THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW UP
Stephen White’s Peter Pan graphic novel
Go to Broadway right now and you’ll find Kelsey Grammer playing Captain Hook and singing Gary Barlow’s lyrics in the musical Finding Neverland. Go to your local multiplex in October and you’ll be able to see whether model Cara Delevigne makes a convincing mermaid and Hugh Jackson buckles enough swash as Hook’s pirate mentor in the £100 million blockbuster film Pan.
Go to a garret in Gorgie, Edinburgh, though, and you’ll meet an artist whose latest project is at once more innovative and truer to the spirit of JM Barrie’s classic play than either of these. And, for my money, his is a better a story too.
Stephen White, 44, has spent the last six years dreaming about, planning, and finally drawing the first graphic novel of Peter Pan. Not only will it reclaim for Scotland Barrie’s classic tale of eternal youth, he says, but it will reinstate much of the darkness and wit that was lost in the
playwright’s original version in many people’s minds. On top of that, it spearheads the launch of a major new list of children’s books by Edinburgh-based publisher Birlinn.
The day I meet him, in his top-floor flat within a crowd’s roar of Tynecastle, White has been up until six o’clock in the morning typing in the text for the speech bubbles. It’s almost the last task he has to do before the finished book goes off to the printer. The project – the biggest he has ever worked on, and one that he knows will define him as an artist – is almost complete.
His career has hardly been orthodox. At school – he left at 16 – drawing was the only thing he was any good at. By way of proof, he shows me his report card. ‘Stephen has undoubted abilities as a cartoonist,’ his maths teacher wrote. ‘Any spare moment when he is not closely supervised, he is sketching. This has led to his poor grade.’
His art teacher was sad to see him go, but gave him an invaluable piece of advice. ‘Wherever you go,’ she said, ‘make sure you leave your drawings lying around. They’re good. People will notice them.’ At his YTS job at Edinburgh Council, he did just that. People did notice, and before long he was working with seven other trained graphic designers in the council. Looking back, he says, it was an even better training than art school. ‘ Everything I drew from the age of 16 – leaflets for pantos, posters for exhibitions – was for print.’
From the other graphic designers he learned everything he’d never picked up when doodling in the classroom: about perspective, how to tell a story, how to do hand-toning in that painstaking, pre-computer way. Working on his own at home, he learnt how to master every style he wanted. He could, it seemed, draw anything, from science fiction and superheroes to abstract, wordless story-telling and simple, slightly twee comic strips. But that, in a way, was almost the problem: he had too many styles, with not a recognisable one of his own.
When Morris Heggie, a former editor of The Dandy and the man he hails as a mentor, first opened a portfolio of White’s work, he was impressed by its range. ‘It was lengthy, crazily diverse,’ he says. ‘The ideas were all over the place. He’d clearly never looked at what we actually produce. It sat in my drawer for four years, though I looked at it many times. It was not material that you forgot.’
‘ Wherever you go, make sure you leave your drawings lying around. They’re good’
In those four years, White, having left the council and started working as a freelance, was gradually amassing a pile of rejection letters and taking up casual jobs, shelf-stacking in supermarkets and telemarketing to make ends meet. Then Heggie got in touch. The Winker Watson strip – a public-school boarder always outsmarting the teachers – in The Dandy needed a new artist. Would he be interested?
At first it was a success, and he worked for DC Thomson for five years, but readership of boys’ comics was in freefall and before too long he was back stacking supermarket shelves. At an Edinburgh event with leading comic-book writer Alan Grant (Judge Dredd, Anarky etc), he handed over a CD of his work. He didn’t expect to hear back from Grant, much less an email praising his art (‘some of the most beautiful and expressive I’ve seen in a long time’) and challenging him to think long and hard about what subject he really wanted to write about next.
When he did that, one subject stood out ahead of all others. It was his first memory. His mother had taken him to see a production of Peter Pan at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh. He was three at the time. He can remember everything about the stage set, how he was sitting next to his mother waiting for Peter to make his entrance – at
‘I do think there’s a gap in the market for graphic novels for children’
which point the fire curtain came down, the alarm went off and the theatre had to be evacuated. ‘It seemed to set my mind alive,’ he says. ‘As a boy, I was obsessed by Peter Pan, the way he flew around. It got so bad that my mother had to put bars across the window.’
He got in touch with the Peter Pan director (yes, there is such a title) at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital to ask whether he’d be allowed to write a graphic novel version of Barrie’s world-famous play and was astonished to find that, provided some of the money earned by the book went to the charity, he’d have their blessing. But now, having finally focused on what he really wanted to do, he had to find the style to do it in.
At first, he thought of updating Pan for the 21st century, in noisy primary colours and a hard-edged style to match. But Morris Heggie – who has since got him back into the DC Thomson fold drawing Oor Willie and other characters – made him change his mind. ‘He told me to draw it old and charming,’ he says, ‘and he was absolutely right. Some styles come and go, but charm lasts forever.’
How do you draw charm? ‘Well, I think it has to have a certain innocence. Working on Oor Wullie and The Broons helps because they’re still charming, and as Maurice says, that’s why they won’t die. Look at Beatrix Potter – that’s never going to go out of fashion.
‘The style I’ve drawn Peter Pan in is the closest I have to my own style, the way I draw when I don’t have to think about it. Your style is always an amalgam of your favourites, and in mine I can identify bits of [early US cartoonist] Winsor McCay and Hergé, whom I’ve always adored. I do feel it’s all starting to come together. I’ve just loved doing this, and I really do think there’s a gap in the market for graphic novels for children like this. At least, I hope there is.’
‘Some styles come and go, but charm lasts forever’