Fund Me Friday - Scornwood
A new Kickstarter to check out!
Scornwood, a new graphic novel by Boz Mugabe, a visual artist and cartoonist from Dublin, Ireland, will soon launch on Kickstarter.
A dark surreal tale of three friends navigating vivid imagination and harsh reality in a small town shaped by weirdness and brutality.
ABOUT SCORNWOOD
This is a dark surreal tale of three childhood friends struggling to navigate a world of spiritual malevolence, ancient weirdness and violent reality. In a small rural town overshadowed by a sprawling woodland, a turbulent history and a shroud of ancient myths, three curious kids embark upon a quest for something greater than their world of nightmares and deranged owners.
An expedition into the Scornwood sets off a chain of events that changes them forever, eroding any remnants of carefree youth as they are thrust into the brutal tutelage of an ominous religious order. Continually exposed to a contradictory world of dubious authority, they are ultimately left with no option but to go on the offensive against the hostile forces that seek to dismantle their lives.
Stylistically, Scornwood is presented in black, white and grey, hinting at a world not quite free from the superstitions that generally faded with rural electrification. Scornwood is a turbulent mix of parochial horror, unerring loyalty, harsh reality and bizarre surrealism, and its sensibilities, style and themes make it a very characteristically Irish novel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I have been obsessively drawing for most of my life, reared on the golden era of The Beano, Whizzer and Chips and 2000AD, and impacted from a young age by everyone from cartoonists Martyn Turner and Carl Giles to Picasso and Dali. My first public facing work was for a self-published Irish underground fanzine called Nosebleed (1990-2002). This ultimately branched out into punk flyers, logos and record cover design for bands you've never heard of. In the first decade of the 2000s I worked as an editorial cartoonist for several national publications alongside building an identity as an exhibiting visual artist (30 solo shows to date!). In 2014, I self-published my first book collecting a decade of exhibited artwork and have continued this work to present.
More recently, I have been involved in horror book cover illustration and continue to make frequent contributions of artwork to various underground entities. Newer self-released publications include The Incinerator (a cartoon series collection) and Sgruntle Invasion (a children's picture book).
The inspiration for Scornwood came from a two-page strip I did for a local punk fanzine in 2022. I realised that there was a much more expansive story to tell and the whole thing just sprawled out of control from there. Two years and almost 190+ pages later and the project is finally nearing completion. Scornwood taps into a dark and often harrowing side of the Irish psyche, but does so with a drawing style that I developed as an editorial cartoonist, and elements of darkness and humour play off each other throughout this religious horror (a trick undoubtedly influenced by two of the great Irish novels, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy and Flann O'Brien's An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth)).
Scornwood is my first full length graphic novel - entirely conceived, written, drawn, inked, lettered, rendered and laid out by me. It is a huge labour of love and a very personal story.
