Lucy Sullivan: ‘There’s A Power In That Uncomfortableness’

© Lucy Sullivan

An incredibly talented creator. Lucy Sullivan has quickly made a name for  herself ever since moving into comics from animation due to her uniquely raw  style and clever use of inking on her Indie work (such as her debut graphic  novel Barking) and her work on the film The Thing With Feathers. At  Portsmouth Comic Con, I got the chance to sit down with her to talk about  everything from the craft to body image. 

D: So, I'd like to start at the beginning, if that's okay. Barking, your debut  comic, is part autobiographical, inspired by your own experiences with mental  health. So I was wondering how, when making such a raw piece of art, you  made sure to protect your own mental health? What advice would you give to  other creatives to allow them to do the same? 

Lucy: It's a really good question and a really big challenge with something like that. I  think at the start, because it was my first comic, I underestimated actually how  challenging and emotional it would get. Luckily, I have a partner who's very  supportive and understands, you know, I was very upfront about my mental health  when we met. So he knew the signs and he encouraged me to do the book and was  keeping an eye on me. But yeah, it does take a strain, particularly if you're trying to  create something around your own personal experiences, it's really raw. Then there  is always a point where you're drawing it and thinking other people are going to see  this, am I comfortable with that? Especially if you're naming anyone. So I think,  you've got to really think beforehand, more than I did, about what you might need;  take breaks, walk away from it, make sure you're comfortable. You don't have to  bare your soul, you can do as much or as little as the story needs. Keep an eye on  yourself and have someone that checks in on you, which I had. I had my partner, I  had friends. I'd step away if it was intense, go for a walk or do some yoga or anything to just take a break. 

I talk about, specifically with Barking, like it felt like an exorcism. Like took all the  blackness and unleashed it onto a page. It was an intense experience. So, I don't  think people should go into it lightly. I had the benefit that it was 20 years after the  events I was talking about and I had distance in my life. I think when people try to do  this sort of work, very soon after an event, that maybe it might be a bit raw. You may  need to have processed the event a bit more before putting it to page. Everyone's  different, but I don't underestimate that you will be reliving some of this stuff, and it  can be quite triggering, so it's worth being aware of, for sure.

D: Perfect, thank you. 

Lucy: Honestly, I put my darkest into that book, I'm now quite an open book, you know, so it’s not a thing now. 

D: This leads on to my next question, so similarly the main character, Alix, is  institutionalised, which made me wonder what your opinions are on the state of the country's mental health support, and particularly with the NHS, the  practise of institutionalisation itself.?

Lucy: Part of the reason I did it was because I was very, very angry about the  system. I'd seen a couple of people sectioned, and my grandmother was in and out  of a mental health ward, she had Paranoid Schizophrenia. I think there's a lot of  great people that work in the NHS, and a lot of them are doing it for the right  reasons, but the system itself is poorly set up, especially the mental health aspect. It  was built from Bedlam, so started out with people laughing at vulnerable,  traumatised people for fun, as in “Hey, it's Saturday night, let's go and laugh at the  loonies” and improving on that, rather than thinking we just need to start again. The  more I researched into the NHS, mental health practises and how psychiatry was  formed; like how Jung was naked in his garden, off his nut on mushrooms, coming  up with theories, and that’s what we're using that to diagnose people in vulnerable  states? It's quite wild when you go into it, it's a very weird system. But I think my main problem, with the mental health in the NHS, is that it's this umbrella approach. People of all different kind of conditions, background situations  and trauma, are all shoved in one place together. You can be sectioned if you're a  harm to yourself, or a harm to others, those are the two main reasons you can be  sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and those are very different things. Someone  who's a danger to themselves is not necessarily a danger to others. One of the  things that I saw with my friends who were sectioned was that their lives were  genuinely in danger from other people, they went from being a trouble to themselves,  to not knowing whether to shut the door. In Barking, there’s an actual anecdote, of a  hospital where another patient was cooking up sugar, to throw it on other patients.  Because it was hot, it would stick and it would be impossible to get off. Obviously a  very troubled person who needs help, but should they be in an open ward with other people who are all traumatised themselves? There's got to be a better way. 

D: I'm aware this isn't in the set question, but it's made me wonder, because  obviously the character in Barking is female presenting, would you say that  the system is still inherently sexist as it was? 

