Embark on the Worst Journey in the World with Sarah Airriess
Reviewer Peter Dabbene Interviews Sarah Airriess, Author of The Worst Journey in the World: The Graphic Novel
We’re always delighted when authors—like intrepid explorers—go places where no one has ever gone before in their books. Often, these authorial leaps and discoveries come from talented artists who are new to the book industry, bringing fresh ideas from other disciplines.
With extraordinary art and inventive layout, The Worst Journey in the World caught our attention when it arrived at Foreword‘s offices recently, and we instantly sensed a new talent. It turns out, Sarah Airriess’s journey to this graphic novel tale of Antarctic exploration began when she was working in Disney’s animation department, so she brings a filmmaker’s sense of motion and expression. In his review for Foreword, Peter Dabbene says that Sarah’s “stunning and dynamic illustrations recall fine animation,” a point he stresses in the interview below when he says that “it feels like we’re looking at cels from a classic animated film.”
Excited at the idea of hearing more of Sarah’s life story and future graphic novel projects, we set up the following reviewer-author conversation.
Enjoy.
The author in front of Scott’s Hut at Cape Evans on Antarctica’s Ross Island
The Worst Journey in the World is based on the 1922 memoir by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who served as part of Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole from 1910–1913. But your graphic novel’s introduction explains that this exciting story came to your attention in a different way, through a BBC adaptation back in 2008. Would you say you had a predisposition to historical adventure at that time, or was your enjoyment of the story a surprise to you?
Oh, I absolutely clicked that radio link because I knew it would be right up my alley—I had an obsession with the Donner Party in 5th grade and was very excited about Disney’s Atlantis. And I did really enjoy it! What came as a surprise was how much it got its claws into me well after listening, compelling me to read up on more and more of the story, chase down the sources, read the biographies of the people involved … it kept on giving, and was gold all the way down. I’ve had lots of obsessions but never one that snowballed (sorry) like this one.
You have a background in animation. What kinds of projects did you work on? Were you dissatisfied with that career path, or was the siren call of The Worst Journey in the World simply compelling enough to inspire you to forge a different path?
I started out doing pretty tedious work on TV shows in Vancouver, which is how I got hooked on BBC radio plays—they kept me working without distraction for the whole runtime. When Disney started up their animation training programme again, after shutting down 2D animation in the early 2000s, I got into that. It was great for a while—living the dream!—but within a couple of years it was clear that that was a dead end, so I ended up doing the same sort of work I’d been doing in Vancouver, only with a lot more pressure and mind games.
It was while working at Disney that I heard Worst Journey, and it gradually started taking over from animation as a passion. It didn’t help that I didn’t gel with the creative direction of the studio; one can only see so many good ideas shot down before one checks out, intellectually and emotionally. If this was the ideal endpoint of an animation career, then it wasn’t for me. I started feeling in 2011 that I ought to turn Worst Journey into a graphic novel, and by 2013 I was so miserable in LA that I decided to throw it all in and start over in Britain, following this book where it took me. It might fail, but at least I could say that I’d tried, and I’d have had that experience in my life. The worst case scenario was moving back to Vancouver and listening to radio plays while doing storyboard revisions, and I quite enjoyed that, so it was worth the risk.
Your bio mentions that you moved to England to work on this project, and that you went to Antarctica in 2019 with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. You’re also currently an Institute Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Can you tell us how you became involved with these organizations, and how that aided the completion of the book? How long has it taken to get from the initial conception of this project to publication?
As per above, the idea started to coalesce in 2011. I arrived in Britain in 2014 and spent a few years getting my feet on the ground with some animation work while nipping into Scott Polar to build a solid foundation of research. I started designing the characters in November 2016, juggling that with more freelance until 2018, when I wrote the script for Vol.1, and started thumbnailing it by the end of the year. Much of this time was also taken up with creating a book proposal and applying for the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers programme—the grant proposal process was quite arduous! In early 2019 I heard I’d been shortlisted for the NSF grant; the rest of the year was split between pencilling pages, planning the trip, and then being on the trip. The pandemic kicked off shortly after returning and I moved to a house in the countryside, which was another big distraction. I finally finished everything in colour by the end of 2021, then there was about a year of chasing paperwork before publication in the UK in November 2022. Not the most ideal creative situation, but nothing like the hurdles so far in the way of Vol.2!
The Antarctic Artists and Writers experience was amazing, and will be hugely valuable for conveying the sense of place for the rest of the series. It didn’t do much for Vol.1, though, as the story only reaches Antarctica at the end. But because I had already got a start on Vol.1 and knew what I needed, I did make sure to take some specific reference photos in Christchurch on the way there and back. I only became an Institute Associate after I finished Vol.1, at the suggestion of a friend who worked at SPRI; I had been there so much, and had had a show in their gallery, so it seemed sensible to make the relationship official. Now I have a beepy card and don’t have to ask people to open doors for me! Such privilege!
Your art style is stunning—dynamic, colorful, and polished. Sometimes it feels like we’re looking at cels from a classic animated film. But also, as seen in the opening sequence of the book, you make masterful use of implied time and action, and the things that happen between panels—one of the unique aspects of a graphic novel. Did you have any experience in narrative storytelling for comics? Have you had any thoughts about turning this graphic novel into a movie one day?
Thank you! These are rather high compliments, and I’m very pleased to know that I’ve succeeded on these points in your estimation. I haven’t had much to do with comics, but a lot of animation skills are transferable—I’ve done storyboards as well as animation, and comics panels are basically storyboards, just using space instead of time to create a filmic experience in the mind of the reader. My experience in the animation industry has given me opinions on visual storytelling, and I’ve tried to put those into practice here. I’ve done a little bit of dabbling in comics—mostly to see if I was up to doing this book, to be honest—but mainly my approach to Worst Journey was to do justice to the material and to make the comic that would have got me excited as a teen.
