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Bruce Paley: Unlike most of your peers, you didn’t grow up reading superhero comics, and you trained as a painter. How then did you come to choose comics as a medium?

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Carol Swain: I studied painting at art school but I've always liked working with narrative and discovered underground/alternative comics. From a visual artist's point of view, it seem a great way to create stories. I was impressed by the work of UK creators such as Chris Reynolds (sort of like P.K. Dick crossed with Enid Blyton), Ed Pinsent (William Golding crossed with I don't know what - unique.) I attended an Escape Magazine workshop which helped seal the idea that comics were a great art form. I also saw the work of the painterly minimal Carver-like creator Jerry Moriarty, the almost-outsider like work of Marc Beyer, and loved what was going on. It was innovative, original, comics didn't seem to have the strictures of for example fine art or literature. Comics were also considered 'low' art which suited me fine.

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BP: When you say underground/alternative comics, do you mean American underground comics like Zap, Maus, and Raw, and comic creators like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman?

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CS: Yes, and British and European alternative/underground/self-published comics.

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BP:  Robert Crumb’s late wife, Aline Kaminsky-Crumb, once told me she and her husband were fans of yours. I understand Art Spiegelman is also a fan – tell us about the New Yorker cover you were commissioned to do.

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CS: Spiegelman's wife Francois Mouly was and still is art director at the New Yorker. I can't recall how exactly, but I got approached to do a cover. I think the theme was the US economy or something along those lines. So I drew the twin towers with a plane's vapour trails creating a dollar sign behind them. This was just before 9/11. As you can imagine it didn't get used.

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BP: How do you think not having that traditional comics background affected your approach to your comics? How did it differ from that of your peers?

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CS: I never had any distinct idea that there was an accepted approach to comic creation. There was never any audience to appeal to as such, usually no editors. A lot of my peers - alternative cartoonists - did have a knowledge and love of mainstream comics, which probably found its way into their work that I wasn't so aware of.

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BP: Have you ever actually read a superhero comic, like Spider-Man or Batman?

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CS: Not many; not sure if 2000AD is considered a superhero comic.

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BP: When you broke into the medium, mainstream comics - by which I primarily mean Marvel and DC - were almost exclusively a male dominated world, with few, if any, female creators, though that wasn’t the case with alternative comics. You’ve appeared in several female-oriented anthologies like Twisted Sisters and the Knockabout line. Are there any female comic creators whose work you particularly admire?

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CS: Yes,  lots – Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Renee French, Rutu Modan.

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BP: In London you lived near Camden Town, where some of your stories from Way Out Strips, It’s Dark in London, and others are set. What was Camden Town like back then? And how did that environment feed into your stories?

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CS: I loved Camden Town, it had a strange manic energy, I nearly got run over once by Ronald Reagan travelling past the World's End pub in The Beast. Lots of homeless folk, broken-hearted Irishmen stuck in Arlington House, the wrong side of the Irish sea, drug dealing along the Grand Union canal, music…. The Pogues song “The Old Main Drag” always reminds me of Camden.  

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BP: "Come Down Town", one of the stories featured in the Dark Horse anthology of your work, Crossing the Empty Quarter, is a sort of literary crime thriller set in Camden Town. What inspired that?

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CS: The editorial brief was for a London-set sort of noir story. I can't fully remember where the idea came from, it just seemed like the kind of thing that could happen in Camden. Maybe some inspiration came from Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, their defacing of Islington Library books.

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BP: In "Communicable Disease", also in the Dark Horse anthology, you reference writers such as Maxim Gorky, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, and Charles Bukowski, and we see words disappear from their books, and books drop from the sky. Tell us about that story, and what the disease actually is, as it’s never specified.

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CS: I suppose it's a disease of which one symptom is the slow death of the imagination. Books dropping from the sky now looks like a sort of literary form of avian flu. Factory-farmed books creating terrible conditions, which leach out and affect wild fiction.

