If the role of art is renewal, revelation in the meeting point between artist and reader, then the abstract comics of Gareth A. Hopkins are art in excelsis. I don't remember when I first encountered Hopkins' work, and perhaps that's appropriate; his work has a spiritual, extratemporal air to it, while still feeling profoundly current. Such contradictory dualities often converge in his work: distancing versus vulnerability, the elusive versus the specific, the transcendent and the earthly. The impact is consistently explosive, and above all else a pleasure to read. Starting in late December of 2023 and lasting into March, I had the pleasure of chatting with Hopkins at length over email; we spoke about the meaning and role of the abstract comic, and—perhaps more than anything—about Hopkins' expectations of himself. This conversation has been edited for flow.
-Hagai Palevsky
HAGAI PALEVSKY: I’ll start with a confession, which is that typically I start my interviews with some variation on “What was your introduction into comics?” because, if nothing else, it allows for some assumption of lineage, a cause-and-effect between this so-called first impact and the subsequent, consequent present day. This sort of framing is challenged somewhat by your art, but I'd still love to hear about your artistic background.
GARETH A. HOPKINS: My artistic background is a bit wobbly, maybe. I always loved art, although my ambition always outstripped my ability, especially as a kid. And more often than not nobody else had any idea of what I was trying to achieve anyway. I did ok at A-level art, but once I left school I didn't really do much at all until I was in full-time work at a supermarket and just sort of happened into filling A2 sheets of paper with black fine-line pens when watching TV. That was back in 2004ish, and I was eager to share what I was doing, with DeviantArt being where I spent a lot of my time. The stuff I was making quickly shrank down from A2 into A4 and A5 because it was easier to digitize for sharing, and also quicker to get finished - I learned loads from being part of a pretty tight-knit DeviantArt community, including that I craved constant feedback and attention online.
For a little while I genuinely thought I was the only person in the world making abstract comics—this was around 2008, 2009ish—and then I found out that Fantagraphics had put out an anthology literally called Abstract Comics [2009], pulled together by Andrei Molotiu. So I fell in with the contributors to the blog that had sprung up around the book, and continued making pages for The Intercorstal with no real goal. Along the way I started using The Intercorstal to redraw comic pages that I liked, and that eventually spun off into doing a full comic, The Intercorstal: 683, which came out [self-published] in 2016. Along the way I did some illustration short courses at Central Saint Martins [a constituent college of the University of the Arts London], a mass of fashion illustration, and a handful of group art shows.
Were you interested in making literalist/representational comics, or did you inadvertently dive straight into the more abstract realm?
Straight into the abstract, and not really inadvertently either. When I started The Intercorstal the things I was really into were Surrealist and Dada art (as well as modern art more generally), and the music label anticon., none of which were that fussed about literalism, and they were who I was taking my cues from. In particular, I was obsessed with the band Subtle, whose albums were an abstract story of a guy being kidnapped into an almost-place to make pop music, and it was that kind of thing that I wanted The Intercorstal to be doing. There was a loose story of an alien drinking out of a hallucinogenic pond and getting caught in an abstract place which hid just behind the corners of perception, and he was trying to escape while being buffeted by concepts. I got bored of that 20 or so pages in, though, at which point I focused more on the look and feel of the pages, and how the panels related to each other visually, rather than worrying about ever telling a story.
Did the Molotiu anthology and blog, and the awareness of a broader movement of abstract and non-literal comics, lead to any change in or better understanding of your own work at the time?
Finding out about that book and the community that had grown around it initially made me feel less special. Until then I thought I was this magical underground genius making medium-shattering work with my twiddly little hidden monsters and 'horsehooks' and 'eyestrips' and all the stuff that I was using. Very quickly I realised that I was both unjustifiably arrogant and wildly ignorant, and that realization quickly brought into focus that (1) my work was, ok, not good, and (2) I needed to get some credibility if I was going to hang around there.
I still feel really lucky to have been allowed to grow there - the conversations happening between the bloggers were so literate and well-considered, it reformatted the way I thought about comics. Like, I would have been even later to Ditko had it not been for the various articles about his underdrawing and highlighting his composition decisions. But as well as all of the formal lessons I picked up there—I mean, a lot of the discussions are very academic, and I think for some of the posters there, particularly Andrei, it was an extension of their academic work—I also got to know James "Mayhem" Mahan really well, and his impassioned, primal approach to comics was really important to me too. In general, I think it would be impossible for me to be creating the way I do now without having been part of it in even the small way that I was. I'm still a bit gutted I missed the chance to be in the book, though.
You mentioned working in fashion illustration, which I'd love to hear more about - at least on its face, that sort of work sounds rather contradictory to your usual art, in that fashion serves a function that fundamentally requires literalism. What was your experience working within that field?
I've just looked back through my old blog—the internet may be impermanent but Blogspot is forever—and I did a bunch of illustration for Amelia's Magazine starting in 2010 all the way up to 2014, it looks like. I did a couple of bits and pieces for other places, but it was mostly Amelia's. I got involved just because I was looking for ways to do more illustration work, and had done a short course at Central Saint Martins where the course leader had said that Amelia's Magazine was a great place to look at the cutting edge of illustration, or something along those lines.
In the end I stopped doing it because my style was diverging away from what Amelia needed - it was either a bit too mad or a bit too dark, and it was around that time my comics work got really referential and analytic, so it's no surprise really. But where I'm drifting back into color now, I think there's a definite link back to all the stuff I was doing back there [from his fashion illustration], and I think in some cases it might be easier to match parts of Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors [self-published anthology, 2023] to the illustration work I was doing at that time than the comics I was making alongside them.
I have my own broad theory about this, but I’d love to hear what the phrase “abstract comic” means to you - which is to say, what the appeal and significance is in the balance of art that is, on its face, traditionally sequential, yet not immediately legible in that same traditional sense we come to expect.
