I’ve known for awhile that First Second’s Editorial Director Mark Siegel would come to Minneapolis this winter. Until he arrived, I didn’t understand why.

Minneapolis, I now know, was the second stop on his “goodwill tour” (my words). Siegel is meeting with booksellers, organizers, librarians and students in an effort to promote comics readership and by extension First Second Books.

He’s reaching out to the people who matter in the comics world who we rarely talk about — the connectors.  People who are positioned to take comics seriously and bring new readers to the medium.  His travels have taken him to Seattle and Minneapolis so far.

Siegel’s tour may lead to other cities, I didn’t get his full itinerary, but I know he spent nearly a week in Minneapolis:

I attended a Thursday dinner where representatives from local bookstores, reading groups, writing centers and universities were present.  I see that he’s really reaching out; hopefully making a big impression on our local literary scene and reigniting excitement and interest in the graphic novel.

On Friday his time was spent largely with the folks at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), talking with seniors during the day and at night giving a presentation on graphic novels to a packed house.  The talk was sponsored by Rain Taxi (a literary magazine that also reviews comics and runs the Rain Taxi Festival of Books), MCAD and Big Brain Comics.

Saturday he delivered a talk on graphic novels to the Children’s Literature Network, an event that targeted librarians and educators and discussed comic editing and publishing at the Loft Literary Center.

Monday he stopped by comic shops around town, including Dreamhaven (closed, unfortunately) and The Source Comics & Games, and ran a workshop on creating graphic novels through the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators.

Tuesday he met with a group of public librarians through the Metropolitan Library Service Agency (MELSA), a library group that includes the majority of the metro area’s public libraries — including Hennepin County Library, one of the top library systems in the nation.

I was able to attend his talk at MCAD and have transcribed parts of it below.

Part of what I do is travel around the country and hit up important towns, talking to librarians and educators and a lot of writers and artists.

As the years wore on…what was the underground, I think it’s fair to say, gave birth to the indie comics scene. And the indie comics scene was maturing this idea of adult comics — but adult in the best sense of the word. In the idea that there are authors working here in this medium.

Teen and children’s librarians have been on board with graphic novels for a long, long time. Before booksellers, before publishers. Sometimes adult librarians are catching up.

If you look at music, movies, novels, poetry — it’s all 90% crap. But there are the gems and the stuff that stays that’s forever. And you meet another human mind, and your life is enhanced from that meeting. Whether that is someone you connected to through their prose or their comics it doesn’t really matter terribly.

To Dance is a book my wife wrote that was ten years of her life in ballet and we did this for middle grade girls, mainly. It’s a little comic book about her being in George Balanchine’s school while he was still running it and she was a young pre-professional ballerina. I tell this when I talk to librarians because, first of all, ballet disarms them a little bit, they don’t expect comics geeks to know even what ballet means. What was interesting was Sienna, she doesn’t really warm to comics and I don’t especially warm to ballet. And we were looking at this project — we’re both excited about it — but we both had to journey towards each other’s medium.

And my journey with ballet is a lot like other people’s journey with comics. With ballet I had to get a little bit of the vocabulary — because it’s a language — just enough so that I could sit through one then enough to appreciate how you read a ballet. Because if you’re looking for plot it’s painful, so you’re supposed to be looking for something else. You’re actually looking with a different part of yourself — you’re actually looking more with your feelings.

What happened with the ballet thing is I had a moment…Sienna pops in this tape of old black and white footage of Don Quixote. It was Suzanne Farrell as Dulcinea and George Balanchine as Don Quixote — him walking almost in slow motion and she’s doing this incredible dance all around him and [knowing some of the background of the performers] — I could feel that it was real. He was reaching for her and she just kept alluding him. The feeling was electrical it just shocked through my spine and I got it. What I felt just now is what gets someone hooked on ballet. And from that point on I was actually able to read ballets and from that point on I could get something from ballets, they could nourish me in a way they couldn’t before. And the reason is it doesn’t matter — it’s never going to be my favorite medium — but what came through that moment was the universal man-woman mystery, it’s human. It’s beyond whatever medium, it just comes through this moment, in this case ballet.

Basically, First Second is aiming to get moments like that into comics. There are more and more. For some people a book like Fun Home a book like Persepolis a book like Maus — now more and more books — are doing that. And it doesn’t have to be heavy. Sometimes it’s goof and it’s fluff or you know in our first year at First Second we put out American Born Chinese which tapped into a very universal immigration experience. And it suddenly entered into this bigger conversation and it wasn’t about whether or not you were into comics, it was just an important book.