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BP: "Sympathy for the Devil", again in the anthology, tells of a temple devoted to Satan in some Arabic country, where women are sent to pray. Does such a temple actually exist? 

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CS: I thought there was one, but I can't find any reference to it. 

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BP: Another story in the anthology, "Family Circus", in which a third-rate Hungarian circus stops for a night in a small Welsh town, is my favourite story of yours. In it, a teenage girl forms a strange bond with a cigarette-smoking chimpanzee that performs an act with a snake. Was that based on a real event? 

  

CS: Yes. This knackered van turned up one winter evening in the Welsh village I was living in at the time. A middle-aged father, mother, and adolescent son got out, they had a weary-looking, aged chimp and a large lethargic snake. I don't think the animals, as opposed to the humans, actually did anything other than look deflated. The humans - in their torn leotards - did acrobatics, tightrope walking, knife throwing, took the ticket money, manned the door; they didn't stretch as far as refreshments. I remember the hall was packed with villagers. After their one performance they packed everything - arthritic  ape, sagging snake - into the van and disappeared into the cold dark night.

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BP: When you first started creating comics, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and there was a lot of social unrest, such as the Poll Tax riots. Generally speaking, would you say your stories are political - inherently so, if not overtly so?

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CS: Some have a political element, some obviously so, like the story I did for the Fantagraphics US Bush Junta book. Who would've thought things could get so, so much worse? 

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 BP: You were at the Poll Tax riots – what was that like?

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CS: Extraordinary. Crowd mentality, groups of people running through alleys trying to avoid the police, like packs of hunted animals, overturned vehicles, looted shops. I remember standing on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, watching the police trying to hold off the protesters at the top of Whitehall.

                                                                        

BP: Your mother took you to the famous Greenham Common protests against US nuclear missiles being placed there. What do you remember of that? 

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CS: Greenham Common was, I'm sure, a Tory  area, in the middle of the comfortable Home Counties. There was this insane chunk of American military might right there, ground zero in the stockbroker belt. The missiles would be driven around the countryside, dry runs for the apocalypse. There was a menacing atmosphere, rumours of the Americans blasting out microwave radiation, hostile locals but also some supportive locals. The great thing is the missiles have gone and some of the base is now a nature reserve - so maybe there are  nightingales there now instead of nukes. My mother had joined one of the peace walks from Wales, but she didn't camp at Greenham. Many women remained at the camp for years.

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BP: You were the colourist on Skin, the controversial graphic novel by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy about a young skinhead with birth defects. How did you get involved in that?

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CS: I think Brendan McCarthy must've seen my work somewhere and he approached me. I did have skinhead-looking characters in some of my stories, so maybe that drew him. 

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BP: What was the inspiration for Invasion of the Mind Sappers, your first graphic novel?

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CS: Invasion of the Mind Sappers was inspired like much of my work by living in a small Welsh town. There was an earthquake - or was it a UFO crashing into the mountains? People claimed to see military low-loader lorries carrying covered objects from the site in the dead of night. Anyway there were aliens around, one being the perpetually drunk English teacher. He seemed to have trouble with gravity, was definitely not of this world.

 

BP: What were your experiences at school at the time?  You once told me you were interested in becoming a veterinarian, but a careers advisor discouraged you from that pursuit.

 

CS: Yes, I should've really said conservation, but the careers teacher would've been even more dismissive. I was in the middle stream, the idea was to get us through the system and away to the 'dignity' of work. No A-levels for me, so I left school at about 15, nearly sixteen. Our class was disruptive, many teachers were driven to complete nervous breakdown! I feel terrible guilt over how our class treated the chemistry teacher. I hated school, but in retrospect it was fascinating. I didn't learn much from the lessons - more from the psychological makeup of the various mostly mad or sad teachers. 

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BP: How did Foodboy come about?

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CS: I'm not sure what inspired Foodboy. Ideas about tribalism, belonging, not belonging, fealty.... Most of my work is based on my own experience, Foodboy less so. There were disaffected youth in the town, a few punks. Mohawked and listless, they'd occupy the memorial benches on the town square. They may still be there, like the few remaining individuals of a functionally extinct tribe. I  hope they're still there - that's the conservation side coming out, I hate extinction.

