Grab Your Pass! Slip Behind The Curtain And Meet
Aislinn Evans
So Aislinn, tell us about yourself?
I’m an interdisciplinary artist from East London: I work across publication, performance, writing & drawing (and more) to explore themes of class, queerness, and neurodiversity. My pronouns are they/them. My name is pronounced Ash-ling. I’m often adapting and subverting myths and other cultural narratives to deconstruct them a little bit. But I cut my teeth on webcomics and slam poetry, a weird mix of ~low-brow~ art forms that radically shaped my practice.
Tell us about your projects?
Well, this is my website: www.aislinnn.carrd.co
And by main project, I guess you’re referring to There Was A War, a now-complete webcomic about two young women in ancient Ireland who fall in love from opposing sides of a thousand-years war. You can read that on Tapas or Webtoons here: www.twaw.carrd.co
Other Hobbies, Guilty Pleasures and Obsessions
I find that I don’t really have hobbies, just obsessions I turn into jobs. My hobby-hobbies are cycling and swimming. Right now I’m really interested in the situationists, psychogeography, the District Line, the outer-London town of Romford, and drag.
So, tell me about your early experience. How did you fall in love with telling stories in pictures?
Crikey, I dunno. I always drew and I always wrote, and I always found those two practices intersecting. One day in primary school I saw a kid in the playground drawing manga, and I thought it was beautiful, so I started watching Ghibli films and reading manga on scanlation apps - it wasn’t until I was like 14 that I started reading American comics; Spiderman and the Runaways both resonated with me at that age. Scott McCloud was also highly influential on my love for the medium.
I think the reason I’m drawn to comics is that they deftly move between written and visual communication, which reflects my experience as an autistic person. Sometimes I just want to show, not tell. Besides that, they’re also an intimately participatory art form, with really complex compositional components that I can get super geeky about.
What media and programs do you work in to produce your project?
The first few chapters of There Was A War were drawn on Paint Tool SAI - I wrote out the text in a word processor and pasted screenshots into the file. It was a lot. But about halfway through I got Clip Studio Paint, and things got a lot easier.
Most of the pages are pencilled physically, on paper and that, then scanned in.
Can you tell me about your typical day or strip-creation session? How does your work process flow from idea to finished page?
That evolved a great deal over the course of the project, but by the end I’d work 2-3 days on the comic each week; saturday and sunday, monday if I was lagging behind and had no other work. I was lucky in that I was only in college 3 days a week, and worked evenings. Also didn’t have much of a social life.
So I’d divide the chapter into stages - the writing process {the outline, page by page, panel by panel, page compositions, pencils} and production process {inks, letters, colours}. By the end I could get an 18 page chapter written in one weekend and produced in the next by working in big batches. I watched a lot of movies during this process.
Before this though, I had a big outline of the entire narrative - that picked up from like chapter 7, because before that it was a lot more loosey-goosey and terrible.
What’s the most difficult part of your work?
Ummmm… making up for mistakes I made as a teenager. I started this comic at 16, I hadn’t made a proper comic before, I dove in at the deep end. I don’t regret it, although I do wonder what I would have done if I wasn’t so tied down to this comic. Anyway, getting myself out of knots I’d inadvertently tied up when I was younger was really troublesome.
Your work is based on a very ancient part of Irish myth. This is pretty obscure. I’d love to hear about how you found these stories and became interested in them.
It actually came out of research for a different comic that I wanted to create with a friend when I was maybe 14. I picked up this book of Irish mythology from the library, made copious notes, wanting to base an anti-hero on one of the mythological figures. I chose Balor, but this original Balor was a far shot from what you get on the page. She was a modern human incarnation chasing down the people who’d hurt her and killing them. Very ‘14-year-old-with-issues.’ But I was really drawn to how tragic a character Balor was, and I’ve always wanted to complicate the story of the monster.
Can you tell me about your storytelling process? Do you prefer to script your stories, fly by the seat of your pants, or somewhere in between?
I’m pretty methodical, and structure-driven. I had a big sheet with the sequence of events divided into chapters, highlighted to signify characters and plotlines. From this I created a play by play for each chapter. I kept things pretty abstract - just the actions and key points, and how long they can take - until I got down to the thumbnailing, and that’s when I’d flesh things out.
How much of a buffer do you like to keep?
I finished TWAW in early September, and it finished coming out mid-December. That much.
What’s a question you’d like to answer once and for all about your art and/or that question you’re sick of getting asked?
Dunno, people don’t ask me questions that often.
If you could send a note back to yourself when you began working on your skillset, what would you say?
Plan more. Know the end, and know how you get there. Get there in 2 years max.
What message do you hope readers take away from your work?
TWAW is weird for messaging and themes because of the rapid development I underwent while making it, from 16 to 19, and now I’m 20 and I think my perspective is radically different once again. I think TWAW is all about obligation and loyalty, picking sides. Violence, guilt, shitty parents. All that. But you tell me what the moral of the story is.
What keeps you devoted to telling the story you’re telling?
Ah, well, I’m not anymore! Not long after I finished making TWAW, it had really left me, my practice shifted to focus on radically different work. By the time the last few episodes were coming out, it felt like a stranger had made them. I was ashamed of it for a little while. I think it’s a pretty great achievement, and I have affection for the work, but it’s not really what I want to keep making.
But what kept me motivated while I was making it was a very personal connection with the subject matter and a good friend that I lost. The first two years were ‘I need to tell this story for us’ - the last year was ‘I need to get this shit out of my system.’ When it was done I got to put that friend to rest, and my life changed. That’s how grief works I guess.
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