An Interview with author and artist Nir Levie

1. Please tell us about your journey to making graphic novels

I have drawn comics since I can remember. It started with small strips and characters, and developed to full stories when I grew up. I chose to study architecture but managed to incorporate comics in my studies. I drew imaginary cityscapes and short comics as informational material for projects. After I finished my degree I decided to combine these images to a single coherent story. That was the inception of Outskirts of Vision - my first graphic novel. It was self-published and garnered positive reviews from critics. The book was a finalist in the International Book Awards. I developed my style with the theme of architecture as a main leading concept. For Mycelium Seep - my second graphic novel I decided to put the emphasis on transportation, but with an urban design point of view. It was published by Markosia in 3 volumes and was greatly praised by critics.

Since then I finished two more graphic novels - Tale of Supersymmetry (self-published) and Above Arid Soil (not published yet). I continued to develop my storytelling style and my art skills to differentiate myself from other writer/artist and create unique and thought provoking graphic novels.

When I first pitched BIORIPPLE I considered other publishers in mind. It was only when I heard Matt Medney - Heavy Metals CEO, speak in a podcast that I realized BIORIPPLE would be a perfect fit for Heavy Metal. One of my main influences is Moebius, Who was among the founders of Heavy Metal, the French magazine. Luckily they loved it and decided to publish it.

2. Your work is intriguing on so many levels -- what inspires your creation?

Dreams are my main influence. I usually write them down as soon as I wake up. Otherwise they tend to disappear. I see dreams as entities floating around and looking for hosts - human minds. They are precious things that need to be protected once caught. If I have a dream that I find especially interesting I would build a story around it. In BIORIPPLE I used a dream I had about an old lady living inside a tree. That led me to think about nature and technology, human consciousness and biology. I also draw inspiration from physics and science in general. I think my role as a storyteller is to try to explore themes related to our existence in the universe and I tend to investigate how science explains these questions. Sometimes I take a specific scientific study and use it as the basis for my comics. For example, In BIORIPPLE I wanted to draw all the panels from the perspective of the characters. The problem was how to insert the desired amount of information to a small comic panel. I used a study that suggested a grid based on the human perception of the physical space. Most of the drawings in BIORIPPLE are based on this study. I draw inspiration from other artists as well but try to present my unique take on their style in order to develop something new.

3. Please tell us about your creative process.

The first thing I do when writing a story is finding an idea. The first idea could come in many forms - in a dream - like I explained before, as a sentence, a drawing, sometimes it will be only a character, other times a theme I want to explore. The next thing would be to write a script structure. I would usually start with a visual scheme representing the different arches of the story, the plot, themes and characters with a basic timeline. After I’m pleased with the structure I would move to scripting the entire story - usually dividing it to different chapters. In this stage, I would rewrite a lot. I would reshape and design the story to best fit the original idea. Sometimes this main concept would evolve and change as well. In the writing process, I build the world, develop the characters and think about who’s telling the story. The next phase would be to design the characters and split the chapters to individual pages. In this process, I would thumbnail each page and basically convert the text to a visual page. I try to do it with the full script, but sometimes I would thumbnail each chapter individually. The next phase is sketching. I like sketching digitally so I could easily manipulate the image - cut and paste, scale, delete, undo. My sketches are pretty rough - I would only do character outlines and basic backgrounds. Most of the drawing process is done traditionally with ink. I print the sketch in A3 printer and with a lightbox, I ink the page and add shading, line weights, rendering, backgrounds, details, and sometimes screen tones that I custom make myself. For the coloring I switch back to digital. I work with a flatter who gives me a flat layer for coloring. This helps me assign the different colors to the elements in the scene.

4. What are the themes of human experience you most want to explore in your art?

I explore human technology and its effects on our lives. My main subject is architecture - but I investigate it from many different perspectives. I try to raise questions related to consciousness, determinism, physics, science and art. I am more interested in the questions than the answers. The plot of the story is a means to tell my idea to the reader. This idea can be sometimes amorphous and incoherent. I tend to rely on the reader to complete the story himself. I leave some of the themes open for interpretation. In BIORIPPLE I was interested in the concept of free choice as opposed to determinism. I was thinking that this contradiction is very relevant today but It’s also not new in any way. An old Jewish saying "הכל צפוי והרשות נתונה'' which translates poorly to "all is foreseen yet choice is given", was repeating in my mind. I was also inspired by Yuval Noah Harari who speaks a lot about this subject. The real danger of AI is that it will be so integrated into our bodies that it will be inseparable from us as beings, making us vulnerable to attacks and misuse by bad actors. In BIORIPPLE the AI, Geodesics, represents that idea.