Alex Scott is a multidisciplinary artist from Auckland. Her first graphic novel, Episodes, is the culmination of a childhood spent in front of the TV, a degree in scriptwriting, 15 years as a magazine sub-editor, an illustration and painting practice, and nine years as a cartoonist for New Zealand Listener.
Her most personal work yet, the book Episodes, unpacks themes of time, nostalgia, identity and perception of reality. Alex is currently working on a follow-up set in the world of women’s magazines. Alex talks to NZ Booklovers.
Have you always wanted to make comics?
I’d always wanted to write movies. I studied scriptwriting at uni but then went straight into a three-year art project painting 500 miniature oil paintings on matchboxes. This overlapped with my first job, as a sub-editor at New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.
So my trajectory hasn’t felt entirely logical. But each thing felt like the right thing at the time and it’s all fed into the making of Episodes. The cartoon work kind of came to me tangentially because I was already in the building freelancing as a sub. The Listener editor knew I painted and asked if I had any cartoon ideas, which I didn’t, but I said I’d think of some, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
I was drawn to the idea of making long-form comics while reading Sabrina by Nick Drnaso in 2018. It’s so cinematic and understated. I saw the potential to tell the kinds of stories I wanted to tell in that medium.
How did Episodes develop?
There were a few factors that needed to align for me to be ready to make this book. One of those turned out to be losing all my paid work when Bauer Media folded during the first Covid lockdown. That’s when I sat down to write.
Episodes is also an incredibly personal book to me because all the stories developed out of experiences or feelings I’ve had and finally felt ready to share. The stories are separated by TV-style ads, which provided an instant dramatic tension that ended up shaping the whole book. So the first draft was kind of effortless. It was all just there ready to meet the page.
Because I’d never written a long-form comic, I approached it as a screenplay, which I then roughly storyboarded to make sure it worked visually.
I spent a long time gathering reference material for the actual illustration. I wanted it to have a really strong sense of the Auckland I grew up in, to feel specific and authentic and familiar to others.
I looked to TV convention to inform the style and layout because that’s what I was familiar with. Rather than having speech bubbles, the dialogue is presented as subtitles. And the frame formats follow the dominant aspect ratio of the time each story is set, e.g. 3:4, 14:9, 16:9 and vertical phone screen, from 1993 to 2020.
The real writing was in the editing, which I did even during the final illustration process as I saw opportunities to refine the themes and visual motifs. The caption style meant I was able to tweak and rewrite dialogue very late in the process.
What were the main challenges in producing it?
I didn’t know how to make a long-form comic — I’d never drawn more than a single-panel cartoon — but I knew I could figure it out. I think it worked to my advantage that I didn’t have fixed ideas about how a comic should look or work or be put together.
The drawing and colouring of the final pages took longer than expected. And it took a physical toll I wasn’t expecting, which delayed things a bit as I had to take weeks off from drawing.
By the time I’d ‘finished’, my illustration had also gotten better, so there was some temptation to go back and redraw things. I could have laboured over it and revised it forever. But you have to draw a line somewhere so you can move on to the next thing.
Earth's End Publishing