Suzy Varty was born and educated in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. This creator of the first UK wimmins comic (Heroine, 1977) was a participant in the travelling women’s art project Feministo between 1976 and 1978, and was first published in 1976 by the Arts Lab Press. Suzy was the only woman on the collective at Birmingham Arts Lab, where she had her fingers in many pies, including graphic design for multiple bands and projects, and where she exhibited her visual diaries for the first time. She “supervised the construction of two Fat Slags” for Viz, and was involved with the visual look of Birmingham feminist punk fanzine Brass Lip. In this interview from 2014, she gives me an overview of her career as well as discussing punk and talking about the Arts Lab Press in detail.
“I was always very keen on comics" explains Suzy, "I used to make little books and stitch them together and do covers for them. When I was young we had little chequebook size comics with three frames usually, Mary Mouse and Rupert The Bear, and then the Beano and all of that. And I just used to write stories and make little comics, I still make comics and things, stitch them together in the same way, same kind of binding.”
She moved to Birmingham in 1970 “I’d just had a baby, married her dad, moved to Birmingham, all within six months. Which was a bit much really. And of course what I discovered having lived in Birmingham then for 16 years, and come back to my home town, what I realised was the way I’d been brought up was to trust people until they couldn’t be trusted. In Birmingham, it’s exactly the opposite way round: That you don’t trust people until they prove that they can be trusted. So I was constantly at odds with things in a funny sort of way. Us Geordies talk to anybody, you’ll tell your whole life story at the bus stop, and Brummies were much more standoffish than that.”
Despite being a talented artist, she hadn’t been able to attend art school for very long. Initially, her stepfather had refused to let her go, so she had worked after she left school before getting herself into art college and studying fashion for a year. But things didn’t go to plan:
“I was pregnant, and I was a bit of a revolutionary at college” meaning that she was no longer welcome. She later did a foundation course in Birmingham when her daughter, Hannah, started school but that didn’t last “Then I split up with her dad, so it was like ‘Well…’ realistically” she was forced to abandon her course. As she puts it “I had the baby and everyone else had the pill, I was right on that very edge and I fell over into it. I tried not to let it stop us, but obviously it did. And then of course when my daughter was fifteen, they all started settling down and having babies.”
She gradually slid into becoming involved with Birmingham Arts Lab “Well, it was one of those places we hung out, I knew a lot of people who were doing things there, creatively, in lots of different fields. I spent a lot of time there. When it moved from Tower Street across to the City Centre campus, and then became the Triangle, that was when we set the Arts Lab Press up. Dave and Martin and Hunt and Paul Fisher and I, were all part of that, and I was on the collective as the token woman.”
The Arts Lab was located in an old building on Tower Street.
“There was an art house cinema, there was theatre space.” This played host to The People’s Show, which involved Mike Figgis. “John Bull Printing Company. And there was always music in the building, Jan Steel was very keen on Gamelan orchestra’s and other kinds of esoteric world music, so there would be music performances and research and all sorts of things. We had a coffee bar and a couple of galleries. We did modern dance because, in Tower Street, we were lucky enough to get Judy McCarthy, who did modern dance, contemporary dance. We started in the old arts lab in Tower Street, and then we got Judy to come regularly when we moved across to the Triangle site on Gosta Green. The Arts Lab had a very nice gallery, with a sprung floor, cos it was round the court yard, and we used that, we did dance class there every weekend, once a week and every weekend. So there was all that going on as well. and this women’s art group had exhibitions in that gallery, I had a sketchbook exhibition in the coffee shop at the arts lab cos I kept sketchbooks, a visual diary, for a long time. And I did an exhibition of that. But the Arts Lab was marvellous, absolutely marvellous. Just fantastic.”
Suzy’s comic, Heroine, which was published in 1977, came directly out of the Arts Lab press. “The lads said ‘Why don’t you do a women’s comic?’ So of course I had to [do it]. Women doing comics in those days was very few and far between.”