I think there's two questions here worth answering separately - they've both got deceptively simple answers which can be spun away from for hours if you let yourself.
The first is what the phrase “abstract comic” means to me, and to me it means any comic where there's no meaning in the visual aspects of the page. I'm trying to be careful when I say “visual” here, because everything in a comic can be considered visual if you want it to, like specific choices of words, and lettering, and even bleeds if you want to get really into it, but what I mean is the bits that get drawn and/or painted.
It's a deeply personal distinction - if you were to do some kind of experiment with people involved in abstract comics where you gave them 100 different pages and asked them to categorize each one by whether it's “an abstract comic” or not, I reckon each set of piles would be different. But the edge cases are where you find distinction, which is what makes it fun. To use the most relatable example I can think of, John Byrne's pretty infamous all-white pages from Alpha Flight #6 aren't abstract comics, despite the fact they've got no drawing, because there's meaning in the blankness - it's representing the blinding quantities of snow, and certain psychological aspects related to being lost within it. Whereas if the artwork for those pages had been presented without that narrative, that the artwork is just the panel layout and the effect that the absence of drawing has on its own merits, it would or could be considered an abstract comic.
The second question is “What's the appeal of abstract comics?” and I can only answer personally with the frankly unacceptable “It's just what I feel like making.”
I suppose that's a fair enough reason.
Why I've made abstract comics shifts project by project. As I've said, I started making them by accident, convinced I was reinventing the medium. I should also say here that when I was doing that I was a massive bellend who wasn't even reading comics at the time. When I moved into the practice of redrawing comics, it was from a slightly academic perspective, pulling them apart to figure out how they worked, and putting the pieces back together to see if they still did.
And after that it's been mostly instinct, I think, albeit trying different approaches for that instinct to exist within. Found Forest Floor [7tNbjV, 2017] was about speed as much as it was about anything else; the art for Petrichor [Good Comics, 2019] came from iterating on the same 16 pages over and over, trying to see how I could make them distinct whilst still holding an echo; Between Teeth, one of the projects I'm working on now, is me figuring out how to make something feel creepy and claustrophobic without any linework, just shade and panel placement... I could go on and on, each project has its own set of self-imposed rules to encourage the outcome I want.
'Feel' is vital to the comics I make. To the audience, the finished comic should be understandable from an emotional perspective, even if they can't quite put their finger on what that emotion is or how it's been delivered. Without figurative imagery, what you've got to work with is everything else, and I mean that both as a creator and as a reader. Like, if a whole page is hues of purple, but there's a small solid acid green panel set away from the edge of the right-hand corner, how does that feel?
I like this, because I feel like the word abstract has been rather diluted by the general discourse into "anything that isn't immediately recognizable." But the Byrne example is a great one, that leads me into my take on it, being that the divergence into the abstract is the point where the onus for logic in the given work is placed mostly upon the reader, or viewer, or however you choose to call the person on the receiving end. It's a gnostic pursuit, almost, that fundamentally relies on impact; with Byrne, sure, the concept is a clever novelty, but it is telegraphed in a way that makes it obvious. As opposed to a work like Petrichor, where the reader is confronted with pieces that evoke something inarticulable and then tell you "Well, go on. Articulate it. Find your own why."
As a side note, as a comics creator whose audience is comic fans, I'm hyper-conscious of perceived association in my work when I don't want it there. Like in my previous example, I've mentioned purple and green together and to a lot of comic readers that association is going to mean the Joker, in the same way that blue and red might mean Spider-Man or blue and grey might mean Batman, etc. Because I'm so aware of those associations, if I notice them, I'll actively break them. In this specific instance, and also in a wider context, the page needs to be absent of any meaning other than the instinctual read that comes from the tone and flow of the page. Like, pareidolia often means I can see faces in my work where I don't want them to be, so I often have to rework artwork to get rid of them.
That's interesting, because by becoming aware of these elements and actively reworking them, you are simultaneously encouraging and rejecting a deeper read. Like you're saying, "I want this piece to be impactful to you, the reader, but I also want you to look deeper for that impact than just that immediate connotation."
I think it would be nice if I could convince myself that I'm actively inviting it... but I think I'm probably doing the opposite. The page needs to become something that the reader feels instinctively, rather than finds meaning inside of - I don't want to create work for the reader, I'd rather they just felt their way around it. Having said that, if someone enjoys the experience of picking out shapes and reading into them, that's awesome too.
I'm not a musician, but... right, ok. I'm trying not to sound preposterous here, so you'll have to bear with me, even though I don't know how to elaborate on the point I'm trying to make.... But, for the most part, I try to make the visual elements of my comics work like the instrumentation elements of a song. So the reader should know what the visuals make them feel, but not necessarily why or how they're feeling that way. And then when I write to those visuals, I treat it kind of like lyrics, which either work with the tone and feel of the page, or intentionally opposite to it. This extends [outwards] in Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors with how I sequenced the stories in the book - I was thinking of them all as songs, and putting them into the 'listening' order that made the most sense.
Having said that, I don't invite interpretation of the visuals... I sometimes do include recognizable/interpretable elements on purpose, or don't excise the ones that appear by accident. There are panels in "Not this House" [a story in Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors], which is about a ghost and the house it lives in, which look like caves to me, and they always have. The text of the story has absolutely nothing to do with caves, but the feelings associated with going into a cave—the uncertainty, and loneliness, and the sense of trespass—are all feelings that harmonized with the themes I was writing to, so I left them in.
And then sometimes I'll intentionally bury images by making them abstract. In "SPiDER" [Hopkins' contribution to the UK anthology DUI (Drawn Under The Influence)] for instance, which is about a lonely man in a bath, the last page is an image of a face superimposed onto an image of a bath, and then heavily worked over to hide their presence. So the images are there, intentionally, but subliminally. But that's relatively rare.