Lucy: Yeah, and racist I found. I was looking into forcible sedation; That’s when you get like four or five nurses, physically manhandle you to the floor, or onto a bed, then  they will pull your trousers down, or whatever you're wearing, and inject you with a  sedative in your bottom, and that's without consent. A statistic I read when I was  making Barking, probably from around 2006 or something, said that it was  statistically more likely, something like three times more likely to be forcibly  restrained (don't quote me on that because I can't remember the exact) if you were black, particularly young black men, or if you were a woman under 20 years old.  Then you add to that statistically women under 20, have high rates of them being  sexually assaulted or physically abused prior to being in mental institutions.  So imagine you've gone through some sort of physical or sexual abuse, and you've  got five people running at you and pulling your trousers down. No, thank you. That's  just going to trigger you again. I thought about the fact that I'd been sexually  assaulted, and then the idea of people doing that to me, I would have just kicked off,  and then I would have been treated as nothing but trouble… 

You lose not only your liberty, but also your individualism as soon as you're  sectioned. You become your diagnosis and whatever medication they’ve prescribed.  Like, oh you're room six, you've got BPD, you're on this medication, you're not, say  Lucy who’s had a grief triggered breakdown. You're not that, there's not this story.  I found this out with my grandmother, who was always this figure of fear in my life.  She was known locally in Fulham where I grew up as the crazy old Irish lady because she'd walk around with a jelly plastic bag with lots of holes in it, and she'd  have ice cream, but she didn't have a fridge, so it just sort of left a kind of melted  trail. And she was quite angry, she was a difficult figure, who I didn't really know  much about as my dad didn't really get on with her. When I was researching Barking,  I knew she had Paranoid Schizophrenia, and I said to my mum, “I found all this  research about people who are diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Often that they've  had a kind of traumatic event, that's triggered oral hallucinations, and often if they  can talk about the trauma event, symptoms can subsides but instead usually they're  just put on medication and treated in a specific way.” 

So my mum said, “Oh that's interesting, because your grandmother, she came home one day and found her brother had gassed himself in her oven.” 

I replied, “Sorry, what?!”

And she said, “Oh yeah, he came back from the war, and he was so traumatised, he  killed himself, in her home.” 

I asked how old she was and mum said “Oh, in her twenties, he was about  nineteen.” 

I mean, what are we talking about here? Like, that's horrific, and no one's sat and  spoken to her about what that felt like? And then she ended up marrying my  grandfather who was super abusive and alcoholic, and she'd just got worse. If someone had just stopped and spoke to her, and maybe she wouldn't have spent her life in and out of mental institutions, you know? So yeah, I was angry about it, to say  the least.  You know, the worst is who the harm is being done by people with best intentions. I  think a lot of people who work in those wards have got the right spirit in what they  want to do, they're doing it for good reasons, but I just think the system itself is  broken. And yeah, racism, sexism, non-cis identity… None of these things will be easy in a mental health institution, you know, and we've got to do better.  Sorry, bit of a rant. 

D: It's not a rant. 

Lucy: Still a sore point.

D: If you're making valid points, and it needs to be discussed [it’s valid], and  also, like, you know, we were talking last night in the pub……. one of the  things you said was, oh, it's great that Barking gets to sit in all this academic  research, and this is why, because if we had a more common discussion, if it  was more appropriate to discuss, then there would be way more graphic  novels like Barking. And also, you know, people wouldn't need to go to a  graphic novel, a traditionally non-academic source, because they'd have a  complete library of academic sources, or if they would, they'd be a person who  goes against the grain, rather than someone just trying to find research. 

Lucy: I guess that's where graphic medicine comes into play, although I'm not sure  that I get put into that genre, but there's definitely something in that where you can get some amazing books about it, so, yeah, I agree, you're right. 

© Lucy Sullivan

D: This one is maybe an easier question, maybe considering what we've been  talking about, it might have dredged up some feelings, a harder question. If  you could give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be? 

Lucy: It's so hard, isn't it, because you kind of go, oh, I would have done this when I was younger, but actually, the older I get, the more I realise that it's connected.  There's things that I regret but they led to things that were better. Even my dad dying,  if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have gone back to uni, I wouldn't have retrained in the  arts, I wouldn't have ended up making comics, I wouldn't have met my partner… All  these kind of knock-on effects. I think I'd go back and say, just give yourself a break,  it's going to be fine, don't stress out so much. I would have actually encouraged my younger self to get into the arts sooner. I left it quite late, I grew up working, like my  parents who ran pubs. I grew up working in bars, I thought that's what I would do, I  would run pubs and be a landlady, like it was just sort of ingrained in my blood to do that stuff. So it was a big for me and my sister, as first generation of our close family  to go to uni. We were very working class, my parents, my dad's family, his dad was a  painter & decorator, my mum's family were farmers in New Zealand, no-one is in the  arts. So I'd go back and say just don't give up on that foundation. Go to art school,  keep going, keep doing it, you'll get there. I did in the end, just later. 

