Communication Design School of Design
Calum Herbert
I am interested in the potential for visual storytelling in the comic book, considering how print methods can be used to affect how a drawing communicates. I like comics because they are direct and immediate and tell you everything you need to know in as few lines as possible. This year I have tried to develop a method of working with drawing and printmaking to make my drawings read like words.
Indoor Tiger
Indoor Tiger is a three-part comic adapted from Alasdair Gray’s short story ‘The Cause of Some Recent Changes’. Gray’s story centres around two students at the art school who decide to dig an escape tunnel in the basement. There they discover a civilisation under the school that power a steam engine that drives the earth around the sun and in the end, the world explodes. During some time spent at the GSA archives I discovered that there is in fact an old rumor of a tunnel that connected the Mackintosh building to the nearby local zoo, presumably to make it easier to bring animals inside for the animal drawing classes. For my adaptation, I used the Gray short story as the basis for a comic that considers a reality where this tunnel is real. In turn, Indoor Tiger presents an alternative history of the Mackintosh building told in typical Gray fashion, through a mix of realist comedy and supernatural, maximalist science fiction.
Learning from Nancy
Comics theorist Scott Mcloud described the essence of Nancy as: a comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible, an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the gag-strip. I co-opted Ernie Bushmiller’s famous character and reworked an existing illustration.
The Boy Who Learnt To Shiver
‘The Boy Who Learnt to Shiver’ is a collaborative puppet show adaption of the Grimm Brothers’ tale ‘The Boy Who Left Home To Learn Fear’. With hand-made puppets, set design and a live score, our play centres around an insolent, arrogant and selfish 7-year old boy, who is kicked out of home and follows his journey through gallows, taverns and crummy hotels. What could’ve been a tale of redemption and self-discovery ends in a… well, you’ll just have to find out for yourselves won’t you.
