Nick Burton
Our Plague Year
2020 - 2022
Online and at HOME, Manchester
Curator | exhibition
Producer| comic strip, with Nick Burton
Commissioned by Arts Council England Project Grants and HOME, Manchester
Special thanks to Eyam Museum and Curator Owen Roberts for creative conversation and historical guidance.
All images copyright Nick Burton
A weekly comic strip launched in May 2020 by artist and illustrator Nick Burton, and distributed by Manchester arts centre HOME, explores self-isolation and human behaviour through the lens of the effect of the bubonic plague on a Derbyshire village in the 17th century.
Conceived and created by artist illustrator Nick Burton in response during the first stages of lockdown in the UK, following a provocation by myself to explore a slow-digital commission , Our Plague Year is an alternative retelling of life in the Derbyshire village of Eyam in 1665-66, when the local community made the decision to quarantine themselves to prevent the Plague from spreading to their neighbouring towns and villages.
Although inspired by real events, Our Plague Year is a wholly fictional, contemporary narrative, drawing a connection between historical pandemics, aggravated by misinformation, fear and discrepancy of wealth.
The cast of characters challenge received histories from the period: from non-white British citizens, to deaf and disabled characters. Essential needs are re-evaluated, not simply food and medicine, but friendship, desire and inequality.
Black humour mixes with still applicable fears and petty muck slinging with no one character entirely likeable, nor entirely unfamiliar.
Released weekly online and with an international subscriber base in excess of 5,000, readers around the world have reached out to express their support for the villagers or claim their Eyam familiar. Characters speak with the droll, North American vernacular of a wider comic canon, with Burton inspired by the likes of Charles Schulz, Kate Beaton, Bill Watterson and Seth.
Are you more of an Edith, or a Godelena? A George Gribble, or a Reasonable Smithfield?
Nick Burton is a Manchester born illustrator and storyteller. He spent the majority of his life in Canada (Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto), but for the past eight years has been living in Salford, England. His illustrations and comics have featured in Wired Magazine, The New York Times, Ride Journal, GQ and others.