1. Please tell us about what inspires the humorous and fantastic worlds you create.
There are a lot of things that inspire me to write my stories and create these different worlds and environments. For my Sci-fi time travel series, The Time Museum, my biggest inspirations were the great museums I’ve been able to visit in both New York City, where I lived at the time, and in some of the great international cities. Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in particular was a key inspiration for the Time Museum. When you walk from one wing filled with Ancient Egyptian mummies and artifacts, then take a turn down a hallway and end up surrounded by medieval armor, it’s like you’ve just time traveled, and that’s what brought on to the idea of a Museum for time travel as a story. For my upcoming fantasy book, Prunella and the Cursed Skull Ring, I wanted to make my version of a fairy tale that involved a problem, and a journey for the main character to find the solution. In this case, Prunella finds a ring that turns her into a skeleton monster and she can’t take it off and her journey is how she travels between different friendly monster communities and tribes to learn a way to break the spell. For both The Time Museum and Prunella, much of my story and ideas are inspired by visuals I have in my head. An action scene, an environment, a creature, these can all be fleshed out into story beats and even significant plot points. Also, sometimes characters start to create their own stories and can pull the plot into interesting directions as I write. It’s a very organic process that doesn’t really end until I finish drawing it all.
2. What drew you to comics?
I read comics as a kid like most kids do. I enjoyed reading humor books like Garfield and Peanuts and Disney stories. I liked some Marvel comics but honestly, I mostly collected them and didn’t read too often. Discovering Manga and Anime in high school opened me up to the exciting world of Japanese comic culture and what seemed to me as incredibly different types of stories that western books never came close to. In college, I majored in illustration but I took a few comics classes and most of my friends ended up being cartooning majors so by the time I graduated I wanted to try making my own too. At that time in the late 90’s early aughts, the indie comic scene was really exciting and had a DIY punk rock sort of feel to it with styles and stories that defied the mainstream super hero comics that was so dominant back then. I was particularly a fan of the early Oni Press books so I tried to make my own humor comic along those lines. That eventually became Sidescrollers, my first writer/artist book and it was even published by Oni which really felt great. Also around that time more kids comic imprints were beginning to spring up and I thought my style of art would work well for that, so I started working on the Salt Water Taffy series, a sort of New England folktale themed boys adventure set of stories, and after doing five of those it sort of solidified me with kids comics, which I like of course. In a kid's comic you are almost freer to do whatever story you’d like without the constraints of the adult aimed comic market that expect things to be sort of gritty or HBO like.
3. Please tell us more about your upcoming book, Prunella.
I’m very excited about the release of Prunella and the Cursed Skull Ring this October 18th. Prunella is a girl who lives in a little walled off village on a forested island filled with monsters. The humans of the village all hate monsters despite most of them never having seen any. This becomes a challenge for Prunella when one day, while digging in her garden, she unearths a skull shaped ring that when she puts it on turns her into a skeleton monster. The village immediately banishes her to the wilderness where Prunella must figure out how to break this curse. Luckily for her the monsters of the island are actually very nice and kind and many try to help her on the journey to find a mythic monster who can break the curse. One of the things I’m most proud of in this book is that I hand painted the whole 158-page story in watercolor. It was a very challenging project because of this but it has such a beautiful mood to it which complements the fantasy setting so nicely giving it all a very studio Ghibli like feel, only in comic form. The entire book is really a painstaking work of art to me and is the most artistic feeling comic I’ve ever attempted.
4. Any message for young creators that you'd like to share?
Yeah, right now the kids book industry is booming unlike when I started out and publishers are all looking for unique voices and points of view for stories. This can really be a good time to try making comics if you haven’t before, or if you have, it may be time to try that personal project you’ve been thinking about for years. The kids comic industry does have its problems such as a focus on what kind of stories are popular and might sell at any particular moment, or what is perceived to be over saturation of a type of story, but even because of these sorts of challenges it is often better to just try and make what you want to make, not just what you think might sell. It’s all complicated, but when you are looking at drawing a 200-page book that could take years to finish, you’re way better off just making what you want to make.
Comments