Antarctica is a place shrouded in tales of epic exploration and adventure. In recent years, the vogue has been for Ernest Shackleton and the destruction of his ship Endurance in the pack ice – a disaster redeemed by the astonishing rescue of his men after the voyage of the tiny James Caird from Elephant Island to South Georgia. But there’s another expedition that ended in true tragedy: the death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party on their return from the South pole in 1912, after being beaten to their goal by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen.
For over a century, Scott has been argued over as a tragic hero for the ages, or a foolish amateur who led his men to an unnecessary death. Both versions often skip over the humanity of those involved. Now, artist and former Disney animator Sarah Airriess is bringing her own version of the story to life, in a graphic novel adaptation of The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the members of the expedition who came home, and one of the best books about Antarctica ever written. We spoke to her about her inspiration for the project.
How did you first encounter The Worst Journey in the World?
Most animation work – especially the technical drawing I was often doing – is generally quite tedious. My animation career became symbiotic with my Radio 4 listening: the radio would keep me on task, occupying the chatty part of my brain that was bored by the technical drawing. I started listening at home too, and it was while sewing a costume for my first Halloween at Disney that I put on a serial about a doomed expedition, which sounded like my kind of thing. It was Kate McAll’s production of The Worst Journey in the World.
What impressed me about the dramatisation was the decision not to follow the Polar party – the story everyone knows – but to stick with the men waiting for them to return. That was an equally compelling story and one that had never been told. I was blown away by the characters: I had been led to believe that humans were, when you got down to it, a bit crap, but these guys were pure gold. The story, when told in greater depth and detail, was a truly epic adventure as well as a classical tragedy.
Working in entertainment, I knew how stories and characters get reshaped for dramatic effect, which discouraged looking more deeply into the source material for a while. But I spent a few weeks in New York doing publicity for Disney on The Princess and the Frog, and took The Worst Journey to read on breaks, and I couldn’t put it down. Contrary to all my expectations, the actual story was even better (and vastly larger) than the dramatised version, and the actual people were even more wonderful. So that was it. That was my life now.
The titular worst journey of the book is actually Cherry-Garrard’s nightmarish winter sledging journey with Edward Wildon and Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers to collect the eggs of the emperor penguin; the attempt on the South Pole follows after this. There are a lot of characters and moving parts, so how do you approach adapting that into a graphic novel?
You find something that already has impeccable narrative structure, and then don’t break it! It started with finding what is for me and perhaps for Cherry too, the central thread of innocence lost. There’s the question it asks the reader: When everything is going against you, what kind of person will you be? These were my compass bearings.
From there I tried to chop up the overall narrative into discrete episodes with a clear dramatic arc. For example, the Winter Journey starts as Cherry, Wilson and Bowers set off from the warmth and safety of Cape Evans into the polar night. Things get steadily worse in new and interesting ways until they get to Cape Crozier, where we get a little reprieve and fun adventure in the egg hunt, and then it gets catastrophically worse with the storm, which is the climax of the episode.
Returning to the hut is an apotheosis: they’ve been through this ordeal together and survived by the skin of their teeth, good fortune, and cooperation; the warm embrace of their friends and the comfort of the hut are almost surreal; they have grown and changed through the course of the story and ticked forward a couple of notches in their character arcs. And then, because this is a serial and not a standalone story, it ends with opening the door to the next episode, to make people want to find out what happens next.
We know these people from black and white photos, but your character designs are a delight. How do you get to the essence of what makes each person so distinct?
I was never good enough by industry standards to be allowed to design characters professionally, and I’ve always been very conscious of my shortcomings in that area, so it’s wonderful to hear that my designs are appealing to readers.
When I first started getting into this subject, I’d look at a group photo of all these young white guys in grey jumpers and wonder how anyone could tell them apart, but before long I could look at the same photo and marvel at the rich spectrum of personalities and character types.
My greatest ambition with my character designs is for a reader to look at a historical photograph for the first time and not only be able to identify everyone but to recognise them as people.