D: That made me think, is Lucy Sullivan going to open the first comics pub one day? 

Lucy: Ooh, well it's tempting. I like the idea of it, although running pubs is incredibly  hard, so maybe not... You've got to be up at four in the morning to work and I'm not  made for those hours. 

. 

D: Right, I'd actually like to move on to your, well, not your most recent work  but quite a bit more recent work so I was wondering, what were the main challenges of working on a major production like The Thing with the  Feathers?

Lucy: It was a really interesting project to do. I mean, a lot of it was quite out of my  comfort zone. I chatted with the director, Dylan, who also wrote the screenplay. We  chatted on and off, well we chatted just at the start of lockdown, and then I just  presumed that the film was off because everything was shut down, but then he got in  contact a couple of years later, and was said we're starting shooting, do you still  want to do it? 

D: So obviously you made quite the impression. 

Lucy: I was quite surprised, I knew he'd read Barking, and that's why he approached  me, and Max Porter, who wrote Grief is a Thing with Feathers, had read it too. It  turned out Dylan, the director lived round the corner from me, so we went for a walk, appropriately through a Victorian cemetery. There's a lot of crows there, and a lot of  crows in the film. We talked it through and decided it was two weeks work to begin  with. I had ten days to draw a wide variety of stuff, but the biggest challenge was that I was drawing it as if I was Benedict Cumberbatch's character Dad. I had to be  thinking all the time that I'm Dad. I know the book really well, I read it whilst I was making Barking, I saw the play version with Cillian Murphy as a treat to me and my  partner when I finished Barking. I handed in the book to my publisher and said let's  go have a night out. So we went to see Grief is a Thing with Feathers, which is an  utterly devastating play, and we came out bawling our eyes out. I knew it really well,  so at least I could embody it, and I had to keep thinking Dad is me, I am the cartoonist who put all my grief into a graphic novel, which is what he does in the film. 

© Lucy Sullivan

D: Did you see maybe a similarity with Barking? 

Lucy: Yeah, I picked up the book when I first dropped my daughter at nursery. I'd  gone into this bookshop near Goldsmiths Uni, and I saw Grief is a Thing with  Feathers, I read the blurb on the back and I went “oh my god, this is really similar,  and I better read it to make sure we're not stepping on each other's toes.”  I'd already written Barking at that point, I had seven chapters left to draw, but it was  fully written, so was relieved that it is very different. But the animal figure that's the  similarity. It’s a crow man in Feathers, and a black dog in Barking. What reading that  book did do actually was give me permission to go as far as I wanted to. It's a really  unusually written book, and I really recommend reading it if you can, then that will  make sense to you, the prose is really unusually laid out. Dad is a Ted Hughes scholar in the book but for a variety of reasons he became a graphic novelist in the  film. So yeah, there's similarities but difference. Alison Sampson said to me, “What's  funny is Cumberbatch is cosplaying as you,” and that made me realise, oh yeah, I'm  Dad, he's pretend Dad, I'm actual Dad. 

D: This leads me on to my next question, I was going to ask when illustrating  Dad's Cumberbatch character's art, how do you embody his character whilst  still keeping it authentically you? Cause I feel at least….. when I saw it in the  trailer……. I went, wait, it looks a lot like Lucy's art, she'd really like that, that  looks almost identical.

Lucy: what was really helpful is I spoke to Dylan about this, I had the script, so I  knew roughly where the art was coming in. The script would say all the action and  dialogue, and then it would say art piece here, so I knew the key points and the  narrative role the art was playing, so that was helpful. But Dylan also made a Dad  playlist for Benedict and I got that too. Whenever I was drawing, I was just listening  to this playlist over and over again, it was quite intense music, so that was really  helpful to get through it. In ten days I drew two sketchbooks, self-portraits, one of the  scenes had to be done in four stages and I filmed it all. I would do a drawing, knock ink on it, smudge the ink, then do another drawing on top of that. Everything was  filmed so that Benedict could know exactly what the process was when he was  doing it on screen, so it looked exactly the same.  

