Ahead of the free SEQUENT’ULL Comic Art Festival taking place in Hull on Saturday 31st August 2024, organiser and fellow creative Sean Azzopardi chats with guests at the event, continuing with Gareth A Hopkins…
Could you talk a little about yourself and your work.
I’m an artist who makes comics, and I live in Essex. I’ve been making comics for about 15 years, but my first proper self-published project was The Intercorstal:683 in 2016. Since then I’ve released the graphic novels Petrichor, Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors and Found Forest Floor (which I made with writer Choku Dawa) as well as a lot of smaller comics and zines.
For the most part, the artwork I make is non-figurative, and within that I tend to change styles quite often. For a while I think I was likely known for finely detailed black ink drawings, but over the past few years I’ve expanded out into other mediums. And I’m careful to not say ‘abstract’ in reference to my work at the moment, because it’s a word that carries expectations which I don’t feel I fit into, really.
The stories I tell with my comics tend to be reflective and observational, and influenced by paranormal studies and weird fiction. Artistically, I’m most influenced by early 1990s 2000AD and Marvel comics, the surrealists, and various DIY music scenes.
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a graphic novel called Rainlight Cope Aesthetic, but I’m doing that by working on multiple different smaller projects to work through ideas and approaches. Conceptually, it’s about the relationship between a narrator and the character he’s created, but as I work on it it’s changing a lot.
A lot of my projects at the moment are experimenting with a new format I’ve called ‘idiot fold comics’, where the binding point on each page is different, forcing the rest of the page to fold in a different place. It’s opened up new ways of working for me, and I’m still working on a way to perfect it. So far I’ve finished three – Rainlight Cope Aesthetic: Temporal Eructation, Homelight and Mountain Battles – and I have at least two others which will be finished this year – Telephone, and Cathedrals.
I’m also in the final phases of a comic called “Between Teeth” for Douglas Noble’s Pocket Chiller line. It’s about different types of horror.
Why comics, what are the core reasons for working with this medium?
For me, I think it’s about the versatility of the medium, and that there’s so much scope for exploration still. Last year I was playing with the order of production, flipping the writing-then-pencil-then-ink-then-colour standard so that it worked backwards, to see what would happen. This year I’m seeing what happens when you put the staples in a different place. And that’s just the mechanics of the medium – plenty of other people are playing with the types of stories you can tell using comics, or how you can tell the same story in different ways.
I dunno. I just don’t think of everything I do as a comic in some way or another.
So much creative time is absorbed by engaging with social media, conventions and other publicity tasks. While necessary to a degree, is it worth it?
If it hadn’t been for social media in one form or another, I’d definitely not be where I am now – it’s had an immense effect on my life. Most of my friends nowadays are people I met on social media in one form or another. And for a while social media also felt like an important tool to further my ‘career’ as a comics creator – telling people that things are for sale, or that I was working on something and so on and so on. The couple of Kickstarters I’ve done wouldn’t have been as successful as they are without Twitter.
But I’ve realised in the past year that I really only have so much energy, and that my energy is best spent doing what I love (making comics) than what I don’t (doing marketing and sales). So I’ve pulled right back, and spend far less time in those spaces, espeically doing any kind of self-promotion.
Breaking away from social media was also helped by how fractured it’s become in the last few years – as well as the audience for Twitter breaking up across Mastadon and Threads and Bluesky, it definitely feels more tribal than it did a decade ago. And not falling easily into any particular tribe, I’ve just sort of floated off.
allAs to whether it’s worth it? Not for me, not in the same way that it used to be.
Do you feel connected to a comics scene in anyway?
Yes, but also with the distinction that there isn’t a single scene to be connected to – it’s more of an ecosystem where some parts interact and others don’t. It’s become quite common for me to be talking to one of my comics peers and go “oh, you know so-and-so” and they’ll have never heard of them. Some people who I’d consider to be A Big Deal are entirely unknown to everyone else.
So, I’m connected to lots of smaller groups within ‘the scene’, and within other scenes too? Another aspect here is that I’m inclined towards being a bit of a hermit, and I don’t get out and about as much as I should, so I’m probably less connected than I could be.
Could you recommend some current creators that are making good stuff?
Some stuff that I’ve read recently that’s good are Home and Threadbare by Gareth Brookes (that other Comics Gareth); Ghost Stories I Remember by Patrick Wray; Bumblebee Hemisphere by Emix Regulus (I have some more stuff by her in my to-read pile, too); Wake Up To Woke by Gary Pratt, and Penge Pieces (After Yoko) by Cosmo Chancer from Colossive Press (which aren’t comics but are zines, so let’s not get fussy); and Anticucho by Gustaffo Vargas.
Have you visited Hull before?
No, and I’m very much looking forward to my first trip there.
• Gareth A Hopkins is online at grthink.com | Patreon
• SEQUENT’ULL Comic Art Festival 2024
11.00am – 6.00pm Saturday 31st August 2024 | Free Entry
Jubilee Central, 62 King Edward Street, Hull HU1 3SQ
• Facebook Event Page
Independent comic artists and publishers, selling comics graphic novels and prints.
Exhibitors Include: Breakdown Press, Colossive Press, Footprints Workers CoOp, Michelle Freeman, Sarah Gordon, Gareth Hopkins, Jake Machen, Shane Melisse, Douglas Noble, Alex Potts, Scarborough Zine Library, Mark Stafford, Lucy Sullivan, James Webster Sharp, Dan White and Lilly Williams
- About the Author
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One of many guest posts for downthetubes.
Categories: British Comics, Comics, Creating Comics, downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News, Events
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