Interviews

Managing Editor Ian Murphy talks to Oliver Smith about his new comic, Summer Ball , and the multiple LiveWire Comics Awards-nominated Hazy Thursday

LWW: What made you want to write a retrospective, end of school years book such as Summer Ball ?

OS: I always felt autobiography was the place for me. It's a lot easier to write because you've already got the characters there, fully formed, and with my sixth form – I went to a sixth form college – and it was two years that really changed the person I was after a chilly secondary school experience. When I went to sixth form it was my redemption and it made me a better person, I thought, in my mind.

I had this girlfriend for quite a long time and I had quite a bit of trouble getting over her and when I did get over her it just seemed like a very nice way to commemorate the memory and acknowledge that it was finished – a self-contained two years.

Summer Ball isn't going to be a stand-alone comic. Eventually there's going to be a prior issue to set out the story. You'll read it the first time and get a certain idea of what went on, and then you'll read the other comics and the stories splashed out and you'll understand the characters and the motivations a bit more so when you finally come back to it it's more heartbreaking – and because you know the end all the way through, you can see where it's all heading. That inevitably is what I'm aiming for – hence the reason it doesn't have so much of a story of itself.

Summer Ball stands on its own. My view on autobiography is you've got to create things people can relate to and I think everyone can relate to the end of an era feeling, the fact that you're moving on and you're not going to see most of these people again, the sense that it's over. You get more of the sense of that feeling because it stands alone.

There's one panel – the interior title page – with the five friends all suited

- The Reservoir Dog shot?

Yes, I was just going to say that it's very Reservoir Dogs . It's a great picture. How does that feed in to the relationships between the group of friends?

It's meant to sum them up. They're all put there quite deliberately. The guy in the middle, Cormac, he was always attempting to be the leader of the group and he never quite managed it, but that was always his role and we always let him play along to that. I was always the second-in-command, quite influential but knocked off my post a little. Those five people were the people who got me through that last bit. Ahmed – second from the left – he never turned up to anything so he was really far back, he was always late. The idea was to introduce it as a bit more of a romp, and the cracks start to show later on.

It takes us very quickly from the opening ‘fun on the bus' to telling us that there's something more serious going on here. Underneath all the gaity of the ball and the larks there's a serious story to tell.

The idea is that it's got the sense that it's the end and you can paper over it all you like but you've got this rift now and they're never gonna be … there's never going to be time to patch them up.

The two double pages – the initial one with the dancing, that's more childlike in a way, and the more violent one on the dodgems – were meant to be the two key emotional representations, so you get the innocence at the beginning, with the childlike drawing of the dancing, and the darker violence at the end.

With the dancing scene, you think of Charles Schultz and Peanuts

- That was the idea. It's not exactly a good page in my opinion

- I think it's charming!

That was the idea, trying to charm. I don't think it was technically skilled so much.

How important an influence on your work is film?

It's pretty important. The idea, eventually for me, is to try and move into TV. Comics is fair enough but ultimately I want to be writing my own TV series. I have a very visual style and most of my comics should make sense without any words. Film fascinates me and is quite a big influence; obviously there are meant to be a couple of homages – the Reservoir Dogs thing is one.

The idea with the panels is to control the pacing. There's the page where I do the mulling over, sitting the drink, and that's back-cut into the panel layout. I appreciate film a lot, film and TV. It's very interesting when you make something that other people read because when you look at a film you empathise with the writer of it. I appreciate what the writer's trying to do a lot more. I admire that – even with the most rubbish of films you can see that it's someones brainchild.

No-one deliberately sets out to make a bad film.

Equilibrium is a good example – it's a very average film, a rip-off of The Matrix and 1984 , but it was written and directed by one guy and you can see that it was the film that he wanted to make when he was 15 and it's a really quite boring film but you can respect that thought process and what he was trying to do.

And what someone wants to do as a creator when they're 15 … you hope it's a little different when they're 18, and 21 …

And [laughter] it didn't seem to happen with that guy.

… but that makes me think of the final pages of Summer Ball , and how at the end of it, you're on your own. You've had this evening with your friends, seen some of the old people again who maybe you've not seen quite so recently, and we end with you on your own, leaving …

The idea was the sense that I'd been overtaken. The relationship had ended a couple of months previously and the idea was that I got stuck there and everyone else was moving on, I wasn't going to uni, I was taking a gap year and I was kinda left behind. The idea was that I was watching everyone else who'd grown up … they'd overtaken me, they were all going off … Emma, the Emma who's going off in the sports car, I went out with her in a very innocent relationship very early on in the sixth form. It suddenly dawned on me that everyone had changed and I don't want to change; it's not that I haven't changed, because I have, but I didn't want to, I wanted it to be back in the heady days of the lower sixth.

The idea of the last page, then, is meant to be reminiscent of Hazy Thursday in the fact that everyone else is growing up and I'm still going home with my mom at the end of the day.

The whole back in the car, back on a journey is right back to Hazy Thursday . If you could just talk about that for a little: one of the things I loved about Hazy Thursday is that I could see it so easily as an animated short [exasperated gasp from Oli] with the same style of artwork.

I'm actually talking to people about bashing it out to make a short film – an half hour type piece - about it. There'll be very little changed. The narrator will be more of a 20 year old narrating back – I don't know if you've seen Gattika and how Ethan Hawke narrates over the top, but that kind of voice-over at the top and then the whole thing would be silent. But I was always envisioning location filming, very stark, grainy Sixties films, outside location filming like Doctor Who from ages ago. I thought that would be a lot more effective – although I can see the animation, and that's the first thing that everybody jumps to, I think that the contrast between the grittiness of the hand-held film style with the idealism and child-like innocence of the narrator and the actions … I think that contrasts pretty well and it makes it so obvious that you're trying to put this innocence and naivety onto a world that's never going to accept that. I talked to a producer about something and he was very positive about it. I've got a couple of friends who've made short movies and shown them around London and I'm approaching them, hesitantly, so anything's a long way away.

