Ink Soup

illustration: Raph Achache
 

How did Ink Soup form?
It was basically a comic book that was already going at Birmingham Uni. Our tutor, who started the whole group, said that if you wanted to do narrative illustration then you were put into Ink Soup. It basically gave us experience and something to put into our portfolio for when we left because there’s no real comic industry in this country. The year he got sacked was the year we were graduating, and he just left Ink Soup to us.

Why did he get sacked?
He was quite a ruthless tutor. He was an amazing artist, but he was like a jui jitshu champion, a real strong guy. He swore at the wrong pupil, and it turned out that her parents were big financial backers of the university. Birmingham is an awful university – there’s hardly any studio space and you don’t get much contact time with tutors. People hardly ever brought work in, which wasn’t beneficial for anyone. When you have an artistic course, you feed off other people’s work and getting inspired. No one did that. In our class, it was all of us in Ink Soup plus a couple of others, because no one else was interested in narrative or comic book illustration.

You lot have taken a lot of inspiration from him, specifically, do you think?
Yeah definitely. He was a really inspiring guy. Chui Jwong Man.

So now you lot have graduated, Ink Soup is not part of the university anymore?
No, as soon as we left we decided to make it a collective rather than just a comic book. We wanted to do some live art stuff. We decided to be a collective in Birmingham, but it was me who got us the first few gigs in Nottingham. It kicked off here before it did anywhere else.

What about this particular project, Nine Sessions? How did that come about?
Ink Soup have been in the Mimm Collective since it started – about a year, year and a half ago. The other people in Ink Soup are all in Bristol now, I’m the only one in Nottingham. I heard Congi wanted to do a comic book alongside their release, and I just knew we could do it.

On the first page, it states an illustrator assigned to each track…
The album itself was them telling a story. The whole story was going to be illustrated about a hustler guy who’s trying to get out the game with one last job. He told us the whole story of what he wanted to happen. People who want a comic book doing always have a huge massive idea – they have the whole film in their heads and when it comes to it, you usually have to condense it due to time and money constraints. We got him to write down the main points, what he wanted from each track. There were four of us from Ink Soup that did it, so we thought we’d just mix it up between us and each take a different aspect of the story. We didn’t want the continuity of it to be really obvious. We wanted it to look like it was another person coming in to tell the story in their own way.

How did you decide who got which part?
We just went for it. We picked which we wanted. Lisa’s style is a lot more internet-style. She’s always drawing women lying around in bed. Pete’s always big on the action, and Sarah has a really ghostly style. I just did the rest, basically.

Did you sit down and listen to all the tracks together?
Nah, they all live in Bristol. We should have worked on it for years to get it perfect, but we didn’t have time. We were on the phone a lot to each other to find out what was going on. It started off just me, Pete and Lisa. Sarah came back from holiday and wanted to do some, but then went away again so it was all very manic. I had to finish mine at work. Luckily my boss wasn’t there that day so I just fucked off to the canteen to get it all laid out properly.

What’s the relationship like with Congi?
It was nerve wracking to meet up with them. The first time, I could have walked in and said “This is what I’ve got,” and they could have just been like, “This isn’t what we wanted”. When we started, we only had a few months to get it done, so I had to arrange for everyone else to email me their sketches before me, Gaz and Alex met up to talk through it all. We were planning on putting a load of hidden eggs in there from around Nottingham. We managed to get a few in.

I recognise the main character…
Haha, yeah. Adrian is the main guy! That started off as a joke, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it’d be so funny. That was the first day I started it. I went to Mimm with Nathaniel and Gareth to listen to the whole album, and Adrian was just floating around being a creep. I was like, “Oi, if we’re gonna do it about some mad hustler then we should make Adrian the main guy.” It works, because he’s such a memorable character. His hair and his features are so distinct I just thought it would work.

How is this project different from the regular comic that you guys do?
Normally we just put a theme on the Ink Soup comic and then you just do a few pages of your own story. It’s like an anthology of comics. We’ve never shared the same storyline before but I think it went well, although I think it’s a big fragmented. If we all sat down and looked at it now, we’d see some kinks in the story that are hard to grasp. I think most people just read it, accept it and don’t really think too much about it.

Would you do something like this again?
Oh yeah, and Congi are always on about doing a sequel. They’ve not made the music yet but they like the idea. We just need to start it earlier next time. I think if we could have started the sketches at the same time as he started the album it might have worked better.

Did he literally sit across from you and tell you the story? How long did it take?
It was just the album, we played that and bounced ideas off each other as we listened to it. It was good doing a project alongside music. I’ve done artwork for albums and stuff like that, but to actually have to portray something that’s going on in the song was really good because I’ve never done it before. The story is a lot longer than how it reads. We were gonna have three pages per track, but because of printing costs, we had to be really compact with the story.

Anything else you wanna say to LeftLion?
I’d just like to thank Ink Soup for their patience for my mad timekeeping, and for trusting me on the project. And to Congi and Mimm for getting it done as well.

Ink Soup on Facebook