Q&A 8: ageing characters

[Apologies for the recent lack of sketch posts and fun comics. I've been writing pitches and scripts, which has left me little extra time and inspiration. I want to get back to sketching soon! I miss it!]

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Michael Ben Silva writes: 

"When did you start consciously ageing your characters? Esther, The Boy, and co. preparing for the end of school days is when I think I first noticed, further heightened by the intro of the Bad Machinery kids. Have you ever imagined or drawn any of your characters older than they are in whatever their latest story happens to be?"

As soon as I introduced the school age characters (in 2004), I inadvertently introduced the rhythm of the school year. The seasons had always passed in my comics, effectively keeping time with the date of publication (which was usually a week after I drew the page). I enjoyed the feeling of doing Christmassy comics at Christmas, and matching what I saw outside my window and walking to work with my drawings. Because the school year was now passing, the characters started to age. And when the young characters started ageing, everybody had to age. 

This introduced a lot of new narrative concerns to the comic, and added richness to the storytelling, but also, I felt, took the characters away from their original grounding, sometimes before I'd said everything with them that I intended to say. This informed me going back and doing comics like Bobbins.horse. It also meant that it was necessary to birth new generations of characters to try to say those things, or investigate those age groups in different ways. 

I was 21 when I started work on Bobbins and I'm 45 now. I've always been interested in reflecting lots of age groups in the comics, and the older I get, the better I understand the older age groups, while windows to younger people's worlds sort of open and close as personal connections shift and change. Modern 21 year-olds occupy a vastly changed social landscape to the one I emerged into. The more alien the subject of your writing, the more time you spend dodging the bullets of authenticity. 

There are definitely days when I wish I could just draw for someone else and not have to think about whether I'm getting the writing right. But if something isn't a challenge, it probably isn't worth doing.

I don't think I've drawn characters older than they are in the stories unless it was to reinforce some comic point in the story. I wasn't working towards some future adult model of Charlotte Grote when the character was introduced at 8 years old. I knew what her mum and sister looked like - that was probably enough to guide me. As a child, Mildred was a little squirt. As a late teenager, she's quite willowy. I remember a friend's older sister going quite quickly from having a round kid's face to almost being etiolated, she grew so fast. The ageing of the character models always follows some path I've seen in real life - the way people age is a constant source of fascination to me -- probably because I have to think about it all the time.

When I stopped drawing the Bad Machinery series, which was driven by this process past the point that I found it viable, my desire was to slow the ageing right down. I find it increasingly melancholy, especially as I go grey, to participate in the process of decay. 

One or two characters basically don't age. Shelley Winters is preserved by her zombification and resurrection in Scary Go Round as endlessly youthful. Either that or something they did to her at the Ministry of History keeps her eternally young. If you knew her in real life, you'd find her a little spooky.

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