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Archaeological Comics - Episode 17
85 Plays7 years ago
Kim talks to three archaeological comic writers and artists - John Swogger, Hannah Sackett, and Katy Whittaker - about their work and the current and potential uses of comics in archaeology. Comics are obviously a great way to engage children in archaeology, but can they be used beyond that?
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Transcript
Introduction to Prehistories Podcast
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you are listening to the archaeology podcast network the archaeology podcast network is sponsored by codify a california benefit corporation visit codify at www.codifi.com
Focus on Archaeological Comics
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Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 17 of the Prehistories podcast with me, your host Kim Bedelf. Thank you for joining me again. On this episode, we're going to be talking about archaeological comics. We're going slightly off topic really, not talking about a fiction set in prehistoric times, but about another way of
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writing and drawing the past, but also archaeology itself.
Meet the Guests: John, Hannah, and Katie
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So on this month's episode I welcome three archaeologists who produce archaeological comics, John Swager, Hannah Sackett and Katie Whittaker. You're welcome, welcome everybody. Hello, hello. It's absolutely brilliant to have you all on, I have followed
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your work for some longer than others, but it's all absolutely fascinating. You're all at kind of a different stage in comic creating, is that right? Yes, I think so, yeah. Yes, I'd agree. Which is quite interesting
Katie's Journey into Archaeological Comics
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actually. So Katie, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you've done with comics so far?
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So I've worked in archaeology for a number of years, mostly for big organisations. At the moment, I worked for Historic England. I've been with them for a while. I've recently started a doctoral research project as well to throw into the mix. Oh, brilliant. And I do loads of different things like the Young Archaeologists Club and Community Archaeology, which is all really fun. But one of the things I've done for many years also is drawn. I've just drawn for pleasure, really.
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Every now and again, I've drawn something that you probably could call an archaeological comic, but I didn't really know that. I didn't really know that was a thing. I didn't know that existed until I met Hannah, who had been drawing for a while. And we did a really great Young Archaeologist Club activity with Hannah.
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And that encouraged me to do a bit more of my own drawing and to think about using comics as a way of talking about archaeology. So I'm really just at the very beginning of drawing and talking about archaeology in this way. Cool. So where's your young archaeologist club?
Engaging Children with Archaeological Comics
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We're in North Yorkshire, we're based in Swindon, but we have children coming from quite a large catchment area, so South Gloucestershire, West Berkshire, as well as North Yorkshire, yeah. They do get, once you get kids who are really into archaeology, they will go for a long, you know, they'll do loads of things to get into it, won't they? They will.
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they're very dedicated. I helped run one in Aylesbury. So yes, we've had kids there all the way through from eight years old to now young leaders, which is so lovely. And the thing is, is that comics is such a
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it's a very widespread part of popular culture, darling. So it makes sense to work with kids, but obviously it's not just for kids,
Hannah's PhD on Educational Comics
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is it? I mean, you get those things they call graphic novels, very slyly, which can be immensely complex and challenging, actually. And obviously, that broadens the appeal for everybody.
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Anyway, sorry, before we go into too much about the theory of it all, Hannah, are you still studying for your PhD in using comics with kids? Yeah, I've just started in October. I've got a way to go. I'm looking at the educational benefits of making comics for children, sort of focusing on seven to 11 year olds.
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So yeah, it's very interesting and enjoying that. Is that mostly in a school context then? It will be, yes. There's been some work done on making comments in after-school clubs and out-of-school contexts, so I'm trying to
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persuade teachers in schools that this is actually something that benefits children a whole range of ways, you know, in terms of their learning, but also in terms of well being in terms of attitudes towards
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towards school and giving them space and time and freedom as well. So, yeah, there's a lot of interesting aspects
Hannah's Blogging and Comic Journey
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to it. Absolutely, and attitudes towards writing. I mean, really, writing is the holy grail of Key Stage 2, isn't it? So, if they can get kids writing anything, the teachers should really be jumping on your offers, I think.
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Yeah, let's see. And you've been writing, you've been making comics for a while, I know. I mean, this podcast has been going for just over a year, and I was worried that I was calling it the same as your blog pre-histories, although I pronounce mine pre-histories just to make it.
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So how long have you been making comics for? Right so that blog started I think it was about four years ago now I've lost track and I've been making comics about that long that's drawing comics I've been writing comics for longer than that not originally about archaeology so the writing came first
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and then I was watching people like my friend Lee Cinder who I've worked with and John drawing comics and I thought well that looks fun so I started doing the drawing as well so yeah there's always so much to learn and it's a very enjoyable process.
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Yeah because it's I mean you have to be multi-talented really to be able to both write and draw. I know that I can only do one of those and actually mostly I can just talk and not either of the other two.
John's Evolution in Comic Creation
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So it's yeah it really is a very
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challenging way to work, I think. John, you've been making archaeological comics for quite a long time and I don't want that to sound like any kind of accusation or anything. Tell us about your work. Yes, I have been making archaeological comics for a long time. It's funny, I
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I suppose when I, when I first started, I didn't really keep track and then all of a sudden you kind of turn around and look and think by me, I have actually been doing this for 10 years now. In fact, more than that 12 years, I was, I've been an archeological illustrator for almost 25 years. And I was out at, I was the science illustrator out at the Chapel Hill project. Cool. And we had a,
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We were doing these open days for local village kids and the stuff that we had up in the visitor center and museums, the visual stuff just really wasn't working as a way to communicate what we were doing on site. And so we decided to try a comic and that was back in 2005.
