The No Country Blog Tour Continues! This is an amazing graphic novel that I highly recommend. See my interview with creators Joe and Patricia below! What prompted you to create a story about a civil war and its impact on families? JOE: I was prompted by the nativist reaction to the refugees around the world. There is such a deep empathy deficit that we need to work to address. Part of the reason for this empathy deficit, I believe, is down to a narrative bias in even sympathetic portrayals of refugees: people fleeing their home – strange and far away – to create a home here. Home is such a personal and individual thing to each of us – senses, memories, foods – it’s tactile, and it’s different to different cultures. How do you empathize with someone who has left somewhere strange to come somewhere familiar? It asks us to conceptualize what their journey means to them, and make an imaginative leap between their home and ours. And that’s what No Country is – bridging that gap for the readers. It’s a story that starts in a collapsed warring state that feels like home, and moves to a functional society that feels strange and foreign. From the perspective of the people fleeing violence, that’s what happens. The specific sense of home is really important to me because I’m not from here. I moved to England in 2008 While my personal experience is categorically different because I was not forced to leave my home, I feel a persistent longing toward that place where I’m from – even though it doesn’t exist in the same way as when I left it. Basically, I’m happy here in England and at the same time I’m homesick all the time. On the surface, No Country is a story about refugees, but to me, deeper down, it’s also about the longing to be home and how being forced apart from that specific place tears you in two. The goal is not to be every refugee story, let alone to replace even one of them. Rather, I’d like No Country to touch on one very personal aspect of the experience as a bridge for the readers to what’s happening in the world. In No Country, democracy in Britain dies, do you think your outlook for the future of Britain is generally positive or negative? JOE: I’m an optimist. Thinking about it historically, we have inherited huge progress in the fight for justice and equality. Go back a century or so, and women couldn’t vote. Go back two centuries in this country, and slavery was legal. Go much beyond that, and think about the bare realities of living in a country of kings and serfs and endless disease and perpetual wars. Our society today is rife with injustices, but it’s also filled with people willing to work tirelessly solve them and popular will to support the ideal of equality. Historically, we have always met the challenges that faced us enough to keep going, and I believe we will rise to challenges that face us today. Do you think people take democracy for granted? JOE: We take democracy for granted when we confuse the process by which we govern ourselves with what it means to govern. People in the UK treat the elements of democracy like voting as sacrosanct, and that’s true for governments all around the world. Think about how even in clear dictatorships they still have farce elections, and in some places they even have farce opposition parties. I imagine the Prime Minister in No Country is elected by margins of 80-90%, but he still holds elections every five years. But even holding fair elections is not enough to create a truly just society. My concern is not that people take democracy for granted, but that they don’t see through it when it functions as a smoke screen for deeper injustices. Government to me is about the management of power across society, and democracy is an attempt to manage that power in a just way. Our government needs to be a mechanism for us to take care of one another. To keep each other safe. To use our resources collectively when necessary to solve a problem that we can’t solve as individuals. To protect everyone from all forms of hate and violence. In a true democracy, government is not this separate organization that rules us, it is us. The process of how we achieve this is of course incredibly important, but ultimately what we need to be striving for is justice; simply being a democracy is not enough. In dictatorships all around the world, it seems that if enough people feel economically secure, they turn a blind eye to the injustice of the government. This is also true in democracies. There are deeply entrenched power structures – deep ruts in the roads of class, wealth, race – that we allow to continue. There’s a wonderful saying (that has been attributed to so many people, I don’t know who actually said it first), ‘Democracy has to be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.’ We used it in a comic for The Phoenix a few years ago about elections (art by Dan Boultwood, copyright held by The Phoenix). To me, the point is that the purpose of a democracy is as a system by which we take care of one another – particularly the most vulnerable among us – and never leaving anyone out. The government and democracy are only one method in achieving that.
