Drawing Turner Family Stories: An Interview with Francis Bordeleau
Drawing Turner Family Stories:
Interview with Francis Bordeleau
Turner Family Stories is a recent publication from VFC that brings together cartoonists and interviews from our archive to share the family stories and personal experiences of Daisy Turner of Grafton, Vermont with new audiences. The Turner Family Stories project connected a group of New England cartoonists including Marek Bennett, Francis Bordeleau, Joel Christian Gill, Lillie Harris, Robyn Smith and Ezra Veitch with the Turner Family Collection in the Vermont Folklife Center Archive. It is a part of our larger effort to explore non-fiction cartooning as a way to share our archive and ethnographic research with the public.
To learn a little bit about how the cartoonists themselves reflect on their participation in the project, we reached out to talk with them about their work. This post is the third in a series exploring the artists’ side of Turner Family Stories.
Boston area cartoonist Francis Bordeleau joined the project at a later point to complete a story that had been started by a different artist. In the early 20th century when Daisy lived and worked outside Boston, she began a romance with one Joseph Boinay, a white automobile and harness salesman. Francis’ comic, “I am Vindicated” retells a story of heartbreak and betrayal that culminated in Daisy bringing Boinay to court for breach of promise--and winning. Francis discusses how they incorporated changing fashion styles, multiple types of text (narration, direct quotation, dialogue) and the value of graphic novels as teaching tools. This interview was conducted over Zoom, which allowed a discussion of Francis’ comic pages. The text has been shortened for clarity and brevity.
What were some of your initial impressions when hearing about the idea?
So I actually heard about this project from Joel Gill because he was my professor [and contributing cartoonist to Turner Family Stories]. I went to the New Hampshire Institute of Art for my first year of college, and he actually asked me if I wanted to do it. And I was really excited to do it, obviously, because I like the idea of doing a comic like this and getting published. And I'm definitely interested in historical stuff, too. So I was like, ”Oh, this is really, really interesting. What a fun project to work on.”
Have you done nonfiction cartooning before?
I haven't done nonfiction, but I've done adaptations of myths and stuff that are taken directly from source. I did -- this was actually Joel's class. I did an adaptation of this one Sumerian poem about the Goddess Inanna’s descent into the underworld. I took a lot of my dialog directly from that poem. And that kind of helped me with this, too, I think, because I was obviously taking a lot of dialog directly from this book [Daisy Turner’s Kin] and from Daisy.
What was most memorable about this project?
I definitely made quite a few spelling errors...When I turned my pencils in and I was like, “Oh, my God, so many!” I think also definitely doing it by hand didn't help with that. Because if it had been digital, it might have been more obvious to me... But I guess, yeah, just the inking was very memorable. I had a really good time doing the inking because I enjoy it a lot.
How did this experience influence your work and process?
I think definitely this project has helped me with the pacing. I think that was a good kind of lesson to me, like, “Oh, you know, here's how to pace this.” And I definitely think that I would be interested in doing more historical stuff especially. I really love the aspect of, like, this is going to get used to teach people stuff...I think graphic novels are great as teaching tools...this is kind of like a middle school and up audience. Because like for me, I've always struggled with literature, like traditional reading, because not out of, like, disinterest or anything, but just, like, it's just hard to finish stuff. You know, I don't know if my brain just can't focus that long, but I feel like comics kind of condense that information a little bit. And also, you know, the way that you're reading is totally different. And it works really well for, like, very visual people like me, because you're kind of reading bodies and you're reading emotions and stuff, if that makes sense, rather than words.
What would you want the reader to be left with when they read the story?
My goal with it was kind of just to, I guess, get a real sense for, like, how amazing this whole situation was and how amazing it was that she won this case, as a black woman in the twenties against a white man. Because it's just like, you know, obviously she didn't get as much as she -- the original amount she wanted, but like, still, you know, like it's amazing that she won at all. And just like it takes a really, like, incredible woman to really power through like that. And just kind of I guess you have to have the reader get a sense for just like, you know, who she was and what drove her and how strong she could be.