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So it's been a while. And since then, well, when I did my first comic, I didn't I didn't really think of it as any different from the illustrations that I was doing. Anyway, you know, it was just a way to solve the problem I needed to do to this audience. And so comics seemed the best way. And it wasn't I got to other excavation projects that I realized that there was actually something quite different about the way the comics worked. It's that
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It's that ability to bring in narrative, it's that ability to use all sorts of different kinds of visual elements and actually have them in a consistent package. And that worked really well and I've never looked that.
Comics in Multiple Languages
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No, I saw your comic that you did at Chatalhöyük. I mean, everyone in archaeology will know what Chatalhöyük is, a Neolithic site in Turkey, if anyone else who listens to the podcast wants to know, and a very, very, very well studied site.
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And it's obviously that's the comic is in Turkish as well, isn't it? So it's, it's, which makes a lot of sense, seeing as you were trying to solve that problem of getting through to the local children. And then that's, it's such a fantastic way to engage them. And you've, I mean, one of the interesting things about, oh, sorry, I was gonna say one of the interesting things about doing that comic
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first in Turkish is that they kind of made me realize that you don't have to write in your own language in order to make a good comic. So I've subsequently done comics in English and Spanish and in English and Welsh and that I think is a real, you know, one of comics real key abilities is to change languages according to the audience that you're speaking to.
Challenges and Potential of Comics
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Yeah. So you've worked all over the world really in the Caribbean as well and Turkey and even Wales, amazingly. Yes, I have. It's interesting that I've done comics projects in all of those countries and every time
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the particularities of working in that country kind of make me think of something else you can do with comics. So there are particular kind of cultural niches, I think, that comics occupy in different places around the world. And archaeology, I think, can do something to exploit those.
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Fantastic. Now usually in the podcast I do read an extract from a book but that's not going to work today because you can't really read just the words from any of your comics. It has to be read and looked at at the same time and examined because of the nature of comics where words and images are intertwined.
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So listeners, you're going to have to find the comics and read along. Now I will put links to some of my guest's work in the show notes that we're going to talk about today, so do take a look.
Accessing Guests' Work Online
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But for anyone who's listening via iTunes or Spotify or whatever, I don't know, I don't know all that stuff,
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and don't have access to the show notes. Could you all tell us where people could find your work, Katie? What's the best place to find your work? The only piece of work that I have online so accessible around the world is the most recent comic that I drew which is called The Tale of the Toadstone and you can find it on the Figures in the Landscape blog which is a WordPress blog. Figures in the Landscape is a research group of
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PhD students who are all at different universities in the southwest of England, but they're funded, we're all funded by the same funding body and we have a blog
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figures in the landscape and that's where I put the tail of the
Katie and Hannah's Comic Projects and Inspirations
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toadstone. Lovely, I'm looking at it now so do look that up if you find figures in the landscape and then search for the tail of the toadstone you'll be able to find that and tell us about this toadstone then. I mean there's quite a few stones called toadstones. Yeah this was a bit of a surprise to me so the story behind the story is that
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Christmas last year, so Christmas 2016, I thought I would spend a rainy afternoon drawing an archaeological comic. It was going to be just one side of A4, and I wanted to tell the story of a stone that is called the Toadstone. This is a really huge piece of rock. The type of stone is Sarson. You find it in North Yorkshire, and that particular type of stone you find in other places in southern Britain.
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But this particular rock is called the Toadstone, because when you see it from the side, it looks like a poe sitting down on the ground. And the story of the stone is that it was left behind. So about four and a half thousand years ago, it is thought people tried to drag the Toadstone off the hills, down into the valley to what we now know is the village of Avebury.
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But the village wasn't there four and a half thousand years ago. Instead, there was a type of archaeological monument called a henge and within the henge, a huge stone circle. And so the toadstone, it doesn't quite look natural in its current position. And so that's where this story came from and that people tried to drag it. They tried to drag it down the hill and the ropes broke and the stone was abandoned and it never made its way into the stone circle. And I thought this would be really good for me.
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to draw one afternoon the story of the stone. But I happened to mention that I was going to do this. I mentioned it on Twitter and some archaeologist and geologist friends of mine then started to make some suggestions. Overly me. That's helpful. Yeah, the story through. So the first thing that happened was that an archaeologist friend of mine called Matt Pope
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who's at University College London said, oh, do you mean the toadstone outside tumbra dwells? And I said, no, I didn't know there was a toadstone outside tumbra dwells. And he showed me a picture, and it's a very similar thing. It's a huge one that is in the shape of a toad. And then other suggestions came about different sorts of toadstone. So that made me think about my toadstone here in Wiltshire, lonely on the top of the hill, never made it down
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into a bridge to the stone circle, left behind. And did the toads don't know about all these other sorts of stony toads or toads in archaeological contexts? And I found out so much more about toads from all these suggestions that the story, instead of being one side of A4 that I would draw in an afternoon, became
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something that's a lot bigger that took me quite a few days to do. It's fantastic because also, I mean, obviously you had to go into quite a lot about geology as well as archaeology. But it's a really lovely way to show how it's linked to so many different things. Yes, and also through different ways. So there are toad stones that are called toad stones because they look like toads.
