Graphic scenes: Comic artist dissects Star Wars, Metropolis & The Shining

12 November 2015

This week sees the publication of Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film by Edinburgh-based writer and illustrator EDWARD ROSS. His first graphic novel, it’s a mix of film history and analysis which is designed to shed new light on the movies we love and also expose readers to some films they may not have encountered before. Here, he writes about how the ideas for the book developed.

Filmish was a real joy to research, giving me a chance not only to watch some of the medium’s greatest works again, but also a chance to see those films from a new perspective.

One of my favourite chapters is about the role that setting has in creating truly memorable movies. The places movie characters inhabit can tell us a lot about them, an idea beautifully illustrated by the Star Wars saga.

As I argue in the book, it’s no accident that most heroic characters in Star Wars hail from rural, natural environments; as stark an opposition as possible to the harsh, metallic machinery of the Death Star.

In those films each setting is a way to further enrich our understanding of its inhabitants, and I think the powerful symbolism of Star Wars’ settings is one of the reasons those movies have captured the imaginations of so many.

Ultimately, Filmish is about watching films in a new way, and trying to better understand how they communicate with us.

Film doesn’t exist in a vacuum and the movies can profoundly affect the way we see the world around us. Part of the book discusses the ways that film shapes our cultural understanding of the human body.

As I show in the book, all too often movies use disability as a way to signal to viewers that a character is a villain. From Dr. No to Spectre, just look at how often James Bond is matched against an enemy who is scarred, deformed or in some way disabled.

While it may seem like an incidental thing to many viewers, these repeated motifs can have real-world effects, both for people with disabilities who struggle to find positive representation onscreen, and those without, who may be influenced by such negative portrayals.

Filmish was a real pleasure to work on, and the journey from creating self-published comics to having my first book published has been quite an adventure.

My hope is that readers discover something new about cinema by reading Filmish, whether they’re viewers just beginning to discover the hidden delights of film history or long-time movie-buffs who have seen it all.

That’s the purpose of Filmish: to shed new light on the movies we love and allow us to see this amazing medium in entirely new ways.

Filmish is published by SelfMadeHero on November 12, 2015.