Graphic Novel

For my undergraduate degree show project I wrote and drew an 80 page long graphic novel. The title is taken from a scene in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, in which a character is fatally bitten by a snake. One of the party tending to them is sent to catch several more adders, as it is believed ‘there’s only one way to cure it. You must rub the place with the fat of the other adders, and the only way to get that is by frying them.’ As well as evoking at the ruralist themes of my work, I felt this quote also operates as a fitting metaphor for the central idea of my book: the human tendency to apply poison to poison. This manifests both politically with the neoliberal tendency to rebrand the optics of evil rather than combat it, and personally with the propensity of trauma to repeat itself. Below are a selection of pages from the book.