Queer: A Graphic History

"Eleanor: Queer: A Graphic History is incredible. It does a great job of breaking down a complex narrative and showing what you can do with pictures. This book is how I got the idea to do my own. I was walking along a canal in Oxford with friends talking about how great it was, and how it’s a really effective format for explaining ideas like this, and my husband said, ‘why don’t you do one?’ I thought, ‘that’s a great question. Why don’t I?’ So this is the graphic history that got me to do a graphic history very directly. It was the first time I’d been presented with something that was doing history in this way. We’ve named lots of personal histories, and great narrative histories from a fictional standpoint. But that’s not what I do. I can’t effectively write about myself, and I definitely am not a fiction writer. What do you do if you’re a huge fan of comics, and you don’t have any of those things in your arsenal? Queer was a great template for that, for understanding what it is that you can do, how you can get these complex ideas across to an audience and also, again, showing that there is an appetite among adult audiences for exactly what it is we’re doing here. Queer is a tour de force, one of the bestselling of any of the ‘Graphic Guides’ thus far. And there’s a reason for it. It’s really smart. Which is something I would say about Meg-John Barker, certainly. They are very smart. They know how to do this. It was a really great way of helping me to think about breaking down history for an audience and how you might do that from a visual perspective. Eleanor: Exactly. Neil: It’s an amazing tool to understand a really hard subject. There’s a lot of complexity and there’s a lot of terminology. It lays it all out, so you feel like you’re really getting an understanding, and a shaking up of taken-for-granted notions as well. It’s dispelling old stuff and really reassessing it. It’s got a real strong feminist voice in there, which is important, and social responsibility. And the art work is really good. It’s slightly different from what we were doing. It’s more Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers. It’s its own style of artwork, but there is that quality to it. Love and Rockets also had that rebellious edge to it, the characters in the comic weren’t conforming to norms, often. The artist and the author were a perfect coupling, for the book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kiera, our editor at Icon, gave us a couple of books to have a look at, the Marx book and this one. I used them as inspirational references, to make sure that I was not making a boring page design, to keep things a little bit on the move. Sometimes there’d be certain ideas in there that would be a reminder to keep the compositions varied. The difference is that often what we were illustrating was in the past, and I couldn’t just go off and draw stuff, because I don’t always know what the past looks like. I was having to do a lot of research. I created a database to look at lots of different manuscripts. I also did a lot of Google searches to make sure that I was historically accurate enough—unless I needed to break the rule to do some kind of joke, an anachronistic visual gag. That definitely impacted what I thought the process would be. I thought it’d be a little bit easier, actually, because a lot of the works that I’d done previously, for historical artwork, were considerably more short form. The level of research wasn’t as much. When you’re illustrating more contemporary times, it’s easier to draw people in suits and trousers and everyday things like telephones, even old-fashioned phones from 80 years ago, I could draw them without necessarily having to go to a reference. The further back you go, the more you need to make sure you’re drawing the right kind of things. Eleanor: There’s obviously a big difference in what we had to cover. Queer covers a lot of concepts or philosophy, how do you break Foucault down, and show that visually? But as you just said, Sophie, if they can do it for Foucault, surely I can do it about historical narratives that I teach all the time? There’s got to be a way. And maybe for us, because we had to show things visually, we’d say it a little more clearly and that gave us an opportunity to be creative in a totally different way. Eleanor: I am of the opinion that whatever gets people reading more is good. I’m team getting people to read more, in whatever way they like. Come to people, that’s the thing that you have to do. It’s one thing to be absolutely strict and purist and say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t pick that up.’ But then where will you be? One of the conversations I always have with other academics is about public history. They can be snooty about it and say, ‘I don’t understand! The public could absolutely read academic books and understand them.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, but they don’t want to.’ Neil: I’d go so far as to say that sometimes they are a little bit impenetrable, and maybe not so readable at all, if you don’t have the academic background. Eleanor: They’re readable as work. You could probably read it, paragraph by paragraph, going to Google if you don’t know something. So sure, it’s possible. But people want to read for pleasure. They want to read for fun. Even if it’s nonfiction , people want to pick up a book and know that they’re going to have a good time. So if you’ve got a popular book, and then it’s made into a graphic form for other people who might not be interested in it otherwise, then yes, I’m always team get more people reading. And maybe they’ll be so into it, they’ll want to read the original. Great. You can’t say fairer than that."