Roger Sutton: You say in the afterword that this book is in some ways a reaction to the Disney heroines of your childhood. Was that something you were into?
Vera Brosgol: Oh my god, yes, absolutely. My mom has kind of a highbrow taste, so she didn’t put anything in front of us that was actually for children. In Russia the only cartoons I watched were Yuri Norstein’s short films, a lot of Soviet adult animation. It was very brown and gray, and there were no jokes. It was beautiful and I love it, but it wasn’t for kids. When we came to America, one of my first memories is going to a birthday party. There was a VCR and TV in the corner, and they were playing The Little Mermaid. That was the first Disney movie I ever saw, and it was like fireworks went off in my head. It was so colorful and funny, and there was singing! I thought, I could get down with America if this is what it’s like. The first movie I saw in the theater was Beauty and the Beast.
RS: By that point, critics had been looking back at Disney and saying, Wait a minute, do we want to keep telling this story? I’m thinking of “Walt Disney Accused,” which was a famous article in the Los Angeles Times by Frances Clarke Sayers, where she blamed Disney for everything that was wrong with children’s culture in the 1960s. [editor's note: this article and an interview with Sayers were reprinted in the December 1965 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.] The Little Mermaid was part of a new era of animation for Disney.
VB: The Glen Keane era.
RS: Even though Ariel had the glamorous hair and the clamshell bra and all that, politically, it’s still much further evolved than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella. And now with Disney heroines such as Princess Merida in Brave, it’s very much about, Gotta be a strong girl.
VB: Ariel’s motives were not the best in that movie. But she had a lot of agency, that’s for sure.
RS: In your book, the mermaids aren’t evil, but they seem kind of amoral. Which reminds me of the way Hans Christian Andersen described the mermaids in his “Little Mermaid.” They were creatures who thought differently about the world than we do.
VB: The mermaids in Plain Jane are like wild animals...but they’re also not. Their backstory is that they’re raised in this insular environment, and they absorb their mother’s values—who absorbed them from her mother, it goes back and back and back. That’s why they do what they do. They were taught that it’s bad when you start to age, and this is how you solve that problem.
RS: When we first see them they seem pretty and glamorous but then the eyes bug out and the teeth get big and they really are frightening.
VB: That’s the mermaid mythology I always liked: the sirens who drag men to their deaths. And no one tells you what the mermaids do with the men once they’re underwater. I was always curious about that. Do they drown them and throw them in a pile somewhere? Do they decorate with their skeletons and make craft projects or something?
RS: You solved it for us, though. Now we know what they do.
VB: Totally. That’s where my head goes.
RS: What was the starting point for this book?
VB: I love anything to do with life underwater. Aquariums are my favorite thing, but I’m terrified of the ocean. I’m not a strong swimmer, and I remember getting stung by some kind of a ray when I was a little kid. So the ocean is this scary, bottomless place full of things that are going to rub up against you in the dark and eat you. But that’s super fascinating too. I think people have felt that way about the sea forever, which is why there are so many stories about it.
I started off with an idea for a short animated film: a sailor brings a selkie home to be his bride. But she’s basically still a seal—a wild animal. She can’t speak, she just barks and trashes his house. He really doesn’t want her there by the end. That idea sat in my head for a while. These images would come up, and the one that sealed it was a girl walking across the bottom of the sea to rescue somebody. I thought that was interesting, kind of funny and awkward, and something I hadn’t seen before. (That’s the worst way to get around, too; it would take forever!)
I did a ton of research and reading of mythologies from all over the world. Something that kept coming up, between cultures, was the beauty of things underwater luring down things above water. That beauty is ascribed to goodness, and ugliness is evil. Those ideas started percolating, combined with the image of the girl awkwardly walking underwater for miles and miles. |
RS: Knowing where to look first, how to let my eye go down or across the page. And even now as I’m understanding some of the conventions, I get stopped by thinking something like, Oh, she’s made the type slightly bigger than it was before. That makes a difference. I don’t consider myself a visually sophisticated person. But I feel smarter every time I read a graphic novel.
VB: Visual literacy is something kids take to so quickly. I also don’t know about a lot of it.
RS: Oh, come on, if anybody should know.
VB: No, no one taught me anything. I’m doing the same as you. I’m reading it and trying to figure it out and reconstruct it afterward. When you make your graphic novel then you can tell me what you’re going to call it.
RS: Yeah, not happening. But you did go to art school?
VB: I went to animation school. What you do in animation is literally draw an arrow with where you want the arm to go. It’s much more literal because it…
RS: …has to move.
VB: Right, it’s just a template for someone else to pick up. It’s not the final product, it’s a step along the way. The graphic novel is a final project. Everything I drew in animation goes in the garbage; it was just the next step in the production pipeline, not for anyone to look at.
RS: Does that feel frustrating?
VB: No, not at all. I liked that you weren’t trying to make a beautiful finished drawing the way you would if you were illustrating a picture book. With a comic there’s a bit less pressure, but it’s still got to look pretty good. For an animation story board, you can use a stick figure as long as you understand what the character is doing or feeling. It’s the most boiled-down, fast, and efficient storytelling possible. I love doing my terrible drawing and then it goes to the next stage and the next stage, and by the time I see it again it is gorgeous. It makes you part of a team in a really cool way.
RS: And now you’re on your own. Do you like it?
VB: I do and I don’t. I definitely miss having someone to bounce ideas off. The longer you spend with yourself working on something big like a graphic novel, the more doubt sets in. You’re so far away from where you started when you were really excited. And you’re really far away from your readers. Mark Siegel put a great thing together at First Second, getting a group of book creators together to share the projects they’re working on and give feedback to one another. Mark did that with a bunch of different artists and put me in a great little group of comic artists, including Ben Hatke and Gene Luen Yang. I gave them the script for Plain Jane; they read it and talked among themselves for half an hour while I listened. I could see what they were responding to or what confused them. The second half-hour I could ask them questions. That was so helpful with this book. It was like an extra round of editing but with a bigger pool. It felt like the teamwork that I really missed.
RS: I also saw in the afterword to Plain Jane that you described what the colorist does. I never knew exactly—thank you for showing us! I imagined someone with, you know crayons, going through your black-and-white book.
VB: Oh my gosh, no. Alec Longstreth, my colorist, who is also an amazing cartoonist, is better at Photoshop, computer anything, than I am. He’s so organized. He needs an extra credit as production manager or something because he made all these spreadsheets to track our progress and make sure we were on deadline. He put together this beautiful, more limited palette, so the whole thing would feel more cohesive. He did tons of research and made Pinterest boards. I don’t think all colorists do this; I won the lottery with him.
RS: Would you be working at the same time or is your work done when it goes to him?
VB: I got all the pencils done and signed off on, so as I started inking I felt like I was laying track and he was the train coming behind me. I had to make sure I had enough pages inked ahead of him. I tried to have a buffer, maybe thirty pages or so, and I'd give him a chunk at a time and he’d blast through. We finished one or two months apart from each other. We went back and looked through it again to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.
RS: And it was all digital, right, on both your parts?
VB: Yeah. That was a first too. It saved a lot of time.
RS: This was your first time creating pictures digitally?
VB: The final inks, yeah. I used a brush and a little pot of ink for Anya’s Ghost and a brush pen for Be Prepared. That was fun because I like having the originals; I like tactile stuff, pen on paper. But this is a much longer book—it's one hundred pages longer than Be Prepared. It just wasn't practical; I didn't want to be working on it for a year and a half. |
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