Gregory McCartney: Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and your background?

Lizzy Stewart: I’m an illustrator and author, living in London. I grew up in Plymouth and studied Illustration in Edinburgh. I’ve written and illustrated a few picture books for children alongside working as a freelance illustrator since 2009. In the last few years I’ve been concentrating on illustrated books for adults.

GMCC: Which came first, drawing or writing? When did you first decide to mix the two? I read in an interview that you read Bunty? Did that have an influence on you?

LS: Ah well researched! I was certainly one of, I’d imagine, about ten children reading Bunty in the mid nineties. I loved magazines. I loved Top of the Pops and Smash Hits but Bunty was also in the newsagents and it appealed to the part of me that liked drawing so I got that too. 

I’ve always drawn. I studied fine Art for a year and then switched to Illustration and for a long time I stuck with image-making on it’s own. Writing crept slowly back into my work, having enjoyed it at school, and I think I have to face the facts that I now do, almost, equal parts of both. 

For this book the writing came first. I need to write it all before I draw anything, mostly for spatial planning reasons but also to stop myself from getting carried away with hundreds of pictures that don’t tell any story.

GMCC: Strangely enough (and kept pretty quiet at the time) more girls than boys read comics in the 1970s and 80s but comics were officially a boys thing over our way, though Misty was pretty good! How did you feel as a female reader?

LS: Well in 90s Plymouth I don’t think anyone was reading comics. No one. I was barely reading them, to be fair. So I would never have identified as a comics reader, let alone a fan. 

I think when I did encounter comics I was curious about them as works of art. I wanted to work out how the drawings were put together. I liked that they were figurative and clear and I liked that they had a story. I loved picture books but had been an able reader so was pushed onto chapter books pretty quickly. It was nice to find a way of reading with pictures that was more acceptable for my age group.

I think, even in something as tame as Bunty, you’d be surprised by the insidious sexuality in the way girls’ bodies were presented. I was fascinated by it, being eight or nine. The characters in the stories were meant to be teens and schoolgirls but they had the doll-like bodies of Hollywood women.

When I remember those comics I remember the tiny waists and little boobs of the characters and wonder who that was for? Why did they need to look like that and what did that do to readers like me?

GMCC: Is Alison a graphic novel? How would you describe it? Perhaps just as a ‘novel’? Neil Gaiman used to get annoyed when reviewers wouldn’t use the word ‘comic’ as if it was somehow dirty or it wasn’t ‘art’ perhaps. Personally I’m a big fans of comics.

LS: I don’t know. In my head it’s an illustrated novel. I’ve been an illustrator for over ten years and that’s where I identify myself and my work. Everyone feels aligned to different words and I think it’s easy to view artists as being pedantic when they specify one word or another. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to the people reading but as a maker it can feel important to make clear what it is you think your work it.

I understand Gaiman’s hesitance with the word ‘comic’. I don’t imagine he was being snobby or exclusive but cautious that something he worked on for a long time might get put on a shelf that very few people visit. We don’t have a broad ‘comic’ reading tradition in the UK as they do in, say, France or Italy. Most people would associate comics with Marvel and DC and weekly genre comics. It’s a shame but having that word applied to your work can limit your audience. It’s all just books, innit?

GMCC: Has the more traditional publishing industry become more open to them? I know you previously published with Fantagraphics (who’re also publishing Alison in 2023), who did the brilliant republishing of the Peanuts series and Bill Maudlin volumes amongst other groovy things.

LS: Certainly in the realms of children and YA books. The success of things like Heartstopper by Alice Oseman has really demonstrated to publishing that there is demand for different formats. It makes sense. Some people are better at visual reading than they are with text. It’s promising that we’re opening young people up to that and the concept of what is acceptable ‘reading’ might be less rigidly policed. Again, a book is a book.

