Fashion and Comics

Last week in NYC, I covered CHANEL’s annual US strategic meeting as a graphic recorder and visual facilitator. As usual in these instances, I had to sign an NDA so, obvs, I can’t share any of the a/w that covers the details of all the meetings, business insights and presentations, but, scroll down and there’s a few no-info glimpses and some nice pics of the view from CHANEL HQ, which is in the old MoMA building. Certainly one of the more creative graphic recording jobs I’ve done, and lunch came with one of the best views of Central Park I’ve ever enjoyed. (Seemed somehow symbolic, at the time.)

It was fascinating to see how a creative industry very different from those I generally work in sees itself and markets its own image and wares to the world. It was intriguing to see how individuals within CHANEL and as an organisation - and like other corporate structures (especially in the USA) - are now beginning to make use of visual storytelling and visual problem solving. They’re doing this in both marketing arenas and within their own culture, which of course (and vitally so) in CHANEL’s case, is visually-led. So much so, they made me present my work at the end of the three-day job - a glimpse of that in the final pics.

You haven’t lived until you’ve had to present to a world-renowned fashion house, one of the biggest brands on the planet, and a roomful of their execs and salespeople, let me tell ya. You could smell the money, but you could also smell the creativity too, and the hunger to take an inventive approach to all things, even the interpretation of KPIs and sales data. That’s not always the case in these kinds of jobs and high profile clients. (OK, candidly - it’s rare.)

It made me really take some time to ruminate upon the place of comics, and specifically comics language and grammar, that have been repurposed in many other areas of industry and communication since the age of information began. First, the computer industry did it (Apple moreso than any other soon-to-be tech giant), with all others following. Every time you look at your phone messages, which uses speech balloons, you’re using a mode of communication fundamentally rooted in the humble pulp medium of comics. Comics was a medium, one which specialises in getting complex ideas across quickly and viscerally, but now it has evolved into a full-blown language, and one that has rerooted (and rerouted) itself throughout all other crucial areas of human endeavour.

Something comics makers need to do, all of us, is reorganise.  We need to recognise our own importance in the grander scheme of things, as interpreters, as translators, as imaginative players and diplomats whose skills are applicable in an incredible variety of fields where we can also work and thrive.

Publishing, of whatever sort, whether in print or online is the natural home of storytellers, but now corporate business is waking up to how a good visual storyteller with strong editorial capabilities can help  them.

Whatever industries we do or do not inhabit, whatever jobs we moonlight in so that we can keep the wolf from the door, we need to more fully comprehend how this storytelling language that comes naturally to us is of enormous value to those out there who don’t, or are unable to, think naturally in visual terms.

The splicing of the visual imagination, the literary imagination and the realm of knowledge and ideas, the ability to encapsulate strategies, emotion, time, sequencing, all to create “plan views” of linear problems so that they may be comprehended from new POVs and reorganised to point ways to solutions, to generate iconography on the hoof  - these are not one single amazing ability, but a whole host of talents that can be redeployed in many and various ways.

In our native territory - and I am talking about the “comics industry,” such as it is - we tend to be undervalued, underpaid, often hamstrung by outdated publishing structures and routinely and abstractly ripped off. We’re often presided over by people who don’t fully understand what we do, or want to achieve, or who want to use us a stepping stone for their own careers or to flesh out their own undercooked ideas.

In mainstream culture, though there may be allies (and lawd bless the few of ya that there are) we’re largely presided over by gatekeepers who want to consign us to some ghetto of literary (and literal) thought. How binary, how absolutist.

Yet wider corporate culture and the majority of creative industries want our insights, our skills, our powers of deductive storytelling and leaps of quantum insight. You can’t automate the latter and you absolutely can’t fake the human experience that is crucial to good storytelling, whatever the TechBros want you to believe about AI.

We have to step outside all these institutions and take back the power. It’s our power, our desire to connect and join dots, it’s in our eyes, our minds, our hearts and our fingertips. We don’t have to leave publishing behind, but to change our relationship with it and make it fairer; to be less misunderstood, we have to also move outside those hoary old institutions to get a better view.

[Hmmm… when I started writing this, I didn’t mean this to turn into a clarion call, but it turned out that it is.]

Comics is a manifold language, and its native practitioners need to take their place at the forefront of culture… however that works for you.

Comics, cartoonists, funnybook creators and all makers of comics of every stripe - the language of comics - are fundamental to culture, to human visual communications and, when you think about it, pretty much everything that human beings are and do.

If you make comics, if you think visually, you are indispensable. Believe it.