1. What initially drew you to comics?
I’m often the odd one out in my professional groups because I grew up pretty exclusively on comic strips. Bill Watterson and Dav Pilkey were my earliest influences, like that was the first time I read a comic and was like “this is significant and I am too tiny to understand why.” I actually didn’t get my hands on a long-form comic until late-ish middle school, and it was scattered manga volumes of One Piece and Bleach and Fullmetal Alchemist as I could acquire them (or skim at Borders before the clerks kicked me out). The solo aspect was a definite appeal, like I just really love looking at art alone and analyzing it, and it’s easy to pick up and put down, which is great for my ADHD brain.
Side note, I love this question because it’s a pun, and I think it should always be worded exactly this way when talking to cartoonists.
2. What message(s) do you hope to send through your work?
Oh, god…haha. I mean, there are definitely strong messages but it’s not usually something I enter intentionally. Writing doesn’t really feel like “creating” to me, it feels more like excavating or sculpting–I find myself asking “what is this trying to say?” more than I am deciding what I would like to say. It’s like my subconscious horks up this disgusting conceptual mess and my job is more to scrub it down and chip away at the gunk until something nice shows up. It’s not a process that I have a lot of agency over, and I’m often arrested by ideas that won’t let me go until they’re realized the way they want, and compromising or forcing things is physically painful.
A lot of the writing process is really just elaborate diary-writing where I add something into the story because it “feels right,” have no idea why, and have to deconstruct the emotions around it before I can figure out why it’s there and what else to do with it. Like…I’ve been writing my next book, The End of Baz Arcadian, thinking it was a story about relapse, but just recently realized it’s a story-vomit of all the things I have found hard about sobriety: being bored but overstimulated, repressed but extremely weird, wired but tired, and chased by the demons I befriended while drinking. On top of that there’s a lot of existential weirdness amidst my experiences with psychosis, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and spirituality. It’s an incredible absurd mess. I hope so, anyway. But the point is that it wasn’t my decision for it to mean that, I just had to decode where my instincts were already going.
Royale is pretty light on messaging, largely just because I wanted something fun. But in it there’s a 6’4” butch-transfemme private investigator from New Mexico named Deedee, a feisty transmasc with wicked ADHD, a using addict, a recovering addict, many neurodivergent people, nuanced queer relationships including polyamory; and themes around abuse, class, individualism, and capitalism that all exist in that “fun” package. I think in a lot of ways I just want to romanticize my immediate world, which looks a lot like that. But my only consistent agenda running into things is to be authentic and useful to the public in some way, and I think Royale does that simply by being a genre romp for the weirdos. Everything else is extra.
3. How did you develop the look for the YA graphic novel My Riot? It’s very different from your Webtoon Original series Royale: The Prussian Blue.
Yeah, they’re super different comics. They’re both historical-ish fiction and have some counterculture elements to them, but My Riot is a story about third-wave feminism, music, and Heterosexual Teen Feelings™ while Royale is a goofy queer crime thriller set in an alternate 1970s.
I think that looking at My Riot, it’s pretty obvious I referenced zines and punk show flyers. The biggest challenge was striking this balance of a DIY or punk aesthetic that still would be approachable to people who aren’t necessarily “in the scene,” especially teen girls. And then that needed to be flexible so the ballet scenes felt very graceful and conventional, and then effortlessly switch to chaotic punk shows. It seems like it should have been a massive balancing act, but I don’t know, there was just enough aesthetic overlap between “90s ice cream shoppe aesthetic” and “sXe show in a shitty dive bar” to make it work. My biggest worry was that real punks would think it’s contrived, but they’ve actually been some of the book’s biggest fans. When the reviews came out there was just this outpouring of affection for my work and it was just hugely validating since it was my debut OGN.
Royale is different. I definitely took some cues from Tintin and Lupin III, but the aesthetic here is mostly functional. Each “episode” is about 10 pages of content, which normally would take me 8+ weeks to finagle. But these need to be done in half the time or less, so I’m embracing more simple shape language, trying to cut out as much redundancy in the process as possible. Myself and the colorist, Hank Jones, come at things more like animation, where the backgrounds are drawn separately from the characters in black-and-white and he assigns the colors afterward. It’s just a lot easier for me to make blocks of shapes that vaguely suggest a background than it is to fully draw them out. I focus most on staging and character acting, and Hank backs up the staging and nails the “mood” of each scene, so even though we have less time we’re still making something impactful.
My next project, an urban fantasy satire, has an even more specific approach. That’ll be in nib and ink wash, way more of a Franco-Belgian angle on things. Truthfully I’m approaching each page like a magic spell, and that’s very nerdy, but the book is about magic, so it feels fitting. (That’s The End of Baz Arcadian, which myself and my agent Maeve MacLysaght are pitching again soon.)
Image from https://www.emmettcomix.art/sketchbook/baz
4. What do comics allow you to do in creating and storytelling that you can’t do in other mediums?
Work alone and draw pictures! I mean, that’s the big thing. I just love the meditative process of making comics. My agent lets me disappear for days, weeks, months at a time then dump a stack of stuff on her desk, and that’s just how I tick best. I’d actually started both a film and animation track in high school but it became clear pretty quickly that I don’t have the stamina to keep up with those kinds of production atmospheres or the social politics of networking there. Comics lets me tell the sort of rich, imperfect stories I want to without relying on others as much. And I guess sort of branching off of that, I like comics in general because you can get really clear visions from creators with way less interference from Production. Meaning, there’s less money involved in comics than in TV/film, so you often get riskier and more experimental work because there’s less on the line.
Comics are uniquely good at telling certain stories too, I think. Something I’ve always thought is special about this medium is that you get the richness of storytelling that comes from visuals, words, sound, and motion, but the reader gets to digest as much as they want 100% at their own speed. You can skim a page in 10 seconds or obsess over the details for 10 hours (which I have done when analyzing others’ work). You can do that with film and animation, but you have to interrupt the design by pausing or extracting individual frames. Whereas that’s built into the framework of comics–we want you to take control of your experience and timing, it’s part of the whole thing. So I think you can get greater layers of nuance too. Clarity of vision, generally more agency for creators and readers, and more layers–I guess that’s really the essence of what I love about the craft.
5. Where can we find more information about your work?
I have a formal website, which is www.EmmettComix.art. You can read Royale for free on Webtoon right now at www.webtoons.com, and My Riot is most likely available through your local bookstore or comic shop (if they don’t have it in stock, they can order it for you).
Unfortunately, we’re still a few years out from seeing The End of Baz Arcadian, but I post updates to my Patreon when they happen.
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