It was quite a long-winded process, and not a lot of time to do it in, I was working  14-hour days throughout. There was one section, his sketchbook, that was all meant to show in the art when he was really losing the plot, so I'd leave that to when I was  getting really tired and a bit distraught and then I'd start drawing wild crows because  I thought that fits the character. I had to just use my emotional state at the right time.  One of them was a cadaver with a crow picking at it, that was pretty upsetting, and  the research was pretty unpleasant, so I had to be canny about when I did it. I got to do more work for it and a couple of days on set, which was amazing. I really  love seeing the set, and seeing the detail. The set designer, Susie Davis, is incredible. She did Conclave, and she did... Gosh, I'm going to forget the name of  the film, with the guy who does the scene where he dances through the house  naked… 

D: Oh, you mean Saltburn. 

Lucy: Saltburn! She did the set design on that. She's brilliant, Susie, and the set was  incredible. It was on a sound studio in West London, you walked in, and it was like  someone's flat with kids, there's Lego on the floor, there's old cornflakes in a bowl,  and the detail was immaculate. And they had created Dad’s studio around my own  studio from photos, and so I walked into a neater, bigger version of where I work and  it was really similar, but with less books. I'm just going to point that out. 

D: I was going to ask you what I think will come across as a very simple  question, but is actually quite complex. Where do you work best? 

Lucy: Ooh, for now, that's quite hard. We've moved house, and I've still not got a  space. I had a really great space at our old house. I sort of took over half the living  room. We had some doors put in, and I could just go in and I’d have quiet. I want to be left alone to work. I have a specific sort of level of neatness to chaos that works  for me. You know, I get quite neurodiverse around that side of my life. 

D: I'm the same. 

Lucy: Yeah. Currently, we've got a garden studio being built. I'll get into there, and that will be my space. And that's going to be amazing. But for now I'm in a corner of  a room full of boxes, and it's really stressful. I don't work best there. I read an article 

years ago by the writer Dave Eggers, who was describing writing to people who don't  write and the mindset you have to go to, especially when you're working from home. His analogy was deep sea diving and how you've got to take your time to get to the  place where your story lives. You've got to dive down to it, but when you get any  interruption and you're pulled out of it, you kind of get the bends. Then it takes you  just the same amount of time to get back down to the story. You can't just snap back  into it. And I'm very like that, particularly with writing. 

Drawing is much more natural to me, so I can come and go. But with writing any  interruptions I find really hard. I can't have music with vocals… I need a specific place. I'm not quite there yet, but I work best when I've got the things I need around  me and I've got enough kind of quiet, to get in the headspace of what I'm doing. And  it's also the time of day. I normally really get into around two o'clock and my kids'  school finishes at 3pm. So sometimes I've got an hour to really get some good stuff  out. But finally she's hit an age where she gets the bus home and I can go on to at  least 4pm. 

D: The one joy of high school. 

Lucy: I know. She went to the shops with her mate the other day and got to work till  six. And it was like, this is incredible. I can't believe how wonderful this is. It is a  challenge, especially when you've got a family to kind of get space. And my partner  teaches, so he's on site at the uni a couple of days a week. Those days I work quite  well because it's just me and my dog who sleeps and I can just work. That's quite good, yeah. So I need to be left alone and then I work well. No email, no social  media. 

D: I'll make sure not to…… 

Lucy: Oh, I brick it. I've got one of those brick devices. So you have to go to this  magnet and tap it and it bricks your phone. And then you have to physically go back  to unlock it. So you put it far away and then you just can't just open up Instagram. It just says, this is a distraction. And you go, oh, yeah. It's good. 

D: It might be useful. 

Lucy: Yeah, it's really good. 

D: I want to move on to probably what's your newest creation, your latest  creation, Shelter Early Doors. I was wondering what made you choose to set it  in Shepherd's Bush? 

Lucy: Oh, it's where my dad grew up. His family emigrated from Ireland to  Shepherd's Bush in the forties, I think. He was actually born in Ireland, but he was a  Blitz baby. During the Second World War, his mum went back to Ireland pregnant so  that he wasn't born during the bombings here. He was the only one of his siblings  who had an Irish passport. They were all born in London, and I was born in  Hammersmith. So we're very West London. It was the time in the UK, when signs  said ‘No dogs, no Blacks, no Irish’ on a lot of rentals. But these slum landlords in Shepherd's Bush went, oh, you can come here. And they would put them in really  run-down houses, they'd be like eight families in one house. My grandparents had, I  think, a two-room home, literally just two rooms. And there were seven kids. You know, it's was pretty low-end poverty. 