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They actually look like the animal, like my toadstone here in Wiltshire. There are types of stones that are associated with toads because of their colour or their texture. There are mythical magical witching sort of stories about toads. One of the medieval stories, I think it goes right back to Pliny, is that toads, which are
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magical creatures had a stone in their head and if only you could get that stone out of the Toad's head it would protect you from poison because Toad's skin is supposed to be poisonous and this was a remedy for poison and then if you could have that stone and you could have it close to your skin so for example you have it in a piece of jewellery like a ring
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or a pendant, then that stone will protect you from poison. And there are toad stones. I remembered seeing them when I read about it. I then remembered seeing toad stones in the Cheapside Hoard when it was on display in the Museum of London. And I thought, yeah, I know this incredible treasure.
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beautiful gold settings and gems and gemstones and fabulous enamel work, but there were also these funny little brown-gray stones that didn't look at all like precious gems or jewels, but because they had the special
Narrative Power of Comics
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quality, they would protect you from illness and disease and from poison. They would be set in precious metals. So all sorts of ways that toads are important to people now, important to
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people in the past going right back to prehistory scenes. Yeah it seems so. It's interesting I think because all this stuff we lose and it's when you start doing some research it's so exciting to find out all of these bits and pieces that maybe other people know but it's new to you and it was new to you when I was reading your your comic so it's fantastic.
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Hannah, where's the best place that people can actually have a look at your work? What's the best site? Because I know there's a few that your work appears on.
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Yeah, the site that I put most of my work up on is the pre-histories blog. So that's prehistories.wordpress.com. I think that's right. And yeah, recently, I did some work for Human Seasons blog, which ran through the year. There was a different archaeologist or artist blogging every day. And I did a series of comics for that.
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And I do have a Tumblr, but I haven't been using that so much. And stuff goes up on Twitter as well. Lovely. So they can follow you on Twitter. What's your Twitter handle for people? For the archaeology, it's Dr H Comics. Obviously, this is all going to be on the show notes, everybody.
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I mean I quite like your archaeological oddities in particular which is you can get to those through the pre-histories website and you kind of focus on particular either finds or places
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don't you? And there's so many quite famous ones that you've looked at. I really, really love the mould gold cape. I think that really stuck in my mind. Do you want to tell us about that?
00:19:19
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Yeah, so that was the first comics that I started drawing myself. I started with the Folkton Drums. That's the first comic that I drew. I've just made my own Folkton Drum today for something else I've been doing. Oh, have you? I tried clay, so just a lump of clay and then I was, because these Folkton Drums, do you want to tell us about them?
00:19:46
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Okay, and the chalk, they're not drawings at all, they're little chalk carvings, they are middle, probably middle, male, I think there were three of them from a grave up in Yorkshire, probably placed in the child's burial. Yeah. So various ideas, possibly that protective objects.
00:20:08
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Um, and they are incredibly unusual because there aren't many objects from Neolithic with faces. Yeah. It seems like there's almost a kind of taboo on showing a figurative representative art, isn't there? So you can just see the eyebrows and beards and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, they're quite intriguing objects and, um, uh, yeah. Um,
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So Andy Jones, my partner Andy Jones, who works at Southampton, he was doing research into them and has been looking at neolithic art. And he was very caught up with these objects. And I got quite obsessed with them as well, because there's just something fascinating about them. So they prompted me to tell their story from their point of view. So that's what I do, the archaeological oddities.
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is the idea of have the object narrates the story, rather than tell the story from a sort of academic or sort of outside perspective. Yeah, so it's a lot of fun thinking your way into how the different objects might tell their stories. And the mole cake, you mentioned that I really enjoyed doing that is such a beautiful object. And I think that
00:21:35
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But people always, you know, things are presented to gold objects and say, oh, gold, wealth is money. But, you know, when you look at how people in other cultures perceive gold, like, say, for example, in Mesoamerica, like gold has special properties. It's not just that it's worth money. It's powerful. It's special. You know, there's all sorts of ways that gold might have been seen in the past. I wanted to get across in the comic was it was to try and get people to
00:22:05
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to see it in a different way. Yeah, because we are just obsessed with gold as treasure in our culture. Lovely. We might come back to the Moel Gold Cape a little bit later. Now, we've just got to take a quick break. And then when we come back, I'll talk to John about where we can find his work. And then we're going to talk a bit more about the nature of comics and why use them for ourselves as archaeologists and also
00:22:35
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to talk to the wider world. So listen to these messages and we're back in a minute.
