Who knows where ideas come from? Those strange fish lurking in the depths – they don’t care about lures. They’re wise to your hooks. They’ll rise, if they ever do, not when you want them to – only when they want to.
But here goes.
It’s 2008. Anna, my girlfriend – now my wife – and I have moved to Bristol. I’m working on an illustrated story I’ve had in my mind for some time. I’m on a full-page illustration. I’ve decided to try it as a comic.
I work quickly. Borders in raw ink. Outlines in pencil, then diluted inks to render. That done, I use splashes of acrylic and pencil to refine the details. It’s finished. I step back, see what I’ve got.
“Shit,” I say.
The page looks good.
By this time I’ve done a couple of short comics, five- or six-pagers for small press magazines. I know how much work goes into even a short comic. (It’s a lot. No, more than you’re thinking. A lot.) I really don’t want to make this story into a comic, because that’s going to take a massive amount of work. I don’t know if I have it in me.
But the page looks really good. Better than that, it looks right. If I’m going to do the story at all, I realise, I’m going to have to do it as a comic.
That was the first page of The Boy with Nails for Eyes.
But even that’s a long way down the road. Where did the story come from?
Rewind 17 years.
I’m living in Bahrain, in the Arabian Gulf. The village I live in, smack in the middle of the desert, is called Awali.
Awali was the first ‘oil camp’ built in the Gulf, to house workers at the nearby refinery. The houses are low bungalows with render like shark skin. The acacia trees have murderous thorns that play noughts-and-crosses on your skin as you climb. At the edge of town a chain-link fence, first installed in the 1940s, marks the perimeter. I can remember a couple of times, cycling near that fence, dogs appearing out of the desert to follow me, barking, along the wild side of the perimeter. A weird place to grow up – but then, I didn’t know that at the time.
Then the Gulf War happened.
I’m nine years old. Saddam rolls into Kuwait. Mere days later there are American GIs wandering around town. Helicopters, humvees. I hear the word ‘Scud’ for the first time. Rumours. Saddam’s chemical weapons.
One day everyone is called to the town hall. We’re issued gas masks. (Instead of the black, insectoid, stormtrooper-style helmets my parents get, I’m given a child’s version, an utterly uncool plastic bag with an elasticated neck-hole and a fan-driven filter. I was royally pissed.) Back home, my parents put big Xs of tape across the windows, to prevent flying glass if there’s an explosion.
CNN feeds us our daily greens: night-vision footage of Iraqi installations growing larger in the crosshairs. Like adverts for the wars of the future. Which is, I suppose, what they were.
Every now and again Iraq launches a Scud. The radio or TV breaks from the regular schedule to a pre-recorded announcement. It begins with music. The music goes:
DUN! DUNDUNDUN! DUN! DUNDUNDUNDUN! DUNDUN! DUNDUNDUNDUN! DUNDUN!
The presenter appears. “Remain calm.” If that’s what they wanted, they should’ve used a different tune.
We wait to see which way the Scud’s going. (By all accounts the Iraqis themselves have little idea.) Are we going to have to hustle into the safe room – my room, as it happens – with our masks? (Ugh. My plastic bag. If it came to it, maybe I’d rather suck gas.)
One night I wake up and it’s actually happening. Everyone’s in my room. My dad’s stuffing a towel under the door. My mum’s clutching our masks. My sister, barely two years old, is sniffling. There’s a Scud in the air, coming our way.
It flies right over our town. A few miles away, Patriot missiles are launched. They catch the Scud in mid-air, blowing it into confetti.
A few days later, a family friend went into the desert and found (so he claimed) the crash site. He brought back a piece of twisted metal the size of my thumb. Scud, he said. A small piece of the war, curled up in my hand like a dead locust.
Another time, I was at a friend’s house. We were building a den in the garden when, in the distance, we heard a siren. It was one of those classic World War 2-era droning wails, up and down without ever quite landing on a tone. I wasn’t even aware of it at the time, but the siren had been installed on the old abandoned cinema at the centre of town. Inside, the radios and TVs would be booming. DUNDUNDUN.
My friend’s mother comes outside to hustle us in – and only then do I realise I’ve come out without my gas mask.
We hurry through the house into their safe room. A brief glimpse of the ubiquitous X of tape over the window before the curtains are drawn (who knows why; they’ll hardly prevent shrapnel, and it’s not as if the Scuds can see us) and the room goes dim.
My friend’s mum disappears and returns. “Here.” She gives me a towel, heavy with water. I understand that I’m to put this over my head if it’s a chemical attack. Full-on canary. For several minutes we sit in the dark, the whole family eyeing me nervously, waiting for the all-clear.
A frightening time.
A good time too. We got two weeks off school (cheers Saddam). I got to drive an enormous US Army forklift after my family made friends with soldiers at the nearby base. There were morale-boosting parties, pot lucks for the troops. My mum and I made cakes (cheers Betty Crocker).
