The Black Project

Gareth Brookes - Stitched himself up

I met Gareth Brookes, briefly, at a Bristol zine fair. He was at a stall touting copies of his new comic from Myriad Editions, The Black Project, winner of (hmm) the Myriad Editions First Graphic Novel competition. I asked him what the shtick was and he sold it pretty well to me, explained that it was about a young man who makes his girlfriends out of stuff he finds in his granddad’s shed and hinted that the subject matter was perhaps on the dark side. I bought the comic, he was amiable, the comic had a blurb from Steve Bell, I bought a copy and it went into a big bag o’ zines.

When I got back and read his book I realized that he was seriously under-pitching. I don’t want to be throwing around too many stereotypes here but Gareth is a bearded bloke in specs who’s selling spooky stories about dysfunctional kids doing weird things. That’s certainly not an unusual premise, not in this particular neck of the comix woods, and it certainly didn’t prepare me for the surprise and delight I felt when I realized that the shtick, the gimmick, the unqualified USP that I can now hardly believe he didn’t bring to my attention, was that he’d lino cut and embroidered every panel of its two hundred or so pages.

Richard's (of The Black Project) Stitching Guide

Yup, folks, that’s embroidered, with like, a needle and everything and lino cut, like gouging chunks out of floor tiles and it looks lovely, with ornate needlepoint frames surrounding stitched line drawings of suburban scenes and heavy expressionistic lino prints.

And the medium informs and somehow reinforces the message. Richard, the boy hero of The Black Project, is a very handy child, whose skill with needle and glue is put to good use planning and constructing himself girlfriends. The story opens as he’s planning the creation of Laura –  “She was the first one I had any real feelings for”. He builds her from gloves, a tee-shirt, scrunched up tissue and sellotape, his mum’s old bra and some grapefruit. A succession of girlfriends are built, discovered and destroyed, and it all leads to a very satisfactory conclusion.

It’s not as weird or as dark as maybe it’d like to be – the voice of Richard as he tells us his story is far too reasonable and sweet to truly unsettle – but that’s not in any way to its detriment. Richard’s character is very well defined and his careful, cautious, methodical assemblage of parts and girlfriends, his fear of discovery, his dependence and distance from his parents, his helpful diagrams of hiding places and body parts, build into an engaging character – a tad earnest maybe, but a nice kid who’s going to grow up alright despite his unusual hobbies.

Gareth Brookes, in his afterword to the book, wonders if The Black Project is really a comic and, over the first few sections of the story I’d have had to agree with him. Formerly the pedant in me couldn’t help but draw a line between comics and illustrated stories and, if you could read it without the pictures, then it weren’t no comic.

The Black Project has made me reconsider that attitude. A good deal of the text in The Black Project could be read and understood without the images, but on having finished it and looking back on it the words and the pictures and the manner of their creation are integral to each other. There’s the story and the stitching and the cutting of the story into a physical form, but unusually for my reading of comics, the actual method of execution adds depth and resonance to the whole story. You could follow every detail of the story if you only heard the words, but you’d be missing the half the pointwork.