While John Miers’ ‘The Tower of Babel’, is a series of digital prints that illustrate the biblical story it has many allusions and references outside of that. For instance the 5th image (see top of this post) quotes from a picture by MC Escher (see image to the left). But most interestingly John decided not to include any text and instead tell the story in a wordless, graphic style that brilliantly comments on one of the original ideas in the Babel story concerning language.
For instance to illustrate the aftermath of God’s decision to mix up the Babylonian language, so that they could no longer organise themselves to make any more heretical towers, a Babylonian is shown desperately clinging onto the tail of a comic strip word balloon as it attempts to flee away from him (see snapshot to the lower right).
The interview below was conducted over a series of months which meant that by the time I posted it here the series had been shown a further three times, the third at the Marine Studios Gallery , and was to be shown again at the Alternative Press Festival in May.
So onto the interview! After looking through the rest of John’s portfolio on his marvellous, award winning website, one thing that intrigued me was that the Babel series showed a different level of ambition and scope to what had come before. So I asked John what inspired him to create “The Tower of Babel”?
It’s certainly true that “Babel” was something of a big leap for me, in terms of how ambitious it was, and the scale of the project, but the ideas and themes it contains build on things that have been bubbling away for years. The visual style is certainly a more recent, and rapid, development, but there are a few examples of similar techniques on the site.
Given the size of the Babel prints, I wanted them to be intense enough to command the amount of space they take up, as well as trying to communicate a bit of Old Testament awe and a primal feeling to go along with the archetypal nature of the story.I’d been interested for a while in building images by drawing detail into simple, flat shapes rather than defining everything with line work. Illustrator Paul Blow’s work was a particular influence and in some of my commercial work you can see me groping towards working in that way. The first complete image I produced using my current style actually takes this as its subject matter as it depicts the process of (good) illustration which is that the artist’s interpretation adds detail to the reader’s understanding of the writer’s original idea.
Also there were two comics I drew which overlapped with my work on Babel and they were “Circle Man in Rectilinear Town” and “Verisimilitude” (see this posting for examples of both) and, again, they have simple character designs animated by overlaid linework. It was while making these that I also got more into constructing spaces with linear perspective. So while themain ingredients for the Babel series were all there, I think the main difference is the amount of time I put into completing them, from planning through to trying to load each panel up with detail, colour and texture.
So the earlier illustration which depicts the process of good illustration was a precursor to creating a series about the process of communication?
Yes, thematically, “Babel” is of course all about language: the original myth is an origin story “explaining” why we have such a multiplicity of tongues in human culture, and my interpretation uses this as a hook on which to try to hang an exploration of how pictorial language works in comics.
It is also a very loose allegory for how language develops in societies and individuals.
In fact I’ve had a “thing” about language since my teenage obsession with Grant Morrison’s “Invisibles” comic, which has as a central theme the idea of an alien or higher language “whose words do not describe things but are things”. This is also explored in books such as in the first story in Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy”, which has the Babel story as a central motif, and in Umberto Eco’s “The Search for the Perfect Language”.
There was also a painting in my degree show based on one of Bruegel’s paintings of the Tower of Babel, and there’s a similar Old Testament vibe in my comic “A Brief History of Slab”, as well as a brief appearance by the Tower in “Burning Down the House”. So when I started thinking about making a bigger project that experimented with pictorial language, the Biblical myth seemed the obvious starting point.
About fourteen months – not that I was working on it the whole time! I’m working full-time as a teacher so personal projects are squeezed into evenings, weekends and holidays. The vast majority of it was done in the Summer of 2009 and by March of that year I had panel 7 completed, and on the strength of that I was invited to present the whole project at the International Comic Arts Forum in October ‘09. So that gave me a deadline! The final prints came out of the shop about two days before I was due to fly to Chicago for the conference.
How much research did you have to do for the series?
Quite a lot! As I’ve mentioned, the main ideas were things that I’d been interested in for a while, but I did look into various other interpretations of the Babel story. Also, as the first public outing for this project was going to be at an academic conference I thought that if I was going to be explaining my half-baked ideas to a room full of academics I’d better get my terminology correct so I also did a fair amount of reading up on semiotic theory. It seemed to work!
You have already mentioned Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy which in the 90s had a highly acclaimed version drawn in comics by David Mazzuchelli. Are you familiar with that version?
