1. What is your author/creator origin story?
When I was a little kid, in elementary school, I had really bad asthma and allergies, which kept me at home in bed a lot. This was before the Internet and Nintendo, of course. I’d entertain myself by reading comic strips like Peanuts and Garfield in the newspapers, and even got pretty good at drawing Garfield in particular. When I was healthy enough to go to school, I’d spend any down time drawing Garfield. This would’ve been around 3rd and 4th grade. Other kids would see me drawing Garfield and they’d ask me to draw him for them, and eventually so many kids asked, that I said “give me a dollar and I’ll draw Garfield.” As it turns out, when enough kids give you their lunch money for drawings of Garfield, the school will find out when enough parents complain about their children coming home hungry and the school realizes they’re throwing out a lot of school lunches that didn’t get purchased in the cafeteria. The school called my mom and told her I wasn’t allowed to sell drawings of Garfield anymore. My mom didn’t think the school could tell me I wasn’t allowed to earn a living, but she also thought this was a good time to teach her kid about copyright. She told me that if I wanted to sell drawings of cartoon characters, I’d either need to get permission from the original creators, or I’d have to come up with my own. So I came up with my own! I started selling photocopies of comics I drew with my own characters, and this time I told kids to not use their lunch money to pay me.
2. What draws you to comics?
It’s the combination of words and images working in unison to tell a story that does it for me. I like words just fine, and images can be great on their own, but put them together and it’s like peanut butter and chocolate!
3. Please tell us about what graphic novels like yours can do for young readers (and older ones like me, too).
I would hope that graphic novels like mine does for young readers what comic strips and comic books did for me as a child, which was engage my mind in a way that other media did not. There is a level of creativity with comics that, to me, feels closer and more tangible, from a viewer’s vantage point, than prose or music or film. As a kid, I would look at comics and think, “I can do this.” All I needed was paper and pencils and I could start making a comic. They inspired me in a way when other artistic forms of expression felt unattainable, either by the need of an instructor, or an instrument, or equipment. And I think this can apply to older readers as well. But if nothing else, I hope my books make people laugh. :)