One of the things that works really well with your comics is your endings. I think a lot of people struggle to know how to end a story. Hazy Thursday has this brilliant … at first glance it can seem like it's been a miserable day of car crashes and disappointments and it ends with the child rushing in full of enthusiasm shouting ‘Dad, guess where we went today!' …

… but then there's the terrible downer of the revelation that there was a dad and he wasn't invited.

And even the result of the journey – ‘they weren't self-sufficient, they were just unemployed', the double ending that rounds everything off nicely. And the same with Summer Ball and its unexpectedly low-key ending, seeing the girlfriend moving off …

That had to be made clear at the end of Summer Ball . What I learned … the reason I made Summer Ball was that I learned that things have got to end and even if it's not with a bang, you've got to admit that they've ended, and I think that an anti-climax is as much as an end as anything else in real life.

And the innocent relationship from two years before has become a girl who's wanting fast girls and fast guys and that movement …

A maturity, but not necessarily in a desirable way

I think great endings are hard to find in comics, and you do them so well - do you find you start with your end point in mind when writing?

Yes, I usually start with the end point. Hazy Thursday ended like that because I had a photograph of that last panel and I could just see the caption and all of a sudden the whole story was there. With The Last Four Minutes … the last page of that, the ‘shouldn't we be having sex or something?' … I think that's probably one of my favourite endings. That was it, it was the whole basis of the story, that's why the rest of the comic is a slight, shallow thing that doesn't really capture anybody or anything, but the ending itself – I think if you just had the last page, I think that would work. I'm actually going to try and develop that last stage in a more substantial way at a later point.

It's usually the endings I start with. I'm constantly bombarded with comics that never seem to have a structure of a beginning, middle and end and even if they're ones that are part of a continuing series I don't think it's fair that there isn't a sense of fulfilment at the end of a comic, if there's not that finality it just doesn't work, you can't be left hanging. A cliffhanger's fine but it's still got to be self-contained.

The idea was always for me to do self-contained stories. Summer Ball is going to be part of a seven-part series, but we're talking years until they've all come out, but they'll be self-contained, stand-alone things. The next one will be called Julian's parties. He has house parties once a term, every term, all the way through sixth form. It starts with a gathering of five people, all the way up to thirty people and by the end back down to five people again, and the idea is that all the comic will be is each one of those parties, one after another, and you'll see the progression of the party story and the progression of the relationships. I'd never want to make a comic that did not stand alone, on its own merits.

Your artwork – there's been considerable development from Hazy Thursday through to Summer Ball . How would you sum up that change?

The change is more practical. With Hazy Thursday I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I had a much bigger comic in mind and this was something to get out and sell. I did it with the cheapest materials available – a brush, a pot, some waterproof ink and a dip pen, that was it. I did that and everyone liked it and that was fine but I always thought that my art style wasn't keeping up with what I wanted to convey. I think that I'm a better writer than artist, by far, and I'm irritated and frustrated that my art can't keep up with my writing. The idea with The Last Four Minutes is to do something … a very professional art style, it was very simple and very light. It didn't really work. It's a lot more sophisticated, technically, but it didn't have the character, that's what I think it lost. It was more of a ‘I can do! Ha! Amazing!' and I was quite disappointed with that.

Summer Ball was meant to be … everyone loved the dark moodiness of Hazy Thursday and I realise now what it is … it's expressive and it was my personality and I realised I should give up trying to drawing like … someone else and just carry on with this moody dark thing that everybody liked. The idea then was to take the moody inkiness of Hazy Thursday and combine the art skills that I'd learned in the meantime and put it together, and present it professionally to show that it was more commercially viable. Hazy Thursday is great … I was told by a friend of mine, Jim Mortimer, that the best thing about it was that it couldn't be done in a better way, because you needed the creamy small press stapled paper and the patchy inkwork, it went with the personality and the cut out stuck on lettering, and that made it a package and an atmosphere that … if you made the pages glossier or you tidied up the inkwork, it just wouldn't have worked.

With Summer Ball I was trying to do something reminiscent of that, but more sophisticated, something that could be done in a glossy way. In terms of the storyline I was going to have speech bubbles but I had great trouble placing those so what I ended up doing was what looked like the cut out, Pritt-stick on lettering of Hazy Thursday , but done in a more stylish way. It's a more stylish, more commercial Hazy Thursday and that reflected the sophistication of me being a teenager rather than a five year old child.

I'm glad you didn't go with the speech bubbles because I think that when you're at a party there's noise all over, you're not quite hearing properly, you're hearing something but you're not entirely sure whose mouth it's coming from and it gives that sense of the ‘busyness' – people talking everywhere, and sometimes you hear this bit of a conversation and that bit, but you don't hear the whole thing …

… Page45 [A UK comics store which declined to stock Summer Ball ] would disagree with me but I thought it didn't matter if you didn't know who was speaking.

Definitely

… In the key scenes, you do know who's speaking, but in the other scenes, it doesn't matter. It could be anybody, it's about atmosphere, it was always about the atmosphere.

 

 

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Archived Interviews:
4th Mar 2007: Craig Kyle Part 3
4th Mar 2007: Craig Kyle Part 2
4th Mar 2007: Craig Kyle Part 1
10th Feb 2007: Peter David Part 2
10th Feb 2007: Peter David Part 1
31st Jan 2007: Ed Brubaker Part 3
31st Jan 2007: Ed Brubaker Part 2
31st Jan 2007: Ed Brubaker Part 1
22 Jan 2007: Mike Carey Part 1
22 Jan 2007: Mike Carey Part 2.