Women’s comics had been around in the US for a few years and the US women’s comics maker Trina Robbins had visited Suzy in 1977, after Suzy had contributed to one of her works. “She had a daughter the same age as mine, and they came and stayed with me. Then I went over there in ’78, Hunt [Emerson] and I went. We went over to the states and stayed with Trina and women cartoonists around America, and Trina also contributed to Heroine.”
Prior to Heroine, Suzy had been part of the comics collective at the Arts Lab Press, which had produced “a fanzine magazine of women’s art, and what was going on around that time.” This was called Mama! (‘Women Artists Together’) They also “had this postal event that we ran, and ended up having exhibitions all over the place - The ICA and Australia, Manchester, all over the shop, with this women’s art thing, this postal event, called Feministo.”
Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman was first exhibited in 1976. It was an explicitly feminist art project and the exhibition was comprised of small but powerful artworks in a range of artistic media, using a variety of conventional and unconventional materials, by women across the UK. The size of the artworks was decided by the nature of the project: each piece of art had to be delivered onto the next artist via the UK postal system. Speaking of the isolation many of the women as wives and mothers felt, the exhibition included such works as Lyn Austin’s ‘Bubble Bath Suicide’, in which a doll is positioned face down in a bath that has been filled with Styrofoam beads, representing bubble bath. Another piece, by Phil Goodall, was a drawing of a naked woman with butterfly wings, a pin stuck between her breasts. A review of the exhibition by Linda Melvern for the London Evening Standard was headed ‘Wife is a 4-letter word’.
“In ’77 when I did Heroine I also did the first micro comic, which is an A6 comic. I just made this one night, I sat there and I made this little comic, and I said to the lads, ‘Shall we do this as a comic?’ you know, ‘Shall we start an imprint, like a mini comic thing?’ Anyway, it had a big heart cut out in one of the pages, and we couldn’t afford a dye cut so I had the heart printed black on one side and red on the other, and I cut them all out. And I only broke one of them. Somewhere I’ve got a bag with 999 paper hearts, printed black on one side and red on the other.” Suzy’s mini comic was called Paper Doll Heroine, and others were to follow in her footsteps.
One of the projects Suzy was involved with at the Arts Lab Press was a feminist punk fanzine, Brass Lip, which only ran for one issue but which packed a powerful punch with its use of satire and interviews with some of punk and post punks most ferociously intelligent bands, such as the Au Pairs.
“Syd Freake [Brass Lip’s editor, along with Connie Klassen] was one of the local people around the place, and obviously she knew what I did. I did quite a lot of graphics for people, I did posters for bands, there was a pub theatre company I did regular work for, obviously I’d done Heroine by then… I did loads of publicity for the Au Pairs when they first set up, and lots of bands around the town actually.”
One way of promoting bands, and gigs, was by creating a ‘vision collision’ on a hijacked billboard. “They’d turn up with old billboard posters, I would cut things out and do a big vision collision thing, and they’d go with their big ladders in their white coats and they’d hijack a billboard.” She laughs as she concedes that “it was quite good fun!”
Suzy was really excited when punk happened.
“My boyfriend was the drummer in Fashion, and he would turn up on his Triumph motorbike after 12 and go ‘I was just at the Wolf Inn in Wolverhampton at a Sex Pistols gig’ when they were just starting to play little impromptu pop up gigs. And obviously I knew a lot of the local bands who were punk bands, but the hard scene of it, with all the pogoing and gobbing and everything…” although Suzy didn't join in with the gobbing and pogoing, she did see the Police, Blondie and Ramones live.
“And of course in Birmingham we had Martin Degville and there was the Kahn and Bell shop, they made clothes, they were the Westwood and McLaren of Birmingham. So all of that punk stuff was exciting, on every level: Fashion, music, and I became much more involved, kind of that post punk bit, with the music and the bands and being in a band. Just when it had crested a little bit. But I was very aware of the hardcore of it in Birmingham.”
I asked her whether she felt it was more shocking for women to be punks than for men.
