Comic artist Debbie Jenkinson: ‘I like the idea that you’re looking over Dublin and could pick out anyone’s story’

Last year a long comic by Debbie Jenkinson, called Midlands, appeared on the shelves of Little Deer Comics. The Dublin store has become something of a headquarters for Irish comics, graphic novels and zines. It is a small but bountiful shop in Stoneybatter where customers browse for hidden gems as well as better-known work.

Jenkinson’s first long project, entitled Remorse, was published in 2015. Set in Dublin, and about a young woman who “gets stuck in a call-centre job for 10 years”, it demonstrated what would become a central thread of Jenkinson’s work: how the lives of ordinary people play out. She followed that up in 2020 with the graphic thriller Ghosting, about an Irish bus driver who meets an Italian chambermaid on his route. “All of a sudden she disappears,” Jenkinson says. “So it’s about whether she has ghosted him or whether something happened to her.”

Midlands is about a young pharmacist who ends up living in a small town in the middle of Ireland. Concerned with the idea of home, and of trying to fill in the gaps of sometimes diffuse relationships, it is a beautiful piece of work. A sense of loneliness, of trying to get to grips with being out of place, plays out across its pages. The minutiae of midland streetscapes and shop signage is hugely evocative, and tiny details from everyday life are everywhere: the tassel of a car keyring; a field gate slightly tilted through wear, carelessness or neglect; the glow of a bungalow window at night; a grotto; a cat stretching.

It is ordinary life that interests Jenkinson. “I don’t know if it’s some part of my brain that doesn’t exist, but I’m not that interested in fantasy,” she says. “I like the here and now. I like being able to relate to characters. I like the idea that at the beginning of Ghosting you’re looking over Dublin, and in a way you could pick out anyone’s story in the background and follow that.”

Jenkinson is drawn to what in Japan is referred to as “ma”, or negative space, where emptiness demonstrates a fullness of potential or possibility, and where the space between contains everything. “This idea of nothing in between,” Jenkinson says, “like a cat going over the road, it’s nothing. But the exciting stuff in life is probably only 5 per cent of life. The rest of the time we’re just drinking tea or going about the day. I love the capacity comics have for this, how using that idea can slow the reader right now, and make them look at those things. That’s exciting to me. The human experience is more there than it is in fantasy.”

In her work Jenkinson defies the idea of “very ‘special’ people, or people we’ve inferred this power in, to represent us, or be icons. To me there’s so much more to say about the ordinary.”

The Stoneybatter shop is central to Jenkinson’s ability to reach readers. “There’s no way I would have sold these books and connected with an audience if it wasn’t for Little Deer. A lot of us aren’t very good at that end of things,” she says about promoting and selling work. “We just prefer to be in our sheds, working away.”

Jenkinson is working on a new story, called Significant Other. “It’s about teenagers in 1986, and they’re doing work experience in a charity shop. They find a letter, figure out who the letter is to, and there’s a mystery they have to solve. This is my epoch: I love playing 1980s music. And unemployment was so bad at that time. It was so dire to come out of school at that moment.” It’s “these little capsules of time” that fascinate Jenkinson, she says.

A key event in the Irish comic and graphic-novel calendar is Dublin Comic Arts Festival. Matthew Melis of Little Deer is a key figure in the event; Jenkinson is on its committee. The festival developed from Comics Lab, a meet-up event that she previously ran with the artist and author Sarah Bowie.

“Everything is free. There’s workshops, drawings, you can wander around and talk to the artists. It’s become a real community,” Jenkinson says. Such is the success of the festival – which pitches itself as a small-press comic-book event and now runs about four times a year – that about 100 tables of presenting artists sell out quickly. The next festival is on the weekend of April 13th and 14th, at Richmond Barracks in Inchicore, Dublin 8.

This alternative Irish comics scene might be niche, but the number of artists, works and events is growing. “The people who love it really love it,” Jenkinson says. “It’s burgeoning – but we’ve been saying that for a while! It’s a very exciting area. I’m always telling people about it. And I don’t think there’s any mystery about being an artist ... If you’re making art, you’re an artist.”