In adult literary fiction…? It feels like one or two break through every couple of years. The big hitters like Marjane Satrapi ’s Perseoplis or Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina. Often these books come from outside the UK. It feels like publishers are open to graphic novels but, still, I suspect the most exciting books are published by smaller presses. I’m thinking of places like Avery Hill which is home to Owen D Pomery’s beautiful novella ‘Victory Point’ and Kat Chapman’s subtle ‘Breakwater’ and Little Toller who publisher Simon Moreton’s experimental and bold ‘Where’ last year. Graphic Novels are expensive to produce and it seems to work better for smaller publishers who can be lighter of foot, printing smaller numbers and selling direct to readers online. That said I’ve been very lucky and had a delightful time with Serpent’s Tail (who are part of Profile books, one of the larger independent publishers).

GMCC: How much of ‘you’ is Alison? She evolves for me from a conforming naivety in her youth to a much stronger character. Yet I feel she’s perhaps a bit puzzled and not altogether comfortable with how she’s ended up.

LS: I think it’s difficult for a lot of people who leave one class and move into another. You feel the ties to the world you’re from but you can’t fully get back there, or you’re not allowed back. At the end of the book Alison reflects on who she was and how that might not be immediately visible now that she’s in her sixties. I think we want people to understand us and when a part of your self becomes obscured, especially something as fundamental and complex as class, it can feel like you’re not being fully seen. So I think that’s where she is at the end of the book. Perplexed by herself. 

I’m not Alison. She came from my head but she’s not me. Patrick also came from my head. He’s not me either, to be clear. I have things in common with both of them, I’d imagine. But they’re fictional people.

I wonder what the inclination is to work out how much of an author is in their characters? I get asked a lot because my work tends to be about young (ish) women. I wonder if there’s something in the fact of the drawings that make the character and their world seem more tangible and thus there’s a curiosity as to how much of it is made up? I’m not sure. I’m not angry about it, just curious. It’s not something I want to know, when I read. If anything I’m more keen it be fictional than true-ish. 

GMCC: Is it difficult to write historically even if it’s very recent history? Are you influenced by present societal attitudes or do you try to avoid placing the weight of ‘now’ on a character. Patrick would be considered quite dodgy these days for instance. Though there’s I suspect quite a few Patricks in the arts world still.

LS: I think part of the process for me, a millennial, was to separate the morality of the l world I inhabit from that of 1970s/80s London. It would be jarring to read a story set in the past in which everyone met the world with contemporary attitudes. Saying that though I think we have a tendency to assume that ‘now’ is the most progressive time in history (politically. At least until the last twelve years when everything started going backwards again) but you can read novels and accounts from the turn of the twentieth century and read anti-racist sentiment, relaxed sexual politics and socialist optimism. So it also irritates me when there’s a blanket ruling that people from the past can’t hold progressive ideas.

I tried to make Patrick a bit of a grey area. Unless we’re thinking about the real monsters most of the dubious characters we encounter exist in the grey. They do things we don’t approve of but there are things that make them interesting. In Patrick’s case it’s his work and the fact that he’s a bit charming.

GMCC: And I guess related, what was the motivation for the question about Alison’s and Patrick’s relationship in the ‘Me Too’ context? I thought it was a neat move.

LS: Thanks! I suppose I was thinking of women of Alison’s generation who might have been reckoning with their romantic pasts in the light of Me Too. I wondered what how they might have to think about things in order to…survive? To make peace with their own history. Would you condemn a relationship for it’s exploitative power balance if you hadn’t been fully conscious of it at the time? I wanted a way for Alison to have her say but also to point out, from my own perspective, that there was some complex stuff at play there.

I don’t have a stance on it, in this instance. Firstly because it’s fictional and so I don’t have to but also because I don’t think that’s what novels are for. They present the question but it’s not necessary for them to also contain the answer.

GMCC: As ever friendships tend to be stronger and more permanent than romance. Tessa, a black sculptor and Alison, a working class artist bond as outsiders to the wealthy London art world. Did you feel it was important to emphasise this?