“Punk was liberating for women, coming hot on the heels of the feminist stuff. We were all in consciousness raising groups by 1971, and I think it was very liberating for women, the punk stuff. Especially when it meant that they could also be in bands. Obviously there was a lot of provocative stuff that went on, I remember when Trina Robbins came over from the states in ’77 to stay with me, she couldn’t get her head around this nihilistic view of the world that the punks had. You know, being American, couldn’t get the negativity. But it was sort of threatening, it could look quite threatening - all the spiky hair, and all the chains, the safety pins and the girls wearing odd garments or re-appropriating. I think that was probably the first time, really, that street fashion re-appropriated bondage gear and things like the Nazi uniforms. There was a lot of very dubious references going on in the fashion, in the way that people looked. And I think it was quite aggressive with it. There was often a riot or a fight going on down the front.”
The links between punk and reggae were clearly established on the Birmingham scene, and Suzy and her friends would often go to reggae gigs in Handsworth. Post punk Birmingham was also a very creative place, and Suzy found herself getting sucked into the music scene around bands such as Fashion, The Denizens, The Ever Readys, The Prefects, and The Nightingales. There were also more surprising moments.
“UB40 played their first gig at my 30th birthday party. I put five bands on, hired the hall, did the invitations, baked the cake, organised the PA and the lights, got the bands to play for nowt. The Au Pairs played that actually, but UB40, it was their first gig, I introduced them to Simon Woods, who became their manager, and they had the first independent single in the Top 10.”
Suzy was in a band called Twist, a mixed lineup band comprised of two women and two men. She played bass as well as writing “half the songs, did all the publicity, carried the amp - this great Dan Armstrong cabinet for the bass - had a permanent bruise on my arm. Me and the drummer would carry it in and out of my flat.”
In addition to Twist were The Strumpets, an all women supergroup made up of women from all the various punk and post punk bands across Birmingham. “So there would be Bridget Enniva, who was in the Tadpoles, she still plays music, Dawn Tibbett, she was a bass player and she still plays, and people from other bands, Janice Connelly from the Ever Ready’s, who’s now Mrs Barbara Knight, the stand up comedian. And us girls all got together, we were Strumpet”
Comics, and their longform version, graphic novels, have a greater degree of respectability these days, as Suzy was quick to acknowledge.
“I think it was Will Eisner who coined the graphic novel term, and he did books that were in that form, but I think it was really when Art Speigelman won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, I think certainly publishers knew what to do with comics. And I think up until that time they didn’t know what to do with them, and graphic novels have obviously made them respectable, I mean Bryan and Mary Talbot have just won the Costa last year [2013, for Dotter of her Fathers Eyes], the first time a graphic novel has ever won a proper book award.”
Suzy’s own style has changed since the 1970s. In 1984, she moved back to her hometown of Newcastle to work with a women’s art organisation, Them Wifeys. “Them Wifeys means ‘those women’.”
It was a different way of working “So my style changed quite a lot, cos it needed to be a bit more accessible for a community group. And then I did quite a lot of artists residencies, comics workshops, I did a comic for the BBC, I did a comic for Thames TV, I did a contraceptive comic… So I started doing a lot.”
Out of this came projects such as a commission for Virago, The Comic Book of First Love, a paperback for young teenagers to which several women comic artists contributed. Suzy also contributed to the alternative comics publisher Knockabout Comics, who had an imprint called Fanny, which was “the women’s comic arm of Knockabout comics.” Penguin later picked up and re-published The Comic Book of First Love “and got us all to do The Facts of Life. So we did that as well.”
She found herself doing a lot of issue-based work. “I just find it really useful. It’s a great way of educating. We’ve used comics and illustrations for education purposes for a long, long time. And there was a piece of research that the Pentagon did, in the 90s, they won’t say when or which department fo the Pentagon, but they did a piece of research for people in the army, to teach them to do things, they tried using photographs with text, they tried using illustrations with text, and then they tried comics… well, you guess which worked best. So the information goes in in a very different way, and is very, very accessible. I just think it’s such an underrated and underused medium.”
Suzy Varty is still creating comics today and, most recently her work has been represented in the touring exhibition Women in Revolt: Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the Uk 1970-1990.
No comments:
Post a Comment