In the last five or six years, in large part because of manga, all the large publishing houses sat up and took notice that there were millions of dollars changing hands and they weren’t getting that money. I happened to be right at the right place at the right time in a weird way. My first picture book had come out and it was in a comics form so that got a good deal of attention. I was at Simon & Schuster and acquired Little Vampire by Joann Sfar — a great, great children’s comic — and that was on the New York Times best seller list for awhile. Then this article came out about me — it was an interview but it made me sound like the messiah of the coming graphic novel — which I’m not. I think I’m not. I’m pretty sure I’m not. I was a designer doing picture books and suddenly I had interviews with the heads of the biggest houses in New York and the head of Macmillan was the one who basically offered me editorial freedom. I had a vision for what First Second would become — we didn’t have a name for six months — which was something uniquely American that could do for America what happened in Japan and Western Europe, which was to actually get into the mainstream reading household and stay there forever. And it wouldn’t happen in the same way as it did in France or Japan but it had to happen in a way that’s right for here. And there was a plan for approach. And Macmillan was definitely the place to go — so I went ahead!

So the vision for First Second can be summed up in these words: care and quality. Specifically care in the editorial process and trying to learn from the best editors.

It’s not the Marvel/DC school of editing, it’s the Maxwell Perkins the Ursula Nordstroms — the great, great editors who are the champions of authors and they also ask the tough questions of authors and drive them and hold them to their own highest standard — and we’re trying to do that at First Second.

The care during is the production of the books. We really try and pamper them in every possible way. And there are a few houses like Drawn & Quarterly that produce really beautiful books. We’re producing them in a slightly different way with a different angle but we’re also trying to create really beautiful books that are not pulp and are not throw-away, that are for keeps.

Care after, of course, is championing a book and trying to not let them go out of print. We banished the word backlist — it used to be that publishing houses lived on their backlist, it’s what sustained them. And then more and more the corporate model of publishing has moved into the more Hollywood model which is the blockbuster weekend and then it’s forgotten and we’re on to the next thing. And I think that’s a terrible tragic thing and it’s not right for books, or how we want to be at First Second.

Another pillar for First Second was a worldwide talent pool. I’m very interested in experimenting with bridging with other fields and that’s sometimes fraught with trouble but I’ve had some very successful experiments and some duds with a playwright, some screenwriters a novelist some historians, I have a naturopath nutritionist — there’s going to be a medical graphic novel coming before long, a couple of culinary projects, and stuff like this is bridging to other fields. We have writers from the Daily Show and Colbert Report. Foreign partnerships we’ve pursued aggressively from the start. I think American Born Chinese is getting up to 18 or 19 languages now. These are international editors that I know that I keep in touch with and we buy from each other. That’s part of the First Second idea.

If you look back at our first season with First Second it looks like we were all over the map — and we were. There was Sardine in Outer Space for 8 year olds and Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist on the same season and I think also the book about genocide in Rwanda, Deogratias. And a few people were wondering what is the program at First Second? But those things became the start of these broad avenues that we’ve kept exploring.

We’re doing every age category so we’ve got children’s, teen and adult concurrently within the collection. We’re not trying to corner a particular niche.

If you’re a librarian, Nancy Pearl is a rock star. She’s in Seattle, she has a TV show called Booklust and a series of Booklust books. She’s one of these highly influential librarians. She was the one who started Seattle Reads and all of Seattle read Persepolis and she’s been a great champion of comics and she’s done great things for First Second.

I think one of the things that distinguishes First Second is that we make an effort to play in all three of these markets — there’s the direct market, the comics world, the book retail and the library market and there’s interesting overlaps between them.

Some of the big publishing houses are good at the library and good with the book markets but they can’t get their act together with Diamond and the comic shops. Some of the indie publishers are good with the comic shop but they can’t figure out how to get properly reviewed by the book reviewers in mainstream media.

With webcomics we have a few experiments going. There are a few different kinds of webcomics — the ones that have been the most successful are the strip comics that are short, easy to forward and kind of self-contained. But then there are more and more of these long-form comics that are like the old-fashioned serialized story, and that’s what we’re exploring more of. I’ll mention these three: Zahra’s Paradise is being done with some Iranian dissidents. It’s being written about the events in Iran that are going on right now, starting back in the June 2009 protests and is a phenomenal story. The other is Sailor Twain or The Mermaid in the Hudson and that has a 19th Century plot to it, and seems to belong in that tradition of the old serial. There’s another one which I’m especially pushing to librarians which is Americus. It’s a banned book story.

