Our Inside Look feature at Broken Frontier provides creators with the opportunity to share exclusive commentaries on their comics projects with our readers, giving insights into the genesis, process and themes of their work. It’s one of the oldest regular features at BF, first appearing on the site back in the mid-2000s and also one of our most well-received. In our latest instalment Dan White talks about the new volume of Cindy and Biscuit from Oni Press.
Cindy and Biscuit has been a much loved favourite here at Broken Frontier for many years (you can read a decade’s worth of BF coverage here) and it was extremely pleasing to see it picked up by Oni Press a couple of years back. Originally self-published for many years, this delightful yet dark series chronicles the exploits of a girl and her dog whose everyday lives are constantly interrupted by having to fight off monsters, mermaids, alien invaders and the like. All of which may… or may not be… figments of youthful imagination. It’s one of the most touching and poignant comics about childhood you’ll ever read so we’re very pleased to be able to run an exclusive creator commentary from Dan here today at BF…
One of the things I love to do with Cindy and Biscuit is explore storytelling techniques. I find that imposing limitations on yourself is a fantastic way to boost creativity.
So, for the ‘Days in the Life’ sequence, each story was one page. This can be challenging, but it also makes you start to think about the page as a complete object, and the aesthetics of that. I also strove to try different approaches in storytelling in the single page format.
This example mixes three narrative techniques. Firstly, we have a ‘splash’ image of Cindy but done as a sort of textbook diagram. This sort of playful distancing is something you can get away with in short bursts without breaking the reality of the strip.
Then we jump to a four-panel action sequence, using repetition, close-ups, and sound effects to create dynamic impact. It’s also an enjoyable way to throw in a few different monster designs, even if they are just fragments.
Finally, we have the punchline, a tonal shift with a ludicrous elegiac tone applied to the ‘death’ of a loyal stick. Note the slight gust of wind blowing Cindy’s hair and Biscuit’s fur, designed to enhance this grave tone. The dialogue is a nod to Frank Miller, again a gentle lampooning of tough guy dialogue as well as a homage to one of my favourite creators that (hopefully) doesn’t distract from the overall story.
It’s fun to pack so much experimentation in, while keeping the storytelling clear. It’s got the rhythm of a joke, but it also tells us something about how invaluable the humble stick is in making Cindy who she is.
This page is taken from ‘Cindy and The Fever,’ which is probably the most formally experimental the strip has ever got.
This is drawn directly from my own experience of having a fever in the night as a child, one of the most disorientating and terrifying things I had been through. I really wanted to capture the dislocated feeling, and the temporal shifts, as well as the horrible physical sensation.
This isn’t a funny or cute C&B story, as I was keen with the strip to reflect the fact that whole chunks of childhood aren’t fun. We all wrestle with big, cosmic, existential stuff from an early age and being delirious with fever gave me a palpable sense of the terrifying stuff lurking at the edges of ‘reality.’
To capture this sensation in the strip, I took a deliberately non-linear approach to storytelling, with seemingly unconnected panels, and fragmented thoughts and dialogue. I also wanted to have different, skewed perspectives hence the use of cinematic Dutch angles, and sudden shifts in scale.
Whilst applying this ‘cut up’ approach I also wanted to include some recognisable signifiers from Cindy’s world, even if they are obscured. This is her brain trying to process the familiar through the miasma of a fever. Similarly, I hinted at something big and scary waiting in the woods, which could have been a metaphor, a premonition for the upcoming ‘Bad Girl’ strip, or simply the breaking of Cindy’s fever.
As is my wont, there are homages and references buried in the strip. On this page, the giant moon in front of the silhouetted house is a nod to the opening sequence of William Friedkin’s deeply strange psychodrama The Ninth Configuration. So there!
This ended up being one of my favourite C&B strips, one where I pushed the boundaries of the form. I hope it resonates with people.
Biscuit is such a huge reason for the artistic success of the strip. He is a joy to draw as a cartoonist and I have striven to invest him with as much life and character as I can. His expressive little face and elastic movements make for a great counterpoint to the blank-eyed, unknowability of Cindy.
I have had a few dog-owners tell me that Biscuit reminds them of their own canine companions, which I consider to be the ultimate sign of success.