You mentioned the sequencing in Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors, and that made me think of the way you laid out the companion minicomic, Pyramid Studies, which I found really interesting. You have several pieces in there that are very clearly discrete, but you weave them in and out of one another. They're not a collection of separate pieces, like Razors; you go back and forth between them. Obviously in more figurative/literal works this could be viewed as parallel plotlines, but, this being an abstract work, you create a reliance on different rhythmic bases and palettes as distinguishing mechanisms. I'd love to hear about that choice.
Over the course of making Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors I had a bunch of ideas for comics that didn't fully develop, or weren't long enough to work within the rhythm of the rest of the book, but I still really liked, and they're what went into Pyramid Studies. Also, they're the stuff that's easy to explain, but also hard to explain: "Bullwise" is a comic about a bull on a UFO; "Eating Itself" is summaries of actual dreams I've had formally butted into a distressed, overworked set of pages; "Broken Windows" tries to describe the sadness I always feel during the winter; and so on.
So I made Pyramid Studies to use up all the little bits and pieces I still had floating around after the main book had been sequenced, whilst also working as a companion to Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors. When I sequenced Pyramid Studies, at first it was like an anthology, with sets of pages discretely lined up one after another, but it wasn't a fun thing to read through. Too many descriptions of dreams, page after a page, got dull quickly, the sadness and light oppression of "Broken Windows" was too heavy... so I broke the comics up and then spread them out so that the comic flowed much easier. A couple of bits stayed together because they made more sense like that, and.... It's really hard to explain in a way that makes sense. But I felt my way through sequencing it, comparing light and shade and fast and slow...
I think you did a good job with the flow. You make a good point about dullness through repetition, in particular; a few months ago I was reading a self-published book by a different cartoonist, collecting a few zines, and one of the zines was made up of a fixed structure of two-page vignettes, all with the same format, and the first thing I told them was, "This comes together well as its own piece, but when it is surrounded by other pieces the impact is different, and the formal repetition just dilutes it because over time the reader is going to want to move onto the next piece."
Even to me now, it's elusive as to how I pulled it together. It all came together really quickly, though. And I think some of it was created to make sure it flowed properly - the text descriptions of the dreams weren't going to go in until I decided I needed a way to slow the reader down at set points so they could better feel the intended pace of other pages. My daughter gave me advice on the running order too, swapping pages of "Body Farm" for each other based on what felt right, things like that.
There are some juxtapositions that surprised me, that I wasn't aware of until I was reading the print version. The page with that ends with the line "Space defined by absence" is a callback to the story "Moon Puke" [in Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors] but it comes directly after a dream about my grandmother, which adds tone and meaning to the dream, but also helps to contextualize "Moon Puke," and understand its main character, in a way that I'd not intuited before.
I should also say that re-reading Pyramid Studies just now reminds me of how much of a debt I owe to Chöku Dawa (credited as Erik Blagsvedt) - it was his writing for our previous collaborations that gave me the title Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors as well as actual words in some of the stories, and it helped shape my writing voice too.
What I’m also interested in is the matter of the “original” [physical] piece. Often in discussion of abstract art there is something of an emphasis on the source and its physicality. I think for example of the impossibility of truly reproducing Rothko’s works, the impact of which relies on unmediated in-person experience. I think texture and tactility play a rather substantial part in your work - the way watercolors warp the paper, the way the gradients scan, and so on. But you working in comics, the reader will largely "only" ever see the reproduction. So there's a sort of paradox there, where what the reader sees is at once faithful and divergent. Is that something that figures into your process at all?
Worrying that something needs to work in print is usually secondary to just making it. "I'll fix it in post" is the phrase that I usually justify my terrible decisions with. It'll change project-to-project, so nothing I say now is hard and fast, but I do tend to enjoy the physicality of making art more than worrying about the end product will look like.
I often encourage mistakes in my work and then deal with those. Just playing with the physical aspect of paper: maybe a blob of acrylic paint smushed onto the page; allowing the paper to get too wet and then tearing; seeing what happens when the paper buckles with moisture. Sometimes the mistake will look great by itself, but more often than not it'll force me to make some kind of correction, either to make the page look good or for it to work in context with other pages in the sequence. For a while that's why I was using discarded paper for projects; "The Hum" [a story in Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors] is made out of sheets of paper I saved from the bin, because there's something to break and work into and/or against.
A really good example of that sort of thing is "Moon Puke." The actual comic art was made by working and re-working over some sheets of paper that my daughter had worked on and then discarded; I folded it in half and put some staples on the spine and then treated each double spread as a single page. I let my nephew Louie add some to it, too - where there's primitive childlike figurative work in there, it's because a child drew them. And I was working with materials I knew were terrible for the job - pens that would bleed through the crappy paper, highlighter pens which wouldn't scan. So when I finally had the finished object, I had to figure out how to turn that into a printable comic - that's why some of it's photographed from a distance, some of it's photographed in something more uniform, and some of it's scanned. Working through that meant I was able to tell the scripted story in a way that was more interesting, adding another layer of narrative to it. And then when I came to sequencing the comic into the collected Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors I was a page short, which is why there's a photo of it in the street with my boots in shot, as though I'd found it discarded.
In terms of how it'll be reproduced and seen by an audience.... When I started, I used to worry about that; making sure that everything was neat and tidy and easy to deal with. But then I read about Bill Sienkiewicz making a cover for a Judge Dredd collection on a pillowcase, or Sean Phillips carrying massive painted boards in to Fleetway for New Statesmen, and others too, and it was very freeing. Once an image has been photographed/scanned it's made flat, and the textural aspects of the image (the extra shadows from folds, or peaks of paint, etc.) add to the effect. I should say, though: although it's very freeing, it doesn't make life any easier.
