These mini comics – sometimes called “grid comics” – are a mix of news and stream of consciousness, ideas, and short stories. They are sort of visual news – mixed up and selected news – and daily art journals, observing and recording the day and world around me. I like the quality of this work – it’s fast, rough and I can do this well. Hand made, pen, ink, pencil and wash. A lot faster than digital!
These are micro stories, mini comics, quick and expressive, sort of news comics.
Opinionated, comment, political, personal, topical, experiments with narrative. There is an immediacy in the work – this is very important to me – freshness, quickness, from idea to conception in one day, making and showing at same time.
I’ve been making these since August 23, so there are quite a lot now, but not as many as I’d like. I think would be great if I could do one a week, at least, and it can be a sort of weekly summary of the news, the world, and my thoughts.
He argues that the airline industry will never raise enough funding to make themselves carbon neutral and so cannot survive. I found the essay thought-provoking, and it made me question my own actions, and what sort of future world will we see. Will most people stop flying? Will rich people simply carry on as they do now? Will governments simply bail out the airlines, and ignore the environmental impacts? I could see the UK government doing that.
I felt this was a powerful and shocking argument, and I was moved to do something with it. I wanted to communicate it more widely and make the information more accessible. Instinctively I felt an info comic would be right. The essay consisted of 15 main points, and I felt it suited a graphic novel or comic format, as a series of 15 panels.
So my first version was a one page comic, hand drawn, and shaded with 2B pencil. Sometimes I prefer hand drawn, as quicker to make, is more expressive, and more fun to make.
I was fairly pleased with the work, powerful in its simplicity – though it is rather limited, and repetitive. Does it have much impact? I have a habit of jumping in to make info comics, maybe out of familiarity with the format. Does it communicate? Does it get the message across?
Trying another angle, I used the same material, but took an interactive media approach: http://davemiller.uk/projects/day13/ with a goal of communicating the information in more interesting and eye catching ways.
This work presents each of the main 15 points about the future of the airline industry, and randomises their presentation. Various things change at random – drawings of dirty planes, backgrounds, and the text for each of the 15 points. The work could be taken further, given more time.
Narrative composition, graphic novel style, summarising visually the Michelle Mone PPE scandal.
Who is Baroness Mone?
The 51-year-old is a businesswoman and the founder of lingerie company Ultimo.
Born in Glasgow, she left school with no qualifications at 15 and went on to launch ventures in diet pills, fake tan and cryptocurrency. She became a Conservative life peer in 2015.
What is the PPE controversy?
The row around PPE Medpro started back in 2020, when reporters first began asking questions about Baroness Mone’s apparent links to the company.
In 2021, the government revealed that she had referred PPE Medpro via the VIP lane system, with the company awarded two contracts worth £200m.
Last month, Lady Mone faced allegations that she had profited from the business, a claim she denies.
How did the PPE contract system work?
The VIP lane system saw a separate mailbox set up for MPs to send on offers from firms, but led to the government being criticised for giving preferential treatment to companies with political contacts.
What investigations are under way?
Lady Mone is currently under investigation by the House of Lords commissioner for standards, with parliament’s website saying the probe is over “alleged involvement in procuring contracts for PPE Medpro leading to potential breaches…of the House of Lords code of conduct”.
PPE Medpro has also become the subject of a potential fraud investigation by the National Crime Agency.
What does Baroness Mone say?
Baroness Mone has consistently denied any “role or function” in the company, with lawyers previously saying she is “not connected to PPE Medpro in any capacity”.
For a book of essays covering politics, media, medicine and more, I researched, complied and drew a series of cartoon strips covering key moments of the Covid Pandemic and the bungling government …
The full comic is published in the book ‘The Pandemic – A Year of Mistakes’ available on Amazon:
From the Amazon description: “Dave Miller has been providing a simply stunning visual guide to the pattern of the UK pandemic in previous volumes. He is the visual Boswell of this modern plague. Here, he tracks the big ups and downs (and there were plenty of those) in the last twelve months in Cartoons. It is a unique record.”