LS: I wanted Alison to have a big, important, romantic friendship. In her early days in London she feels very out of her depth and, as a result, I’d imagine quite shy. She wouldn’t have been ploughing up to someone successful and intimidating to make friends. I had a think about who would feel as out of place in that situation as she does, and I found (in my head) Tessa, a British-Nigerian woman. Tessa would have been even more exposed as a woman of colour in that very, very upper-middle class, white world. She’d be on the lookout for an ally. When she approaches Alison they form a quick bond because they’re so desperate to find safe harbour in that environment. The version of the art-world that they’ve found themselves in, Alison as a girlfriend and Tessa as a gallery assistant, is the very upper echelon, the wealthiest and most successful. In a room full of students they’d have blended in and, perhaps, never met. But here one sore quickly thumb finds another.

GMCC: Was the misogyny of the London art-world something that you experienced yourself?

LS: I guess the book exists in the Art World because it feels familiar to me. But it could easily have been publishing or music or theatre…or business, or science, or social-work or anything else. The misogyny exists in whatever field you care to choose. It’s rich pickings! And more than misogyny; racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia. I think I’m maybe less interested in the treatment of women in particular than I am the treatment of anyone who doesn’t fit the standard of outline of a figure of power. Who gets to be successful? Who gets to live freely? Who gets to relax?

GMCC: I really like how you use notes and letters in the book. For me they grounds it really well in the period. I miss getting hand-written emails and nobody uses a pen for much anymore. Of course as an artist you (presumably) use lots of pencils and pens. Can you tell us your working methodologies? Your choices in terms of drawing style for example or how you use lettering?

LS: I’m very much still using pencils and pens, to the detriment of organisation of my home and studio. I secrete pens everywhere, they fall from my person daily.

Most of the book is painted with quink ink, which does nice colour change-y things when mixed with water which is where you get the browns and purples that come through the grey. There are places where I bring in colour using watercolour. There’s also a fair bit of digital stuff going on in there to apply old paper textures to the images to make them look like aged photographs and letters.

GMCC: I feel it’s incumbent to ask given Brexit, Covid and now cost-of-living crises, how difficult is it to be an artist/writer these days?

LS: Oh. God. It’s not good. It’s not been good since I graduated in 2009 but it’s definitely getting worse. Like so many people I find the contempt that the UK government has for its citizens absolutely abhorrent. Beyond contempt for people they also seem to have a deep, abiding hatred of the arts. The cuts, the lack of support, the complete inability to recognise that part of the UK’s global reputation depends on it’s creative output. It’s not the top of the pile of things that needs fixing but it’ll be one of the things that has the greatest affect on the sanity of the population I guess.

Personally in many ways I am fortunate, this is my full time job (supplemented by teaching illustration at a university part-time). I have a relatively affordable studio space and I’ve not, yet, been driven out of London by rising costs. But I think what makes art feel possible is space. We all have increasingly less space; physically, mentally and financially. The good stuff happens when you have afford to take risks and explore and that’s just not possible when you’re trying to scrape a living. At this rate art will be only be a viable pathway for people who have the family wealth to gift them that space.

GMCC: I always ask people (the very boring) question of who they’re reading and who they’re reading? Usually it’s either poets or novelists. Perhaps you can expand that a bit and add some graphic/comic/sequential art/whatever it’s called suggestions?

LS: I read far more fiction than I do graphic novels to be honest! I’m keen to read Ducks by Kate Beaton, which just came out and is quite enormous, but I think that’s the only thing on the illustrated horizon for me at the moment.

I’ve recently enjoyed ‘Kick the latch’ by Kathryn Scanlan which is sharp and bite-y and smart and moving and, mostly about horses. Which I wasn’t expecting to be a winning topic for me but I loved. I’m always reading a lot of Tessa Hadley, Ali Smith, and Annie Ernaux, I don’t think there’s a better book than Ernaux’s ‘The Years’. It’s the best one, the best book.

GMCC: What’s next on the horizon?

LS: I’m writing… I’m not sure what it is yet.

You can buy Alison here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/alison/lizzy-stewart/9781788169059