As for making a movie, I’ve been asked this since day one, and always give the same answer: I know so many people, vastly more qualified than me, who have awesome story ideas, who have spent years and years failing to get them picked up by a studio. Making these graphic novels is something that I can do, and then they will be done, and people can read them, unlike all the unmade films. I’ve seen what happens to stories as they go through the production process and I don’t want that to happen with this one. American studios wouldn’t invest their usual budget in a very British tragedy; European studios could handle it artistically but don’t have the funding for the scope. If someone else wants to get it made, and has the means to do so, maybe we can talk, but for now I’m not even considering it an option, and I won’t until the series is finished—there are enough distractions as it is, and a series of books has never benefited from being optioned for film part way through.
Animation typically involves many people working together, but with your book you’re responsible for everything, the writing and the art. Did the work ever seem too much to handle? Did you ever consider bringing in a collaborator to lighten your load, or was this always envisioned as a solo project?
Animation teaches you to work very efficiently, and compared to animating, making a book of static images is a lot less work. So I never felt overwhelmed in that regard. I did get a bit of help splitting the line drawings into multiple layers for colouring. For everything else, I had something very specific in mind—it would have taken me more time to explain what I wanted and fix what came back than it would take just to draw it myself; I draw fast, and enjoy it. I benefited enormously from feedback on the script from writers I trust, and my supporters on Patreon gave some valuable feedback on the rough pages. As for the project as a whole, I’m the one who’s done the research and have all this stuff readily in my head, so I don’t know how much help a collaborator would be; what helps most is other eyes on my work to see if it communicates.
Friends who had made graphic novels warned me how much work they are, but I didn’t mind, and having made one now I still don’t mind. Sitting at my desk and losing myself in drawing is my idea of a good time. What I wasn’t warned about was the amount of admin! I think I’ve spent two hours on admin for every hour on the book itself. That’s a burden I would love to have taken off me, but the nature of it doesn’t allow for it—it all requires either my brain or my hard drive or both. And I can’t afford a secretary, anyway!
Annotations make up a quarter of the book’s size, but they’re done in a way I’ve never seen before: placed at the back of the book, with convenient visual references to page and panel. Were the detailed notes part of your concept from the beginning, or just a natural outgrowth of doing all that research and wanting to share your knowledge? Was there ever a question as to whether including such comprehensive notes in a print volume was economically feasible?
Annotations were always part of it. One of the things I quickly realised, when I got into the subject, was how much shoddy historiography was out there. I wanted not only to tell the story in a fresh and accessible way, but to set a standard of accountability to all my sources, and to flag any changes I may have made to the history for narrative purposes. I’ve been lucky enough to be friends with Sydney Padua for long enough to have seen Lovelace and Babbage come to life on her blog, so I knew that comics and annotations could live in happy harmony. I put them in a section at the end because I’ve always hated being pulled out of a comic by a footnote referring to an incident in some other volume—I wanted people to be completely swept along in the story, and then they could get deeper detail when they got to the annotations if they wanted to.
Those were my reasons for including annotations and doing them as I did, but I was surprised when I started posting them to Patreon how much everyone liked them. I thought they would only be interesting to the hardcore nerds. Thankfully, both my US and UK publishers sided with my Patrons, and have seen the annotations as intrinsic to the work. They don’t seem to add terribly much to the cost of each volume, and they are a unique feature that sets my book apart. The German edition sacrificed most of the annotations for the sake of a much bigger format; it’s a matter of how many books to the kilo, and that was the price for making it a deluxe edition. My very generous translator translated them all anyway!
You clearly have a gift for graphic novel-style visual storytelling, and this book is a tremendous achievement. Do you intend to continue in this genre after publishing the conclusion of The Worst Journey in the World? Do you have other projects in mind?
Honestly, the sole thought in my mind right now is finishing Worst Journey before I die. If I achieve that, we can talk about after! In some ways, I’d like to return to animation and just be a cog in the machine again, but I’m sure that by the time I finish these books, I’ll be obsolete in that field. Maybe I will teach. Maybe I’ll go be a hermit on a Scottish island. Who knows! The only thing right now is cracking on.
The Worst Journey in the World
Vol. 1: Making Our Easting Down
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Sarah Airriess (Illustrator)
Iron Circus Comics (Sep 3, 2024)
The Worst Journey in the World is a graphic novel adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir about an ill-fated voyage to Antarctica.
In 1910, Cherry-Garrard signed on as assistant zoologist on Robert F. Scott’s mission to Antarctica. He was one of many scientists, specialists, and crew members aboard. Their ship, the Terra Nova, left from Cardiff, Wales. Their itinerary included several stopovers before their final departure from New Zealand six months later. The crew took advantage of each location, relaxing or gathering wildlife samples. On the final part of their trip, though, a storm and a clogged pump caused problems, requiring daring heroism. The dawning of 1911 brought the first sight of Antarctica, their final destination.
From the first pages, the text hints at an impending tragedy, heightening anticipation. But the book also focuses on the friendships between the men, not just the wonders and dangers they encountered. The characters are engaging and well-defined, with their personalities often established through short but memorable bits of narrative, as with Cherry-Garrard’s observation about Scott’s motivations: “To face a thing because it was a feat, and only a feat, was not very attractive to Scott.”
The stunning and dynamic illustrations recall fine animation, and the book’s outstanding design showcases a variety of font, layout, and composition choices that further enhance the story. The informational pages, references, and detailed footnotes are exhaustive as well.
The Worst Journey in the World is a graphic memoir about an epic exploratory adventure on the high seas.
Reviewed by Peter Dabbene September / October 2024
Peter Dabbene