Yeah, one of the first things I noticed about your work is the materiality of it; the way the text bleeds through from the other side of repurposed paper. That sort of ephemeral impact is particularly interesting to me, because one thing I often think about—which has been more and more of a cause for adjustment as a reader as I've started reading more abstract/conceptual comics—is how the 'mainstream' approach to comics is to treat the page as a unit that is fairly 'texturally invisible,' for lack of a better term. Whereas, when I'm reading work like yours, these physical warps and disturbances and imperfections serve as a sensory reminder that this is work made by a human being. That the artist isn't just a mediator to disappear into the work; they are an active participant.
So, one realization I've had while reflecting during this conversation is that when I'm asked about my work I always end up going into detail about how I make things, whereas what's possibly more interesting to people is why I make them. But... I think the truth is that I don't know why, I only know how. I saw James Acaster at one of the launch events for his musical project, Temps, and he said something along the lines of "In stand-up [comedy], you make something, and figure out what it is afterwards," and obviously that really resonated with me, since it's been my approach to comics in the past few years.
So, to swing back to what you were talking about - having the physicality of the page on show. It's really important to me, and I'll try and encourage that where I think it makes an impact. Like the "Dream" pages in Pyramid Studies, where I knew for sure that the seam in the middle of the pages wouldn't come into focus properly when scanned, I used that as a marker to add dimensionality to the split between the two halves of the dream. But then that's contrasted in Electric Sweet Freezer Razors with "Children of the Valley" where the intention was to create pages that showed that I could draw and make comics in the 'normal way' if I wanted to, as a way of showing to the reader that revealing the physicality of the pages is intentional, not a product of me blundering around amateurishly.
I do think that sometimes those things can be a barrier to readers, though, especially since there's an expectation of a particular kind of quality in books that are meant to be well regarded. I had a portfolio review a few years ago, just after Petrichor had come out, and the reviewer flicked through the book and went something along the lines of "Ah, I can see the bleed through from whatever was behind the page you did..." as a piece of constructive feedback, like I might not have been aware of it. So now I'm more aware of that as an aspect of my comics that might cause someone to pre-judge the work; hence the care to further demonstrate it's intentional.
That's funny, because to me that sort of thing would almost immediately scan as a demonstration of intent - to have the bleed-through come up accidentally is one thing, but to assume that the cartoonist simply didn’t notice at all is... well, a bit of bad faith.
Another aspect that allows the physicality of the art to show through is that it creates a duality, or extra-dimension to the page. In "The Hum" it's really obvious on some pages that I've drawn the gutters on in white paint, whereas the gutters are more usually the absence of content, and it's that absence that signifies temporality. Whereas if the gutters are more pronounced then they're both the absence of content but also the content of each panels becomes more the absence... I don't know if I can explain what I mean here, or even if I know what I mean. But it's something.
You’ve mentioned “Moon Puke” a couple of times, which is one of my favorite stories of yours, and it makes me think about how often your work features a push and pull between the abstract artwork and narratives that are—in no derogatory fashion, I should say—fairly mundane. Whether you write about your own life or, as is the case in that story, about fictional characters, I often find myself thinking, “In another life, this could have been made as a standard slice-of-life comic.” Daily life is present, albeit at some remove. It makes me wonder - to what extent, in your opinion, is the ‘real world’ present in your work? Where is the divergence point between the real life and the abstract prism through which you present it?
Well, I like being slightly abrasive in my work, putting things that shouldn't work together, together. And I suppose one aspect of that is where the 'real world' stuff collides with the abstract imagery I create. But as abrasive as it is, it's also an appeal to make the work more accessible and relatable.
In terms of what I tend to write about... it's a cliché, but I write what I know. And in the case of "Moon Puke" what I knew was commuter anxiety and Baker's Lane Car Park. In Petrichor it was grief and feeling lost and being in love with my family. But I also know that ghosts are real, and so are poltergeists, and that there's a world underneath the sea full of bones, and that the air inside of a spaceship smells like hot metal, and that it's possible to detach your consciousness from your body through meditation.... So I write from both perspectives at the same time.
But it's fair to say that nearly all of my work is autobiographical, though sometimes I'm better at hiding it than others. And I've got a pretty boring life, which is why situations described in my comics are everyday situations. One way to disguise the autobiography is by injecting and/or covering it up with paranormal elements, like in "Not this House," or by fragmenting it and presenting it back as abstract [such as in] "The Hum" [and] "Petalburn."
Presenting those stories against abstract imagery [all in Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors] heightens the mood attached to them, I think, and whilst it's not fully intentional as I'm working on it, when I recognize that I've done it I can magnify it further. "Not this House" looks the way it feels to be a depressed ghost. "Thunders" looks the way it feels to be losing grip on reality.
I don't know if that answers your question. I've had to delete a whole paragraph about whether I believe in ghosts which had nothing at all to do with your question...
It does, actually. And you may have to rewrite that paragraph, because I'm reminded of our conversation at Thought Bubble this past November, just after I'd read Petrichor; you described Razors as "This one has a little less grief and more ghosts." I like that description, because I think it speaks to your general aesthetic/narrative sensibilities, at least insofar as they can be described as narrative. The supernatural or spiritual plane ultimately does exist, in your work, as an extension of or parallel to the 'literal' day-to-day plane that you and I occupy. If you don't mind my asking, are you a spiritual person at all?
I grew up very Christian - I was in the church choir, had a Bible in my bedroom, did various Christian youth clubs. But it sort of floated off. There was never a defining moment where I 'lost faith,' it just evaporated. So I'm not spiritual in a sense of being religious, or believing in God. I am spiritual in the more annoying, clichéd sense, where I believe that there's something, but I don't think the tools exist at the moment to understand what that something might be, so instead I worry at the edges of what else there is.
