Mostly planning a presentation for that paper, a load of stuff for Disorder, drawings I did as a result of one of the funniest things that's ever happened to me, and distractions with Charley and Ann (which I'll use for some postdoctoral thing focussing on them, currently it's looking like it'll be a graphic novel about memory and time or something like that)
(Timelapse video of this one here!)
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| First page sideways because it wasn't entirely relevant to the main part of my work - I found out about a terrible fire in Barnard Castle when Charley and Ann were living there, and got excited and had to check the Newcastle Courant's coverage (issue dated 31 March 1848) against some directories (such as this one from 1827) |
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| Top of left-hand page: I was practicing presenting that paper, and evaluating my performance every time I did. Right: developing a visual language that was somewhere between Mary Ann's and Charley's for a couple of pages of Disorder where they talk to each other |
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This drawing of Mary Ann was the last thing I drew before my appendix burst! I was partway through another presentation rehearsal and feeling increasingly rough, and, to my great inconvenience and surprise, it transpired that one of my internal organs was rupturing. I drew most of the stuff on this spread while I was recovering at home. |
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More stuff I drew during post-appendectomy recovery. I thought the whole thing was hilarious, especially as I was working on a comic in which my protagonist nearly dies, and then I nearly died! (But I only realised that I nearly died some time after the event. At the time it was just annoying.) Anyway, the experience of having to recover from something that scares the daylights out of everybody around you proved very useful and gave me ideas for when William is recovering from whatever happened to make people despair of his life. |
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I'd been reading Nigel Llewellyn's The Art of Death (Reaktion Books in association with the V&A, London, 1991) and I developed things that ended up in Disorder. (I've already discussed this book here.) Some of these drawings are influenced by my post-appendix fun. |
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The first version of William's possibly-weirder-than-the-rest-of-the-book bit. He sees his own corpse, and Bridget in deep mourning, and then encounters their daughter Jane, who is deceased but who remains very cheerful. I wanted this part to be ambiguous - it's unclear whether he's had a supernatural encounter, some sort of prophetic vision, a mildly alarming hallucination, a consciously imagined episode, something induced by medication, or something else. Depends on how you interpret it! |
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Working out logistics of some of William's pages that show his bed. I don't know what his bed was like at the time when I set the comic (or at any other time), so I used some near-contemporary tent beds, which were apparently cheaper than a four-poster - he's a Yorkshire schoolmaster offering reasonably priced education, he'd probably approve of saving money where you can (I am of Yorkshire descent, I can make these jokes) |
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Left: by doing that drawing of Benning, I realised I needed to do two more pages in which William expresses his concern over the ophthalmia and becomes increasingly unwell. Right, underneath Bridget and young Ockerby: I drew some rough layouts which became more disordered as William's mental state deteriorates, and, by drawing something disordered, I retitled it - it was going to be called Despaired Of (which came from one of the trial reports, Benning said that William's life was "despaired of") but Disorder can be anything: the ophthalmia was called a disorder, William's mental state is disordered, the narratives are in a disorderly state, and I want to throw ordinary ways of doing history into disorder too. |
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Ideas for stuff to put on William's two new pages. |
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Definitions from Frederick Dinsdale's A Glossary of Provincial Words used in Teesdale in the County of Durham (1849, available here) which is very relevant! Teesdale is where the people in my case study lived, and Dinsdale would have been collecting these words during (some of) their lifetimes. |
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| Most of this is me thinking about the written bits (the introduction and the conclusion) in Disorder. I was going to have a glossary full of illustration/ history terms - things from each discipline that people familiar with the other one might not recognise - eventually I decided it was long enough, and I could probably do a bigger and better version of a glossary elsewhere (with more exploration of each term, oh no I sense another postdoctoral thing brewing). Lower right-hand page has a bit about a nasty version of William (I tend to depict him as short-tempered but generally trying to do the right thing) |
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| There's a few spreads like this: I printed a copy of my introduction, cut it up, glued it in, and annotated it. Working out page layout and how the images would work with the words. |
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| A distraction! It's Charley and Ann again! I'm going to do a postdoctoral project about them, focussing on memory/ memorialisation/ commemoration/ forgetting/ misremembering/ that sort of thing. |
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| Left: a load of symbols and such that appear in the comic in Disorder, that I also included in a couple of places in the introduction, intending on having the audience say "I've seen that before somewhere". Right: printed the conclusion and annotated it like with the introduction. |
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| I read Beverley Pilcher's Barnard Castle and the Cholera Outbreak, 1849 (2004, privately printed) and had loads of good ideas about Charley and Ann - they went to live in Barnard Castle in the 1840s, and Charley died at the end of the 1849 cholera epidemic. In some of these drawings, I'm wondering how Ann might have reacted to some of the moralistic things that people were saying. |
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| More Disorder conclusion stuff |
I am now totally distracted by the idea of that postdoctoral project about Charley and Ann, oh no - leave me to my diversions and go back to the sketchbook index
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