Comics vs Traditional Reports
00:22:45
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00:23:08
Speaker
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00:23:25
Speaker
Hello, and we're back talking about archaeological comics, which is a fascinating subject. John, if anybody wanted to have a quick look at your work whilst they're listening to the podcast, where can they find you? They can find it on my blog, johngswogger.wordpress.com. The comics are there and also a lot of commentary about them.
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as well as things like conference papers I've given and conference posters as well. So there's actually a fair amount of material there about Archaeological Computers or Least Muffin. Yes, absolutely. And you've actually given, I mean, some of your papers are comics, aren't they? I'm just looking at ceramics, polity and comics, which is written as a comic. And I love that. I think that's
00:24:13
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I mean, why write a paper, you know, with, you know, maybe 4000 words or whatever with references and no images in it at all, arguing for how great it is to use comics? When you can write a comic about it? Yes, indeed. And, you know, as is traditional in these talk things, I'm going to plug my book. So I've actually got a book coming out next year, which is about comics archaeology, and it's as a comic.
00:24:43
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And yeah, it's ridiculous to sit there and talk about how wonderful comics are when you can actually show how wonderful comics are so much better. And the first time I did that was with that paper over in Advances in Archaeological Practice, which was a real opportunity to show not just members of the public and people who weren't archaeologists, what comics could do for them, but actually show archaeologists.
00:25:08
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that they were kind of missing out by not having to look at this medium and seeing what it could do in their own particular instance. Yes, absolutely. I mean, if we think about what it is that comics can actually do then, because there are a couple of things that I've just noticed from your work, and I'm sure you'll be able to point us in the direction of other examples. So, Katie, going back to the Toadstone,
00:25:37
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what's my favorite bit and I'm going up and down really quickly on my screen to see the Toadstone finally move and to see the Toad crawl away and that's it's absolutely you give everybody a tip at the bottom don't you to say do move the
00:25:56
Speaker
move the cursor up a dab so that you can see the toad move. So you can actually create that kind of almost like movie like quality, stop motion animation quality, can't you? Yeah, when I decided that the comic was going to be bigger than just one side of A4 and I was trying to think
00:26:18
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how I would present that, how am I actually going to construct it? Physically, what will the structure be? And I could have chosen lots of different things. It could have been a number of pages of A4 or A5 or something like that.
00:26:31
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or poster size or whatever. But one of the things that I wanted to happen at the end of the story, whatever was going to be in the story in the end, at the end of it, I wanted the Toadstone to be able to get up and walk away. Whether that was because the Toadstone was joining the stones that had gone down into the valley to be part of the stone circle or to wander off to see all of the
00:26:57
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members of the Toadstones family that are around the world, depending on where the rocks are. I wanted the Toadstones to move, so then I thought, I know what I can do. I can make it like it's...
00:27:09
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a flick book because we used to do that when we were kids in school it was the best to buy these little rectangular books with plain paper that were just the right size to hold in your hands and you we did our own drawings so in the flick book so that then when you flick the pages you got this animation I thought yes I'll do that the trouble was the trouble was that
00:27:32
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I ended up with so much going into the story that what was physically going to be stitched together as a little rectangular book ended up being far too many pages for me to be able to actually make it into a book. I'm just not skilled enough. If it had been 20 or 30 of the little rectangular pages, I could have done it, but I ended up having 70 pages. It was a good idea that I couldn't quite get a loss.
00:28:00
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But that meant that when I had scanned those images, scanned those pages and put them online, at least with a cursor on your mouse on the screen, you can make the toad kind of move if you move the image on the screen quickly enough to scroll up and down. But for me, I really had wanted to make a thing that was physically
00:28:22
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comic, if you sort of mean, as well as in terms of drawing style and in terms of the medium. And I really, I really like that idea. One of the brilliant, most brilliant things that my first introduction really to, to conference posters that were, that were actually engaging as opposed to just the most tedious things on a screen at a conference that you usually see
00:28:45
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My introduction to a really good conference poster was Alison Atkins' plague poster, which she did a few years ago. They even had moving parts, so people at the conference looking at her poster could open little flaps and pull little things and make parts of the poster move. I did a similar thing, a much smaller version for the 2015 Experimental Archaeology Conference.
00:29:10
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which was held in Dublin. I made a poster that had moving parts inspired by Alison's plague poster and I kind of wanted to do a similar thing with the Toadstone story to actually make it into a book and to make it
00:29:25
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make it move so so that it also had a sort of a feeling of something in your hands because I can't in in in the story I can't take people I can't physically take the reader who could be anywhere in the world I can't take them out onto the
00:29:42
Speaker
the downs onto the Marlborough Downs. And I can't take them to actually touch the stone and feel what the surface of the stone is like and have all those other sensory experiences. But I thought maybe I can bring a bit of movement and feeling to this somehow. So the comic at home, here at home, there was only one copy of it from the electronic copy.
00:30:05
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But that copy is a physical thing. It's got its own box that I made for it. And you can flip the last section of it and watch the toad move. Cool. Well, yeah, the trick will be trying to find some way to publish it that it will work like that.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yes, that's a good question. And Hannah, going back to the mole gold cape, for one thing, but I'm sure you can bring our attention to other things, as well as the main comic that you did where the cape speaks for itself, which is lovely.
