Vision and Labour: MAKING COMICS The art of Avery Hill Publishing

For some years now, Avery Hill Publishing has been arguably the foremost publisher in the British small-press comics scene. In no small part, this is owing to the publisher’s implicit mission statement, hewing closer, in UK terms, to the mainstream appeal and approachability of SelfMadeHero than to the more holistically-outré vision of the ‘alternative’ offered by, say, Breakdown Press. This is not at all meant as a slight — the publisher has platformed a fair few cartoonists I enjoy a great deal, including its two most significant ‘stars,’ Tillie Walden and Zoe Thorogood.

A new exhibition, Vision and Labour: Making Comics — The Art of Avery Hill, seeks to celebrate the achievements of Avery Hill’s decade-plus of operations while focusing on the process aspect of comics, showcasing original art, scripts, thumbnails, and commentary by various Avery Hill cartoonists.

In this regard, the exhibition encounters a certain difficulty: many of Avery Hill’s cartoonists work digitally, creating little to ‘show’ in terms of a gallery setting (a print-out of a final page being largely indistinguishable from the published version). For some of these digital cartoonists—Tom Humberstone, cartoonist of the Suzanne Lenglen biography Suzanne, for example—the emphasis is on the steps from thumbnail to finished colors; for others, like George Wylesol, pages are displayed as is. Naturally, it is the analogue-drawn art that commands the most attention, in light of the unexpected ‘discoveries’ that aren’t evident in the final product: I hadn’t realized, for example, just how loose the linework is in Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam, while the black-and-white art for Donya Todd’s The Witch’s Egg has a Ron Regé quality that the cotton-candy-hued coloring tends to obscure. 

What follows is a not-quite-complete photo report of the exhibition, mostly focusing on the original analogue art and more granular process elements on display. Vision and Labour will be on display at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate, England, through April 26th.

-Hagai Palevsky

Note for readers: We realize several of the pictures within this article contain glare from lighting or reflections from the glass framing the photographed artwork. While some of them have been edited to reduce these characteristics, removing them all would take away from the texture of displaying this exhibit. These artworks have a powerful presence in the world, which we aim to provide apart from the sterility of little images stuck in the cold and wandering screen.

- Ed.

 

 

 

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