Darryl Cunningham Interview

Next up to be inter­viewed is Darryl Cun­ning­ham. Darryl really shouldn’t need any intro­duc­tion what­so­ever. Drop whatever else it is that you are doing and pay Darryl your undi­vided rapt attention.

1 / Can you intro­duce yourself?

I’m an artist/writer of comic strips. I’ve been involved on and off with the UK small press comic scene since the late 1980s. I have a back­ground work­ing in men­tal health. I star­ted my train­ing to be a men­tal health nurse, but had to leave the course, because I began to suf­fer from my own men­tal health issues (depression/anxiety). My graphic novel Psy­chi­at­ric Tales is based on my exper­i­ences both work­ing as a carer, and as a suf­ferer. Psy­chi­at­ric Tales was pub­lished in the UK by Blank Slate this year, and will be out in the US and Canada in Feb­ru­ary 2011 from Blooms­bury. There will also be an Italian edi­tion of the book out in the Sum­mer from Coconino Press.

2 / What drew you to comics?

Read­ing a comic feels very like dream­ing to me. The com­bin­a­tion of words and pic­tures can be extremely power­ful. Often by the time you’ve decided not to read a comic, you’ve read half of it. The medium creeps in under the radar, in an invis­ible, effort­less way. It is a per­fect way to tell stor­ies and to get com­plex ideas across. I’ve always loved draw­ing, so using that skill in order to tell stor­ies came very nat­ural to me. When I look back at my fail­ure to be a men­tal health nurse, I see now that part of the prob­lem lay in the fact that I wasn’t doing any­thing cre­at­ive. To not do the thing you feel you’re good at and enjoy doing, whatever that may be, can be injur­i­ous to a person’s men­tal health. It’s noth­ing mys­tical. I had a tal­ent I wasn’t using and this made me feel bad about myself, when I knew I could have done so much more.

3 / Who do you count as your influences?

Early influ­ences include Beano/Dandy, and then later Marvel/DC. I’m influ­enced by both the power­house widescreen dynam­ism of Jack Kirby and the intim­ate scratchy con­fes­sional strips of Eddy Camp­bell, and everything inbetween. I’m at the older end of the group of people cur­rently work­ing in the UK comic book scene, so I’m no longer able to say with much cer­tainty what is influ­en­cing me, as I’ve read, seen, exper­i­enced, so much in my 50 years on this planet.

4 / Can you describe your work­ing process?

The writ­ing comes first. I’ll often write the text/dialogue out in a note­book in order to get an idea of how many pages it’ll cover. Then I’ll draw up the pages in pen­cil on an A4 sheet of paper. This done, I’ll ink and then scan these pages into pho­toshop, where the col­our work is added. My let­ter­ing is actu­ally a com­puter font made from my own hand­writ­ing. This is an excel­lent way of get­ting consistent-looking let­ter­ing. There’s plenty of web-based font gen­er­at­ors online that you can use to do this, like yourfonts.com. Clar­ity is everything where com­ics are con­cerned, and this is espe­cially true online. The easier it is for people to read your work, the bet­ter. If you make read­ing your comic hard, then folk will just click away to some­where else.

5 / What does your workspace/studio look like?

Noth­ing very inspir­ing. A desk in a bed­room, but this bed­room has a great view. It looks out down the val­ley towards the town, with Haworth on one side and Ilkley Moor on the other. Most days I can see steam trains on the pre­served rail­way chug­ging up to Haworth and Oxen­hope. It’s the line on which the Jenny Agut­ter ver­sion of The Rail­way Chil­dren was shot. Sadly, when I look out of the win­dow, I can’t see Jenny Agutter.

6 / What are you work­ing on at the moment?

I’m work­ing on my next book for Blank Slate, Uncle Bob Adven­tures. This is an all ages book in which Uncle Bob, a 150 year old man, tells his two great, great, great nieces, tales of his extraordin­ary life. There’s a jungle tale, a West­ern, a Vic­torian crime story, and so on. One tale tells of his adven­ture at the Earth’s Core, while another explains how he met the Franken­stein mon­ster. All this and lots, lots, more.

7 / What are your ambi­tions for the future?

At the moment, I’m still work­ing in health care in order to make ends meet, doing occa­sional agency work at a local old people’s home. What I want is to gain enough of an inter­na­tional pro­file so that I can write com­ics for a liv­ing. I’m slowly get­ting there. I’m already at a point where I don’t really have to go to pub­lish­ers any­more. They come to me. You may say, what a lucky sod, and per­haps that’s true, but I’ve spent thirty years graft­ing away under the poverty line. It’s about bleed­ing time, frankly!

8 / What advice would you give to an aspir­ing ama­teur cartoonist?

Draw every day. Draw blue whales, moun­tains, fridges, frogs, astro­nauts, deep sea divers, doorknobs, and any­thing and everything. It’ll all come in handy. Use Google images for ref­er­ence. Draw strips on sub­jects that interest you. Make sure people other than just comic book folk see your work. We need to pitch to the wider world.

9 / What do you think of the health of the UK com­ics scene at the moment, and what do you think it can do better?

It’s a healthy scene. There’s a pos­it­ive buzz around, des­pite the eco­nomic dif­fi­culties we’re in. It’s much easier now to get interest from media and pub­lish­ers than it was even a few years ago. Very quietly, a gen­er­a­tional change has taken place in big pub­lish­ing. The editor I work with at Blooms­bury US, who runs the graphic novel side there, told me that she’d got inter­ested in com­ics when younger after read­ing Neil Gaiman’s Sand­man and other DC/Vertigo titles. This told me that there’d been a huge shift, because not that long ago, you’d have been hard pressed to find any­one in pub­lish­ing who’d read a comic book. Younger people have come into both pub­lish­ing and the media, who are much more aware of the pos­sib­il­it­ies of the comic book form, than the older gen­er­a­tion who came before them. This is a genu­ine last­ing change, I think, that isn’t going to fade away. The UK small press scene needs to take advant­age of this. We need to have a big­ger pro­file inter­na­tion­ally than we do now. Are people in other coun­tries even aware we have such a vibrant scene in the UK? I don’t think they are and we have to fix that.

10 / Where is the best place to buy your work?

You can buy my work from For­bid­den Planet, Gosh Com­ics, Page 45 in Not­ting­ham, dir­ect from Blank Slate, or Amazon if you must. There’s a ton of stuff avail­able to read free online at my blog. Why not go there now?

Thanks Darryl! You cer­tainly should go and have a look at Darryl’s site — there is lots and lots for you to read. Go now! Just like every­one else, Darryl is on Twit­ter. Go and say hello!