Drawing Strength: Lorna Miller on comics, cartoons and creativity

“I view being an artist as a state of being, not a job title,” Lorna Miller tells me, while we chat in Glasgow’s West End. There’s still the last chilly breath of winter in the air, but it’s one of the first bright days of the year, and the spring bulbs are starting to appear, bright daffodils lining the embankments of parks and roads.

For a number of years, Miller designed the May Day posters for Glasgow Trades Council, seen dotted around the city promoting the marches, rallies and events of each year’s programme. Before and after this work, she’s been on a series of journeys, cycling through periods of growth and rest throughout her colourful career.

Having graduated from GSA in 1994, Miller moved down to Brighton, where she took on work as a comic colourist. This role sat as part of the traditional production chain in comics at the time, before software like Photoshop became standard, adding colour to pages after they had been pencilled and inked.

While beginning in watercolour, a medium Miller was comfortable with, the company quickly moved to digital colouring. She pulled a classic fake-it-till-you-make-it after telling the company she can definitely do digital colouring, then immediately going to a friend, ”I’ve just taken this job – you need to show me how to do it.”

During this time, Miller had great success with her self-directed project Witch, a satirical graphic novel: “It was basically a spoof of girls’ and boys’ annuals that I’d grown up with,” she explains. “There was always a theme of gender issues in my work... it was ripe for satire.” The success of Witch brought “a whole load of work” her way for the next 15 years, until a move to Hastings focused her practice on more political matters.

“There was a road being built in Hastings that was just a carry on. It was like the Tories were just grabbing the land. It was through an SSI site. It was actually a nature reserve.” The feeling of frustration Miller experienced, combined with the community found in collective action, galvanised her to use her practice to share political messages. Somebody from a campaign group she was in shared one of her cartoons with Private Eye, which she discovered on a warm day in June.

Credit: Lorna Miller.

“I remember, it was my birthday – I was watching Wimbledon with my ice cream, and I got this call going ‘Hi, this is Tim from Private Eye.’ And I really shit myself, I just was like, ‘Oh my God.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, we’ve got your cartoon here. We’d like to run it.’ And I just thought, ‘No way.’”

This publication led to a monthly cartoon slot, which was the first time the magazine had created a recurring cartoon position specifically for someone. It was also a major breakthrough to have such a position made for a female political cartoonist in a very male-dominated field. Alongside this, Miller worked for The Morning Star, “the only newspaper that was open to regularly publishing women political cartoonists.”

While this reads like a shimmering career, slipping with ease from job to job, this hasn’t always been the case: “I’ve been through so many periods of debilitation and recovery and had to resurrect myself so many times.” For example, working for The Guardian, which had been a life-time goal, came after years of persistent pitching and was largely ad hoc, covering rota gaps when regular cartoonists were unavailable. While it provided her with the best-paid editorial work she had done, she describes the pace as intense and unsustainable, and her time there ultimately remained short-lived and contingent on changing editorial structures. “I had to have three ideas by ten in the morning, finished artwork by four pm, and a nervous breakdown by four-thirty,” she laughs.

She received an autism diagnosis at age 51. While this has brought challenges, being a neurodivergent person has also brought some answers, and on reflection perhaps helped her into jobs and positions she might not have been brave enough to ask for: “It kind of just didn’t occur to me that I would be prevented from doing anything.” However, Miller also suffers from chronic illness, and recently lost her flat to a tragic fire, meaning she is currently living in temporary accommodation. 

This recent period of her career has been challenging; “I hadn’t been able to work in the past six months since the fire due to health issues and CPTSD.” However, Miller refuses to give up. “Everything that’s happened with the fire and losing everything has somehow kind of reset me and cleared a lot of kind of crap out of my brain.” This renewed burst of energy has led to a new piece of work for the Springburn Winter Gardens campaign, with profits going to the restoration efforts of the building.

Just like the flowers of spring, Miller returns every year. “I’ve had to learn new skills, reinvent myself and diversify throughout my career just to keep on being an artist.” And despite the difficulties, she maintains a positive outlook on her practice, and is grateful for it. “Creative expression is such a wonderful gift... it’s so important to have that in the world.”

---

Find Lorna Miller @mistressofline on Instagram, where you can find links to her Ko-Fi page and shop to support the Springburn Winter Gardens campaign