Celebrate kids comics with Q&As with fantastic children’s
cartoonists for Children’s Book Week! Join us as great authors talk
about their own creative work and the graphic novel industry throughout
April and May. Comics for kids are reaching a time of unprecedented
acceptance in the American literary scene, and it’s now true that there
are comics for everyone. All interviews are conducted by Jorge Aguirre
and Rafael Rosado (Dragons Beware!).
~ Follow the tour HERE ~
Children’s Book Week, (May 4-10, 2015) – 96th annual celebration!
Children's Book Week is the annual celebration of books for young people and the joy of reading. It is the longest-running national literacy initiative in the country.
Children's Book Week is the annual celebration of books for young people and the joy of reading. It is the longest-running national literacy initiative in the country.
In 2015,
official Children’s Book Week events
– including appearances by beloved children’s book authors &
illustrators, children’s open mic nights, read-alouds, book-themed
costume parties, and much more – will be held
in all 50 states. Photos from last year
here. Event attendees receive complimentary
Children’s Book Week posters and tote bags. You can see how the celebrations for 2015 are shaping up
here.
Children’s Book Week is administered by
Every Child a Reader (ECAR) and the
Children’s Book Council (CBC) is the anchor sponsor.
More.
RAFAEL/JORGE: Hi, Kean, thanks for answering our questions and great to cyber-meet you.
Where did the idea for Jellaby come from? He seems like a character that was somehow fully-realized from the get-go.
A: Jellaby basically came out of a series of
sketches over the period of several months as I was working to come up
with ideas for a graphic novel for younger readers. I knew I wanted to
write a graphic novel for kids, but I had no idea
where to start. So at that point, I was just having fun: just drawing
things I enjoyed, like robots, monsters, that kind of stuff.
I found that when I kept going back to my
sketchbook, I would always be drawn back to one drawing of a girl
hugging a hideous monster (that monster would eventually become Jellaby,
but he was far more grub-like and horrible-looking in those
early drawings). I started asking questions about these two: Why would
these two be hugging each other? Why would they be friends? How did they
meet? Out of those questions, the characters and story started taking
shape, and I was off and running then.
Can you talk a little about how Jellaby's story evolved from a web series to books?ON:
A: The intention from the very beginning was to get
Jellaby published in print, but at the time (late 2004, early 2005),
there really weren't that many avenues for a comic for younger readers
to be published -- Jeff Smith's Bone had only
just wrapped up in its original black & white run, and we were only
just starting to see manga and graphic novels trickling into actual
bookstores. It was a totally different landscape back then, and only 10
years ago!
It was a great coincidence then that Hope Larson
was also looking to publish her first graphic novel, Salamander Dream,
and we decided to band together to start a website with a daily schedule
and post the pages of our graphic novels there,
with the intent of finding a publisher through this website.
Hope's book found a home almost immediately with
Oni Press, while Jellaby took a little while longer, but I was
eventually contacted by Calista Brill, who was then with Hyperion Books.
It's kind of astonishing how bold we were, looking
back on it now.
Your work-in-progress, "From Toronto to
Tuscany" is an autobiographical web series/graphic novel. There seems
to be so many great autobiographical graphic novels, and we can't wait
to read about the rest of your journey through
Italy. Do you find that something about the medium of graphic novels
lends itself well to autobiographical tales?
A: I think it's the simple fact that cartoonists
draw things with their own unique style, and that immediately gives the
reader a sense of how the author sees or interprets the world. It's a
faster, more direct way into the author's mind,
and it's something that new readers can really latch on to -- it
certainly is the case for me as a reader!
What’s your working process like? Do you write a full script, an outline? Or are you scripting with thumbnails?
A: I generally start with a detailed outline, and I
just go straight to thumbnails, working out the staging and dialogue as
I go along. This usually leads to many false starts and multiple
revisions of my thumbnails, but I actually tried
writing a traditional script once, and as soon as I got to the
thumbnails, that script went right out the window anyway as I discovered
more visual jokes or other interesting story beats in the thumbnails
themselves.
I actually find that my brain only works in 40-page
chunks, so it's no coincidence that my chapters (and in the case of my
new project, whole books) are only about 40 pages long. I work in these
40-page chunks, writing then refining each
chapter to a certain point where I'm happy with them, and then I'll
move on to the next 40-page chunk. The overall outline keeps me on
track, so I know not to stray too far with each chapter.
My workflow is probably pretty frustrating for an
editor (just ask Calista Brill, who was the editor for my two Jellaby
books before she joined First Second (Hi Calista!)), but I honestly find
that working this way lets me keep things loose
and, most importantly, more fun, and I hope that's something that comes
across in the final work.
What are you working on now?
A: I'm putting the finishing touches on my new
graphic novel series, MARCH GRAND PRIX, which is being released this
summer, in August. My elevator pitch for this series: Hello Kitty meets
The Fast and the Furious -- cute, anthropomorphic
animals racing cars. I pulled from a lot of my childhood loves and
poured it into these books, everything from those Incredible
Cross-Section books to Richard Scarry to racing video games. I'm very
happy with how these books turned out, and I'm excited for
people to read them!
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