Comix Influx Blog: Woodrow Phoenix in India

“A blank sheet of paper is a profoundly democratic thing. It doesn’t care what you do with it. ... Think of comics this way. Let’s get started.”

So says Woodrow Phoenix, in his blogposts about his recent tour of India. He was invited to go by the British Council To promote British books, and in his case. He blogged about it on the Lit Sutra website, whic is dedicated to cultural interaction between the UK and India. The links are below, and are well worth checking out for his fascinating insights about creating comics, about the medium itself and also about India the country. Or just for Woodrow’s great writing: “after the relative calm of Chandigarh, arriving in Hyderabad is like being plucked from a tub of yogurt and plunged into a hot bowl of minestrone soup”.

• Woodrow Phoenix in Infia – Day 1
• Woodrow Phoenix in Infia – Day 2
• Woodrow Phoenix in Infia – Day 3
• Woodrow Phoenix in Infia – Day 4
• Woodrow Phoenix in Infia – Day 5
• Woodrow Phoenix in Infia – Day 6

While in India, Woodrow particularly talked about his innovative book Rumblestrip. Exploring, as the book does, people’s relationships with their cars, it is of particular relevance to a country that has the highest rate of road deaths in the world.

Woodrow eloquently expresses the feelings of many visitors to India when he says, “I was taken aback by the elaborately pugnacious free for all of New Delhi road traffic. Everyone drives straight at each other without altering their trajectories at all, picking a line and then going for it, cutting in, weaving, swerving… give way at the very last second if you have to, but don’t stop, never stop. You just keep going. Horns are for continuous announcement of your position, like sonar in reverse.”

Appropriately enough, Woodrow was invited to judge a poster competition by ArriveSAFE an NGO dedicated to reducing the appalling number of road accidents in the country.

Woodrow also uses the blog to describe his thoughts about comics as a medium, of which I, for one, would love to read much more:

“Comics pictures are not illustrations because the words in a comic are not the primary source of information. Text and image carry equal amounts of narrative weight. If you can read the words as a completed narrative without the pictures, then you are not reading a comic strip. If you can understand the entire narrative without the words then the text is a useless decoration. The relationship between word and picture is not parasitical. it is reciprocal.”

“There are a lot of silent panels in my book. Images without text. That does not mean there is nothing to ‘read’ there; the image contains a great deal of information and it is doing the job of carrying the narrative without words.”

“It would be very hard to do a whole comic this way only because of the risk that you [the reader] will run away with these images to a place where I didn’t intend you to go. Rumble Strip is deliberately ambiguous in places because I want you to filter those points through your personal experience. But I might not always want the reader to do that. I might want to reader to see only what I want to show them.”

Woodrows says that in Rumblestrip he made “the reader into the protagonist so they experienced the book actively rather than reading it passively.”

In addition, Woodrow describes his visit Chandigarh, which he chose to visit in order to see the extensive work of the architect Le Corbusier, whom Woodrow has long admired. He discusses creator ownership when visiting an animation workshop in Hydrebad, and his approach to art. Finally he has a close encounter with a large number of illustration-hungry Indian children.

I would love to write more about Woodrow’s blogposts, as I think there is so much there that is worth repeating, but I don’t just want to copy everything that he has written. Far better if you go take a look yourselves!

All images used with permission of Woodrow Phoenix