Like, I believe in ghosts, but I don't know what a ghost is. And I don't believe anyone else knows either. I think narratives have been applied to try and explain things which happen, and those narratives have then been used to try and make sense of other phenomena in ways that make sense on a very simplistic level. I don't necessarily believe that ghosts are the spirits of dead people, and I don't think that poltergeists are necessarily ghosts either, but I do think that spirits of people exist after their physical aspect has died, somehow. Like... as an example of my approach to these things, and why I can never make up my mind:
Generally people understand that a haunted house is a structure with one or more ghosts in it. But, to really define a 'haunted house,' you've also got to define what a house is - if half of a building is lost in an explosion, which bit is still haunted? The part that's left, the part that was lost in the explosion, or are both parts haunted equally? If the entire building is demolished, is the same space that the house previously existed in as haunted as it was when the house was physically there, or less so? Plus, that's not to mention that in space that house isn't a fixed point - it's spinning with the surface of the Earth as it orbits around the sun. So for a ghost to inhabit the 'house' it must have some physicality that keeps it tethered in place - is that physicality associated with the volume of the house, the materials it was made from, or is there some previously unregarded psychological aspect, a connection between thought and matter?
And those questions keep spinning on and on. If the brain is electrical impulses and hormones, and a ghost has no hormones, might it still be electricity? Shit like that. One of the many hums present in my brain at any given time. Those are the kinds of ideas that I try to explore in my comics: "A Hill to Cry Home" is very explicit in trying to break up that conversation, but then defines ghosts in a way that I don't actually believe; "Not this House" is less explicit, but still the same subject; The Intercorstal: Extension [self-published, 2018] gets really close to illustrating the feeling I have when I think about that stuff.
I'm tempted now to wonder whether my abstract approach to storytelling is somehow an aspect of that uncertainty of how things are supposed to work. Drawing something is a way of understanding it, and of defining it, and since I don't know how to define how I feel maybe I avoid defining them through drawing too. Maybe. I'm inclined not to say either way for sure, because I'll definitely change my mind if I do.
I think ultimately the open-endedness is the force that kind of keeps the questions alive, isn't it? Any answer is bound to be at least a bit of a letdown. This does make me wonder about your process; how do you generally approach a new piece, or a new idea? What does a "new idea" mean to you, given the general lack, or at least looseness, of conventional narrative? Where are its beginning and end to you?
There's no defined process, and it changes for each comic. It's mostly just sitting down at my desk with materials sat around and seeing what I feel like trying. For the past two years I've been posting a new comic page every day, and every page was the same size and went into the same Affinity template to force some cohesion, but I get so bored so easily, and the idea of doing the same thing more than a few times turns my brain off. Sometimes I'd get into a groove and do a 'set' of pages, but more often than not it was just whatever happened on the day.
At the moment I'm making 'idiot-fold' comics, where I fold a booklet with the spine-fold in a different part of each piece of paper and then dealing with what's in front of me. They're a new challenge because of the mechanics, as well as the way pages change sizes all the time, as well as making all these weird little bits work together. [You can look at] the prototype of Telephone to see what I mean, it's really difficult to describe.
But in terms of ideas... it comes back to 'how I made it' rather than 'why I made it.' With [Electric Sweet Freezer Razors] I started by making iterative abstract works by drawing one page, scanning it, drawing over it, scanning that, and on and on until I had a stack of pages. Then with the first Hackney Comic + Zine Fair 'round the corner, I went, "Right, I need to make a new comic, and I want to make one about ghosts, and one about the feeling of knowing you've just had the last big night out of your life." I pulled together sets of pages from that iterative pile and wrote to them to make "A Hill to Cry Home" and "Petalburn." And that approach worked that time.
For "Moon Puke" I knew I wanted to write about car parks, and the weird feeling of being in an empty one, while at the same time making that little book out of discarded paper and terrible pens. "The Hum" fell out of me in a weekend. "Thunders" was made by recreating my favorite page layouts from a copy of Marvel's Thunderstrike I had on my desk over the top of discarded geography worksheets that my wife had made - it only turned into a comic about aliens when I happened to take the photo that became the cover, and only about timeslips after I started writing...
Like... the ideas come by connecting things together. There's never a grand plan, just "Does this work here?" Yes, then keep it; no, then wreck it until it does. That's the same for writing as it is for drawing/painting. Usually I make the art as sets of pages, pull them together into what feels like a narrative order, and then if I have something that I want to write about I'll write it with that art in mind - the page orders might change based on how well the art works with the words, and the words might change to make better sense of the pages. It's very "organic" - in quotations there to minimize the cringe of saying organic.
I don't know if you've read any of Jim Woodring's work at all, but what this brings to mind, for me, is his perception of his "Frank" work as something that he is not a very active force in; as he frames it, he is essentially 'guided' by the Unifactor, the divine force that both contains and motivates the world of his creation. Which, y'know, saying things like "I'm guided by my own work" is always inviting the risk of sounding pretentious or disingenuous, but I've always found it to be shockingly relatable in my own work; some creators are more regimented or active than others, but I always find it to be a process of instinct, one that I can't really force. Where do you feel that you stand in relation to your work? Do you feel like you have 'control' over it, or is it just a matter of trustingly following your own instincts and curiosities and seeing where it leads you?
No, I don't really have a lot of control anymore. I think I used to, back in the days when I was measuring every panel border to fractions of millimeters and placing every line, either for abstract or representational drawings, with thought and precision. Now I'm guided by what happens moment to moment, really. It's most of the reason I never take commissions, because doing work that someone's requested means having something come out at the end which looks like what they wanted, and the tension of not being able to chase the image and instead rein it in with purpose is too aggravating.
Part of me would like to be 'normal' in the way that other, more successful creators are, where they can plan what they want to do and make that happen, and they know what they want to write about and for how long it happens. But at the same time, I enjoy myself too much - at least on the days when the ideas are coming easy, and I'm not just sat with my head in my hands groaning to myself.
