Milk White Steed’s ‘zone of weirdness’: an interview with Mike Kennedy

Portrait of the cartoonist as a 19th century market souvenir

TONY WEI LING: I wanted to start off by asking about cartooning itself, if that's not too broad! Milk White Steed in particular seems to make the style and storytelling of cartoons central to what it's up to. How would you describe your relationship to cartooning (as art or tradition)? 

MIKE KENNEDY: My relationship to cartooning is mostly emotional, both as a reader and a cartoonist. I want to write, draw and compose a story to achieve its emotional potential. I've spent most of my twenties failing to work out how this could actually work on the page. The zines and comic strips were the most publishable experiments in this journey, although that work was using cartooning to protest and satirise. Eventually, I wanted more complexity from what I was cartooning.

Deciding to make self-contained short fiction was the turning point. Through the discipline needed to finish short comics, I realised that my voice and the lives I was interested in writing about were emotional, flawed and always changing. This reflected all of my drawing instincts, yet it has taken years to see how they should work together as words and pictures. Simply put, after much struggle and frustration, Milk White Steed is proof to myself that I can say everything I need to say within the artform I value the most.

I'm struck by your phrase, "always changing," because multiple comics in Milk White Steed––"Giddy Up Duppy" and "Yellow Bird Blues"––are stories of shape-shifting, and of course we get Anansi looking like one of those Studio Ghibli dust-sprites. What were you looking to explore with these different metamorphosis plots? And was there anything that took you by surprise, either in the process of making them or looking back now? 

What I know for certain about Duppy's and other folk spirits is that they are very physical in their presence on earth and in people's lives. They wouldn't phase through a wall or control the candlelight. They would more likely jam their whole physical form into a keyhole to get into a locked room. This insists upon a weirder, more bewildering type of relationship with the dead on the page. This belief in how my horror should function kept me anchored as I developed the stories.

What really excited me as I continued to shape the work was embracing this folk tradition that can transform both the physical state and the mind state of a character over the course of many panels and pages. I think the book can be divided between these interior stories and these exterior explorations. I would say that the title story is an attempt to blur the lines between the objectively interior and exterior experiences of the character. This more liminal, limbo state is one I'd like to play within in the future. How does one transcend the limbo of twentieth and twenty-first century life? The limbo of knowing our history on a day-to-day basis?

Oh, I love this answer. I appreciate that the Duppy and its kin then have this very tangible claim or intrusion on the page. I’m curious now what moving deeper into that liminal/limbo state of narrative (and history) will look like in terms of both length and genre, but I’m not sure that’s a question I can ask before you’ve worked through it.

Which story was the first that you worked on? And when did you start to conceive of the short comics as connected, or was it that way from the start?

As I'm editing a lot of work from the past couple of years into a new collection, I'm realising this limbo narrative is an original invention for me. There's a pattern of considered choices emerging and I feel this new collection I'm composing will try to define this limbo narrative in fiction and nonfiction. At the minute autofiction is the best vessel for this new style. So personal history seems to drive it right now.

The stories in MWS began humbly as small press work. After the eclectic satires of MiNT, I wanted to return to the horror comics that I loved. The 1950s pre-censorship stuff. Each story really started as four, five pages that grew organically over time. At some point I realised I couldn't afford to print any work, let alone multiple stories. The only option was to keep shaping the work to their natural conclusions as they emerged to me.

I worked on the stories at the same time and tried to understand the importance of each one, relative to discoveries made in the other stories. But at the same time I wanted each story to hold up on its own. It was a tough process that taught me that I'm a better re-writer than a writer, to paraphrase Samuel Delany.

After the range of sci-fi and horror in this collection, and especially the uncertain sights observed by the wandering narrator of the title story, I'm really excited to see what kind of autofiction you'll make. It makes some sense, too, that these stories in MWS feel so seasoned and fully thought-through, given that longer process of revision.

Your mention of pre-Code horror and Samuel Delany is reminding me that I wanted to ask you about works or sources that were most on your mind as you were working on MWS.

That's a big question. I'll have to dive into my bookshelves to remember prose work. So, let's start with comics:

So pre-code horror I've always loved, in what looks like a practice-defining way now. I've had this one Fantagraphics collection for many, many, years now and refer to it constantly. Just flipping through, they make me excited about comics. Those pieces are so brilliant, they utilise not just horror but terror specifically. The terror of day-to-day, twentieth-century life especially. As an amateur historian of sorts, that's gold. And as storytelling, the way it reminds me to just keep things concise. Just bring it home at the end in some way. My comics do waffle by comparison, but in the scenes and movements in the stories I try to keep it tight.

The second influence is the British children's comic. So I'm talking about Beano, Dandy etc. What I'm getting from those works is how they laser beam social history into our contemporary heads in incredibly accessible ways. The brutal silliness of what it means to be a child in Britain. What going on an adventure looks like. The colouring of the MWS and the design of the book was made to resemble a kids comic annual from the mid 20th century. 