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BP: In Foodboy, the character Ross withdraws from society to the point of becoming almost feral. A lot of your stories, like Foodboy and Gast, which we'll come to, deal with themes of alienation and people who exist on the margins of society. Are these people you particularly empathise or identify with?

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CS: Yes; long years of depression and anxiety, which fairly recently I've come to realise is underpinned by autism (undiagnosed at present). It's a bit hackneyed, the alienated artist thing, but sadly I can't alter that. 

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BP: Giraffes in my Hair chronicled my youthful (and not so youthful) indiscretions and misadventures. Was it liberating to draw someone else’s scripts, in that there was a storyline and a framework you had to follow, rather than going where your imagination took you?

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CS: I had drawn for other people before - Dennis Eichorn for example, he had not too dissimilar a life! It is liberating working on someone else's scripts in a way, you feel a different sort of responsibility. 

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BP: Next came Gast, which many consider to be your finest work so far. It tells the story of Helen, a young English girl recently moved to Wales, who investigates the suicide of Emrys, a reclusive cross-dressing farmer. Is that based on something that actually happened?

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CS: Yes, he was a near neighbour. A hill farmer, make-up wearer, raddle (dye for marking sheep) in his  hair, never saw him in a dress, just a moleskin suit and winkle-picker shoes. One day he picked up his double-barrelled shotgun, loaded it, and killed himself. The valley he lived in was a kind of suicide alley. His neighbour - another farmer - killed himself too.

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BP: In Gast, we never actually see Emrys. Rather we follow the Helen character as she learns about him by seeking out and speaking to those who knew him - which includes his animals - and like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, a picture of him gradually emerges. One reviewer said it was like a detective story without a murder. Would you say those were accurate descriptions?

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CS:  In reality Emrys was sort of like a chalk outline of a body, post crime, as insubstantial as that. You never fully know why someone kills themselves, other than usually it's some manifestation of intolerable pain. Looking back, I don't suppose anyone really understood Emrys. The Helen character is trying to make sense of events, though there is no solution to the 'puzzle', just a bit more understanding. If Emrys' story was a jigsaw puzzle it would still be as perplexing on completion as it was when in pieces.

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BP: Your style evolved a lot over the years, from the thick, rougher charcoal panels of Way Out Strips to the fine, precise lines and gentle pastoral scenes of Gast. Was that deliberate?

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CS: No, just a natural kind of refinement over time. Longer stories slow down the drawing, there's more complexity, you hone things. With Gast I wanted a certain 'accuracy' regarding place, that requires more precision.

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BP: You tend to stick largely to the nine-panel grid for your stories – why is that?

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CS: I'm beginning to wonder! It's a sort of self-imposed 'grammar' that I like, could be an autistic thing. I do like working to the nine-panel format, it's sort of like a drum track, keeps things moving along, I've never been fond of splash panels. It's also like the format of a film, super 8 or something, there's a constant, fixed dimension, within which almost anything is possible. 

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BP: How do you approach one of your comic stories? Do you have the story worked out beforehand, or do you have a basic framework and allow the story go where it likes?

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CS: The earlier shorter stories would evolve quickly – they appeared like a gift, really, art and words forming together. Longer stories take more planning and plotting, something I'm less fond of. Shorter earlier stories, such as “Good and Gone” or the desert-set war story, ("Desert"), sort of turn up like fully formed dreams. I can't imagine a long story appearing like that, unfortunately, and even if it did you'd have to draw at pace to keep up with the 'live' idea in your head.

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BP: Lastly, what are you working on now?

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CS: A graphic novel entitled Mwnci Siwt which is the Welsh for monkey suit. It seems I can't escape primates, or Wales. It's about social cohesion, or perceived lack of, myth, anomie, alienation, all the usual....

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                                                                                           The End