Did you model the story after an event in a particular country where this type of event actually happened? JOE: It started that way, but quickly grew into something else. I started thinking about Syria and the war there. For example, the Free Kingdom is in my mind the English equivalent of Isis. But so much has happened since I started. Brexit. Covid. Cages on the American border. When I started, I had never heard of the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, and now they’re in the news almost daily. The population of people who have been forced to leave their countries because of violence is roughly equivalent to the population of the UK. And that’s to say nothing of the untold billions of people who live under the threat of oppression, or even the ones who haven’t survived to tell their stories. Sadly, the world is a font of source material for books like No Country. When illustrating a serious topic such as this, do you have to adopt a particular mood for each scene or panel? PATRICE: Comics are created organically, with the underlying mood making a wide sweep across all the scenes and panels. I need to draw the reader into the story, and that means establishing some kind of consistency of mood to keep from breaking the spell. It's a scary story! At the same time, the pictures are trying to remind us that there are soothing, hopeful elements in what seems to be growing chaos. Bea's notebook of comics also helps lighten the tension. We'll be seeing more of the stuff she draws in the next book, and hopefully it will serve as a balance, like an uplifting change of key in the middle of a song. Are there any particular books or stories that helped inspire you to create this graphic novel? PATRICE: When Joe and I first talked about this book and what themes it was going to explore, I thought I must look again at How the World Was and Alan's War, both by Emmanuel Guibert. They're in black and white and they aren't written for children, but the assured sense of place and concentrated focus in the middle of frightening events is staggering. And I wish I could draw as well as he can! Both books sit next to my drawing table all the time. Did the unrest and chaos that occurred in the United States shake your confidence in security and democracy? PATRICE: I grew up in the United States. As an African American I have never had any confidence whatsoever in security or democracy. In developing a graphic novel do you create the story first and then have the images drawn around it or vice versa? PATRICE: There were times when I thought I had just the right treatment worked out for a particular scene only to find it looked awful once I'd drawn it. Joe would have a number of ideas for how much to show of this or that backstory, only to find it distracted from the flow. Characters changed personalities. Things were taken out and then got put back again. I tried (unsuccessfully) to keep in some wonderful exchanges Joe wrote between a couple of the characters, but... Graphic novels are not illustrated stories. There's a conception stage, and then there's everything else all at once, in and out and back and forth. We're both artists and we're both writers, only using different tools. We have numerous budding illustrators in the library, what advice would you give to anyone interested in making a career out of illustration? PATRICE: In a strange reversal of the elders-and-betters teaching their offspring, the best advice I've heard (for any art form) came to me from my daughter. Do It Now. You might think the art you're making isn't good enough, or your project doesn't quite come up to standards, but there is no way to get better, or find out what you're really good at except to Do It. Don't put off trying out that crazy idea, or not get round to applying for that trainee spot or online workshop because of doubts or a lack of confidence. Do It Anyway, and Do It Now. (My daughter is a musician, but I've come to realise that in all art there is a storyteller, you just have to find which way of telling stories is best for you.)
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-Cora has a dilemma, her brother works for a state of the art company called Pomegranate, what they do there is mysterious yet intriguing. Cora's father isn't very impressed with Pomegranate or anything they do. However, when Cora strikes up an unlikely friendship with the CEO of the company, her life becomes confusing and complicated. Torn between her friendship and what she thinks is right, Cora becomes entangled in a mysterious web of lies and misdirection. A truly stunning new novel featuring a neuro-divergent protagonist and a whole slew of interesting, deep characters. A near-future pre-dystopia with a power punch of a message. I loved it, and you will too. It's the perfect read for ages 11+. It's vital that books that represent neuro-diverse students are in our libraries and bookshops, for too long their voices haven't been heard, this a book that demands to be heard. Show Us Who You Are by Elle McNicoll is out now, published by Knights Of. If you’d like to join her for the official launch event with Jen Campbell on 10th March, tickets are available at www.blackwells.co.uk/bookshops/events/. |
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