Roger Sutton: I want to talk about collaboration, because that seems to me what your book is all about, and here we are, the three of us, talking together, and it seems to me—unless I'm romanticizing it—a kind of ethos of the comics community. So how did you two come to work on this together?
Raina Telgemeier: Scott and I have known each other as friends for almost twenty years now. But I’ve been a fan of his work for as long as Understanding Comics has been in publication. I read it when I was a teenager and it's always been such a cornerstone of the comics community and conversations about the art form and understanding what it is that we do, even if we don't understand it ourselves. It's just such a great foundational work. I am often asked what books I would recommend for somebody who wants to try making their own comics, or a teacher or a parent who doesn't think that graphic novels have that much value.
RS: That’s why I read it. Because the young people at the office wanted to do an issue with a mini theme of graphic novels. This was twenty years ago, and I said, “Ugh, do we have to?” And they said yes. So I did. That was my introduction to the form.
RT: And I think after you read Understanding Comics you feel smarter. You feel empowered. And if you’re a cartoonist you immediately want to go to the drawing board. I’ve been having that conversation with my young audience for the past twenty years and I always hit a little bit of a wall when I would tell an eight-year-old kid, “Well, there’s this great book called Understanding Comics, but I don’t know if you are quite ready for it. It’s a fantastic book for a high schooler, or a college kid, or an adult, but...” So this whole time I’ve had in the back of my mind that maybe at some point somebody will write that book for younger readers. Maybe Scott will write that book. Maybe Gene Luen Yang will write that book. I could never write that book. I’m not smart enough or good enough at explaining things to write that book. And there came a point, a few years back, when I got fed up, that I went up to Scott at a party and said, “Scott, imagine, if you will, Understanding Comics meets Smile. That’s the pitch. What do you think?” He was caught off-guard. I don’t think there was any preamble to this conversation. But his family was with him at the party, and they immediately got excited and said, “Yes, he’ll do it. Yes, the answer is yes.” It took Scott a few more months before he called me up and said, “All right, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I’ve wrapped my head around the concept.” Neither of us really knew what it was going to be, but we decided that we were going to try to figure that out together.
Scott McCloud: And the whole process of making the book was, in large part, figuring out what kind of beast it was. We did three full drafts, and it changed a lot in the course of those drafts. And one of the most important things that changed was that in our original conception Raina and I were characters in the book, and we were helping teach all these concepts to these kids. And Scholastic—Cassandra Pelham Fulton [Graphix Editorial Director], and David Saylor [publisher of the Graphix imprint] was also kibitzing on this one—felt that we were onto something. But also that it felt a little preachy, a little didactic.
RT: Explain-y.
SM: Yeah, a little explain-y. It was Raina who had the insight starting with draft two, to just, as you say, Raina, “kill your darlings,” and the darlings that Raina decided to kill were us. It was exactly the right move because then it became about these young characters discovering these principles largely on their own, though with the help of their library media specialist who runs the cartoonists club, Ms. Fatima. And that was so much more organic, much more familiar territory for your readers, Raina. It also relates to that idea of community that you mentioned, Roger. We have a very strong community in comics and there's a lot of collegiality and a lot of friendships that grow out of it, and that also informed the book.
RS: To me, the particular brilliance of this book is the way it develops as it goes along. When I began it, I thought, Oh, it’s a Raina Telgemeier book about middle-school friendships and kids who have a club; this will be fun. And then the how-to-make-a-comic element creeps in and becomes more and more complex as you go. And then you’re at the end of the book and realize you’ve been given all the tools to go back to the beginning of the book and understand how you two did what you did.
RT: Very sneaky of us.
SM: And as adults, we've seen examples of breaking the fourth wall for many years.
RS: Oh, and when that one character reached out of the frame? I jumped the first time that happened.