D: Part of the reason I asked was because I was wondering, before we had that  discussion about Irish heritage, because my grandparents had a period  where they were in Shepherd's Bush. They weren't in there for long. They  moved out. 

Lucy: West London, it’s still very much an Irish community. North London obviously  has a section as well. I grew up in a pub in Fulham, in the seventies then we had a  pub in Shepherd's Bush for a while. Near the Westway, which is the main local motorway, a lumbering figure that cuts through the whole of West London. I was  fascinated by it as it was built by the navvies, they're Irish workers and for a lot of  them, it was built through their houses. They were made homeless by the thing they  were building. It's just extraordinary. It's also built through an Irish traveller camp,  who managed to get the right to stay in a permanent camp under the Westway at  one point. Then there’s actually a Ley Line underneath as well, which is really  fascinating. So there's all these wild aspects….. I love the mixture of people with folklore and ties to the land, and then this construction of a motorway through it.  And how does that affect the community? So much job loss once the road was built  and people turned to drink and crime because they couldn't get work, because the  road was the main income, and then they don't have housing because of the road.  And it was... I want to set it amongst the community that I was aware of my dad  growing up in, where you couldn't go to the police if you had a problem because  they thought that Irish people were thieves and drunks. So the community came in  and helped itself. I wanted one of those kind of community figures but set within the women of the community, not the men, especially in a kind of darker, more crime  affected world, we always see the men, but actually it's their mothers and their wives  that you need to watch out for. I'm less scared of the show-offy, mouthy gangster  than I am of his mum. So I wanted to bring all those aspects in, and it just felt like a great place for that. Plus with the Irish diaspora I could research my own family's  connection and history. So there's multifaceted reasons for it, but quite selfish ones. 

D: This one sort of, um, covers most of your career so similar to Barking, and even I  know it’s not you, but The Thing With Feathers, Shelter: Early Doors presents  animals, in the form of a murder of crows, as a stand in for/ an aspect of complex  emotions. Is there any particular reason for this recurring motif in your work? 

Lucy: Yeah, it’s really interesting, I was talking to this student Thanos in Athens….. He’s  including Barking and the animalistic nature of it in his thesis. He asked if I read  Cerebus into Barking. And I did. We talked about how animals are psychopomps in  Irish mythology too, there’s the Púca which is a shapeshifting animal. I think animals  are a really lovely way to represent our wild selves and the roots of our emotions, I think 

it’s a great way of doing that. In Shelter, the character with the crows is The Morrigan, a  mythical battle witch who had two crows, amongst many other things. 

D: Yes. I love that.

Lucy: Max Porter’s book is inspired by Ted Hughes’ book Crow, his character Dad is a Ted  Hughes scholar and the titular crow manifests as his grief. A crow man. I was talking with  this student about how there’s such a long history of relating to animals in folklore and classical stories that so ingrained to people that they instinctively understand it. Like a black  dog you can look at the Hound of the Baskervilles or American Werewolf in London, any of  those kind of werewolf tales, people understand it’s a portent of something. You know? That  there’s something bad coming so it’s easy to put this menacing black dog as a danger and  people will just naturally understand it. 

© Lucy Sullivan

D: I also see, I don’t know what you’ll think about this, cause I’m aware you said it’s  inspired by a lot of Celtic myths. I definitely see that but I also see a very Bacchic  quality in your characters in the sense that like Bacchants they allow themselves to  sort of feel emotions without constraint. And that has consequences that manifest in  the form of animals, in the same way in stories about Bacchants become more like  animals by taking skins of animals and transforming……. 

Lucy: Yeah that’s very interesting. 

D: Taking on animalistic qualities….. 

Lucy: Yeah for Shelter: Early Doors that works very much so with Ealga, our main character.  She has a Fetch, which is like your doppelgänger self, who she sends off to do terrible  things. She has crow claws, crow feathers… She has qualities. Yeah, that's a very good reference. I hadn’t consciously done that but I’m sure, this is what I mean, subconsciously  we have this in our stories, our knowledge of ourselves….. And it’s such a great thing for us to tap into cause the groundwork is laid out and you’re just sort of building on that, which is  wonderful. 

D: So this is slightly off topic but I was wondering why you chose to use Crowdfundr  over Kickstarter? 

