Exploring mental health through making comics and zines

Panel Discussion chaired by Fionnuala Doran, featuring Tara McInerney and Stuart Hutchinson.

Doran, McInerney and Hutchinson discuss the use of zines to explain and explore individual mental health, and the possibility of these artefacts as therapeutic tools within a shared community of makers and readers. Zines, in their combining of image and text, and their cheap, ready-made aesthetic are an accessible way of creating artwork and narratives that can be distributed, shared and discussed.

Panel members discuss their own experiences of making, sharing and reading zines themed around mental health and the impact it has had on them.

McInerney’s sequential artwork tackles issues of self-identification in the LGBTQ
community, exploring narratives in which empowerment is sought through self-authored realities and identities such as fanwork, and the creation of inclusive spaces through this. Their ongoing graphic diaries uses illustration as a way of gaining perspective whilst in the immediate, insidious grip of mental illness. The process of drawing and diarying provide a distance and externalised point of view, simultaneously recording harmful thought and physical processes and acting as a cathartic tool that makes the illness more tangible thing to grapple with.

In 2018, Stuart Hutchinson produced the adult web-zine- ‘How Drawing Cartoon Erotica Saved My Life’. In it and other comic work, Hutchinson explores his own self-image through an anthropomorphic parody of himself- “Tank”. Tank is a non-traditionally masculine character who finds themselves flung into awkward and erotic circumstances. For Hutchinson, Tank acts as ‘a manifestation of... weird fetishes, gender confusion and broken sexuality.’ Through the zine, Hutchinson articulates how drawing this alternate persona allowed them to confront and begin to understand a mix of problems that they had been confronting their entire adult life.

Hutchinson’s work addresses anger, shame and frustration. “I like to think of Tank as the missing link between my childhood and adulthood; a cathartic stand-in for the difficult years of my adolescence. Tank is a product and self-parody of my wishful thinking and unhealthy habits from those awkward times. Now as an adult I feel strangely disconnected from who I used to be, to the point where I see much of myself as completely separate person from that nervous lonely kid struggling through puberty that I used to be. But it was still me, and in a lot of ways that person now exists as Tank. He’s a symbol of myself at my most vulnerable and confused.”