Dirt: A Graphic Novel

Could you tell us a little about your creative background? When did you start pursuing this art form?

I’ve been making comics for as long as I can remember and would make little comics as a hobby all throughout my school life. It was only in sixth form when I started seriously thinking I could pursue drawing properly, and I went to UWE a couple of years later, intent on making picture books and graphic novels. At the start of my third year, I had never made anything as long as Dirt before. All my comics before were a couple of pages long at best, and I wanted to challenge myself to make something lengthier.

As a graphic novelist, what do you feel distinguishes the medium from other narrative forms? 

I think graphic novels are limitless. You can tackle pretty much any subject matter within a graphic novel, and in such a succinct and accessible way. It’s such a broad medium to work in, with so many different genres and potential audiences. I think Dirt could have only been presented as a graphic novel. It couldn’t have been a book or a film.

What is your process when it comes to creating a graphic novel? What comes first, the text or image, and how does the project take form?

They both come at the same time. I’ll draw a tiny little thumbnail of what I want the page to look like and then write a short script next to it. It’s then chopped and changed a lot of times to make the text compliment the image, and vice versa. I wrote the first 30 or so pages of Dirt back in my first year of university, and had a sketchbook full of these tiny thumbnails, and just shelved it for years! I only wanted to come back to it when I knew I had the time and the ability to tell the story the way I wanted it to be told.

Are you working on any other exciting projects that you can tell us about?

I’m working on a picture book about a city that gets shrunk down and relocated to inside a man’s head, which is as ridiculous as it sounds. I think after I graduate I would l like to make another long form graphic novel like Dirt. I’d love to make a story about working in retail or the service industry, and just take my worst experiences of working in those kind of jobs and draw them out. It’d be quite cathartic, I think. I have a big list back at my house stuck to the fridge of ideas I’d eventually like to make, hopefully I get through a fair chunk of it in the next couple of years!