16/05/2020

(AU) New Comic Book The Grot Is A Timely Quarantine Read Imagining Australian Life In A Climate-Ravaged World

ABC Arts | Teresa Tan

Amy Reading's book The Mark Inside and old Hollywood con-artist films inspired Pat Grant's The Grot. (Supplied: Pat Grant) 

In 2012, musing what the future might look like for his children in the age of climate crisis, cartoonist Pat Grant conceived a world where harvested algae is a commodity worth more than gold, Kevin '07 campaign t-shirts are archaeological treasures, and a plague is decimating the population's migrant have-nots.

This is the world of The Grot: a darkly entertaining coming-of-age story exploring sibling relationships in a near-future Australian landscape scarred by environmental disaster.

Grant began writing The Grot in the "Julia Gillard and Obama days". (Supplied: Pat Grant) 



This month, the third instalment of Grant's graphic novel The Grot: The Story of the Swamp City Grifters was released online for free, after its physical release by US publisher Topshelf was postponed due to COVID-19-related industry disruptions.

For the first time, fans can access all three chapters online, for free.

Kate Evans says dystopian stories are popular among young adults because by exploring serious and dark themes "it's a way of emerging from childhood into adulthood". (Supplied: Pat Grant)



Grant's saga opens with teenage brothers Lippy and Penn Wise journeying north on a capitalist pilgrimage to Falter City, to make their fortune with their "medicinal yoghurt" business in tow.

For a story written between 2012 and 2013 and long before the COVID-19 pandemic, some of The Grot's ideas feel eerily of the moment.

The main character cultivates yoghurt starter (not sourdough) and instead of COVID-19, the book's rampant plague could be smallpox or typhus, which Grant says were "the sort of breakouts that happened all the time in big cities in the 1800s".

Grant researched "plagues that liquify people's innards", like Ebola, as well as the Spanish flu and Bubonic plague. (Supplied: Pat Grant)



Plague-ridden areas and buildings are marked and boarded up, while the dead are stacked up in a pile by workers in hazmat suits as the fortunate watch from behind barriers — echoing recent scenes from China and Italy.

Thanks to the breakdown of manufacturing and global supply chains, The Grot's population looks to medical workers "who brew things like beer, kombucha and fermented products … but also might be snake oil". Only last month a celebrity chef was fined $25,000 for misleading consumers about a natural therapy coronavirus treatment.

It took Grant roughly one year to write and six years to draw (with Fionn McCabe on colourist duty) to bring the story to life. Like his previous graphic novel Blue (based on his experience of the Cronulla Riots) and his Toormina Video (a poignant and ruminative ode to his late father), The Grot is deeply personal.

Grant spent a year working on a thumbnail manuscript to work out The Grot's visual structure. (Supplied: Pat Grant) 



After his father's passing, Grant's once-close sibling relationship became hard work, so the cartoonist plunged brothers Penn and Lippy into a bleak anti-utopia and cast them into a string of deeply trying situations, to test "how robust the sibling relationship is when the chips are really down".

The illustrator has even immortalised his eldest son as a muck-covered starving street urchin in one panel from the novel.

"That image is really horrifying to me," the Australian cartoonist and author told ABC Arts.
"Using fiction and imagery to project a day-to-day sort of moment in the future — where your child is starving — it's grim."
Grant says he has been fascinated and obsessed with climate change and its impact since he was a teenager (Supplied: Gabriel Clark)



A city sick with change

Seated on top of a MacGyvered "pedal-punk" vehicle made from a salvaged car body, bicycle wheels and bamboo, propelled forward by people pedalling bikes, and full of youthful ambition, Penn and Lippy are bound for Falter City — a lawless swamp-dwelling dystopian metropolis with "a sweaty armpit vibe", swarming with prospectors, swindlers, hustlers, hawkers, and con-artists on the make.

In the scene, Penn tells his idealistic younger brother Lippy: "It's the great migration of our times!"