Working with aged photos and newspaper
This last page was actually taken directly from a newspaper, like the newspaper that had this story on it. But obviously, I had to change it around a little bit to make it look good as a page, because there was more -- it was actually, like, a little a column, I think, the original one. So I just kind of moved it around a little bit to make it, like, a full page, and did this stylized portrait of Daisy that looked like the portrait that was on the actual newspaper article. You can see her face is very, like, shadowed because it's an old, old paper.
This was another one of my favorite pages. I was doing a lot of this hatching and crosshatching effect to fill in white space, which is really fun to do. And I just like the way that the photo kind of goes off the page. I thought that was a fun thing to do. And obviously, Alec Turner was also taken from photo reference. And I was looking at, yeah, there were all these photo references and sometimes it was kind of hard to -- they're obviously very old photos, so it was a bit hard to see some of the faces in detail. But there was another page where Daisy’s sisters come up. And these are obviously pretty, you know, very small drawings. So they're not particularly detailed. But I tried my best to make them look like each of them did in the photos.
“Combining of the narration and the dialog”
I definitely do use a lot of narration, that's just what I find myself, kind of, leaning towards. I have a very literary kind of style, I think, because I do like to write a lot. So I kind of, often struggle with doing comics when I can't, like, just say this happened or this person was feeling this. So I like to do that kind of narration and I like to jump between, especially with this comic because it has, like, narration, it has direct quotes and it has dialog. Sometimes, it almost kind of -- I felt like it seemed a little bit, almost jarring to go from like this narrative style, like the captions to these people speaking, especially since they're speaking, like, very old style. And I hope that it comes through sounding pretty normal. I did try to keep the dialog definitely as, kind of, simplified because I felt like having this, like, kind of wordy narration with, you know, with wordy dialog would be a bit weird. I wanted the characters to kind of be very, like, in a story rather than, for lack of a better term, like fleshed out, you know, because this is a short story. This [page] is probably the heaviest dialog... it was kind of a struggle to try to fit all that in, but I really wanted to get all of it because that was a direct quote from Daisy. And I think there's this panel at the bottom where I have the council's voice above Daisy, and she answers, “I did.” And that's, kind of, a combining of the narration and the dialog.
Styling Daisy Turner
One of the first things I did when I was starting this comic was I’d look at a bunch of Google Drive folders full of images of all the Turner family members and one with Daisy in particular in it. And I just looked at all the pictures of Daisy, and I just sketched her face over and over again, to try to kind of get it down and figure out how I wanted to simplify it. And then there weren't really any visual references for Joseph Boinay's face. So I kind of just did like a very normal, average looking, 1920s, white guy face, you know? And then I was looking at a lot of historical clothing references for all of Daisy’s and Boinay’s outfits in this. And then her hunting outfit was actually taken directly from a photo of her with, I think, it was a deer that she had shot and she was in her hunting outfit. And then all these wonderful hats...
I'm very fascinated by history and I really like working from historical reference ...Any time I work with historical stuff like fictional or like nonfiction, I'm very meticulous about like I really need to make sure everything like, “Oh, Is this accurate?” This is something I actually am trying to get over a bit because -- sometimes a little bit of inaccuracy is OK. You know, it can be fun. But with this, obviously, I wanted to keep it accurate. But yeah, I was definitely like really looking at all these photographs being like, “Oh, you know, can I use any of these dresses that Daisy wore in any of these?” or whatever. And then like looking at, like, a fashion from this exact period and how that changed too, throughout the comic. Because it starts, like, I think, 1916 and then it ends in like 1923, I think? So there's a bit of a fashion change there, and you can kind of see because that first image of Daisy, I had her in this, like, more Edwardian style, like, long skirt and like, puffy blouse. And then in the court, she wearing a lot more, like, typical like ‘20s casual dresses.
Thank you Francis for speaking with us!
To learn more about the recordings of Daisy Turner that inspired Turner Family Stories, visit this page.
Francis is a New England based cartoonist and illustrator. They attend Lesley University for illustration in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more on their work, visit https://www.francisbordeleau.com/
