Q&A Hannah Berry
An extract from Hannah Berry’s forthcoming Livestock, in which the author herself features (top left panel), as does her editor at Jonathan Cape, Dan Franklin (above)
tom tivnan Your new graphic novel, Livestock, is out in May. Tell us about it. hannah berry
I’ve not come up with a pithy elevator pitch but it’s set in a world where [Rupert] Murdoch owns the BBC and it’s about the media, the way it is used in “crisis communication”—I think that’s the PR phrase—to divert atention away, or move atention to things that are less politi- cally embarrassing. It’s actually quite timely. I wrote it in 2014, but I seem to have
Top draw
Graphic novelist Hannah Berry reflects on the comics scene and its recent explosive growth—and reveals how her new title is particularly prescient. Tom Tivnan reports
predicted the current climate very well. A blurb on the front cover says, “it’s a para- ble for the Trump era”. I’m torn about that quote: I want Trump to disappear, but I still want my book to be relevant and sell.
Why has it taken so long to come out? Well, I worked on the artwork for two and a half years. I’m a slow worker—just really, really slow. Maybe that’s not the best way forward for a graphic novelist, maybe you shouldn’t get bogged down in the detail. But I love the detail. I’ve hidden so many things in the images, I love to tell a story behind the main event [with the artwork]. Graphic novels are such a brief and succinct way of telling a story, I like to create things that you can go back to and get more in your second or third reading. Hey, I’m just good value for money.
Hannah Berry, as drawn by... Hannah Berry
The graphic novel market is rising in the UK—but is there still a struggle for acceptance on the more literary end? It’s an uphill struggle. The Royal Societ of Literature recently published a report on the public’s perception of literature, and it made for depressing reading: just 41% of UK adults think graphic novels can be classed as “literature”—that’s behind even self-help. I’m writing for everybody, but people who might enjoy the subject may not pick up my book because they don’t think it’s for them. I feel slightly aggrieved as I have no people in tights flapping around on my pages— nothing against superheroes, but I’ve never been into that kind of comic.
So if Marvel came calling, you would say no? Look, I have a mortgage to pay, I wouldn’t turn it down. I did write a story for 2000 AD,
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