00:30:48
Speaker
But you also did a make your own cape, didn't you? Where you can cut it out and glue it together and create your own.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah, I made a few, I made a few Make Your Owns, I made a palaeolithic foam trope, you get these beautiful ones, which I've seen in the museum in France, and they had at the Ice Age Art Exhibition. And yeah, so there are those discs where you flip them. And the two things like you usually have a bird on one side and cage on the other and they'll join, the images join together as you flip them.
00:31:28
Speaker
And there are examples of those from the palette. I think they're amazing. Yeah, I made a mold cape and I made a little boat, a little jet boat that you can make as well. I haven't made any for a while, but they were a lot of fun. I think, John, you designed to make your own things for your Welsh comics as well, didn't you? Yes, we had some simple games in the middle.
00:31:54
Speaker
cut-and-fold cardboard model, one of the shield bosses and a shield. Yeah, my dad used to buy me those cut-out models we could get from this museum whenever he went. Oh, those were great. They took ages to make, but they were fantastic. It's great, especially when they're so intricate and really accurate, and you've got your own little thing.
00:32:20
Speaker
So comics can kind of do so many different things and we haven't even talked about the actual matching words and image. John, I am in a little book club in my village and one of the ladies in the club was really into graphic novels and she wanted us to read a graphic novel. We read Watchmen.
00:32:47
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And it was the first one I'd ever read and my brother lent it to me and he said, oh yeah, you'll read it in an hour. And it's huge for one thing, but I found it took me a long time to get used to reading and looking and matching those together. But when I did, it was obviously quite a very powerful thing. But what would you say to people who are maybe
00:33:17
Speaker
a little bit worried about how that, how those comics can actually work and are they going to be able to kind of get into it? I think you're absolutely right. I think reading a long form of comic work like the Brahma Dumbo is something of an acquired skill only because we are, we're all not used to seeing comics in
00:33:46
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was a single panel thing, short panel thing for close to several over a century. And I still think people are used to reading in the natural way. But it's a little bit like getting used to reading some private prejudice, or one of those people who feel like you need to pay attention to it. You're not just kind of serious. That's it. I think it is. It's that if you're used to reading just a normal novel, it's the paying attention. That's the thing. Yeah.
00:34:14
Speaker
But it's very rewarding. Yes, and I think sometimes too, people who read a lot of comics, particularly if they read the Superman comic every month, that kind of thing, I think they get very used to reading very quickly because they have a way of absorbing the story and the artwork because they want a very particular set of things out of it.
00:34:36
Speaker
But if you're going to read something complicated, like Posey Simmons and Gemma Bovely, for example, or Tamara Drew, where there's a lot going on on any given page, you can actually read that story or read that book five or six different times and get something different out there every time because your eye is going to go across the page in a different way every time you read the stories. And I think that's one of the things that can, comics like Hannah's,
00:35:07
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And then the next thing that happens, they're much more exploring your way through this page where text and image lay off each other in different ways. And I think we've only just scratched the surface of that in archaeology. I think there's a lot more that we feel.
00:35:24
Speaker
Yes absolutely because I mean the opportunity to make jarring contrasts between pages or between images next to each other or links through as well to you're moving to a different part of the story but there's the visual link
00:35:42
Speaker
that helps you kind of jump to that bit and see the links is what I found really quite amazing. And the amount of work that has to go into creating and all of these images with people taking part in a story over many little windows or I don't know,
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah, the panel. Thank you. It's just, it's staggering, really. Again, I think you build up a bit of a workflow too. When I did that first comic in Turkey, it took me ages to do. And I really didn't know what I was doing at all. And the prospect of having to control the same face more than once is just, anyway. But now I think I do it
00:36:37
Speaker
because I've been doing so many of them, it comes kind of second nature and you find yourself actually thinking
00:36:43
Speaker
in terms of comic artwork. You don't think of, right, I've got to draw all this and I've got to draw that in this panel and then I've got to draw it again. You think of ways to do the drawing almost across several pages, across multiple panels across multiple pages. It's not, you do end up in a different kind of mindset than just giving us a static trait. Yeah, I bet. I mean, you started out as an archaeological illustrator and
00:37:12
Speaker
It is a very strict and controlled way of doing things, isn't it?
00:37:20
Speaker
It is, yes. I mean, it's technical illustration. So there are rules the way that you show an object, show a piece of pottery, for example, or a piece of foam. And those rules work for archaeologists, because they show them the kind of information that they need to see. And you can use tricks like cutaways and half sections and that kind of thing to expand that information. But that really only means it to archaeologists.
00:37:45
Speaker
But I think the same thing is true of comics, you know, there's a way of producing a comic which can tell your audience a lot more, and it's learning those tricks and techniques that makes comics interesting. Oh lovely. Well, we're just going to take another break and then when we come back, I'm going to ask my guests, can archaeological
Future of Archaeological Comics
00:38:10
Speaker
comics replace archaeological reports and illustrations?
