what they were looking for. There was British work it just wasn’t the glimpse into the British comics scene they wanted to take home. The tourists would get confused and head off across the street to look at pieces of Ancient Greece we stole from the Greeks. We have called an ambulance for the graph, it is dead.
That was only four years ago. And around that point stuff was brewing that would make life easier for us, tourist-wise: British publishers were either launching or setting their pieces up on the chessboard. SelfMadeHero and Blank Slate have since put out so many books by new British and European talent that their titles near dominate the shelves, and both give relatively untried new talent a go, which means that up-and-coming British creators now have somewhere to pitch to which is within closer reach than Random House comics imprint, Jonathan Cape.
Then there’s Nobrow, an East London outfit launched in 2008 that plays with everything that paper and book design can do – their interest is in comics and illustration and – as the very excellent book designer Peter Mendelsund put it in an interview at Powell’s entirely unrelated to comics – “the thing-yness of books”. In a world where Kindles and Nooks and downloadable comics are vying for our attention, Nobrow is exploring the tangible nature of books and producing some of the finest (and best-smelling) objects around. They are bought in their piles by Americans mentally listing the things in their luggage they can do without as they hand over their credit card. Socks and T-shirts and shoes get left in hotel rooms in favour of Hilda & The Midnight Giant by Luke Pearson, Dockwood by Jon McNaught, or their huge semi-annual anthologies.
Which is of course not to say that the scene is purely here to show off to travellers passing through. It’s just that four years ago we would struggle to find stuff for these people interested in British comics bar things that were already 20 years old, and now there’s new stuff every week. The graph is on a sort of Muswell Hill incline. That’s why we’re banging on about comics so much (it also helps that NS curator Alex Hern is a huge nerd): because this is a very good thing.
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