By Zack Quaintance — In today’s Kickstarter Interview, I had a chance to send some questions to writer Fraser Campbell and artist Lucy Sullivan, whose book Barking made my list of the Best Graphic Novels of 2020 (So Far). This is a very cool book, one that has hugely-talented creators on its creative team. You can read our conversation below, and then when you’re done you can head over to the IND-XED campaign page to back the project now.

Enjoy!

Fraser Campbell and Lucy Sullivan Interview

ZACK QUAINTANCE: So first things first, what can you tell us about the book being "lo-fi" science fiction?

LUCY SULLIVAN: INDXED is Fraser’s concept but for me LoFi SciFi is a future that is rusty & bolted together rather than glossy. When ai first read Fraser’s script it immediately evoked films like Brazil, Children of Men & Twelve Monkeys. It was of my favourite genres, not represented anywhere near as much as it should be so a pleasure to work on.

FRASER CAMPBELL: When we were talking about the look of the story, we came up with the expression “dustbowl sci-fi” to describe what we were aiming at. We wanted to get across that this was a kind of cosy catastrophe “post event” story, where the societal backdrop was that technology has failed somehow and now tech was only in the hands of the authorities and the rich. Everyone else had to pretty much make do and mend, having to repair old cars, old cookers, old clothes etc. time and again. The kind of situation where new systems of order would be required and it would seem almost natural that totalitarianism would flourish. I was thinking of The Road and Truffaut’s movie version of Fahrenheit 451 as a guide in terms of atmosphere when I was writing it. However these ideas are all more or less implicit within the story and so the onus on getting this across was almost entirely on Lucy, who’s done just an incredible job of making that World real and believable.

ZACK: Apologies for diving right into the heavy stuff, but the book's concept and a lot of its inspirations deal heavily in dystopian disenfranchisement. For both of you, have you had that fear or feeling from recent headlines and if so how?

FRASER: I actually wrote this in early 2019, so the script wasn’t informed by recent events. It’s kind of funny how it dovetails with a lot of what’s going on. But being disenfranchised isn’t anything new of course. While being treated like a non-person might seem like a dystopian science fiction story for us, it’s a daily reality for many others. A lot of people in the more comfortable parts of the World perhaps believe that this kind of thing can only happen to others and never to them. We compartmentalise horrors we find difficult to confront in part by imagining we’re somehow insulated from disaster by our Governments, our institutions, our comfortable lives. We’re obviously learning right now that this notion is hooey, and I think one of the purposes of dystopian fiction has always been to remind us that the perceived robust stability of society is something of a con. That the rug can be pulled out from under any of us at any time.

LUCY: Big time for me. I read a fair amount of speculative fiction and fear we’re in or on the verge of a catastrophic point in history. Heavy stuff indeed. I think there’s all the more need for stories that posit theories on where humanity is heading. I think daily about Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy of novels and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Recommended reading if you’re interested.

ZACK: I'm a huge fan of your work, Lucy, and Barking is among my favorite graphic novels of the year so far. This seems like a very different story from that one. What kind of tweaks to the aesthetic of your work did you make to fit this project?

LUCY: Thanks very much Zack, I’m very happy BARKING has struck such a chord with you. I did intend to draw IND-XED completely differently from BARKING. I’m keen to develop my colour work & been dabbling with Procreate. I sent Fraser some character ideas. He tweeted the images & they went down well so that was the style set! It’s a painterly style, I tried to think about what I’d learned from an oil painting course on colour spots whilst using a film of dust across the comic to hint at what has happened in this society.

ZACK: Fraser, I'm especially interested in this having just concluded my own recent Kickstarter campaign, but how was the process of taking the book you all were making and finding a way to market it on the platform?

FRASER: My approach universally is really just to try and utilise the tools available. When you’re a small fry indie book, there’s obviously no marketing budget so you try your best to use social media to build anticipation and get the word out and hope that people will be interested in reviewing the book and talking to you about it. You’re somewhat reliant on the comics community to spread word of mouth and that’s where your personal reputation comes in. If you’re known to make decent comics, for being supportive within the community etc. that all helps. With IND-XED, we talked about approaching a publisher rather than crowdfunding, but we decided because of the short length of the book that it’d be difficult to find somewhere it’d sit in the book or comics market. I like using platforms like Kickstarter because it gives you more or less total control of how your work is presented, produced and distributed, plus you can approach audiences for your prior work with new projects, allowing you to genuinely build and grow your audience. I sometimes wish Kickstarter itself would do a little more to help creators reach new backers, but you obviously can’t deny it’s been a great resource for small press comic creators.

ZACK: Finally, what questions are you hoping readers take away from the finished book?

LUCY: I hope people will look at the current climate, both political and environmental, and consider their role and actions. None of is need be swept up in the current. We are our choices. I also hope it can be a bit a time out of personal circumstances and a moment in another’s shoes. Helps me personally a lot right now. I’d just like to say a huge thanks too for every pledge so far. The response has been truly uplifting.

FRASER: I’m not sure. One thing you find when you make stuff and put it out there in the World is that the book stops being yours and becomes something that belongs to the audience. Interpretations you never considered crop up and people read their own interests and ideas into the work. This usually makes you seem far cleverer than you actually are, so I’m not complaining! IND-XED is ultimately about fighting to retain your compassion and empathy, so I hope people come away from it thinking about that and how important it is to stem the tide of blasé cruelty that seems to dominate so much of life these days.

IND-XED

IND-XED
Writer: Fraser Campbell
Artist: Lucy Sullivan
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Meredith is an ordinary young woman just trying to get by until she wakes up one morning to find she has been IND-XED, marked by those who control her society as a stateless, nameless and worthless non-person. Desperate to find out why, she follows a clue to The City, where rumours hint that others like her dwell within the shadows.
BACK IT NOT: IND-XED

Check out our past small press previews!