Photo Karen Graham.
Bill Slavin signing his new graphic novel, Secrets of Jarrow, at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on Sunday, April 30, with the book’s publisher, Alexander Finbow of Renegade.
This month marks a new beginning for our local award-winning children’s book illustrator and author, Bill Slavin. On Sunday he attended the Toronto Comic Arts Festival for the launch of his new graphic novel, “Secrets of Jarrow”. It is the first in a trilogy featuring a young hero, Mordecai Crow. Set in the year 2103, Mordecai struggles in a world of anarchy, chaos and tribal warfare where climate change and technological meltdown has left a few small bands trying to establish a new society based on conflicting visions of the new world. Mordecai’s mission is even more urgent: he is searching for his past and evidence to prove his innocence of a crime of which he has been wrongfully accused.
Slavin’s interest in illustration began at the age of seven, and he has never looked back. He is best known as an award-winning illustrator, having illustrated over 100 books for children, including the popular Stanley series by Linda Bailey and The Cat Came Back popularized by Robert Munch. In 2016, he published his own children’s book, Who Broke the Teapot? .
Slavin is determined to keep the youthful perspective that has been a key ingredient in his success. He sums up his love of his career by explaining that it allows him to never grow up, living in a stage he describes as arrested adolescence.
The outline for this series began to take shape in 2007. Bill returned to the project occasionally, but each time he tried to find a publisher, he found no takers. Last year he secured the support of a publisher Renegade Arts Canmore Ltd.
Graphic novels are works of love. The entire story is first laid out in a series of “thumbnails” or sketches which are the basis for the illustrations and the text for each image is outlined in the margin. Each page in the final novel includes between one to six illustrations, and Bill estimates that it takes a week to produce two to three pages of a novel. At an average length of 150 pages, that means it takes more than a year to produce a graphic novel. Bill has completed the second book in the trilogy and is well on his way through the final book.
Working in pen and ink is quite unforgiving: you can’t erase an ink stroke that goes astray. For his third book in the series, Bill has opted to use computer software to help create the images, which are not only easy to revise, they can be sized with the stroke of a keyboard. Bill makes a reluctant convert, perhaps, and it is even a bit ironic given the storyline, in which technology has suffered a massive meltdown. All that critical/indispensable information stored in the “cloud” has evaporated, along with most traditional knowledge and human history.
Secrets of Jarrow is a “whodunit” set in a medieval environment. Indulging in his fascination for ruins, Bill uses the medieval period as a model for his post-apocalypse novel’s setting. Readers will recognize the style and quirky humour of the images in this work, but the images lack the colour of his children’s book illustrations, and are produced in monotone shades of muted sepia, grey or green, underscoring the theme of an earth destroyed.
Despite this foreboding backdrop, Bill insists that the message of the novel is hopeful, even uplifting. While it’s a bit depressing that the theme of climate change he selected in 2007 remains even more relevant today, but he reminds us that the situation in the novel is fiction, and will hopefully stay that way. Congratulations, Bill! KG