Lucy: I put out Shelter in 2023. I used Crowdfundr as at that point Kickstarter was being quite dodgy. They were talking about taking crypto and not giving you an option to say  whether or not you wanted to take it. And obviously it’s a really volatile market and if you’re  crowdfunding for a month and someone pays you with Bitcoin but that bubble bursts later on  and then you’re left with nothing. You can’t get your money back. Kickstarter were meant to  put out a white paper that was going to outline their views on crypto and AI. And they still as  far as I know, haven’t done it, three years later. And I just thought ‘oh I don’t know about this’  as Crowdfundr started. They’d done some reach outs to artists and I'd spoken to them, they  were based in Canada, they came from the charity sector and they were really keen to have  a sort of ethical version of crowdfunding and so Shelter was an early campaign.  It was harder, I think I would’ve made triple the amount on Kickstarter but I’m still happy, I  made enough to make the book and to pay some artists to do some commissions. I was  deeply uncomfortable with what Kickstarter was doing then and they still haven’t been open  about it. Crypto’s not my bag, I feel very uncomfortable about it but you should be able to choose and they were not making that clear. So it was really for ethical reasons at the time.  But also I’d rather not run any kind of crowdfunding again cause it’s really hard. I did that, in  fact it was lockdown when I did it, so maybe it was 2022? I couldn’t go to the post office often  but the postman would come and she’d collect, we’re all masked up, and she gave me sacks  to fill with my parcels to send around the world. It was quite an intense time! 

D: I’d like to move on to…… Lifeline Comic’s Witching Season Anthology. How did  you approach illustrating such a go to ‘monster’ in myth and fiction? And what were  the struggles that came with that? And I say monster in quotes.

Lucy: I like the monster title as I think it is what witches have become, this sort of monstrous  figure, when actually what we’re talking about, particularly in the witch trials, were  menopausal women or women who weren’t societally appropriate and were punished for it. 

D: Which is just code for living free. 

Lucy: Yeah, right, for just having their own opinion. I’ve done a lot of witches now. I’ve done commissions for Jeff Lemire and Black Hammer on Madame Dragonfly who is a great witch. I  love her duplicitous nature and she had the green skin. I looked at Margaret Hamilton, the  actress in Wizard of Oz. She has got the most extraordinary face and an incredible  elegance, and from her came the whole hand thing, the kind of cackling witch with the long  fingers… There is a thing in Irish folklore of witches having one dead finger which they point  at you, the cursed finger. And Margaret Hamilton brought that in to her role. But you try  drawing her hands and realise you’ve got to have really long, flexible fingers to get those shapes that she can do with her hands. 

D: What you definitely did in that particular picture that is interesting is you presented  someone who society would label as maybe not the most objectively pretty but,  they’re very elegant and I think they’re beautiful in that picture, whilst maintaining that  they’re not a socially acceptable beautiful if that makes sense. 

Lucy: And I think that’s it. I think the kind of the witch mythology is around someone that isn’t  presenting in a way that makes you necessarily comfortable and I’m like well what’s wrong  with that? And you know, there is a power in that uncomfortableness that you’re putting someone in, why wouldn’t you lean into that? 

D: Because your art arguably goes against A) what society expects anyway but B)  especially what they expect from female creatives, do you think you find quite a lot of  sympathy in that? 

Lucy: Yeah for sure. And you know I’m aging… So I think it’s a shame that we’ve stopped  being scared of old ladies. 

D: To have that social power. 

Lucy: Yeah. To get to where they got to, what they’ve dealt with and lived through, you  should be scared cause that’s one resilient woman. And you know she’s probably really  angry so you know........

D: Especially in the medieval period, where a lot of things we’d consider abuse today  were…… 

Lucy: Normal. There’s still so much of that about. You look at sexual, physical abuse  statistics every woman will have experienced something and usually by the time you’re  sixteen. It happens so frequently, and by the time you get a bit older, you are fed up, you’re angry and I think we need to reclaim that idea, that we ought to age and not look younger. I think it’s mad. I want to look old, I want to be a crone, I want people to scuttle past my  house for fear if they lingered too long. Bring it all on. 

D: It’s not the same thing but one of the nicest things….. I went to a Queer rave and I  went, and it was a lot of people my age….. Sort of oldest I was seeing in the crowd  was sort of late twenties. And there was this one person in the crowd, I don’t know  what their gender identity is…… More masc presenting person and they looked to  be…. Sixties, maybe slightly older. And I’d always be in Queer spaces, and I’d seen  older gay men, but I’d never seen someone who was defiling……I kind of like the word  defiling cause I like the idea I’m pissing someone off when I’m going against gender, and…… I was like no one’s taught me there’s old people like me. 

