Walk around Dundee and it’s hard to avoid reminders that the city is the home of The Beano. On High Street a statue of Desperate Dan is forever caught in midstride. Minnie the Minx – frozen in mid-Minxiness – is not far away.
On the hoardings down by the waterfront Beano characters extol the virtues of the city, while up in the foyer of the Tower Building of Dundee University there’s a sculpture of another of DC Thomson’s most durable creations, Oor Wullie, reinvented in the guise of a Dundonian version of Doctor Manhattan from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s superhero epic The Watchmen.
In short, the comic book legacy of DC Thomson is writ large across the city. Indeed, for the last couple of months it’s even made it as far as Dundee’s contemporary arts gallery the DCA.
Now drawing to a close, DCA Thomson (you see what they did there?) is an artistic response to the comic book creations of cartoonists such as Dudley D Watkins, Malcolm Judge, David Law and Ken Reid. Six artists had the chance to visit the DC Thomson archive and then create original work that plays on and plays with that legacy.
The result is displayed alongside strips and original art from the archives. Here, for example, is a wartime image of The Broons by Watkins, which shows the family front room, wully dugs and all, and Hen and Joe in military uniform. Here too are examples of Ken Reid’s manic late 1960s strip Jonah.
The result could have been a couthy, cosy exhibition but thankfully the best of the new work vibrates with a pleasurable shock.
Sometimes the inspiration is obvious. Juxtaposed with the Jonah strips are Rob Churm’s frenetic artistic reactions; loose, frenetic free-associating comic strips that trace (sometimes literally) Reid’s lines but also take in the Scottish pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, the Blue Meanies from the animated Beatles movie The Yellow Submarine, and Beatles associate and German photographer Astrid Kirchherr’s silver bedroom.
Hideyuki Katsumata’s art seems far more manga-influenced than Beano-esque and yet the Japanese artist, whose work has graced the DCA before, has long been a fan of The Beano and has been a member of the Dennis the Menace Fan Club since he was 20. As well as original illustrations, the artist Katsumata-ises a Dennis the Menace strip here, adding a wild, punky, bizarro quality to the schoolyard antics of the original. It is a measure of the plasticity of the comic strip form that it doesn’t look out of place.
But the most interesting works on display are those of Craig Coulthard and Edinburgh-based artist Rabiya Choudhry. Coulthard, probably best known for Forest Pitch, his commission for the London 2012 Festival (effectively he created a football pitch in the middle of a forest in the Borders) also offers the art of appropriation. But the result is easily the most hard-hitting inclusion in the exhibition.
Taking a series of images from Commando comics, by veteran comic artist Ian Kennedy, he has replaced the narrative captions and speech bubbles with words drawn from an interview with a First World War soldier taken from the BBC documentary The Great War which offers a different take on the violence of war than the normal derring-do of war comics: “If I hadn’t of thrust my bayonet into his belly …” one caption reads.
He does the same on a further set of images from Commando, reconfiguring information from the Ministry of Defence website on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The results offer a painful, potent punch to the gut.
But best of all are Choudhry’s hallucinogenic paintings Dream Baby Dream and Houses for the Holy, which are inspired by Judge’s Numskulls cartoon in which a team of tiny humans live inside a man’s head and run his body. A look at her paintings and the inspiration is obvious. But she has taken it and absorbed it into her own artistic vision. The result are manic canvases full of acid colour which have a comic book energy and a surrealist imagination.
The fact that the excess of eyes on display in her work reminds me more of Doctor Strange than Dennis the Menace in the end just says more about my own childhood reading habits than hers.
DCA Thomson continues at the DCA Dundee until February 19.
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