Thom Ferrier Interview

Next up to sub­mit to scru­tiny is med­ical com­ics cre­ator Thom Ferrier;

Can you intro­duce your­self? What is your background?

My name is Thom Fer­rier. At least, that is the name I use when mak­ing com­ics. I ini­tially trained in medi­cine and have worked for 20 years as a doc­tor in the NHS. Now I make com­ics, do a bit of illus­tra­tion and I write and talk about com­ics’ rela­tion­ship to medi­cine, hav­ing pack­ing in the ‘day job’ (for the time being, at least) about 10 months ago.

I was always ‘artist­ic­ally inclined’ and after I qual­i­fied in medi­cine I star­ted to paint like crazy. I was exhib­it­ing and selling my work before I really knew what I was doing, so then a few years later I went back to col­lege to do some part time post­grad stud­ies in fine art and get some crit­ical feed­back. One of my tutors in Chester was a print­maker and he intro­duced me to the joys of intaglio. I was work­ing part time in medi­cine and pro­du­cing paint­ings and prints the rest of the time, but felt the need to find some way of bring­ing these two sides of my work together.

To this end, I enrolled on an MA in the rel­at­ively new dis­cip­line of Med­ical Human­it­ies at Swansea Uni­ver­sity. Med­ical Human­it­ies is about examin­ing the dis­course of Medi­cine using the con­cep­tual tools of the arts and human­it­ies, it is not about art ther­apy, ‘human­iz­ing’ med­ical pro­fes­sion­als or hanging nice paint­ings on hos­pital walls. When I star­ted the MA I thought I would end up study­ing ‘med­ical’ art for my dis­ser­ta­tion, but find­ing ‘Mom’s Can­cer’ by Brian Fies in the book­shop of Tate Mod­ern gave me the idea of look­ing at ‘med­ical’ stor­ies in comics.

What drew you to comics?

I was into com­ics when I was younger, of course. After Beano and Shiver and Shake it was Action, Drac­ula Lives! and 2000AD. I still kick myself when I think that I sold issues #2 to #50-odd of 2000AD to someone at school for 5 pence each (this was a long time ago, mind). As a rel­at­ively clean liv­ing teen­ager grow­ing up in north­ern Eng­land, my friends and I were addicted to the tales of drugs and sex found in the work of under­ground artists such as Gil­bert Shelton.

Then of course Viz came along, just as I was going to uni­ver­sity. I found some­thing in all these works: a world into which I could escape or some com­ment­ary on our life and times that chimed with my own world­view. I guess I stopped read­ing com­ics for a while, but gradu­ally became aware of these new-fangled ‘graphic nov­els’. I read Maus and was staggered by the genius of the work. For my MA dis­ser­ta­tion I tried to find every com­ics work I could that ‘said some­thing’ about medi­cine. It took me ages because I kept find­ing more and more of them and in my book just about everything can be rel­ev­ant to medi­cine in some way. Instead of get­ting down to writ­ing the dis­ser­ta­tion, I set up a web­site which I named ‘Graphic Medi­cine’ to review each book as I wrote it. Of course I thought I was pretty clever– I didn’t think other people would be look­ing in this area, but as soon as I launched the site, oth­ers star­ted to con­tact me to say they were inter­ested in com­ics and medi­cine too.

The term ‘Graphic Medi­cine’ caught on and now the phrase I coined is being used to refer to this area of study. Last year the Brit­ish Med­ical Journal used it on its cover! With two other schol­ars I set up the first con­fer­ence on Com­ics and Medi­cine in Lon­don last year which went very well and we are set­ting up a fol­low up con­fer­ence in Chicago next year with MK Czer­wiec, aka ‘Comic Nurse’ tak­ing the lead.

I do all this under my real name, by the way, which is Ian Wil­li­ams. When I got back into com­ics in a big way, being a typ­ical medic with a ‘see one, do one, teach one’ sort of men­tal­ity, I thought ‘I should draw some com­ics’ so I did. At first I drew short auto­bi­o­graph­ical strips about the frus­tra­tions of the job, then slightly silly ones– like won­der­ing what would hap­pen if a patient went to see a doc­tor who had quietly gone psychotic without any­one real­iz­ing. Then I star­ted doing some more auto­bi­o­graph­ical work about my own foibles and neur­oticism. There is a lot left to mine in that vein.

Who do you count as your influences?

Chris Ware, undoubt­ably, and Daniel Clowes, Ivan Bru­netti, Gil­bert Hernan­dez, Phoebe Gloeck­ner, Justin Green. I grate­fully embrace James Kochalka’s dictum that your draw­ing doesn’t have to be per­fect before you make some­thing, in fact that is the basis on which I work– hope­fully improv­ing as I go.

Can you describe your work­ing process?