00:38:23
Speaker
you
00:38:25
Speaker
The CRM Archaeology Podcast brings together a panel of cultural resource management professionals to discuss the issues that really matter to the profession. Find out about networking strategies, job hunting, graduate programs, and much more. We'll often feature interviews with college professors, CRM business owners, and experts as well. Check out the show on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash CVRM Arc Podcast. Let's get back to the show.
00:39:03
Speaker
Hello, and we're back talking to John Swagger, Hannah Sackett and Katie Whittaker. Hello again, everyone. You're still with me?
00:39:14
Speaker
So I've really controlled the conversation up till now, but I want to kind of throw it open to you discussing with me, where do you see archaeological comics going? For you personally, but also in the profession and maybe is there a way to get this much more widely promoted to the public?
00:39:41
Speaker
So what do you think? Anyone? It's a big question. I mean, that really is a huge question there. But I think it's one of those questions that
00:39:53
Speaker
As more people start doing more archaeological comics, I think the answer will kind of emerge out of that work. It's really interesting that when I first started doing my comics 10 years ago, everybody just looked at me when I said archaeological comics. And now I'm sitting doing a podcast with two people who are doing PhDs on the subject.
00:40:13
Speaker
I mean, I think shows you part of the direction that comics has been taken, not by me, but by other people. And that's one of the reasons why I think it's best even though it's going to be really useful to get more and more people doing comics, thinking about them, writing about them, figuring out the things that they do, their particular areas of expertise, and then deciding what comics can
00:40:38
Speaker
go on to do from there. I mean, I'm doing comics now. I mean, I see the trajectory from my work in the United States, but that's one direction, that's one person working on one set of projects. So yeah, I mean, the more ideas. Well, where are you? Yeah, go ahead.
00:41:00
Speaker
I was going to say that I agree, I think that comics will be as diverse as the people who make them. I think it's not one direction and if you look at the range of comics outside archaeology at the minute, that's getting wider and wider so it can go from informational comics to comics that are fine art.
00:41:21
Speaker
to comics that are very sort of mainstream aimed at different audiences and I think that that will be the same in archaeology. I think John and I ran a workshop at TAG at Southampton last year and loads of people came along and they are working on their comics. People got back to us and sent us their comics and they're really enthused about it.
00:41:47
Speaker
and they're all going to take it in their own direction. It's going to be really exciting to see. That's brilliant. Do you think that comics make it easier to, is it really made for social media? Are they made for social media? Does it work better there? Hannah?
00:42:13
Speaker
I would say it works well on social media and it does grab people's attention and I think that's one reason that people use it. I'm very in favour of also making print comics so I print my comics and sell them and also I think for things like notice boards and displays at sites
00:42:40
Speaker
And in museums, I think comics are invaluable for getting across a lot of information for people that might not want to stand there and read a blog. Yeah, I never. And I think, John, have you ever noticed sports?
00:42:53
Speaker
John, have you done any notice boards for anyone as comics? Yes, absolutely. I mean, the links between notices and comics and posters are very, very strong. And in fact, in the Caribbean, I didn't print and distribute my comics as comic books. I just distributed them as posters, which went up in local businesses and so on. And that's a way of going into spaces where comics can always go. And where archaeology doesn't always go.
00:43:23
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. I mean, people were asking for them not, I think they've been asking for them, and I've been producing them as comic books, they would have sat on a table somewhere, but because they put them up on the wall, they could easily show anybody who came into a hotel reception or anybody came in for a little shot. What it was going on, you know, you don't have to sit there and do anything, but the images just fall in on you. And that's very different between which we usually do our
00:43:53
Speaker
our engagement with other archaeologists. I think that's really interesting, actually, because to me, that has links with traditions in graphic art that you see in the posters that work best and are most effective for things like the British Transport Network, the posters of the glory of the British railway network.
00:44:20
Speaker
When you think back to the way that information is displayed in
00:44:27
Speaker
train stations and on the London Underground. The things that work best are those images that you can just see immediately. When you're in a tube train looking at the depiction of the line with its stations up above the windows, you can work out really quickly where you are and how many stops you start to go. I think it's a part of that family practice, a bigger family and why wouldn't they work? Of course they can work to communicate what can be really quite
00:44:57
Speaker
complicated pieces of information. I think there's also something with the physical problem. Something's really interesting that you chose to do the code of physical object, I mean, in an addition of one. I think there is something in the abstract nature of archaeological information, which I think almost needs to be countered by tying it down to a physical object. I think that's why we like
00:45:21
Speaker
archaeological books and journals, you know, they give us something concrete to come onto when we're sitting there talking about very, very esoteric stories. So I'm looking forward to your book, John, on archaeological comics as a comic. Do you think that, hey, maybe the next next book by Barry Cunliffe should be a comic or, oh no, no better, Ian Hodder, that would be great. And then maybe then I could understand archaeological theory.
00:45:49
Speaker
Yes, yes. Well, I think part of the article that I did for advances in archaeological practice was taking an article from American antiquity on pottery decoration and pointing out how visual it was and yet how unvisual the article was. And it's a shame. I mean, I like articles on pottery decoration because I'm an illustrator, but most people I think would have flipped across that article to something with more pictures in it.