What maybe connects these two to me is that they both confront the limits of the social world and attempt to break free of it all. I sensed that if adult terror and the boldness of childhood can play together, I could form a new language for myself. The final more literary aspect is that I could write a rhythm of voices through the stories. These voices that range from monologue to dialogue, to song to whatever oral expression. Alternating in arbitrary, improvised ways resulted in new compositions every time. This is the Caribbean tradition, and Irish too, through my dad's side.

I prefer your waffling to the clean "snap" or twist endings of EC horror, honestly! It occurs to me that MWS's opening story, "Green Men," could end six pages earlier than it does, and on a more conventional twist ending. But those final six pages let us linger in the dread and wonder of what comes in the wake of its twist. 

And speaking of color, the actual final page leaves us swimming in that literal sea of green, on the cusp between heath and ocean, Green Man and Duppy. It reminds me of how Keguro Macharia writes about the weird, confounding similes in Amos Tutuola's ghost stories––as a cusp or bridge, "not one that compels a crossing from one side to another, but one that enables voices to travel from one side to another." Which is maybe getting back to what you were saying about limbo, in a way.

Feel free to say more about prose inspirations too, but I'd love to hear more about the "amateur historian" part! You recently had a fellowship with Birmingham Museums, but you must also have done a lot of research for Milk White Steed. How far back would you track your interest in history? Has your relationship to it changed over time? 

My obsession with history goes back to vivid memories of school trips to pungent-smelling Roman Granaries. I went to Lud's church as a young child, I think about it often. Tamworth, where I grew up, is founded around a motte and bailey castle. It was the seat of power for the kingdom of Mercia. It makes sense how I got into reading and drawing and writing and comics through those kinds of experiences with history. 

With MWS I had been seriously researching colonial history prior to 2020. So I haven't had the convenient access to the diversity of media on that stuff as we have now. I had to rigorously source a lot of work that was long out of print, basically esoteric and I formed my own frameworks to research a subject through my comics making instincts. As a result of all this hoarding I have a growing reference library at home that I can develop and make work from. This is not uncommon for writers of any medium I understand. It's apt that you mention prose then move to history as I think most of my favorite writers were like radical researchers and made important fiction works that acted as gateways into this real history. With Americans, for quick reference, I'm talking about Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon etc. Maybe that's what I wanted from making comics. An encyclopedia of Black Atlantic weirdness.

Nowadays my relationship with history is feeling mature and only getting more refined. With the fellowship it looks like the start of a mutually beneficial relationship with the museum staff and its collections. As a lifelong comics maker I've gone from childhood intrigue to heavy reading to actually handling the objects. It's mad nerdy, but it's cool to me.

Nightmarish as most colonial history is, there's also something very beautiful about your relationship to history being bookended by immediate sensory encounters, from the smells of ancient places on school trips to now being invited to handle museum objects. Have any of those objects from your recent research stayed with you in particular?

My time at the museum has been about mapping Birmingham's 19th century marketplace through its artifacts. I think I'll always remain fond of this little silver souvenir of Jemmy the Rockman. A 19th century street pedlar and ex-soldier (of empire) who stayed dressed in his military regalia and sold pencils to children. It's just fun to come across, like seeing a figure of Kitaro in Angoulême. Seeing the souvenir led to conversations about this makeshift economy in the market and things massively expanded from there.

The pre-2020 research centered largely around the histories of Black art and music and writing that came from the diaspora. It relied a lot on the great work made by American scholars. A major book was Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond. The "Yellow Bird Blues" story was inspired by the book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis. In these cases I was able to research further and source out-of-print books to elaborate on these mind-altering ideas. 

Important to remark that I had to shed much of this academicism to actually make the book's stories the way I felt was right. I say this as my personal and creative relationship with my Caribbean side is entirely non-academic. It hasn't been mediated to me by university presses or art institutions or the internet or movies. So some unlearning had to be done, especially the political guilt of wanting to explore the grey areas of life. Something all writers should be able to do. 

I say 'grey areas', as my love and appreciation and experience of Caribbean life isn't limited to the Afro-Caribbean identities either, or Anglophone work. The region is of many races and ethnic origins and languages much in the same way I am myself of different labels. This can be a dangerous/exciting idea in conversations in the UK that transgresses and challenges what a lot of people assume about the region. The "Green Men" story to me is chiefly about an Indo-Caribbean man who sweeps roads and plays English folk music out of love. It's only when he is maimed by an arson attack, do we see how he sees himself along with the society of the day, as Black: a second-class citizen.

It makes sense that scholarship was one important starting place for MWS, but also something you needed to shed––happy Year of the Snake––to get into messier, uglier corners. 

Now that I know you've gone through this whole journey with and beyond Sammond's Birth of an Industry, I'm thinking back to MiNT 1.5 (“ACAB: all... cartoon minstrels... are... black!”) and realizing that some of its images reappear in MWS, transformed. The animated ink-drop comes back as the ligahoo; the cop's mouth becomes the Green Man's father's; the floating glasses return to slowly compose the narrator's face in the final story. 

