THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2024! 10 YEARS OF THE BF SIX TO WATCH! George Ives’ life, even in synopsis, makes for fascinating reading. Born in 1867 he was a writer, a poet, an early campaigner for change in the law regarding homosexuality, the founder of the Order of Chaeronea, and a penal reformer too. When he died in 1950 he also left behind 45 scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, including stories of the weird, the esoteric and the unlikely. It’s these volumes that form the basis of 2023 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artist J. Webster Sharp’s The Scrapbook of Life and Death, published recently by Avery Hill Publishing.
If you have experienced Sharp’s singular storytelling vision before you will be aware of how she forges oblique narratives from abstract symbolism, surreal page structures and motifs, and tantalisingly obscure visual metaphor. It makes for a disconcertingly alluring read – the transgressive and the obscure converging in a heady cacophony of unsettling imagery. All of this bound up in her incredibly intricate shading, studied use of light and shade, and an artistic realism that breathes authentic life into the nightmarish and the unreal.
The Scrapbook of Life and Death is split into two sections providing a kind of compare and contrast framework. In the first Webster Sharp brings some of the oddest newspaper clippings from Ives’ scrapbooks to life as silent, bizarre stories, chronicling their accounts but with elements of projection and supposition injected into each one. It’s like a morbid comics cabinet of curiosity, with sprawlingly dark tales of a baby born with a wolf’s head, a mother who fed her child like a bird for 17 years, a man driven to his death by 1,000 pictures of pigs, suicide by black widow spider, and more.
Sharp recreates the original newspaper accounts in a section at the back of the book and it’s intriguing to see how our interactions with the comics change when confronted with their specifics in written form. The second half of The Scrapbook of Life and Death is a representation of Sharp’s own mental health struggles. It’s an intriguing juxtaposition. She describes it as evolving “out of a deteriorating sense of self and the collapsing of a will to survive”. These visceral, explicit and fragmentary pages are intended as a direct appeal to the sensory rather than as structured sequential storytelling. Indeed in her foreword Sharp states “I don’t think I want to be understood” and this uncompromising trip through a fractured mindscape reflects that.
If you’re unaware of the work of J. Webster Sharp then The Scrapbook of Life and Death is a perfect starting point to a genuinely unique voice in comics. Thought Bubble attendees should also note that she will have a new issue of her self-published series Fondant with her.
J. Webster Sharp (W/A) • Avery Hill Publishing, £14.99
Review by Andy Oliver
J. Webster Sharp will be at Table B19a and Avery Hill Publishing at Table C39 in the Travelling Man Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2024 runs from November 11th-17th with the convention weekend taking place on the 16th-17th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2024 coverage so far in one place here.
Art by Rocío Arreola Mendoza
2024 marks the tenth year of Broken Frontier’s ‘Six to Watch‘ initiative. Look for articles throughout the year celebrating the work of those artists who have been a part of the programme.