00:46:16
Speaker
it just didn't immediately grab them. And yet, when you're talking about the coffee decoration, you want to be able to show the decoration and the parts and the typology. It doesn't make any sense otherwise, doesn't it Jimmy? To just write about it.
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah. And I was filming your paper, wasn't I? So for open access archaeology. So that will be shared on YouTube. Eventually, it does take a while for Doug Rock's McQueen to edit all of these videos. So but when that's up and running, I will make sure that there is a link to that in the show notes. So
00:46:59
Speaker
Katie, are you doing more comics? Are you hooked now? Yeah, so as I mentioned before, my comic about the Toadstone is the only one that I've really found a way of sharing
00:47:29
Speaker
The next comic that I want to draw will be a conference poster.
00:47:35
Speaker
The only problem with that is time. Have I got enough time to do it given the deadline to get it in? But I've done some preliminary sketches. So if I do run with that and if it goes ahead, it will be a conference at the University of Reading for Reading's postgraduate students.
00:47:56
Speaker
But I'll have to find a way to make that more widely available beyond the audience in the room at that conference in June. But it's one of those things.
00:48:12
Speaker
Sometimes, when you read about something, doing a bit of research, the way it works for me is that I think, yes, I'm going to write about this, this is going to be part of a paper or a chapter or something that I'm going to be doing. But actually, my immediate response is that this would work so much better if I grew it, if I could
00:48:33
Speaker
tell the story of this particular little interesting thing that I've discovered. And that's, that's why I've decided I want to do this conference poster on a particular story of some Sarson stones that are very strangely in Reading. Why they're in Reading was that was the, that was the question. Reading does not normally have this, this type of rock. It's not part of its normal geology. So why are these rocks
00:48:59
Speaker
that my research is concerned with in Reading and it turns out that they used to be in Wiltshire and they were taken in the very early 19th century to form part of an amazing landscape garden. Because I've been thinking about this piece of history and this piece of research in pictures, so looking at 19th century engravings of the park as it once was before it became
00:49:29
Speaker
in effect, derelict. Because I've been taking my own photographs and then doing my own sketches, it occurred to me that this is something that ought to be drawn and the characters involved in making this thing happen 200 or so years ago in designing the landscape and in moving the stones and the stones themselves, they could tell their own story very much in the way that Hannah
00:49:58
Speaker
get objects to tell their own stories and that that would work best. But for me, I love drawing, but I don't do enough of it. And so it takes me longer to get to the finished article. By the time I've done a couple of sketches or a couple of revisions, I'm just not practiced enough. My skills, my motor skills and my design skills are
00:50:28
Speaker
are still very young. Yeah, well, it takes a lot of practice. And my problem is that it'll never be there with me at all. I just don't have that eye. Do you ever get anybody do you ever get any negative feedback about the using comics at all in in any part of your work or? No, or is everybody quite open to the idea? Oh, I think interestingly, I had some
00:50:57
Speaker
I had some, some critical comments from the reviewers when I was doing my paper, but they were more along the lines of this is unexpected. And I'm not sure how your audience is going to react rather than I think this is a bad idea. So I think there's a general timidity.
00:51:16
Speaker
in academic circles in using to using comics. But I don't think generally that's born out certainly not in my experience. I know that in medicine, I do some comics for medical subjects and the animals internal medicine have been very, very good as a journal in using comics, not for a whole article, but just introduce stuff that wouldn't otherwise work very well in text. So ethics, for example,
00:51:45
Speaker
They'll use a comic to tell the story of the situation that prompted the actual question. That's a really good idea for archaeological ethics as well, isn't it? Because it is a very difficult thing to write about.
00:51:59
Speaker
it is it's it's kind of confusing unless you can get some context and then that's things that yeah exactly one of the things that you can do is draw real draw um real people in a comic style um or draw general generic comic people and um it's so it's so flexible in that way isn't it that you can put in quotes but actually show who's saying them and it makes it more understandable that this is just a person and it's not
00:52:29
Speaker
you know, even if you are quoting someone like Foucault or Heidegger or that does get quoted a lot in academic circles, they were just a person and they're not necessarily right. I think that in a way that if you could see them in the comic, I think that actually it really does humanise that area. Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
00:52:56
Speaker
I agree. And I think one of the things it also does is it kind of asks archaeologists if they're willing to take responsibility for something. They say, no, it's one thing to footnote somebody. That's not really, it's not really
00:53:11
Speaker
right in your face that this is what he and Potter said, or this is what Harry Potter said. Thanks. But if there's a picture of Harry Potter saying, I think this, then it's very, very clear that this is his idea. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure why I picked on them particularly. I apologize.
00:53:30
Speaker
just thinking of the grace and the good in scare quotes. What about Hannah and Katie, have you ever had any negative feedback at all about using the comic style? I don't think so. I think some people, I think, well,
00:53:51
Speaker
The great thing about comics is for some people, they're immediate and they draw you in and they make you want to read it. Other people may look at a comic and just not be interested at all. So people may pass it by or just think that's not something for me, but I've never had anyone sort of be angry at me that I would make something as a comic. But I haven't done what John's done and tried to put it sort of into an academic context.