But yeah. It was scary.
After the Kuwaiti oil fields were set ablaze by the retreating Iraqis, even hundreds of miles away we could see the discolouration in the sky, like a bruise. Dead flesh in need of amputation. Those fires began in January – they didn’t end until November.
Everywhere, the colours changed. CNN went from the acid green of night-vision to bright billows of orange and red. We’d go to the beach to watch the sunsets – glories in the sky, nature’s work augmented by the particles and gases in the air. You could smell them. A memory – wiping the back of my neck at the day’s end, my palm streaked black.
Fast forward seven years.
I’m at boarding school in England. I hate it. I don’t belong at all. In English class, we’re studying a poem about the poet’s ghost coming back to haunt the lover who rejected him. (The stalkery ickness of this escapes me at the time.) The teacher points us to a picture on the wall, an illustration of the poem by a previous student. It’s been done in ink on thin, fragile paper. The apparition from the poem, watery and sad, staring out at us with eyes that are long streaks of ink. I love the picture, though it doesn’t match the tone of the poem at all. Every now and again over the next few years I try to produce my own version of it, but I can never catch the sad isolation in the original.
Forward again – four years this time.
I’m at university, my second year. I’m studying English literature, after messing up my application to art school. The autumn term’s not started yet, I’m alone in my shared house when, one afternoon, a friend of mine busts in, wild-eyed and panting, and tells me to turn on the bloody TV. When I do, the skyline of New York appears. Moments later the second plane flies into the South Tower.
If you were around in the 90s maybe you heard that ‘end of history’ bullshit so popular at the time. Fascism’s dead, Communism’s done. The West triumphant. Like Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: “Our fucking troubles are over.” (Spoiler: they aren’t.) Nothing to do now, we’re told, but wait for the whole world to wake up to liberal democracy. All happy little consumers (except, of course, the poor bastards making the things to be consumed). Amen.
September 11th 2001 was the end of all that. The end of the end of history. War again. But this time a War on Terror. War on an abstract? A war like that can’t be won. No more than you can bomb out a fire, or scratch out a wound. I began to feel the same old feeling as when I was a kid. Everywhere, the colours changed. Black streaks of carbon on my hand.
Fast forward another year.
Last year at university. I’m really getting to grips with my literature course by painting and drawing a lot, with occasional forays into Grand Theft Auto.
The Iraq war is on. The WMDs we were all promised would be found haven’t been found, and won’t be found. Security has been stepped up everywhere. The government has promised us ID cards so that we can all feel more safe. I’m getting used – long-haired, goateed, suspiciously foreign – to being followed by members of staff whenever I’m at a train station. One time I turn around and see a spotty guy, barely out of his teens, wearing a hi-viz vest and a nervous defence-of-the-realm expression, eyes on me, whispering into his walkie-talkie. Getting used to, well – dread.
(Just so you know, dread’s not a thing you get used to. No. What happens is, it walls you up. It immures you. If it goes on long enough, you forget you’re in that confinement. You redefine the horizon. No longer the line between earth and sky, now it’s the flat, unyielding limit on all sides.)
One evening my housemates and I are hanging out. We’re watching a DVD of Tool videos. (This is pre-YouTube, if you can imagine such a thing.) We put on the video for ‘Sober’ – and there, four minutes ten seconds into it, one of the weird mechanical creatures in the vid turns to the screen, the nail in its eye swivelling like an insect antenna.
I think to myself “Huh. It isn’t like the nail is in his eye. It’s more like the nail is his eye.”
And
DUNDUNDUN
like that, there’s an idea in the air. A picture in my head. I wait to see which way it goes.
A young, frightened boy. His eyes are long black streaks. Sticking out of them, a pair of nails. A boy with nails for eyes.
That evening I do the first of several drawings in ink and acrylic. There he is. He hasn’t got a name yet, or a story, but he’s already the boy with nails for eyes. More sketches follow in a rough, multi-media style that, in retrospect, is surprisingly close to the final look of the book.
A few weeks later, I start on a rough idea of an illustrated story. A sick town on the edge of a war, a lonely kid, a journey into the dark.
I work on the story for the next few years. It’s pretty rubbish, but I’m learning. Details gather gradually.
A few years later, living in York with Anna, our house is broken into. Some of my PC equipment is stolen, along with it all my artwork and all the drafts of the story. After a few painful days hunting all the second-hand shops in the city for my stolen work, I decide to start again.
This is, in retrospect, a good thing. I hone the story.
We move to Bristol. The story’s kicked into gear. Lots of fluff has been jettisoned. Anna and I talk the story over a lot. She’s been a part of it since almost the beginning – it wouldn’t be what it is without her. Whenever I’m stuck, which is often, she’s guaranteed to find the problem, if not the solution.
One day, against my better judgement, I try one page as a comic, just to see.
“Shit,” I say.
It looks good.
