BARKING
BARKING
AN INTERVIEW WITH LUCY SULLIVAN
For those who aren ’ t familiar , can you tell us what readers can expect from this book ? Readers can expect to be pulled into an honest , visually kinetic , and verbally disorientating exploration of what a mental health crisis feels like . To be confronted with the position of fear experienced by those institutionalised . Asked to consider how we , as a society , treat people at their most vulnerable and how we can find light in the darkness .
How did this project come about ? When I was 23 my Dad died suddenly . I was living in New Zealand at the time and so received ‘ that phone-call ’ everyone dreads on moving away . It was a difficult return home both in terms of travel and settling back to a previous life but now without my Dad . Around 18 months after my bereavement I had the worst night of my life and was told by an old family friend to seek help . I was diagnosed with grief-triggered Depression & Anxiety . I had to find ways to live with and manage it , leading me to study Illustration & Animation at University .
Years later I found myself spiraling into depression again . I had been toying with making a graphic novel about my experience and had seen people around me suffer a similar crisis with familiar outcomes . At the time it was still quite a taboo thing to discuss , particularly the kind of aggressive symptoms I was displaying so it felt like unexplored ground . I started researching comics that worked with similar themes ; Glyn Dillon ’ s The Nao of Brown , Billy , Me & You by Nicola Streeten and Lorenzo Mattotti ’ s Stigmata amongst many more . I knew I had something to say and a comic in me that could be the vehicle for that .
With the encouragement of my partner Stephen and our good friend Nick Abadzis ( Laika / Hugo Tate ), I started creating the story .
Can you tell us more about how you adapted your own experiences for this graphic novel ? At first , I was going to create it as a purely biographical account , however I found it incredibly difficult to honestly depict myself . Even decades later I was still ashamed by my behaviour and actions . I also wanted to discuss what I had witnessed through the treatment of other sufferers along with the varied research I had found . It became apparent that the best solution was to devise a character , Alix Otto , to drive the narrative and be subjected to my experiences . This also meant I could add elements to make it both engaging as a story and link into my personal ideas about death and grief . I referenced films like An American Werewolf in London ( 1981 ), Folkloric concepts of Black Dogs and Japanese traditions around ghosts and water . Alongside articles and books on mental health and the structures in the UK ( United Kingdom ) for treatment and care . I still wanted to keep an honesty about my own crisis , so I tried to not plot out the book too much and focus on automatic drawing and writing based on the individual chapter themes . It was an experimental way to make a comic and perhaps not one I would repeat but it was the only way to make BARKING .
How did you develop the art style for this graphic novel ? It took quite a while to develop the look I was after , although in the end it was serendipitous . I knew I wanted it to be black and white . I found the process of penciling then inking a tad daunting and was concerned it would take away the immediacy I was after . At the time I was teaching life drawing and would use a Cross Biro Pen to sketch out explanations of the poses in a notebook . I really enjoyed the line it created and even the smudges as ink built up on the page . I tested it out on a variety of materials without success until I remembered a stack of 2D Animation paper gifted by my friend & fellow animator Pedro Serrazina . I wanted to enjoy the process of drawing the book and this combination hit all the right notes , but I knew it would be difficult in terms of heavy black areas . Then I was teaching on-site drawing when a student , Hannah Simpson , showed me work she ’ d drawn with carbon typewriter sheets . The fluid , messy nature of the material was exactly what I was after .
Once I combined the materials , I knew it had the media I wanted , and I started laying out page ideas . There ’ s a spread I created that was a watershed moment where I knew I ’ d found the style . If I utilised my experience of dynamic poses for animation with observational drawing , I could develop something unique in an immediate manner . All the panels were sketched freely in biro or carbon on large sheets of animation paper , without page structure or panel borders but alongside dialogue . I would then roughly sketch a layout and scan everything into Photoshop , laying out double spreads individually from the sketches . I would place the images by eye and then add panel borders from a bank of lines I ’ d drawn and scanned . I built
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