00:54:22
Speaker
which is something I may be trying in the future. Will your PhD thesis be in Comic Form? Well, there may be an aspect of it which is, and that's still being resolved. There are now a few PhDs which are for me or partially in Comic Form. So it has been done now and I suspect it may be on the increase
00:54:52
Speaker
So yeah, I think it's becoming definitely, and I think that as John mentioned, the graphic medicine, you know, huge changes have happened in that area, and they're really using comics in all sorts of ways. So I think that's kind of pushing forward for the other disciplines that if it can be used in something as serious as medicine, then I think all of us can get behind it, really. So I think it's spreading to a lot of disciplines, and I think it will become more
00:55:20
Speaker
acceptable. And yeah, recently, there was a thing in the news that Sheffield had a psychologist did research looking at comics as textbooks, and they did a psychology experiment looking at comics text and text with unrelated images, which communicated best to students, the information and the comics. So
00:55:46
Speaker
they should all, can you send me a link to that and I'll put that in the show notes as well. I will have the reference to that piece because that's fantastic. That's really interesting. The little bit of drawing I've done so far where I've actually shared it with other people has been very well received by those people, but then they are people I'm working with my
00:56:16
Speaker
my supervisors or my peers and at the moment I feel like that's at worst tolerated and at best encouraged and they're enthusiastic about it and are happy that it's just one of the things that I do and am quite enthusiastic about. I haven't yet tested the waters
00:56:42
Speaker
any, any further than that. And I'm really hoping that I don't come up across objection. I mean, I might come across sort of indifference. And I can certainly imagine that some people would think it was perhaps a bit, a bit sort of, I don't know, not, not too serious enough for something, but
00:57:01
Speaker
It's certainly not the way that I look at it. And I think at the end of the day, you know, every month I do a load of activities with a bunch of enthusiastic kids aged sort of 18 years old, all the way through to 16, 17, through the archaeologist's car. When I just think about all the things that we do together and the things that matter most to those kids and their interest in archaeology. And if communicating or telling stories about archaeology can be done in any way,
00:57:31
Speaker
in any way that people enjoy and respond to.
00:57:34
Speaker
That's got to be the ultimate test. Yeah, absolutely. I try on this podcast to celebrate that and I think that fiction and comics and poetry are all really fantastic ways to engage people outside archaeology. But also I think that we need them ourselves because we're people too.
00:58:05
Speaker
It does help us think about things in different ways. So thank you ever so much. I just wanted to ask one last thing before we go because we're coming to the end of the podcast of this episode. I'm hoping in a future episode to talk about Mezalith and there is a Mezalith too now. Have any of you read this? Have you read this? It is a comic, a graphic novel.
00:58:34
Speaker
Yeah, I really must get hold of it. So maybe I could talk to you about that at some later point. One or two or three of you, all three of you as well, because it would be really nice to hear your views on it. But very quickly, what do you think about it? Yeah, it's brilliant. It's amazing.
00:59:04
Speaker
It's the kind of thing that I think you feel a bit overwhelmed by the quality of it a little bit and I always wonder whether it stops people thinking about doing an archaeological comic themselves because they look at that and say well I couldn't do that so I can't do an archaeological comic. It is a particular style though isn't it and it is that kind of graphic novel style rather than a
00:59:25
Speaker
And yeah, but you're right, though, that there are lots of different ways to do comics. So hopefully nobody will be put off, but just encouraged. Yeah. Because I think it's... So I was going to say that I think for people that are archaeologists, I think it would be a real pull to people to become interested. You know, they've really researched
00:59:52
Speaker
that specific examples of archaeology in there. And I think that it would probably draw people who weren't interested in archaeology before to be interested.
01:00:09
Speaker
who read, you know, different sorts of point books. So yeah, I think it's brilliant. I'm really looking forward to reading the second one. Yeah, fantastic. Well, I'm hoping to talk about that in a future episode. So I may be talking to you about appearing on that. And I also have some specific Mesolithic archaeologist I'm going to be talking to as well, hopefully.
01:00:35
Speaker
So all I have to say is thank you so much everybody for talking to me today and it's been fantastic. I think that we've explored how comics can be brilliant for engaging new kind of audiences to archaeology but also there's much more potential for them to be used as a tool for each other in the discipline. So yeah.
01:01:05
Speaker
Thank you ever so much. I will make sure that all your contact details are available in the show notes. So that your Twitter handle, Hannah, is Dr. H Comics. Katie, is it all right to share your Twitter handle on the show notes? Yes, you can form me on Twitter as artificial underscore KW. Are you on Twitter, John?
01:01:35
Speaker
I am. I'm not one very often. I'm much more deeply found on my blog. And we already know with your blog JohnGSwagger.WordPress.com. That's the one, isn't it? So lovely. Thank you ever so much.
01:01:50
Speaker
I will be in touch with you and hopefully everyone has enjoyed this podcast and will look out for my next one, which hopefully will be about Medolith or it may be a film special. I'm not entirely sure yet. All right, but tune in to hear that next Prehistories podcast.
01:02:22
Speaker
. .
01:02:55
Speaker
This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and edited by Chris Sims. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.