Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1179886
THIS WEEK BOOKS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 OCTOBER 2019 4 From intense and emotionally wrenching literary adaptations to sights of mind-bending horror, British comic book artist Mark Stafford has created some memorably twisted visuals over the years, all marked by a distinctive trademark style. He speaks to TEODOR RELJIC ahead of his visit to this year's edition of Malta Comic Con Teodor Reljic 'Nothing pans out the way It's always interesting to hear about how artists find their way to their careers. What was your trajectory as an illustrator, and did things always pan out the way you'd planned them (ha!)? I always drew, and I always wanted to draw cartoons from as far back as I can remember, but it took an embarrassing amount of time to figure out what I was doing and how to put a page together. After I moved to London from Bournemouth I spent years on the dole hang- ing out with other cartoonists, largely in pubs, slowly meet- ing people and learning things, getting work into small press anthologies and doing only the occasional piece of actual pay- ing work. Eventually [renowned British comic book creator] Bryan Talbot chose me to work on the 2007 comic Cherubs!, and things began to take shape and I got a bit more professional from there. In my experience nothing pans out the way you'd expect. For better or worse. The 'big break' earns you nothing and gets no reaction, dumb little sketchbook doodles and chance conversations evolve into great books. Cartooning can take you to some strange places, if you let it. You're best off just saying 'yes' to the projects that feel right, even if they seem daunting at first, and hoping it all makes sense in the end, though my bank balance might testify as to the wisdom of this philosophy. Comic books have always been a hybrid genre/format whose reputation in the wider culture tends to vary from country to country and ebb and flow with time. How do you feel to be working in comics at this point in time, and from your current geo- cultural, geo-political standpoint? It's the best of times, it's the worst of times, as always. I'm grateful to be around when so much great work is being put out by so many fabulous creators, the British scene feels buzzy and fertile right now, and there are good publishers putting out good work, but it's hellishly difficult to earn a living from comics, and the platforms that would allow a cartoonist to get widely known in the past are fewer and further between. The cultural domination of super- heroes is as much a curse as it is a blessing, as far as I can tell, repelling as many as it attracts. And, of course, the current po- litical mess isn't helping either, a cloud of uncertainty hangs over everything. Generally speaking, artists, writers and performers like to be connected with the wide world beyond our shores, because that's where the audi- ence is, so our current state of deranged grumpy insularity isn't a good look. I'm being po- lite and restrained here.... The Man Who Laughs, an adaptation of the classic Victor Hugo novel and one of your many collaborations with writer David Hine (a former guest at Malta Comic Con) is very much a perfectly sustained piece of work – melodramatic in all the right ways and richly layered both narratively and visually. What was the process of putting together such a carefully conceived piece of work like, and what excited you the most about such an endeavour? David got me excited about it, describing scenes he loved from the novel, in one of those pub conversations that turned into a couple of years work. He also did a fantastic job of fillet- ing Hugo's novel to bring out the actual story, free from the journalism and ranting and philosophical flights of fancy that make up much of the book, all the while trying to retain that voice. Comics is a 'show, don't tell' medium, and Hugo was clearly quite happy doing a lot of telling and a little showing when he felt like it, so there was a lot to consider and research and rethink. He sent the script chapter by chapter, I sent him sketchbook ideas and pencils and there was a lot of discus- sion. We wanted to include all that incredible tortured roman- tic imagery and we needed the melodrama to work as melodra- ma, but the political anger had to shine through it all. Hugo was as enraged by the 99% and the 1% as we are today. Enraged, as much that so little has changed since the era he described. But it "The cultural domination of superhero comics is as much a curse as it is a blessing" Mark Stafford