1. How did you find your way to comics?
When I was a kid, as young as I can remember, I loved reading and drawing comics. I made up a comic strip called "Acronym" which was basically just Garfield except he was a bird instead of a cat. Instead of hating Mondays, Acronym hated Wednesdays. Pretending it was published in wide circulation, I drew a new one every day, collected them in books, drew wall calendars and holiday specials. I knew for sure I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up.
When I got older, I tried getting into superhero comics for a couple years, and then in high school I just grew out of it. I wasn't exposed to many comics for adults and 90s bookstores hardly had "graphic novels" sections. I grew disillusioned with my art classes and decided that writing would be my focus, not art. I had a lot of fun with writing that I no longer found in drawing.
Years later, I realized that it was because I'd completely dropped the storytelling aspect of drawing. All the drawings I made as a kid were in the service of characters and stories. But in high school it was just figures in space. A portrait, a still life, a three-point perspective exercise. Rediscovering comics as an adult made me realize what I'd been missing. A friend turned me onto an Alan Moore book and it made me curious about what else my library had. And I completely fell in love again, devouring everything on those four shelves. I didn't know what was out there or what my taste was, and just read everything I could find. After a year or so of reading, I really wanted to make comics again. And I soon found a home in comics communities, online and at festivals.
2. What is your creative process like?
A new idea comes with questions to answer, or problems to solve. When you have a problem, it's helpful to talk about it, and for me it's especially helpful to write about it. Writing about my problem in a letter or email to someone often leads me to an answer or perspective I hadn't seen before. I've turned this strategy into my standard writing process. I write a kind of letter to myself in a very conversational way. "So. I need to get from point A to point B. But if I just do this one thing, then it won't make sense because of this other thing. What if I do X and Y? Hmm. That might work but only if I can establish Z first. Hey, maybe if I put Z first then I can do this other thing. Part of me wonders if..." and so on. Being so informal about it frees me up to just keep writing, keep moving, and I always get somewhere eventually. And then I can write the story bits, sometimes continuing to add these notes to myself in between just to break the silence.
The goal is to get in that "flow" state which is hard to do by staring at a blank screen. I know no one will ever see this weird diary of mine and this technique guides me to a place where I can think more creatively.
3. What do comics allow you to do in informational writing?
Comics excel at communicating complex ideas and breaking down processes, making them more tangible. At MICE (the Massachusetts Comics Expo), I helped produce a podcast episode that explores how that works. There's a lot that could be said about this, so I'm just going to pick one aspect.
Personally, I love that First Second's Science Comics series leverages stories and characters to educate. At an elementary school talk I did, one of the students asked, "Are these books fiction or non-fiction?" The book I was presenting is full of true facts about polar bears but disguised in stuff I made up. Our polar bears are characters with their own names, desires, and anxieties, who grow and change. And they talk, which is not scientifically accurate. It's similar to the way kids learn about their world by playing pretend. It's fun but also functional.
Global warming is a big concept that a lot of us have trouble grasping. But by learning about transparent polar bear fur and the absorptive properties of their black skin, it becomes easier to understand how albedo accelerates climate change in the Arctic. In the book, we discover the different kinds of sea ice that make up the bears' world (I had no idea there were so many kinds of ice). And we realize that the ice isn't just the place they go to hunt; the microorganisms that live on the underside of the ice are the foundation of the entire Arctic food web. We follow the cubs as they learn how to thrive in their environment, and by the end we're rooting for their survival. The loss of sea ice becomes a very real threat.
I'm grateful that it can work so well, because stories and characters are really where my heart is!
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