I am an outsider in the world of comic books. I don’t follow graphic novels, although like most people I have several on my bookshelves. My work as an artist has been with sculpture, not drawing. One of the joys in art are all of the unexpected paths it can open up. I couldn’t have known, for instance, that drawing and storytelling would become a central part of my first solo exhibition. These graphic stories differ in a number of ways from what may typically be thought of as graphic narratives or comics. In addition, I chose a graphic narrative form; it wasn’t a given. This, I think, makes my experience helpful in understanding how we communicate through pictures.
As early as 2006 I began to hear stories of the Canadians who were serving in Afghanistan. Over the next few years this became a big deal in my community. I was out of the army by then but these were my friends, people I had served with before becoming an artist more or less full time. Because of the war in Afghanistan they returned and departed on this new work schedule like slow motion commuters. Ours was a militia regiment, so in addition to being soldiers they were also postal workers, engineers, carpenters and the like.[1] They were deployed singularly or in small groups within larger regular army units resulting in a wide variety of encounters. Some of my friends experienced combat in ditches and alleys while others viewed Afghanistan from hundreds of feet in the air, amid the wreckage of a suicide bomb, or through the glow of a monitor’s screen. My conversations with them resulted in approximately twenty sculptures and drawings exhibited as Light Horse Tales of an Afghan War.[2]
Comics Forum 