You mentioned "Thunders" earlier, and before that you spoke about The Intercorstal: 683, which is based on the first issue you read of 2000 AD. I can't help but notice that you have two separate works that reinterpret or respond to existing, more mainstream works - and the framing stories in both of them are about an alien protagonist. Besides your interest in the 'beyond,' I can't help but wonder if this has anything to do with the way you engage with, or relate to, more mainstream comics; whether there's a feeling of alienation there, of an impossibility to mediate between your mode of comics and the more literalist mode.
Yeah, I definitely think that part of the impetus for reworking existing comics pages was a way to bridge the gap between the work that comes naturally to me, and that I release, with the more mainstream comics community. Part of it—not all of it—was to say, "Look, I'm not some pretender, I'm proper comics, I know the history, I know the form, please accept my work." Didn't work out that way, [laughs] apart from a handful of excellent people. Fixating my abstract work on traditional comics alienated me from the 'art crowd,' like when I did "After Smith" a few years ago [2015] for a gallery in Bremen, [which was] an abstract retrospective of my favorite work by 2000 AD's John Smith for a crowd of people who'd never heard of 2000 AD, let alone Indigo Prime. And the traditional comics crowd... I mean, they're in it for the characters and the stories and the art, and don't want or need an analytical breakdown of a page of Harlem Heroes. So, yeah, that's why, for the past few years, if my work has intersected with traditional comics it's been done quietly, an in-joke for those that know, and not something that anyone else would or should need to know to enjoy the comic.
And I layer stuff up, too. The Intercorstal: Extension is re-drawings of some of my favorite comic pages, originally as an A5 page and then 'extended' on both edges to make A4-sized spreads, overlaid with text that references the TV show Most Haunted, the Enfield poltergeist case, and a bunch of songs that I like. Knowing any of that has never impacted anyone's enjoyment of the comic, that I know of; if anything, me spouting all that at a reader is likely to put them off. One of my proudest moments was being in the audience of a panel that Lucy Sullivan did where she recommended Extension as the "weirdest comic she'd ever read," and I'm pretty sure she didn't know any of that extra guff.
I've slowly learned to go with that David Lynch quote: "The film is the talking." Although it's hard to stop me running my mouth off anyway.
One of my favorite things about part of the UK indie scene, people like you and Lucy and Douglas Noble, is that... y'know, a lot of people who come up reading mainstream American comics will more or less stick to that lane. That's not a hard-and-fast rule, but you have the sense that, as you say, they are interested in the property, and the property is fixed. Whereas, from my experience in the UK sphere, a lot of people came up reading the golden age of 2000 AD but sort of went, "Right, this has taught me a great deal about art, now it's time to make something completely different." Lucy and I have talked plenty about Arthur Ranson, who is one of my absolute favorite artists, but you wouldn't look at her work and immediately think of him as the natural influence. There's more of a willingness, I think, to treat the things you admire as a jumping board rather than the be-all and end-all. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes total sense. I'm being quite careful with my answer here - I'm not as hardcore a 2000 AD fan as I once was, and my memory is awful, but I know how important it is to get facts right on stuff like this, and unless I couch everything with 'I feel' and 'I think' I'll definitely get something wrong… I was reading 2000 AD when, stylistically, it was a very mixed bag, where butting up against Dredd there was Revere [John Smith & Simon Harrison, 1991-94] and Bix Barton [Peter Milligan & Jim McCarthy, 1990-94] and Sláine: The Horned God [Pat Mills & Simon Bisley, 1989-90]. And although 2000 AD's never been known for being quiet, I definitely feel that the breadth of strips they let back in during that late '80s, early '90s period meant that my understanding of what a comic could look like was much broader than if I'd just been reading U.S. superhero comics. And then that gets mixed in with the art school sensibilities and love of the esoteric that so many of my peers have, and you get that great breadth of styles all mixing up shoulder to shoulder. And when I say 'peers' here I don't mean other abstract comics people, because I know that they have different influences - I sort of generally mean the rest of the UK small press, to be honest. I was going to try and list some names, but there's too many. There's too many.
Oh, certainly. I realize that I make it sound like a bit of a monolith as well, but obviously that's the beauty of a small-press sphere, that you can't really boil it down into "this is what everyone is influenced by" or "this is what everyone makes." This also reminds me of the one story in Electric Sweet Freezer Razors where you mention you and your daughter talking about the X-Men, and you trying to one-up her knowledge, and I remember finding that bit jarring, precisely because you don't read a comic that looks like your work and be reminded that the X-Men exist on the same plane. It was another one of those reminders that there is, in fact, a world out there, outside of the highly-specific work at hand.
I think the X-Men reference in "Bones of the Sea" was doing a bunch of things all at once. Predominantly it was a direct description of me being a shitty person and dad. [Laughs]
Well, sure, but I wasn't going to call you out for that. [Laughs]
But it was also creating that friction between "high" and "low" art styles - as you said, it was jarring to read, and you're right that I think the perceived audience of my comics might not jump to X-Men as a frame of reference. And at the same time, like with the blatant and secret 2000 AD references, it's me waving frantically at that 'comics monolith' in general and going "Hey, look! Look at me! I'm proper comics! I'm not just drawing like this because I don't know anything about comics!" A few years ago I was applying for an award in experimental comics, and I remember detailing all the things I was doing as an artist, the themes I was addressing and my philosophical interests and whatever; and then, at the end, in the 'any supporting statements' part of the form, going on about all the times I'd volunteered at London Super Comic Con.
There's a cynical view of that, which is what I probably naturally gravitate toward, which is that I'm just... I don't know... like, justifying myself? That I'm just doing it to try and stay in the club and get to hang with the 'in crowd' or whatever. Maybe. But it's also an effort to make it clear that although my comics aren't within the mainstream lane, I'm not rejecting comics as a medium by making work that rejects predominate aspects of the form. There are creators who make abstract and/or experimental comics because they hate the mainstream, whereas I'm making them because I love them. If that makes sense?