Looking back over the past three years, Brexit has proved more gripping than any TV drama or Zombie movie; glueing the UK public to their seats while the EU and rest of the world look on in amazement and horror as a once great nation spirals into terminal decline.
This colouring and activity book captures the excitement and craziness of the period – the characters, the locations, the slogans, the lies, scheming and nail-biting political crises in dot-to-dot scenes and colouring pages. Character trivia, cool anecdotes and Brexit facts are mixed in along the way, so you can re-live the intensity of those memorable Brexit moments.
This is a 100 page colour book, A4 format, for sale in selected bookshops in London. £ 11.50.
I made a mini comic for this book, and I am one of many contributions. It’s a largely academic/ journalistic book, which aims to capture the zeitgeist. My comic covers the pandemic – from UK perspective and many different angles. I was very lucky to be included and it’s a great opportunity to have my work published.
About the book: This is the first draft of a very public inquiry, important to the UK and the world. 2020 was a wasted year for much of the planet, wiped out by the virus that started in Wuhan China just over eight months ago. Since, the novel Covid 19 virus is no longer new and has had devastating effects on people and economies. To date, over one hundred and twenty four million have contracted it worldwide, over half a million have died: in the UK close to 300,000 cases with 45,000 official deaths. The true figure is north of 60,000. Coronavirus truly is the modern Plague. It has devastated lives and economies. This book is an attempt to explain the genesis, aetiology, progress and handling of the Pandemic in one country – the UK. It has varied from farce to panic and back again. With its innovative comic book short history of the pandemic in the UK, through the intense analysis of everything that has occurred by the most distinguished cast of journalists, commentators and academics, this book is an important first step in uncovering the crisis that has been created.
The contributors are: Dave Miller, Rod Liddle, James Ball, Juliet Rix, Paul Corrigan, Angela Antetomaso Forbes, Dr Alex Connock, Matthew d’Ancona, Dr Steven Mccabe, Simon Morioka and Claire Kennedy, Dr John Lister, Peter K Wells, Dr Paul Davies, Dorothy Byrne, Paul Connew, Professor Barnie Choudhury, Neil Fowler, Ben Parsons, Professor Vicky Pryce, Professors David Bailey and Phil Tomlinson, and Professor John Howson.
In 2008, there was an ‘Occupy’ site at St Pauls in central London. There were lots of drawings and paintings sellotaped to the walls; the area became a sort of temporary public Art gallery. Works full of slogans and messages, full of passion.
It occurred to me that many people wanted to express their views in this way, and contribute their own art work to express their support and solidarity; but they couldn’t physically be there – at St Pauls.
I built an online cartoon tool to make it easy to collaboratively author your own political/satirical cartoons. Once a week I printed them, went to St Pauls and stuck them on the walls. Some well known artists contributed their work, building up a big stock of ‘ready-made’ fantastic drawings and cartoons – for everyone to remix into their own political cartoons.
The project was a collectively authored and networked satire, giving people a chance to participate/ support/ speak out/ in a creative way.
I am in the process of updating the project code to the latest version of PHP, as it doesnt work anymore. Once this is done I will post a link.
Newscomic (2008) recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it. It takes live news feeds, chops them up, reworks them and places the text into speech bubbles in a comic. The result is a disjointed reading experience, where the words and pictures don’t quite match but create their own meaning from the network.
Newscomic has been described as a generative satire, that takes RSS feeds from major newspapers, uses PHP and databases to chop them up and generate interesting strings, based on the feed content and user input, then puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a 3-panel comic format.
The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don’t quite fit but instead make their own story, blurring fact and fiction. Sometimes the story makes sense, and readers/ users always found it fun to experiment with the stories. Possibly, this early experimental idea seems to be part of what is now referred to as “Conditional Text” in recent interactive story works (Ambient Literature).
Often the stories generated are quite surreal, and can even be revealing.