Seeing these side by side has me thinking back to your comment about rewriting. Does revising or redrawing (very loosely conceived!) a motif from previous comics feel akin to rewriting, or is it a different kind of process?

I really appreciate these comparisons as it's not something I've thought about. Surprising! All those were entirely drawing-led, I can tell you that. Do I associate authority figures (Police officer, Father) with big chompy mouths?

That small MiNT zine was really transformation personified. The character in those comics and that particular comic, Mr Inki, is a vagabond directly derived from cartoon minstrelsy. Looking back now, he HAS to be a prototype for the Duppy, surely?

I think that these images are what form my comics language on a purely instinctive level. What feels right at that time. It does feel like rewriting or just editing. In MWS I often put imagery like that in work to create visual breathing spaces. Quieter moments.

Unconscious association of authority figures and big chomping mouths you say… your countrywoman Melanie Klein does have a line about how children set up an “image of parents who devour, cut, and bite” them; I think she’s only wrong about it being an “unreal, phantastic” image. 

Moving between the cartoon minstrel’s personification of transformation and the Duppy’s, what changes? Both are, to say the least, ambivalent figures! 

Where I struggled with cartoon minstrels, is that I only could emancipate the minstrel within the confines of the cartoon it lived in. I was restricted by the ideas in the Sammond book as I understood it, that the cartoon minstrel is not even based on humans to start with. It was never alive and could be read as a work of anti-black cosmic horror, ha! So when I wanted to make work about the real world, I had to find something "tangible" as you said to channel more personal ideas and experiences into. Something that once lived in some way, that understands us. The minstrel does not understand, also, the minstrel is not an African invention. The Duppy, the Jumbie, the Ligahoo obviously do originate in the African imagination.

With the Duppy, I sensed a really validating way to to fold things back towards African folk traditions and what I knew. With the silhouette I can play in a graphic way, I can challenge things freely. This tracks with multiple African retained traditions of the Caribbean. Traditions of slave resistance and mockery of colonisers through pouring molasses on bodies, wearing cow horns, and other traditions of parading as whiteface minstrels to mock the colonists funnily enough. I only really scraped the surface of the undead as figures for protest in this book but transformation allows this ebb and flow.

The minstrel only allowed me access to entertainment media. Stage, film, television, music. Not to daily life and not to pre-abolition history or political events. This recalls to me the power of Kara Walker's work which transcends the minstrel trap in my opinion. Within her art we see the silhouettes of children's book characters. The fictions, the history, the childhood reading, the fairytale. A memory or lived experience that cannot be mediated by glib, shocking minstrel/blackface polemic but something else. But something that is also the colour black.

I figure Walker is challenging a colonial, Caribbean idea of depicting the enslaved African as black? The slave narratives, the pirate ships, the big sphinx, the Europeans made maps of the world. What could that look like in a comic? The dead could provide this to me and the comics reader. What I looked at were these children's comics from the period where the British empire and commonwealth was very much a thing although on the decline. I placed the impossible to enslave Duppy in comics forms of the coloniser. But I wanted to avoid pastiche! I didn't want to make ironic comics about haunting pirates in the lower antilles. I wanted to reflect the lived experiences of west indian immigrants in post WW2 Britain.

I’m grateful to you for taking me through this so fully, especially in terms of the life that the minstrel has, but also lacks—“it was never alive”––as a figure coming out of white fantasies about black freedom. 

Though you’re speaking here to the potential of the dead in a protest tradition, that capacity of the dead to understand also feels like a source of that grey-area complexity you've pushed toward. Also horror––or maybe weirdness––since there's a deeper and more complicated dynamic to the strange and irreversible transformations that the dead enact upon the living, like in “Yellow Bird Blues.” I suppose one of the things the minstrel always lacks is an idea of how painful a transformation might be.

What questions/dynamics of gender came up for you, as you worked on this collection?

With gender, and women, I wanted to understand. If the men survived in these stories and were visible, the women shall achieve more than that. My mother, my Caribbean parent, was the model for this. That's natural to do, of course, when making personal work. Parents seep through. The whole book contains her instincts not only to survive the present, but to imagine a future for herself so different to what's expected of her socially and achieve it. That's the arc of "Yellow Bird Blues" is it not? Animated by the historic and cultural matter within my research.

All that said, any further thoughts on that phrase you used earlier––"an encyclopedia of Black Atlantic weirdness"?

"An encyclopedia of Black Atlantic weirdness" has got me thinking. Even as the paradox it feels like, I resonate with it. I admire bodies of work. The pursuit of it. In some ways it feels like it could be a restriction on one's imagination. Or upon the collective Caribbean imaginations about the dead. Yet to me it insists upon a commitment to ideas that are important to me. Also, an encyclopedia or archive or map could range from many volumes, not just one.

Milk White Steed features characters undergoing transformation of some degree in order to leave a place successfully or not. I've said what I wanted to say there. 'Suppose I need to map a new zone of weirdness.

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