Lucy: You grow older and you’re still this person inside but you’ve got this older exterior. And  you’re thinking I still feel like that person. 

D: There was such a power seeing that person I thought I’d be locked out of when I’m  older. 

Lucy: They’re comfortable in what they’re doing, you know? And I think that does still go  against the social contract cause there’s this idea of what you’re supposed to be when you  get to a certain age. And I think there’s going to be more and more defiance of that. 

D: Especially as well, I wonder if people who are your peers, your age, like people I  know even if they struggle with the Queer identity and stuff, they're fine with it…….  Whereas that guy’s sixty, I can’t imagine everyone they know is okay with them……  [And] I can’t imagine it was, it’s easy to enter the space and be significantly older. 

Lucy: It’s really interesting. And I think, particularly Chrissy and I are….. Women of an age,  women of a vintage. And she’s got that amazing series Golden Rage, which is Golden  Girls meets Battle Royale, I love it. And there’s some amazing, like proper saggy lady boobs in that cause Lauren Knight is a brilliant artist. 

D: One of my colleagues who is about your age started talking about how she’d been  life modelling and still is life modelling and no one had ever spoken about this, especially not a woman of that age. 

Lucy: Life modelling you want a proper body. You don’t want them slim. I taught life drawing for ten years. Drawing a slim model, different genders, it’s very hard to draw the difference.  You get a woman who has had a baby, whose got a proper body, they’re extraordinary to  draw. You want all the lumps and bumps and stretch marks. They’re wonderful to draw. You know I love drawing women with proper figures and people with, there’s nothing better for  me than someone with an aged, gnarly face. I just…. 

D: They’re human. 

Lucy: Yeah, every line means something, it’s why I made my zine Hagbound. In my next  book Mothers Ruin, my main figure is Mammy Magee, an Irish matriarch, she's not entirely  human, of the Celtic Folklore side I wanted to tap into. I wanted her to have an opposite so I  have a very English grandmother, who’s a moneylender called Nana Michaels, she sends  out her bruiser of a son to collect debts. Nanna’s the complete opposite to Mammy, she  believes in God and country and nothing else. I wanted to know how to visualise her, cause there’s these women that I’ve met in my life who are like that and they’re terrifying… They’re like a monster in a cardigan. How do you get across that they look soft but they’re also  brutal? I was watching all this old footage of the Westway where they’re interviewing locals  about living with this motorway suddenly next to their windows and there’s this one woman  who’s just talking about what an outrage it is. She’s exactly what I was looking for, she’s got this strength, projects fear…. She’s going up to the GLC members, to Michael Heseltine, a major politician…. She’s just in his face and telling him how it is an she’s just amazing and  that’s how I want to age. I want to age with that attitude ‘you can’t put me down, sorry I’m not  taking this, I’m going to tell you exactly what I think and why it’s important’. And just the  more I looked at her, the more I went we’ve got to regain this, we’ve got to start celebrating  age in women and age and life and all the wonder and strength that comes with that.  That’s very much what Chrissy and I were both trying to go for in Please. And then Chrissy  wanted to link it with infant mortality and how difficult it is to have children and get pregnant and to do so at a later stage in life. I had my daughter at thirty seven and I don’t know how  old Chrissy was but I know it was later. It’s quite difficult to be geriatric pregnancy, that’s how they’re refer to you which is quite weird. And then it’s a play on the Hansel and Gretel story  so it’s all set in Bulgaria for atmosphere. There’s hardly any dialogue in Please. It’s almost entirely silent. I can’t wait for it to come out. 

D: It’s overfunded. 

Lucy: It went really well so that’s great. We’ve seen the proofs and our story is quite different  to everyone else’s… And the art gets quite bonkers as well. We stand out. 

© Lucy Sullivan

D: I’ve got two more questions….. You and Chrissy use the idea of witches to portray  the stigma around the emotions of women who lose their children….. Trying to give  birth. Which makes me wonder if you believe these inherently sexist monsters, like  witches, banshees and sirens, can truly be reclaimed? 

