There’s one comic by Jordan Bolton, called ‘Science Fiction’, that I think about a lot. Its twelve panels tell a short story about our relationship to the present, and the future’s relationship to the past, and finding meaning in things we can take for granted. But it’s also simply two people having a chat while skipping stones. Everything is connected to everything.
Bolton’s work has a meditative quality and would probably make a great cure against main character syndrome; it makes you notice the things and people around you, think about their stories and experiences and reflect on your own life.
Your writing journey originally started when you had an idea for a film and began working on the screenplay. This seems like a huge first project to take on. What sparked you to jump into the deep like that?
I had been working as a graphic designer for about six years up until 2020. Most of my income was from commissions. During 2020, I found myself getting much less commission than usual – which I attributed to covid – and assumed the work would come back in 2021 when things were being marketed again. I used the free time to start writing a film, which is something I had wanted to do before but never had the time to do. So I spent most of 2020 focused on writing and realized how much I loved it. In 2021, the commissions did not start rolling in like I’d hoped, so I knew I needed to do something else but I didn’t have the time to finish writing the film and then try to pitch it to earn money from it. At the time I had a fairly popular Etsy shop and around 18k followers on Instagram, so I tried to think of something I could do using those platforms. That’s where I got the idea of writing a series of comics called, ’Scenes From Imagined Films’, which I could post online and sell as prints and zines on Etsy.
You’ve said that when you initially started getting noticed for your ‘Objects’ and ‘Room’ series, you had no real drawing or painting skills. Again, speaking of jumping into the deep, how do you get from “no real skills” to making the comics you do now?
In short, I got a phone with a camera. This was around 2013. I had never really taken a photo before, and I just became a bit obsessed with taking photos and filming things around me. This is when I started making posters for local events in Manchester and I would make them by arranging objects and then photographing them, so I didn’t really need any artistic skill in terms of recreating anything, I would just sketch something out messily, then put together the objects and photograph it on my phone. Then the photograph would be the final poster.
Your work really focuses on the mundane or everyday details of life – bus drivers, people in the grocery store, little gestures of love for those around us – and uses them to find meaning or zoom out on a sometimes cosmic level. Is this way of thinking and connecting things easy to shut off?
I think it’s probably what I was doing before I started writing. It probably goes back to getting a phone with a camera. Once I started doing that, I started recording the things around me, and they were obviously very mundane things. I was getting into the photography of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore at the time too, which is often focused on trying to find beauty in the everyday.
Reading your comics, I was reminded of a quote from an old high school teacher, who used to say “poetry is a lot of white”; so much of it is about what you leave out. What does your writing process look like? And how much of it is taking more and more away?
I really love films or books when something is hinted at, but not fully explained. It makes it feel less like you are being told a story and more like you are just witnessing something unfold, because that is how life is. It’s the same in paintings or photographs: when they have something missing or cut off slightly at the edge of the frame, somehow it feels more real and lived in. I sometimes will draw a comic panel of say a car, and I’ll draw the entire car from the side but it just looks like I’m presenting a car to you. But when I cut off part of the car, it somehow makes it feel like you are just looking at a car, because you know there is something off-screen you are not seeing.
You’ve mentioned Chris Ware as a huge inspiration for your work. How did you discover his work?
I think I discovered ‘Jimmy Corrigan’ through one of those ‘Best Books Ever’ lists online. I hadn’t read any comics before and didn’t know anyone who did, so when I read excerpts, it just seemed so strange to see a comic that wasn’t jokes or superheroes. Then I read the entire book and was blown away by how creative it was. Then I read ‘Building Stories’ and that book is really the one which re-arranged how I thought about stories and writing, which goes back to what I was saying about stories that are fragmented: you only get fragments of a woman’s life in that story and yet it feels so much more real than if you had a complete autobiography of her. It’s like when you get to know a person, they don’t present you with everything about themselves in chronological order, you get to know them in fragments. So when that happens in a story, it just feels like a better representation of a life.
If you were to try and write a screenplay again, what lessons from your experience making comics would you keep in mind?
I would be more confident in the audience. I think one of my problems with that first screenplay was that I wasn’t sure how to tell a story and I would explain a lot of things – there was lots of exposition – whereas my comics are so short that I’ve always been forced to leave a lot out, and the audience still seems to understand them.
More Jordan Bolton:
Interview with Beneficial Shock
Interview with It’s Nice That
Instagram