SM: Marvelous. Oh, we love that. We love to surprise people that way. And you know, even as adults we can still be surprised. But I think about myself at the age of twelve or thirteen and my first encounter with that—with being confronted with the nature of the medium as I’m reading, to have characters aware that they were in a book. And we had to have faith that breaking the fourth wall would not break the spell of them being real people. That we knew our characters could be aware of themselves as characters, aware of themselves as drawings and lines on paper, without them stopping being real people. Because we know kids can be wonderfully flexible.
RT: And I think if we had started chapter one with the fourth wall breaking, it would have been a totally different book. I don't remember if we ever made the decision consciously that it was going to progress into a more magical realism setting as it went on. But I love the surprise factor. I love, Roger, that you encountered it exactly the way we hoped you would, which was, Oh, this is a Raina book; it's about a group of kids that form a club. This is true. But it's also a Scott McCloud book. That was what I was the most excited about—sneakily turning a Raina book into a Scott book.
RS: How did you like working together?
RT: Collaborating with Scott was a dream come true, but it was also intimidating because he’s someone who I respect and whose brain I find so interesting, and it’s very different from my own. It took us a little time to figure out where we were headed together. Who was going to wear which hat? Who was writing? Who was drawing? Were we both doing each other's storytelling? Were we talking over each other? It took us a few drafts to really get the answer. The whole thing was pure fun. It was an absolute blast trying to figure all of this out. I think by about draft three we had disappeared into the story so much that even our editors can’t tell which part is Raina and which part is Scott, it is so seamless. I can tell. I can see my influence on certain things, and I can tell where Scott picks up the pen and starts talking. But I hope the kids don't see that. I hope they see it as seamless, as just absolutely its own thing.
RS: Scott, you did this first of the three of us. How did you come to understand how comics work?
SM: Some artists really are more scientists than expressionists, and I was definitely in that camp. (My father was an engineer.) So, from the beginning, as soon as I became interested in making comics, I was trying to take them apart like a Swiss watch and figure out how they worked. I found myself asking questions and then asking question after question after question. I was like that little kid who keeps asking why, and there's value to continually and stubbornly asking why. I was that kid, and after a while I found that just in figuring out how to do my job of writing and drawing stories I had somehow uncovered all these principles. And that became my passion. I realized I had to tell people about these ideas. I had the ideas very early on, but nobody would listen. Every time I started talking about them, I was that guy at the party that you want to back away from. But when I was showing people these ideas that I had in my head, when I could draw them, that's when I realized that they were connecting. And so it became vitally important to me that I put all it in a book—at the very least just to clear my head so I would have room to put something else in, because, boy, was I overflowing with ideas.
RT: How long did that book take?
SM: It was very fast.
RT: Really?
SM: Well, for me it was fast. It took a year and a half to make it. Although I'd been thinking about it, by then, for about seven years. I had been collecting notes. I had a file folder filled with notes for understanding comics, and it got so heavy that it was falling off the hooks, you know? Where the hooks are kind of tearing and it's slumping down. I figured that was my sign that it was time to make it a book.
RS: You know, the characters talk in The Cartoonists Club about how a necessary component of a comic is this reader, which is of course true for any book. But what do you think it is about comics that does inspire, you know, readers like Raina who said reading your book made her want to go out and make a comic. Why do you think that happens? Why do you think that the readers of comics seem particularly invested in trying to make their own comics in a way we don't necessarily see with kids who read novels?
SM: Well, it’s interesting when you are comparing prose and comics. In prose, the reader is tremendously important, of course, and the reader is continuously creating the world as they read, using only those symbols on paper that we call words. In comics, though, it's a kind of call-and-response. There's a rhythm to it, where the artist and the writer are giving you more and you get to lean back and have them fill you with images, but then you lean forward and you create that world between the panels, and so there's a back-and-forth that creates a unique rhythm. I don't think there's anything quite like it in any other art form. It's participatory, but it's also receiving—you receive, and you give. It's more like a relationship. I don't know—it's unique. |
RS: I was reading comics in first grade. I couldn’t read the words, necessarily. But my older brothers and I would share Superman comics, and they got more out of them, maybe, than I did. It was a part of my life since I was very young. But by the time you get to the age of the kids in this book, maybe you can do something with all that experience. Maybe you can create comics, in a way, create anything, in a way that's going to be tougher when you're seven or eight years old? For one thing, you have to have learned how to finish something. Which for me was always the hardest.