Your book is more than just a graphic reimagining of the Terra Nova expedition, it’s rooted in deep research – you even moved to Cambridge in England to be close to the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute. Why was this so important to you?
The idea of making a fully referenced, factually truthful, historically accountable comic was there from the beginning, and because it was the people I loved more than anything after reading The Worst Journey I went looking for ways to spend more time with them. If I was going to do it (and I did fight it for a while) it was darn well going to be accurate. In doing so I came to the history mainly through primary documents, so that when I did finally work my way to the secondary histories, I could see how they had been misrepresented.
I’ve been friends with Sydney Padua since I was in animation school, and was present for the birth of her graphic novel The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, so I knew that a cinematic, character-based, fully annotated comic could work. The Worst Journey is such a fruitful gateway into all sorts of other subjects, and I hope readers will jump off from my annotations and investigate whatever excites their curiosity.
Scott’s expedition has the hallmarks of a classical tragedy, but your book is so full of joy, and the sheer giddiness of setting out on an adventure. Why was this tone so important?
You’ve got to have somewhere to go! If you start out full of hopes and ambitions, you have a long way to fall, and you hit a lot harder at the bottom. It’s also what the beginning of the expedition feels like in the primary documents – everyone’s having the time of their lives, high adventure and comradeship, seeing new places and doing exciting science. Cherry’s journal in particular is full of enthusiasm; his excitement when they enter the pack ice and his rapture at the beauty of everything leaps off the page. It’s easy for us to look at all these stiff monochrome photos and think everyone in olden days was very staid and serious, but they were just as full of feeling as any of us, and that helps endear them to us and make them real people in our minds.
Once you get to know them and love them like your own friends, you care what happens to them when things go wrong – they cease to be blank chess pieces enacting a lesson in project management, but are rather real, soulful human beings, with nicknames and faces and families, whose loss is a loss to humanity. And maybe you’ll have a little cry for people you never had the chance to meet.
You spent time at some in the Ross Sea as part of the US Antarctic Artists and Writers programme, seeing many of the locations that Scott’s men visited. How did Antarctica impact you, and your feelings about the expedition?
I read an interview with Jon McGregor about his polar novel Lean, Fall, Stand and how he dealt with how Antarctica defies words. He went on a similar programme to mine with the British Antarctic Survey, and it took him fifteen years to put it on the page. I absolutely get it. I’ve written a lot about my time there, but it’s just picking at the surface – I can only approach it obliquely, like Jesus trying to describe the Kingdom of God. Antarctica is the edge of a painting where the image dissolves into brushstrokes. Antarctica is a hole in my heart. You say these things to someone who hasn’t been there and they look at you funny, but to those who have, maybe they’ll nod slightly with a faraway look in their eyes.
The people who told me that I couldn’t understand Scott’s story without having been there were absolutely right. There’s the purely pragmatic stuff like geography, as well as things like how all plans are only ever temporary thanks to the unpredictability of conditions and limited resources – even now, with all our technological advancements! Bits of The Worst Journey which had only been suggestions before, I could see in crystal clarity after having stood in Cherry’s footprints. And episodes which were previously confusing, like the motions of various parties after laying One Ton Depot [food depot that Scott’s party died barely a day’s march from], are now obvious to me.
But I picked up so much more besides; the light and the sound, the feel of the air or the surprising warmth of the sun. I don’t know how I will get these onto the page, or whether I can successfully communicate them to someone who hasn’t been there, but I’d have no hope of being able to do so if I had never been. I’ll be so pleased if someone who knows the place looks at my work and says ‘Yes, that’s how it is.’ The instant I heard Lean, Fall, Stand being read on Radio 4 I knew Jon McGregor had been to Antarctica himself. If I can trigger the same recognition, then I’ll know I’ve done my best to portray it faithfully to those who’ve never had the privilege to see it themselves.
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The Eisner-nominated The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, adapted by Sarah Airriess, is published by Iron Circus. For more information see The Worst Journey in the World or follow Sarah on Patreon for updates on the project.
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