I gen­er­ally pen­cil first on A3 Bris­tol board, then ink it with indian ink. I’m now try­ing acrylic ink and I think I prefer it. I used to use pens for all lines, but now I’m try­ing to do most things with a brush in the hope that my tech­nique will improve. Then I scan it as a hi-res bit­map image (in two halves on an A4 scan­ner) and tidy up the image in pho­toshop using a wacom tab­let. Some­times I’ll leave out the paper and ink and just draw with the tab­let, but most of the time I like to keep things at least a little bit ‘tra­di­tional’. Then I will gen­er­ally con­vert the image to grey­scale at 400dpi and flat it or render it with hatch­ing on the com­puter. For digital col­our­ing I found a great set of pho­toshop scripts that came with a book called ‘Hi-Fi Color for com­ics’ by Brian and Kirsty Miller which I would def­in­itely recommend.

I put all my work online, but I also self pub­lish in print. I like to do a bit of simple book­bind­ing so my comic ‘Dis­rep­ute’ is hand stitched in between grey board and made to look like a set of patient’s notes. I make hand made mini-comics too. I had ‘Fear of Fail­ure’ prin­ted commercially.

What does your workspace/studio look like?

A mess, like most peoples’ work­space, I’m sure. I’m lucky in that I do have space, but it is mostly filled up with large paint­ings or junk and all sur­faces are piled up with stuff I’m work­ing on, or have aban­doned, or should be work­ing on, or have lost in the clut­ter. It is bad, truly. I have a couple of paint spattered com­puters that I don’t use any more, and I have an i-mac which is my sole work­ing com­puter, in a sep­ar­ate room which, at this time of year, is freez­ing. We live out in the sticks– In the hills of North Wales, so If I look out of the win­dow, I’ve got an amaz­ing view. A lot of the time, how­ever, I’m star­ing at a screen.

What are you work­ing on at the moment?

I’m work­ing on the second issue of my soap-opera style series ‘Fear of Fail­ure’ which is about a female, 40-something G.P. work­ing in a small South Wales mar­ket town. She is a feisty anti-hero called Dr Lois Pritchard. I made the main char­ac­ter female because I didn’t want it to look too auto­bi­o­graph­ical, and because I didn’t think it would be dif­fi­cult to write from a female per­spect­ive– I don’t see too many dif­fer­ences between the sexes. I have how­ever, been ques­tioned about why I made her a woman and why I made her attract­ive… I’ve also had people tell me they have ‘fallen in love’ with the char­ac­ter, which is a pretty good res­ult, and Maur­een Bur­dock, who has sound fem­in­ist cre­den­tials, told me she loved Fear of Fail­ure, so I may be doing some­thing right. I’m also doing other short strips as and when I feel like it. It is all on my web­site: www.thomferrier.com

What are your ambi­tions for the future?

I’d like to get bet­ter, for a start. I’ve been paint­ing and print­mak­ing for years, but it is all abstract and I haven’t really put in the time draw­ing. Now I am draw­ing reg­u­larly I see things improv­ing all the time and am rather embar­rassed by some of the dodgy draw­ing I’ve put out there.

Of course I’d like a pub­lisher to pick up my work. I intend to make sev­eral volumes of Fear of Fail­ure and nat­ur­ally I’d like to see them col­lec­ted. I’ve prin­ted up the first volume and so its avail­able as a floppy. I’m prob­ably going to do some more auto­bi­o­graph­ical work too. I have so far ten­ded to avoid too much in the way of auto­bi­o­graphy as there seemed to be ‘a lot of it about’, but I’ve had a var­ied and ‘inter­est­ing’ life so far, so I feel I’ve got a tale of rampant neur­osis and med­ical may­hem within me that needs to get out. I’m not under the delu­sion that I am in a pos­i­tion to make a liv­ing from com­ics, so I have been doing a bit of teach­ing, writ­ing and work­shop­ping and have also had a few illus­tra­tion com­mis­sions, so I am hop­ing to be able to form some sort of port­fo­lio career around com­ics and Med­ical Human­it­ies, as I’m not in a rush to go back to med­ical practice.

What advice would you give to an aspir­ing ama­teur cartoonist?

I’m not sure I’m quite out of that bracket but, pre­tend­ing for one moment that I am, and have been given the plat­form to bestow sage advice I’d say:

“As long as you don’t expect to make a single bean out of it and are pre­pared to put up with know­ing that how­ever hard you try there are still going to be so, so many people whose work is effort­lessly cooler and super­ior to your own, you should read James Kochalka’s ‘Cute Mani­festo’ and just go for it. And try and be hon­est and not pull too many punches. And thor­oughly digest Ivan Brunetti’s ‘Car­toon­ing– Philo­sophy and Prac­tice’ and always carry it around with you.”

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

I can’t really say I have much to com­pare it to, being a rel­at­ive new­bie, at least in the ‘mak­ing com­ics’ scene, but it seems pretty damn healthy to me, and there seems to be a feel­ing that com­ics are on the up again which means that, at least before the next bust, we might be see­ing the start of a boom.

Where is the best place to buy your work?

From me in per­son, or on my web­site www.thomferrier.com (I take paypal).

Orbital Com­ics in Lon­don have some cop­ies of Fear of Fail­ure and I’m just send­ing some to OK Com­ics in Leeds. (I would be very pleased to sup­ply them to other out­lets too) My web­site about med­ical nar­rat­ive and com­ics is www.graphicmedicine.org

Thanks Thom! Click some links, buy some com­ics and fol­low Thom on Twitter.