Lucy: Yeah I do because that’s not their beginnings it’s what they’ve become. But witches  were originally healers. When we were a more pagan, matriarchal society, it’s only with  Christianity women started getting tarred. I think we’ve got to reclaim the true basis of these. I mean banshees, banshee means ‘was a fairy’, and the whole point of them is not that  they’re terrifying you with their screams, they’re mourning someone’s death. They’re telling you that this terrible thing has happened and actually you lose someone and you wonder why the whole world has not stopped. That’s what a banshee does, it cries for you in the way you maybe can’t. And yeah I think we have to get those all back. And actually that’s what I'm  trying to do with Shelter, I’m trying to get that research around the figures and talk about  them in their original sense. In Shelter, Brigit is a healer, you go to her for an abortion, you go to her cause your husband’s an arsehole and you need to get him to sleep at night and  maybe she’ll give you a little mixture to put in his tea and he’ll leave you alone for five  minutes. She’s traditional witch, a gateway to the fairies……. 

D: You’re talking about a traditional witch and obviously problems like abortion have  existed together but they feel very modern. 

Lucy: Still an issue. Still in the patriarchy. It’s still making it a problem. It feels like we’ve gone backwards lately. Again that will come the other way round. It’s the cyclical nature. Hopefully we win and then it’s the final sweep of the tail of patriarchy and we can all agree it was never good idea in the first place. But you know, we shall see. I live in hope. 

D: I think it will….. Dissolve at some point…… The problem with any system that’s  been ingrained we all have inherent..........I had a really weird discussion with someone cause someone wasn’t believing women can be subconsciously sexist. I was like no,  no, you don’t understand everyone can. 

Lucy: Some of the most sexist against women I know are other women. Especially older. 

D: Just to finish off, this is the signature question of Freeze Frame, I’d love to know  what’s the next big thing for Lucy Sullivan? 

Lucy: It’s the next Shelter story, Mothers Ruin. I got an Arts Council grant which Hagbound came out of. It was a research and writing based grant, I spent twelve days at the British  Library just reading about folklore, London history and women’s history as it’s all set in 1970  back in West London. The story goes a bit more into Mammy Magee’s background, who she  is beyond what you see, her Celtic folklore link, I don’t wanna give that away yet. And I’ve  got a whole other roster of characters coming in. I’ve got another woman who needs help;  Pegi, an au pair, who was brought over from the Isle of Wight. This actually happened.  They brought thousands of teenage girls from the Isle of Man to be live-in au pairs in  London for wealthy families. Many of them got abused by the families, some of them weren’t paid… And turned to prostitution. 

D: And so we don’t learn about it. 

Lucy: It’s all washed over. My character Pegi ends up meeting a local Irish lad, getting  married, getting pregnant… It’s a coercive relationship. So I’m looking at tackling coercive  and abusive relationships as well as my cast of characters and then Mammy and her  nemesis Nanna Michaels and her son Jon Mickey who’s an absolute bruiser. So it’s a big  story. 

D: I’m really excited to see how the tension comes with an English girl and an Irish  guy. 

Lucy: Well she’s Manx. They’re quite anti-Irish at times as well. Sorry Isle of Man. So Pegi also hates witches and there’s a Manx folklore figure called Tehi Tegi who I’m bringing into it.  A witch that came, probably from Ireland, to the Isle of Man. She was incredibly beautiful and  bewitched all the men on the island with her beauty so that they followed her into the sea  where she turns into a wren and they all drowned. From that came Hunt The Wren where  boys dress up and they go and hunt wren birds. They no longer kill the actual bird but they did for a very, very long time. So I want to deal with that folklore as well. 

D: Now I’m wondering, are there going to be undead wren? 

Lucy: There’s going to be birds, some bird action.

D: There’s always some bird action. 

Lucy: I’ve got a lovely scene where the bird shits on someone. It’s really pleasurable to write  and I’m not sure quite how I’m going to paint it with water colour but we’ll get there. I’ll figure  that out. 

Beyond birds and witches, Lucy Sullivan continues to carve a fascinating space for  complex horror stories that intimately dissect the complex psychology of their  characters as well as exploring women’ issues in a variety of settings and time  periods and the intricacies Celtic heritage. And I can’t wait to see how she does it again in Shelter: Mother’s Ruin.

If you want to hear more from Lucy Sullivan, you can find her at Thought Bubble (as well as Chrissy Williams where you can get a special edition of their story for Lifleline’s Witching Season Please) or the links below:

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lucysullivan.bsky.social 

Insta: Lucy Sullivan 

Website: Lucy Sullivan - Comic Writer & Artist