I think about conventions in this context - especially about Thought Bubble, since that’s where I always meet you. Thought Bubble is a very interesting space, specifically because it tries very actively to cater to all kinds of comics; you have the ‘traditional’ big DC/Marvel names, and the American direct market creator-owned people, and a lot of small-press and self-published voices, and often I think it’s actually the latter group that manages to thrive. But what I wonder about is where you find yourself within that convergence. That is, if you have people come across your table and go “Huh, this is interesting, I’ve never encountered this before,” or if it’s usually people who are more or less well-versed within that milieu, and who come to your table with that context already ‘in hand,’ so to speak.
I find tabling at conventions baffling. Convention by convention I go in thinking I know how it'll go, and then it goes entirely differently. On paper, Thought Bubble would be the place for me—and you're right, I think it's small-press and self-publishers who do best there, and that's why I love it—and sometimes it has been, but more often than not I don't get that 'casual traffic.' Instead it's people I know who come and find me because I've got something new, or just to say hello. I love these people, by the way, unequivocally. The last two years my daughter Martha has tabled with me. The first year we had our Ghosts in Things book [self-published, 2022] which did really well with people just wandering past and going "what's that?!," and that really got us enthusiastic about future possibilities. Oh, and that year Dan White had been on the 'Best Thing I Read This Year' panel and had included Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors, and lots of people came looking for me off the back of that. The second year we [Gareth & Martha] tabled as Absolute Collider, the small press we set up specifically so that we could table at conventions together, with Martha selling her own abstract zines along with a bunch of other stuff we'd put out that year, and didn't do nearly as well.
I put part of that down to me - as I've said before, I have a habit of going into a lot of detail about how something was made, which rarely answers the question "What is this?" in a way that holds most people's interest. Plus I put a lot of things out, and my table tends to be very busy, so when people do stop it can possibly be a bit overwhelming with me barking away about how some stuff is abstracted from a copy of 2000 AD that they'll never read, and some of it's explicitly autobiographical and some of it's pretending to be about ghosts but some of it is actually about ghosts, and it's all about me being SAD boohoo haha and look this one folds really weird, it's called an idiot fold comic because I'm an idiot and this one imagines landscapes where there was a tower set into mountain ranges that look like cats not for any reason haha and this one's a horror story by my son (he's 14) where he wrote the story because my daughter (she's 11) said we'd pay him if he wrote one and it only took him 20 minutes but drawing it and putting it together took days haha oh but I'm really excited by this one, it's by Anastasia Hiorns OH but yeah that's Jimmy Hotdog my nephew did it it's about a talking hotdog, he wrote and drew it and I did every other bloody job on it including coloring it and printing it but he wants all the money haha but yeah most of these are about ghosts and being sad but the ones with actual drawings of ghosts aren't about being sad haha they're just ghosts IN things and we used to have a book of them that was really cool but I'm too cheap to get it reprinted haha so we've got these zine-sized follow-ups instead, and we print everything at home on Bruce the Printer it used to be Reggie but he's dead now - not actually dead, he's a printer that stopped working and no haha not a printer as in someone who prints things a printer as in a machine full of paper and ink haha oh you knew haha well OK, yeah, no worries, come back tomorrow if you get a chance we'll be here haha
[Laughs]
But, yeah. That's tabling for me. For a while I thought there was some magic mathematics to it, that certain arrangements of tables in certain shapes of room would force crowds to either flow toward me or away from me, and that I had no control over how well I did. Now I think I just need to take everything a bit easier and also shut up.
I must say, this is, if nothing else, the most formally engaged interview answer I’ve ever gotten. [Laughs] But I do understand the struggle; the more opaque a work is, the harder it is in terms of a straight 'sell,' naturally. How have you experienced changes or developments in readership over time? You have been self-publishing for a fair amount of time by now.
I don't know if it's been changes in readership so much as just changes in community, over the years? When I first stapled my first collection of Intercorstal pages and sent them out for free to get feedback, they got sent to a pretty diverse audience, built up from random encounters on blogs, in particular [the Abstract Comics blog], DeviantArt and Twitter. Oh, and doing that was inspired by an interview that Alfie Gallagher did on the Awesome Comics Podcast in... 2015?
I think the main place I was able to create an audience was on Twitter, back before it got really broken, and via the Awesome Comics Podcast, who have always been incredibly supportive of my work. There was this great crossover period where all of my Twitter friends were either fashion illustrators or in the UK small press. But, yeah, Twitter has formed my 'core readership,' and then depending on the project it's sometimes wobbled one way or another depending on who that particular thing might interest.
Page 45 [a comics retailer] in Nottingham have been really supportive of Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors, as have Gosh! Comics [in London], and I've lucked out with both of them. But otherwise I only sell to people who know about my work already, if that makes any sense at all and isn't a crazily obvious thing to say. I think when my work gets recommended to people it's usually to people who've already sort of 'done' comics and want somewhere new to go, rather than to people coming in fresh. Like, there's not a lot of audience crossover, except with places like noise music communities, and they've never got any money either. [Laughs]
I'm also a victim of my own attention span. Selling comics is a different skill to making them, and it's not a muscle I enjoy flexing, to be honest. So I put my time into constantly making new things rather than selling what I've already made - it's why shifting to a model where I just print off what I need at home suits me better than doing big print runs and selling through them.
You touched on a point that I've been thinking about very much for the past year, with the ongoing decline of Twitter, which is the collective coming-to-terms with the danger of convenience online access; I know that, on a purely selfish level, a big worry of mine has been "Where am I going to find out about new comics if not for Twitter?" I think 2016-19 were probably something of a minor 'golden age' for online discoverability, and I suspect that's been slowly waning ever since, frustrating as it is to think about. I imagine that it's been on your mind as well.
