"The Scrapbook of Life & Death" by J.Webster-Sharp
Published by Avery Hill
Paperback A4 88 pages
Black & White
£14.99
You know, I'm the last person qualified to review comic books. If I'm honest I'm rarely convinced by the validity of the Graphic Novel as a form deserving of its' hype or status. I personally feel that despite the positive nature of a wider and more diverse array of artists and subject matters, it's become an orthodoxy as tedious and damaging as the Superhero genre was to the wider perception of comics, and rarely does it's content go beyond an appeasement of a certain need for the acceptance of a largely wider middle-class readership ,and the seeming constraints both directly and indirectly imposed on publishing regards market trends, content, taste and lately political ideology. Ever so now and again though, something comes along to tell me I'm a great big know-nothing idiot ( for which I'm always thankful) ,and which goes some way to restoring my faith that there are still people out there willing to make brave, courageous and challenging art that refuses to tow the line in conforming to whatever the current criteria of how things should be or what should be written and drawn, J.Webster-Sharp's first book, "The Scrapbook of Life & Death" does just that.
The stark, unnerving cover alone should tell you you're in for an uneasy ride; a garish yet beautifully rendered disembodied head with smaller head appendages extending from it on stalks in a void of black, and hand-lettered titles that create the impression of something off-kilter and out of time, a hand-made artefact, an illicit secret discovery best left unopened. The entire contents do nothing but add to the disquiet and unease, as well as a continual tension that what you're engaging with isn't remotely comfortable, possibly bordering on the distasteful and pornographic; the subject matter and themes permeated by sex, horror, death and an underlying perversity. It's interesting in her own introduction to the book that Webster-Sharp states that the latter half of the book "evolves out of a deteriorating sense of self and a collapsing of a will to survive". I want to return to that later, but you could be forgiven for feeling something similar as a reader, under the weight and nature of the artistic language the artist employs in relation to the subject.
Webster-Sharp's starting point as subject are the scrapbooks of one George Cecil Ives ( 1867-1950 ) poet, writer, penal reformer and homosexual law reform campaigner, who in the course of his lifetime amassed a collection of interesting and unusual newspaper clippings and articles.Splitting the book into two halves, Webster-Sharp includes a description of those items and stories she has used and been inspired by to illustrate, as a hand-lettered appendix to the visuals, reinforcing the sense of her Graphic Novel being an almost parallel visual version existing in a different time. The pieces of Ives' archives she chooses to illustrate are indeed interesting and unusual, as well as horrific.absurd and perverse, the kind of stuff the likes of the News of the World or National Enquirer would have had a field day with, such as the crimes of child murderer Albert Fish, a Dentist who took out womens' teeth to "satisfy his cravings",a woman who fed her son like a bird, and a man who had thousands of pictures of pigs. Taking these snippets, Webster-Sharp weaves these pieces and others into a patchwork of comic pages and strips that illuminate an overall sense of grotesque visual surrealism.
And what pictures, panels and pages they are. From my first discovery of her work via her Instagram page, I have been utterly blown away by the audacity of Webster-Sharp's art. There aren't many artists you can say are unique, but right now I think she is. There hasn't been anyone in comics since Eleanor Davis who has made me so excited to see their next drawing, their next page. Webster-Sharp has. And oddly, hers is not a drawing style I would consider one I either like or would usually find interesting. So what is it I find that makes her work special ?
Well, it's about drawing that looks like it's been drawn by a human being, that doesn't look like every other tedious, bland, graphically and artistically reductive, spineless, anodyne, visually dull, badly observed and unexciting bore-draw that seems to populate most graphic novels and comics these days. Webster-Sharp's art here does everything comic art used to do; it has detail, it has passion and courage and guts, and wit and intelligence. It's daring and takes risk in both subject matter and execution.It also makes you unnerved, uncomfortable, intrigued, repulsed, excited. It's singular and unique, it doesn't really look like anyone else, even though there are other artists that use a similar style ( think Drew Friedman). It's also the way she juxtaposes the vocabulary of her visuals, a collage of images and objects that create a tension by their proximity and opposition to each other, whether it's human-animal body hybrids, butchery, genitalia, dolls, gasmasks, fetish gear and assorted meat products, it's a disturbing visual lexicon that is likely to give you nightmares, or a strange erotic frisson, if so inclined. The devil is in the meticulous detail of the drawing, a pointillist stippling style that I would suggest was fashionable in the Sixties and Seventies, but has since gone way out of vogue, which also lends it an eerie, out of synch feel. For me there's an odd nostalgia for such drawing and the genuine insanity of it's time-consuming nature, but when it works, there's also a certain sublime quality to the imagery, and in some of these individual panels and pages, Webster-Sharp executes some quite brilliant and dare I say it, strangely beautiful artwork, even if the content of those drawings might make some reach for the sick-bag and the censored sticker. If I was to make any artistic comparisons, my immediate thoughts were to artists of the earlier decades I hinted at, but not comic artists. Her sense of collage and juxtaposition of content, allied to a threatening and frightening worldview, reminds me of the art of Crass' Gee Vaucher and the collages of Linder Sterling, also, and perhaps not so obviously, the artwork of 1970's/80's British illustrator Stewart MacKinnon, and maybe also the surrealist Leonora Carrington. I doubt any were an influence or inspiration, but I find echoes of a similar feel in her work. There are also echoes of David Lynch and Charles Burns somewhere too maybe. If I haven't described individual pages here, it's because I think it's a book that must be looked at, and I don't want to spoil it -you should all go out and find it and look at it,and keep looking, take it all in. All its' beauty and horror and tension.
It's this tension, as well as the actual pages and imagery itself, that perhaps account for Webster-Sharp's admission of that "deterioration of a sense of self " mentioned earlier. The images of the final pages and section of the book seem to move away from a certain formal cohesion of the earlier short narratives depicting the Ives archival material, to imagery and pages that suggest a more personal narrative direction taking hold, resulting in singular illustrations that mark a visual representation of the "physical and psychic abandonment "she suggests occured in making the work. By the end, the drawings have gone from full-page, full-blown horror to become smaller, encapsulating the merest fragments of strange small microscopic crying faced worms or larvae, before completely disappearing to blank, black pages. Whether intentional or not, I feel it works as a conclusion of sorts, the effect of inhabiting someone else's collection of disturbed psychic debris, the result of a kind of possession, leaving us all in the dark.
This is a rather wonderfully frightening book, in all the right ways. Credit also to Avery Hill for having the guts and courage to publish a book like this. J.Webster-sharp is that rare thing. An artist to excite and disturb, an artist with courage, intelligence and wit, and no small amount of skill and visual flair. I can't wait to see what she does next. Fondant anyone ?
Paul Ashley Brown
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