SM: Yeah, in fact, we directly address that. Raina and I know that one of the pitfalls that kids encounter is setting out to create something that’s just too big. They may have a 10,000-page space epic in mind. We explicitly encourage them to start small. We have them making mini-comics, which are little eight-page things you can do out of a single piece of paper. Obviously, you’re not going to start with a grand galactic epic. Maybe start with a smaller story.
RS: But then you have that one girl who wants everything to be perfect and you know she's nervous about just trying to slap something together in eight pages and she’s obsessed with drawing perfectly, what would only be the first panel.
RT: I’ve met that kid. Over and over again.
SM: Absolutely.
RT: And also, they don’t want to share their sketchbook because they're like, “Well, it's not my best.” Or “It's not good enough.” Or “I need to do it again before I can share it.” And so much of the storytelling of comics is just kind of slapping it down on the page and moving on to the next panel. And each panel then becomes part of a perfect whole. It's not about an individual drawing.
SM: And this is a convergence of two things that we've been talking about—the value of play that you mentioned, Raina. But also the value of failure. And embracing failure. Realizing that failure is a necessary step on the road to finding what it is you really want to do. You have to fail. And failing can be fun. It can be hard. But it can also be part of the adventure of it all. Try something that you don’t know if you can do it or not, and maybe fail. But that’s okay.
RT: Fail twice! Fail ten times!
SM: Fail on purpose.
RS: And if all you need to do is an eight-page mini comic, and even collaborate with other kids on doing it so no one has all the responsibility, the stakes aren’t going to seem that scary, right?
SM: Well, yes—lowering the stakes, on the one hand, but also honoring the ambition and the zeal of creating something wonderful. Because we have the character of Makayla, who starts the club. Her dreams are enormous. She has a universe of dreams. And I will tell you here, I believe she will make that universe. I don't think she's just talking through her hat. That kind of ambition—that's real. That's where you get your Miyazakis and your Jack Kirbys and who knows who.
RS: Those people terrify me.
SM: But it starts that way. Where their dreams seem too big for any one person. But if they hold to it, if they really care that much, they're going to make those worlds. So it's both things, right? It’s: start small. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Don't be afraid to play. But at the same time that doesn't mean that it's not serious. This is serious business. It is as serious as you want it to be.
RS: And the rules of comics are so loose that it's expandable in so many different ways and in different directions, right? There's still kind of an outlaw nature to the genre that allows people to choose their own path. Raina, what kind of an artist were you at ten years old?
RT: I drew a lot of TV cartoon characters. But I had just recently started reading For Better or for Worse by Lynn Johnston, which is a pretty realistic comic strip. It was a lot about the inner worlds of the kids and their relationships with their friends and I glommed on to it and started doing comics that looked a lot like it. But also just recording my life. So I was keeping a diary; I was keeping a journal. And I started drawing my own life in that style and using a similar turn of phrase to seize on the joke of whatever it was that had just happened to me—could I turn my day into a punchline somehow? I didn't show these to anybody. They were private. They were personal. And periodically I would go through the drawings and be like, “Ahh, these ones are not great, but I'm going to keep this little stack because this day was really important” or “I really like the drawing I did of this thing that happened with my friends.” I was processing in the moment and then looking back on it a few years after the fact and thinking, Okay, what did I learn from this and what was this experience about? So I think I was already a pretty self-aware kid and interested in people and how they talk to each other and the way that they looked on the outside but felt on the inside. I didn't know this would become my job, but it doesn't surprise me at all that this led directly into what I would do with my life. |
RS: What about you, Scott? At ten years old.