Grant describes the technology and aesthetic of The Grot as "pedal-punk", and says people have retrofitted 19th-century machines to run on human energy. (Supplied: Pat Grant)



As they approach the swamp surrounding Falter City, Penn and Lippy's mother draws their attention to the stench: "Something foul. Something ancient … That is the smell of sick people," before matter-of-factly informing her son that whatever the malady "you'll be perfectly placed to profit from it".

Describing the world of The Grot, Grant says: "It's massively dysfunctional, there's no infrastructure, no groundwater. There's no real policing so organised crime is rampant and there's a plague too."

In Grant's vision of the future, people return to 18th-century ways of producing things.

"It isn't this wasteland apocalypse where there's no people," he explains. Instead, he forecasts that society will face "the gradual degradation of the human and non-human experience".

"We're going to lose technology rather than gain technology," says Grant.

Grant's stories share themes in common, including gentrification, inequality, the politics of place, and how migration changes urban places. (Supplied: Pat Grant)

"The way we think about industrial progress is this exponential uptick of technology, production, creation, energy, information and mobility. But what if that's a parabola curve?"
Good drama is flawed people doing their best

Under the current pandemic it's understandable some readers are avoiding dystopian fiction, while others rush towards it. As Caroline Zielinski wrote in a recent op-ed: "It exists, we should remember, to show us a way out."

Kate Evans, host of ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf, says "an important part of dystopian fiction is that it is based on something [real] in the world … it looks at reality, expands it and distorts it in really interesting ways" — citing Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments as examples.

"All of the things people just think she was imagining — those dark moments — all of them were based on real things," Evans says.
"It's that anchoring to the world while exploring the imagination that makes it effective and makes good ideas work. I think that's the secret to the writing that resonates in some little dark corner of your soul as you're reading it.
"Under the current pandemic, dystopian fiction seems more prescient — particularly because some of it is not very far from where we are now."

The world of The Grot references gold rush boomtown architecture, Indonesia's urban environment, and local institutions like Sydney Chinatown's BBQ King. (Supplied: Pat Grant)



Dr Pat Grant is a Sydney-based cartoonist, writer, graphic novelist, UTS School of Design lecturer, and holds a PhD in cartooning from Macquarie University. (Supplied: Gabriel Clark)

Grant says that the feeling of déjà vu when sci-fi, dystopian and speculative fiction seem prophetic is because the authors who write in that genre are "obsessed and fascinated with technology, history and the kind of cycles and patterns that repeat themselves".

When it comes to many of the grungy, bleak and gruesome scenes in The Grot, Grant says "everything comes from something I've seen with my own eyes".

Scrawled on a post-it note stuck above Grant's desk is a quote from The West Wing Weekly Podcast: "Good drama is flawed people doing their best."

"You can probably find enough horror in your daily life that you don't have to be too fantastical," says the author. "It's usually something people ignore or don't see, they edit it out.
"Stories draw from deep intuition and our subconscious, and package things up in a way that disguises [it] as entertainment."
He says one of storytelling's abilities is creating a plausible future.

"And whatever future does come to pass, you're just guaranteed that there will be a storyteller who's imagined it already — and not just what's going to happen, but also what granular sort of texture of life is going to be like too."

'An expensive hoax'

Grants says the literary conventions of The Grot come from crime fiction and hardcore sci-fi, and the world takes cues from gold rush era Australia and frontier-era America. (Supplied: Pat Grant)



Grant describes The Grot as "a book that really thinks through one future, one kind of life that lies ahead of us, one kind of possible and feasible experience of life that climate change could bring to us".

But since he started writing the series, he notes, climate change has "gone from being an abstract idea to something that's happening down the street".

In 2020, Australia was ranked the worst-performing country on climate change policy in the Climate Change Performance Index (out of 57); US President Donald Trump — who once called climate change "an expensive hoax" — has rolled back almost 100 environmental regulations in his first term.

The Grot doesn't feel quite so far from reality as it once did. But Grant is particularly pleased to have his "meditation on climate change" out in the world right now.
"I like to help people understand the world that we live in."
The Grot is out now as a free webcomic. A print version will be published by Penguin Random House in August

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