Overground underground

Big thanks to Overground Underground for making my graphic memoir 'Dance the Night Away' free to read along with some wonderful works from other writers in their inaugural issue, which you can read here (scroll to p58 on the site bar, p52 on the magazine itself for my Comic).

Everywhere is now

 

 

In 2018, I was commissioned to write a Comic about war. The editor ended up being replaced and my piece didn't see the light of day, so I'm publishing it here because it seems pertinent to the current period. It was after all written in response to Trump. I had been in America for the first weeks of Trump's inauguration in 2017, researching my Mary Taylor biography, and saw first hand the women's marches protesting against his presidency and the clap-back of MAGA advertisements on TV. 

 

Page ant

The Masque of Curtis

“I’ve been told I need to open up” reads the narration above the image of a box doing precisely that over the following four of six panels on page one of Neal Curtis’ The Talion Maker (Part One). In the final panel, the box is closed. The simplicity is striking. Page two introduces another metaphorical image: shards (glass?), which represent being told to “piece it all together”. The closed, empty box represents our protagonist, and the shards suggest we’re in for a fragmented narrative, but the effect is more like poetry than post-modernism. 

Over the course of Part One, the shards motif is repeated, urging us to remember that opening request to piece it all together, to work like the ants depicted infiltrating a crack in the wall on page 12, a device which works particularly well where panels don’t follow on sequentially. Then another image is introduced, a porthole in a cell door, its circularity echoed by a smiley face, loo roll, toilet bowl, moon, sun; the images build like “sediment” into a musicality in the same way sonic echoes develop in poetry. And although the title tells us this is a revenge tragedy, there’s a reference to Shelley’s Ozymandias on page five that hints at Romantic quest with a capital R.

As Ozymandias begins in ruins, so does our narrator and his narrative, but we are guided to piece together the fragments in what is redolent of another Shelley poem, The Masque of Anarchy. That poem arose from the Peterloo Massacre, as one of the first documented examples of peaceful protest, though peaceful protest seems unlikely for our narrator when he reveals a gun. 

Just as the allusions to poetry stack up, so do the references to conflicts: Che Guevara, Hitler, the Berlin Wall, 10 Downing Street, prisoners wearing jumpsuits and hood with their hands bound in the style of Isis captives, The Crucible (McCarthyism), Pop Idol. Yes, that’s right, Pop Idol. Because this isn’t just a story about large scale global issues, predominantly the refugee crisis, this is primarily a parable of British culture with a distinctly Brit-pop feel. It’s probably not accidental that the protagonist keeps his weapon in an Adidas shoe box. The latter detail and the panel lamenting “the last independent” bookshop tipping into bathos, but the contrasting levels, the small scale issues like bookshop closures intersected with globally recognised cultural threats, keeps the overall narrative’s feet on the ground and stops it becoming too far-fetched.

With Isis in mind, a reader interested in Shelley might now think of his poem “The Revolt of Islam” (1818). The epigraph on the first edition reads: “Hope is strong; Justice and Truth their winged child have found”. That poem followed the story of Laon and Cythna as they initiate a revolution against a despotic ruler. The reference may be a stretch, but thematically it’s a good fit. Both works are symbolic parables for revolutionary idealism. 

The Talion Maker is at the time of this review incomplete, so it’s not possible to come to any meaningful conclusion, though Part Two continues in a similar format. Considering the opening, I would hope to see the protagonist breaking out of those restrictive square panels, and for the various backstory pieces to be brought together in a manner that makes their purpose definitive so that the events alluded to in Curtis’ work are brought cohesion in a work that looks set to do what hasn’t been done for Peterloo, and stand as a tangible memorial to what Britain has lost during times of poor leadership.

Textual tennis

 

Introduction from Sexual Textual Tennis,

Copyright © 2015 by Carolyn Gage and Rachel J. Fenton

 

 

Back in January, I connected with playwright Carolyn Gage on LinkedIn. A few years previously, I'd asked Carolyn for permission to quote from her play The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and use her as a character in one of my stories, which she agreed to, so I was pleased when she messaged me the following:

"If you're ever looking to illustrate a graphic novel, esp. a lesbian one... I've got some!"

Although I was too busy with the NZ Book Council's Graphic Exchange Residency, and the subsequent graphic work that went into Island to Island, and Three Words, and I wasn't able to take on a large unpaid project, I still wanted to collaborate, so I suggested we take the text from one of the essays on her blog and turn it into a comic. Sexual Textual Tennis is the result. Also available in paperback and as downloadable pdf.

Fore word

Before I ramble on about being the runner-up in the Dundee International Book Prize, please make do with a comic about such things and associated feelings.

Break feast

 

Breakages seem to be the fashionable accident in my house. I've had a belly full of them now.

Something to be in

September's issue of Flash Frontier is just out, and I'm so proud of the features page this month.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Adnan Mahmutovic for trusting me with his personal story in our graphic interview: "Something for Being" was an absolute privilege to work on. I'm grateful, too, to Michelle Elvy for letting me run the whole piece. I feel like we all broke some new ground.

In complete words

New Zealand poet Paula Green has blogged a terrific write-up of Dylan Horrocks' Incomplete Works book launch on Tuesday evening, focussing on the part of the discussion my "Incomplete Names" comic is about - which she kindly mentions.

Thanks so much, Paula! I can see that me and Rachel Jones are going to have to have words.

Link din

Many thanks to Adnan Mahmutovic for including my comic Link din in the 2014 issue of Two Thirds North.

Miss ogyny

 

  All text and images ©RaeJoyce 2013

 

I read an article about a school in Redditch banning the wearing of skirts for girls. The reason cited was because short skirts were "unladylike".

Ordinarily, I'd have been pleased at an article reporting girls being given the choice to wear trousers to school. I certainly protested for this right at my own high school until I was allowed to wear trousers. But "banning" skirts and allowing no alternative to trousers isn't the same as choice. Far from it.

At my daughter's school she has the choice of shorts, culottes, or skirts. No trousers, yet.

However, the school's reasons for the skirt ban weren't in the name of choice or equality, a point which is underlined by the use of the word "unladylike". I don't like this word. It smacks of class distinction and elitism. Questions that spring to my mind when I read this word include: Is a covered body a classy one? Is classy better than the bare naked truth? Are middle and upper class bodies better than working class ones? And on I go like a little engine.

I've already aired my views on this article on Facebook, and some commenters there pointed out that to cover the girls is to protect them from the gazes of paedophiles and men.

Paedophiles will seek out children regardless of what the children are wearing. Men - if men are eyeing up nine to thirteen-year-olds, shouldn't our focus be on them, not on penalising the kids? That is the problem with those men. It is not a problem with girls. Time and time again, women are punished and made to feel shame for their bodies for no reason than to protect male dominated culture.

The school's failure is not merely that it punished the girls for what is a male problem, but that it didn't even see there is an opportunity and a need to educate its boys.

This issue isn't a simple one or the other choice, cover the girls or blindfold the boys - these simplistic generalisations are distractions that get in the way of real answers. The answers do not include censorship or shame; they are founded in education. And a school of all places should know this. Shame on them.

Brick kit

 

 

 

  All text and images ©RaeJoyce 2013

Mersea

Warning: contains strong language and adult themes. Other parts of this comic can be read here and here, in no particular order (yet).

 

 

 

 All text and images ©RaeJoyce 2013

Foot loose

Warning: contains offensive language. Ignore the "Part One" etc. I'm going to post these comic chapters in no particular order. You can read another part here.

 

 

 

 

 

 All text and images ©RaeJoyce 2013