Yeah, massively. Twitter was, for a while, so good for me in so many ways. I met and interacted with people I'd never have met otherwise, found peers in unlikely spaces, and could just go on there and have a chat with some of my favourite people, pick out bits of interesting news, and 'grow my audience.' I mean, I definitely wouldn't have got The Intercorstal: 683 printed and out if it hadn't been for the support I got there, specifically from Rich at Comic Printing UK, but also everyone else. And also it was one of the only places I could go where people had the same opinions about things as I did, and liked the same things as I did...
And then, obviously, it got ruined; some people were able to make a clean break and just get off and some of us can't escape, just stuck in there circling the drain. I did manage to turn my account off for a month, maybe two, but I still log in there every day. I can't get into Threads or Bluesky, there's just some vibe missing from them. But really the internet's always moved in waves - I spent four very happy, productive years on DeviantArt before Twitter ate up my brain, and before that I was all over the various anticon. message boards. So I'll land somewhere else.
I've been doing Patreon for just over two years, and when that launched there was this massive surge of support which has naturally tailed off, mostly due to money and at least partly due to me exhausting people by posting every day. But there's no real route that I've found to promote it to fill in those spots. Maybe I should find the time to start a YouTube channel or restart the Alpha Pod Flight podcast [an Alpha Flight-themed podcast Hopkins hosted from 2018-19], try something new. I don't know.
One semi-unexpected result of these shakeups for me, which I don't know if you relate to at all, is that I find that it actually has affected the way I view making comics as well. I think the internet is a really good platform for headier, more self-indulgent projects because, from a purely practical perspective, you don't have to deal with any of the printing and fulfillment costs; if you want to, you just split the thing up into pages, chuck it on the internet free-to-read, and then offer up a PDF for sale as well. Obviously not a perfect system, but a pretty safe one, all things considered, and there are absolutely artists or comics that I see and think, "You clearly created that with online publication in mind." And, personally, back in 2022 I was looking into doing a pretty big project, at least by my standards, to be serialized online, then suddenly I was forced into that realization of... Twitter is just utterly impermanent. All of these platforms are utterly impermanent. It's stressful in a very tangible way, suddenly being made aware that your 'convenience,' so to speak, has an expiration date, at which point God help you.
We were all sold digital as being something permanent, right? That if something was put on the internet it would be there forever, in some format. But that's clearly not true now, if it ever was. Amazon destroying comiXology was a bit of a wake-up call, to be honest, and since then I've not pursued the idea of having my comics be digital-first or digital only. Even storing them digital is a hassle - like, in a very specific example, my Google Drive has just shrunk by two-thirds unless I pay an extra tenner a month. Physical drives can break on a whim, get unformatted... I've lost a lot of work over the years through that entropy.
That's part of the reason why I've concentrated so much on the paper-fold stuff I'm doing now, like Mountain Battles, Telephone and the first release of Rainlight Cope Aesthetic [an in-progress graphic novel], which I finished prototyping yesterday. They're untranslatable to digital, because even if you could find a format that allowed the page sizes to shrink and grow with each subsequent page turn, the experience wouldn't be the same. I mean, you could conceivably replicate it by making some kind of app - I imagine it would have been relatively easy in Flash, but we all know what happened to Flash, so there's no desire to even explore the modern equivalent, because it would only be readable for a few years before technology changes and it's lost.
So, yeah, paper creates a better illusion of permanence—and it's far more fun, for me anyway, to use rulers and scissors and glue sticks—but maybe sacrifices the potential for distribution? But for the moment I'm fine with that, while I work up the next thing worth paying someone else to print.
One thing that's totally passed me by, though, is platforms like Webtoon, where there seems to be a certain level of permanence and a massive audience. Like, my daughter's just read—and then immediately re-read—Heartstopper, and there are plenty of other screen-first publishing projects that have enjoyed success. So, maybe, as is so often the case, the problem is me. But also the problem is Twitter.
Yeah, I actually think you, personally, as someone who's so compelled by format, would be able to do some interesting stuff with the scroll format. Which offers its own challenges in terms of production translation, mind; I think most printed Webtoons just reformat the art into traditional comic pages since that's the simplest solution, but then you have stuff like Ron Wimberly's GratNin, which Beehive Books put out as a boxed set of, basically, vertically-pasted pamphlets, to preserve that reading dynamic.
I've spent a fair few hours after you suggested the scrolling format thinking about whether there's anything I could play with there, and to be honest nothing's piquing my interest. I guess I'm probably a bit too married to the physical act of turning a page, and for all of the pages to be in dialogue with each other at all times? I don't know, I'm probably overthinking it now.
Having been making abstract comics for, at this point, 20 years or so, do you see any progression or change in how you've viewed the abstract as a mode of work?
Over the years—and maybe it's because of my work as an abstract-artist-who-makes-comics, or maybe it's just age or maturity—I think the biggest change in how I view abstract work is that I don't over-intellectualize it as much as I used to; that goes for my own work, and the work of others. The analytic work I used to do fairly early in my comics-making, measuring other people's pages and looking for composition, was useful at the time, and I've absorbed what I learned, but now I sort of just feel whether it's right or not, and allow myself to experience it. Like... what I do is just what I do now, it's who I am.
Is there any loftier goal or point that you'd like to reach with your work?
It'd be nice to have my work more widely recognized, even for just what it's trying to do if not for what it is, but I don't know how to go about doing that. I guess the simple answer is to 'be better,' but I've grown used to the fact that I'm never going to snowball into being popular, so for the most part I have let go of the need for it and instead just enjoy making stuff. So I'm going to make the best work I can, keep making it available, and if people want to engage with it then they can.
And pretty soon I'd like to do some kind of exhibition, a collection of big things people have to walk around rather than flick through. But obviously that takes planning and organizing, and I'm not great at either.