I was asked about Mazzuchelli’s adaptation after presenting at the conference, and the answer to that is yes, and I enjoyed it very much. As I think it says in the intro, it’s a very successful use of a visual medium to reinterpret a very non-visual story. I loved the way that Peter Stillman’s speech was depicted, with the balloon tails emerging from deep in his throat, or indeed from inanimate objects, it seemed to communicate a sense of disembodied language very eloquently. I think Paul Karasik deserves a lot of credit for his breakdowns too, for example the way they mimic the grid structure of Manhattan in the section where the narrator traces out Stillman senior’s wanderings. But because I’d got so into the novel when I first read it, I suppose it seemed more like watching a good performance of a play you’re already familiar with than an entirely new experience. Which is not to diminish its achievement! I’m sure it would have felt revelatory if I hadn’t read the novel beforehand.
As far as the response from ICAF goes, it was overwhelmingly positive. Andrei Molotiu, who edited the “Abstract Comics” anthology that came out on Fantagraphics in 2009, told me it was the best-presented artist’s talk he’d ever seen – but immediately qualified that by adding “they’re usually 45 minutes of incoherent mumbling”! Out of artistic solidarity I should add that that description does not apply to either of the other artists who spoke at the conference… other than that, quite a few guests & committee members said that they hadn’t seen a project quite like it before, and I also had some very useful discussions about ways of presenting it. The powerpoint presentation that accompanies the comic came out of those conversations.
Have you read Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp? It came out in 2009 and is the first Mazzuchelli book in a long time. It was such a tour de force of modern graphic I was a tiny bit suspicious of it as it is as though someone took Scott Mcloud's ‘Understanding Comics’ and created a book that uses all its rules, albeit to beautiful effect.
No, but I will!
Can you tell me about how you work? I imagine its sketches, research, more sketches, scan it in, create vectors, colour etc.
That’s pretty much it, although a lot of those stages happen together. I mostly work straight into the computer, drawing with my beloved Wacom Intuos 3, which allows colour to be part of the sketches from the start. The slideshows at the start of each verse in the aforementioned powerpoint slideshow (http://www.johnmiers.com/files/Babel_annotated.pps) pretty much lay the whole process out, although they don’t show all the intermediate versions. So with Babel there was just one set of very loose thumbnails on paper, and then I started sketching directly into Illustrator. Then it’s tightening up the vectors, and once I was happy with the shapes I’d then use the Wacom to add the linework.
The final stage in each image was printing out the Illustrator file onto off-white, grainy paper, scanning that back in at 1200dpi, and using Photoshop to combine that with an exported version of the Illustrator file. This allowed me to get a bit of texture in there and have warmer colours – I find PhotoShop much more intuitive & flexible for fine-tuning colours than Illustrator. The paint-blobby stuff in the last few panels was drawn using Corel Painter.
One thing that the Powerpoint doesn’t show is that I also had an Illustrator file that combined all nine panels into grid and row arrangements so I could keep an eye on how it was all working together as it went along.
How ideally would you like the series exhibited or bound in a book?
In a perfect world, I’d have the nine panels recreated as stained-glass windows at full size and displayed in a Gothic cathedral in a 3x3 grid! To come back down to earth, I was very happy with the way it was displayed in “That’s Novel”, which also used a 3x3 grid and had a sort of “map legend’ with it that provided a way in without over-explaining everything. But as it’s a comic I do also like having a version that you can hold in your hands and turn the pages. Currently I have it in an A4 collection, which is the smallest it can go without becoming illegible. Bigger would of course be nice – something like the giant Kramer’s Ergot from a few years back. Overall though, having exhibited it twice and presented it twice (the second being at the Caption convention in Oxford last year), as well as reproducing it in my most recent comic, I feel like I’ve got pretty good value from the project.
So what is your next project going to be?
Well, the next project is complete already and is something very different as it’s basically a 10-page fight/chase scene. It uses Kevin Huizenga’s “Fight or Run” template and that will be appearing in New British Comics #3, and I’ll be contributing to a couple more indie anthologies in 2011. On top of that I’m hoping to get a new book out in time for the London Small Press Expo in March 2011, the main feature of which will be a strip I’m working on based on the myth of Sisyphus, both the Greek legend and the Albert Camus essay of the same name. This’ll be a bit of a departure for me as it will feature – gasp! – words, and characters as individuals rather than archetypes.
Further links:
Comica London International Comics Festival: Article on the series.
Paul Gravett's article on the London Print Studio exhibition.
London Print Studio: Hosted an exhibition as part of Comica 2010.
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