Graphic Wales : Exploring identity, landscape and language in Carol Swain's Gast

The graphic novels of Carol Swain frequently take rural Wales as their setting. Her most recent publication in 2014, Gast, continues her preoccupation with an isolated Welsh community. It explores aspects of liminality and fluidity, of blurred boundaries, both in terms of identity and of language. This article discusses the ways in which Swain represents and intertwines the landscape and language of Wales in order to demonstrate the child protagonist’s absorption into rural life. This article will consist of three parts. First, it introduces the work of Carol Swain and provides a brief summary of Gast that will help to contextualize some of my analysis. It will then discuss Swain’s mix of the Welsh and English language, and how language is used both to establish identities and confuse them. Gast is a graphic novel of intense silences, but when words are spoken they have an almost poetic weight to them, and this section will discuss the importance of conversations in the story. Finally, this article looks to the landscape of Gast to demonstrate how the isolation of the community is reflected in the sprawling countryside, but also how the protagonist comes to explore and understand the sparseness of her surroundings. By comparing Gast to the canon of Welsh writing in English, such as Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-Race ([1962] 2007) and Cynan Jones’ The Long Dry in 2006, and to the recent S4C/BBC Wales drama, Hinterland (2013), this article aims to situate Swain’s text alongside the fiction that reflects a realistic image of the Welsh identity.