SM: The funny thing is I started in on comics later. I thought I was too old for comics when I was ten. It was only when I was about thirteen that a friend of mine tried to get me into comics, in middle school. So in some ways I think you, Raina, are a more native speaker, in the sense that you learned the language of comics when you were very young. At the time when we can acquire language in a very integrated way. Whereas I started to acquire the language of comics when I was already maybe just a little past that, and so my storytelling has never quite felt as natural. It's much more calculated. But in the end, I was able to survive as a cartoonist because my ideas were interesting to people. But it was a very different start for me. I was going to be a microbiologist. I was going to be an archaeologist. I was going to be an astronaut. I had a lot of obsessions—for three solid years I wanted to be a chess champion. That didn't pan out. Comics was the one that stuck. But it's not as natural for me as it was for others. Raina, you started in exactly the way that a cartoonist should start—learning it for the sake of it, telling your own stories to yourself. It was less natural for me, and that's been my Achilles heel, actually, as a cartoonist.
RS: I wonder what it would be like now that we’re seeing comic conventions showing up in board books and in books for young children. And I wonder if that’s going to change how young comic artists develop.
RT: I think so. Now that we have webcomics and there’s animation freely available to kids 24/7, they’re using a different language than we grew up with. I see it in their comics all the time. It's exciting. I think they'll continue to grow that language. And we might not recognize what it is they're doing in another twenty years, but it's okay, because it belongs to them.
SM: And as Marshall McLuhan said, each new medium, as it comes along, appropriates the previous medium as its content. So it takes a little while when you have something new like webcomics for people to sort of get the hang of it. To become fluent in that language. The first webcomics really were people doing comic strips or comic book pages and just slapping them on the screen. But now I'm starting to see mature, very talented cartoonists who have come through what they're calling webtoons, which are comics that you read on your phone that scroll down and down and down. I'm starting to see graphic novels come out that are informed by that sensibility, that have that kind of downward cascade to them. And it’s very natural for them. But it took a while. It took a while for cartoonists to get the hang of it.
RT: I also get asked by kids constantly now, “What app do you use to make your comics?” And I just stare at them for a second. I'm like, “What do you mean, an app? I use paper and pencil.” No one else does it for me. No other piece of technology, just me, my brain, a pencil and paper—and an eraser.
RS: Do you think that, or do you find in talking to children interested in comics, that paper and pencil, paper and pen, paper and paint will continue as a primary medium?
RT: I hope so.
RS: Or are we all just going to be pressing buttons on our computers?
RT: But computer technology mimics what pencil and paper can do. You don’t have to have a stack of physical paper, you have endless files to play with. And a stylus on a tablet feels, to my brain, very similar to a pencil on paper. It’s my brain that’s the most important tool.
SM: Yeah. In fact, I've been working digitally for many years. But everything I do is hand drawn. I'm just using another kind of pen, and I'm drawing my lines directly on the screen. It all happens in software, yes. But it's still drawn with a human hand according to this very fallible human’s ideas of where that line belongs. So it has many of the qualities that we associate with traditional comics on paper.
RS: Do you see doing another book about these kids?
RT: The word balloons coming out of our mouths would both say dot dot dot.
SM: Let’s put it this way, Roger, we have some hurdles we would have to clear. And the very first hurdle is the kids who read it. Let’s see what kids think of this book first. Then we get to approach the idea of “Do we have the time? How many other projects do Raina and I want to do? How does Scholastic feel about it?”
RT: To me the answer has more to do with what questions we will be asked after this book is published and in the hands of kids. Because that’s where all of my books begin: when I have a question I don’t have the answer to, and my brain will start to try and answer it. If I see that a lot of kids are asking the question “how do you get a book published?” we might have to write a whole book about that. And if The Cartoonists Club readers ask to know more about Linda's backstory or about Makayla's home life, well, Scott and I are both tinkerers and so we'll start to want to answer those questions. It's impossible to predict the future, but again the word balloon and the thought balloon that say dot dot dot are the current answer. |
|