I often like to do solo Biscuit strips, partly because I love drawing him but also as I get to do a purer form of cartooning. I grew up on Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons and I love the slapstick and comic timing of them. Biscuit solo strips are a chance for me to pay dues to Wile E Coyote, Sylvester, and the rest.
For this page, part of the two-page ‘Sundays’ strips, I was playing around with the eternal comic signifier of dogs and their bones. This being Cindy and Biscuit, of course this also means the inclusion of an army of skeletons straight out of a Ray Harryhausen special effects sequence.
With Biscuit, I like to really explore ways of using the comics form to suggest innate canine qualities and here I think I really nailed the feeling of Biscuit on some ‘downtime’ from his missions, happy to be doing pure dog-stuff.
I also absolutely love using sound effects, and big expressive lettering, as in the single panel battle sequence. I find it incredibly aesthetically pleasing and it sets up Biscuit’s triumphant final pose nicely.
The ‘Sundays’ strips were done after the birth of my daughter, and despite everything that was going on, I remember feeling creatively energised. As a result, those strips are some of the best cartooning I ever did, and I will always love them the most as they remind me of her.
The story ‘Abducted Again’ was, at the time I wrote and drew it, the longest single story I had attempted, coming in at 38 pages. In the early days of the strip, I was trying out different lengths of story as I got a feel for the world of Cindy and Biscuit. Whilst ruminating on a story about C&B being kidnapped by aliens, I realised that I wanted to do something more substantial. This was partly to cater for the relative complexity of the story, but also so I could play around with different storytelling techniques with more freedom.
I have subsequently pushed the boat further with the 100+ pages of ‘The Bad Girl’, but I still love this strip. It’s a really satisfying narrative, has propulsion, lots of jokes and some killer action sequences.
I also loved putting the main characters in a totally – ahem – alien environment. The spaceship gave me an opportunity to explore some different textures, outside of the woods where their usual escapades occurred. I was aiming to give it the feel of being lost inside an industrial maze, full of weird machinery and extraterrestrial technology. I have always loved the ‘used sci-fi’ of Ridley Scott’s Alien, 2000 AD and Red Dwarf, so I made sure this ship was full of ventilation shafts, shuddering pipes, and battered metal.
To depict the duo’s escape through a vent in an economical, but visually fun way, I conceived the idea of this continuous single drawing. I love the movement and the playfulness of this page. Although it makes no linear sense, it really tickles me that Biscuit is looking up at Cindy nervously as she dangles over the side, despite being actually behind her in the sequence. This sort of gentle rule-bending keeps me interested and gives the strip a sense of fun and possibility.
My final selection is from one of the new strips in the collection, ‘Winter’s Going’ (a reference to both the DJ Signify track, and the Bonnie Dobson song it samples. Along with films and comics, C&B is packed full of musical references if you know where to look).
One of the key flavours of Cindy and Biscuit is its sense of melancholy, that rubs up against all the monster-fighting and kinetic manga-influenced action sequences. This page is meant to evoke a specific kind of winter day, and that strange no-man’s land after Christmas before school starts again.
Snow is a brilliant artistic device for comics. The sense of negative space, and the starkness of it can give real impact to characters, or actions. Here, I apply a repetitious three panel structure to create a sense of quiet, atmospheric tension, as well as the nothingy feeling that Cindy’s talking about.
I’m particularly pleased with the snowman in the distance moving to observe the pair passing. This is a callback to the earlier ‘Cindy & The Snowman’ story, but also to show my love for the stories of MR James, which my dad read me as a kid. In those tales, awful things were always lurking out of focus in the background, in some dreary English setting and I can’t resist an opportunity to populate my strips with my versions of them.
There is also a delicacy to the drawing which I’m really pleased with. I love the two-tone colour scheme that we’ve used in the Oni collections, and here the palette really adds to the vibe of the comic.
It’s a quiet, pensive moment. Don’t worry though, I’m sure there’ll be a scrap any minute…
Cindy and Biscuit: Wild, Wild Life is available now from Oni Press. The launch party for the book will be held at Gosh! Comics on Friday, August 22nd. Details here.
Article by Dan White
