James Pyman studied in Sheffield and lives in London. His first publication, Rememberdogs, was commissioned by Imprint 93. He went on to produce Nine Panel Grid, a series of self-published comic books exploring the 3x3 panel grid through mundane and semi-autobiographical stories. He has shown in numerous exhibitions including EASTinternational 2003. His comic Wilf—A Life in Pictures is a fictional biography of an English editorial cartoonist over a thirty-year period of the character’s life and examines how drawing changes in response to political and cultural events. Pyman also led the Drawing Newham project in one of the capital’s poorest boroughs, and made hundreds of drawings of the West Ham football club. He recently completed a series of drawings for a new edition of Dracula published by Four Corners Books and has contributed an illustrated children’s story to the latest issue of Esopus Magazine.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

JP: I was initially drawn to the language of comics through learning to read, firstly British children’s comics like Dandy and Beano, then Marvel Comics reprints from about age 8, then newspaper cartoon strips such as Andy Capp, The Perishers and Peanuts, Mad paperbacks, DC Comics, undergrounds and on and on. My approach is to use conceptual and stylistic elements of the language of comics to generally discuss shifts in popular culture and social history and, specifically, examine the creative process.

The text that frames the first page of your comic for this series is a fiction, but it’s based on an actual event from comics history. What’s the back-story here? And how did you adapt and change it?

JP: The back-story is the brief history of a company called Atlas/Seaboard, which published comics for four months in 1975. It’s a story that’s gone down in infamy because the company was supposedly only set up as a “spoiler” for Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics. Atlas/Seaboard offered more money and creative rights to Marvel and DC Comics writers and cartoonists and then deployed them to create a really horrible facsimile of a mainstream comics company without the texture, history, and narratives that arguably make superhero comics interesting. Their version of Spider-Man was The Tarantula, their version of Conan the Barbarian was Iron-Jaw, The Hulk was The Brute, etc, etc. So because the whole world of it had been created overnight, no organic relationship had developed between the audience and the characters and therefore the product had no residual emotional affection to draw on. Also, the plagiarized characters’ specific details were jettisoned to disguise the sources but no one thought to replace them with original, new fictional details. The company’s output also reflected the early 1970s’ obsession with horror/monster/vigilante tropes in comics, fiction, and cinema. Probably the worst example was an amalgamation of Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man and The Fantastic Four that produced a comic called Planet of the Vampires.

I shifted the time frame to 1972, as that was when I started reading American comics and I could call on that childhood sense of being absorbed in a new, imaginary world.

You draw from several visual languages and narrative conventions in this piece, making it a particularly rich and complex digestion of the many worlds that make up the comics universe. Does the reader need to possess a fluency in this particular history, or can it be accessed on other levels?

JP: For the text page, the “Adventures of Lionel” and “Scruffy Herberts” are self-created characters I have used before for work about newspaper cartoon strips and children’s books. My thinly disguised, fictional version of Atlas/Seaboard is called Premier Comics, which is named after the imprint I conceived for my own comic books at age 11. The superheroes in The Future Men are designed to have a kind of plangent, derivative bathos about them. Maybe the reader needs to possess a fluency in that sensibility. Either way, I think there are enough clues in the narrative that a detailed knowledge of the history of comics isn’t necessary.

Are there aspects of 1970s comics—their visual language, characters, tropes, or stories—that you see as having a particular relevance today?

JP: Only in the sense that a lot of stuff from that period is being remade or referenced, like the X-Men films drawing on the early 1970s comic book stories. For The Future Men I wanted to create a comics page that looked as if it had been written and drawn in 1972 when the visual language of comic books was pivoting between the old school Golden Age studio system cartoonists and the emerging hippy writers and artists who’d grown up in the counterculture (Note for obsessives: I wanted to draw a page that looked like it was penciled by someone like Ron Wilson and inked by John Tartaglione). For that same reason, it also marks the beginning of the descent into a really dreadful period in mainstream comics that lasted until the mid-1980s. There are obviously also global market forces and broader cultural conditions that progressed the stagnation.

Have superhero comics been influential in any of your other projects?

JP: Not directly. In the comic book I did called Nine Panel Grid (1994-1997) I tried to avoid any traditional stylistic tics like characters in silhouette, captions, and thought balloons, but that was generally the case in the slice-of-life autobiographical stuff of that time.

It made sense in the context of the Creative Time project being “set” in New York to do something about the home of the superhero. It’s a small part of the work, but I like to create the sense that the characters or comic books or creators referred to are part of a complete world that’s slowly being revealed. It’s a similar narrative approach to comics I like such as Astro City or Planetary. It’s also done to echo the effect of picking up a comic book story as a child and trying to extrapolate the world of it with only the fragments of information in that issue.

Your project Wilf—A Life in Pictures (2004) constructed 30 years of the life of a fictional editorial cartoonist through more than 70 cartoons. How much of your own experience did you draw on?

JP: The substance of the Wilf book was an examination of the relationship between British post-WWII events and the development of illustrative tropes and styles to describe them. The period of the 1960s to the 1990s saw a huge shift in a popular understanding of cartooning, TV animation studios, comic book spin-offs, etc. All of the book’s visual material (archive photographs, fictional peers’ artwork) was drawn to enhance the reader’s feeling of being displaced into a world of illustration. Some of it was researched through reading British cartoonists like Giles, Mac, Jak and Thelwell. The cartoon subjects were then cross-referenced and merged to create new gag cartoons. While some referenced recognizable moments in history, others alluded to minor events and forgotten figures. The influences were taken out of their original source and set in other eras and locations. In this way the work connected social history, popular culture, and autobiography.

That project, like the Creative Time Comics commissions, has a particular relationship to temporality, in that the viewer can trace political and cultural changes as the drawings progress over the thirty-year period. Could you talk a little about this project and why you chose to explore history in this way, through the biography of a cartoonist?

JP: It was initially through my own interest in the life of the Daily Express cartoonist Giles. Also, two of my childhood friends’ fathers were professional cartoonists so I had watched them work (and not work) first hand. Having also read thousands of interviews with comic book creators as an adolescent I wanted to make something examining the pathology of the professional cartoonist. They seemed to be unified by a distaste for fine art practice and an obsession with the value of technique over concepts.

Adaptation and appropriation are clearly important aspects of your work—how do you select the cultural and visual references that you incorporate in your drawings?

JP: The references tend to be from slightly more obscure sources (like the Atlas/Seaboard story) than more iconic references like Superman or The Hulk. Everyone now has a general working awareness of those characters, whereas something like Wally Wood’s THUNDER Agents is a less immediate, more existential creation that maybe says more things about the people making them than the products themselves.

In Nine Panel Grid, you worked in the 3x3 panel format, which was very influential for me in conceiving this series. How did you decide to use this particular layout, and what did it allow you to do?

JP: It was less what it allowed me to do and more the formal constraints that were important. A 2x3 six-panel page reads very quickly and seems more designed for action genres. With a 3x3 format there’s obviously a lot more potential inter-panel relationships without crowding the page. The format obviously referenced influences like Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man, Eddie Campbell’s Alec and Dan Clowes’ Eightball, and the height to width ratio allows for a lot of text and a square picture area. I also borrowed from the Watchmen scheme of running a scene across a tier or sometimes a page and staggering its sequential progress through panel borders.

What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

JP: I’m afraid I don’t have any answer to that, although I probably should.