Each one is basically an experiment in building a different kind of community around a project. It’s a very interesting thing.

In America it’s kind of a vexing thing. I wonder why do we have (other than our top tier of books) print runs around 10,000-15,000 for a first printing? And that’s better than some of the indie houses, but I think in a country this size it’s crazy. So I think there’s work to be done here. And maybe you guys can join into that but we need to find a way to crack America open. It needs to be that comics are in every reading household and maybe in some cases households become reading households.

I really do think the taste I’m getting from being here and talking to a lot of people is that the Twin Cities are ripe to make something happen for the whole country. I think if it happens here it will happen everywhere else.

I’ve been to Seattle, which for a long time has been the big book town, and I’m from New York. Certainly if you can make noise in New York that’s a feat in itself, that can launch a book.

Seattle can launch a book. Nancy Pearl has been known to do that. And she was the one who told me two years ago when I was doing a workshop out there, “Go to Minneapolis, you need to go to Minneapolis. That’s where it’s going to happen.” And I don’t know if you know that about your own town. Just in terms of books, Minneapolis is one of the great book towns.

So how does that translate into comics? How can you harness some of that Minneapolis power and make it go bang? Because I think if you can make it happen here it will spread through the librarians, to the booksellers to the comics community…it will happen.

You’ll find more photos of Siegel’s visit HERE.

Congratulations to First Second Books on its fifth anniversary this year!

- Sarah Morean

In this second part of our interview with Gene Yang, we speak in more detail about his latest book, The Eternal Smile, a collaboration with fellow Bay Area-based cartoonist Derek Kirk Kim, which collects two brand new stories and an old, largely forgotten fantasy tale, which saw a small run on Image Comics in the late-90s.

Yang discusses his collaboration, the impact of its predecessor’s success, and the difficulties of tackling ethnicity in comic book form.

[Part One]

It sounds like Derek initiated this collaboration in which you wrote the script and he illustrated. Was that sort of method something that had interested you before the project?

Yeah, I jumped at the chance to work with him. He’s a world-class illustrator. And it’s also the most physically tasking part of putting a comic together. One of the things I really like about comics is that one person can really drive a project. One person can really have a hand in every element, and I think that’s much different than other storytelling media, like animation. But I think when you’re able to work with another person who really has common sensibilities with you, I think it can work really well. That’s how I feel about working with Derek. Especially in that last story. He took a greater role in the last story. I storyboarded the other two, and in the last one, I wrote the story, but he was the one who wanted to break it up a little more into a panel layout. I think that really set the story better—it enhanced it a lot.

Then he didn’t play much a role in terms of developing a plot for the first two pieces?

Well, I think the plot was mostly mine. All of the characters were mine. For certain panels, I would have the camera shot in a certain way, and he would shift it in a way that he thought was more dramatic. When I storyboard, I storyboard for me. I storyboard almost subconsciously for my own limitations in illustration. He would come up with visuals that I just couldn’t draw, so he doesn’t need to tell stories in that way. He did a lot of that, where he would reshoot panels. But the general pacing and the panel layouts on each page were from my thumbnails. But in the last one, the actual panel structure was all him.

When he approaches you and says he wants to create a fantasy story from the aesthetic point of view, how do you approach that? How do you tackle such a potentially alien genre?

I actually wrote another story first and showed it to some friends, and it didn’t get a very good reaction. Duncan’s Kingdom was actually the second story that I wrote for him to draw. I think that was actually helpful to write a project that didn’t actually get finalized. At the heart of it, it’s not really a fantasy story. That was helpful, too. I haven’t written a straight fantasy story, yet.

There were some fantasy elements to American Born Chinese.

Yeah, I think so. I think it’s the whole magical realism thing, where you blend the two together. The whole “Monkey King” story takes place in a fantasy setting.

The second two-thirds of The Eternal Smile were done specifically for the book.

Yes, they were done after American Born Chinese and Duncan’s Kingdom was done much, much earlier.

American Born Chinese won all manner of awards and was really well-received in general. After having that manner of success, is it important for you to try on something new?

Yeah, I think I was a little freaked out by it. I didn’t really expect all of the attention that it got. I was just happy that it was being collected into a graphic novel by a great publisher. But I did get a little freaked out. It definitely changed my life, especially the support from teachers and librarians. So I was a little freaked out by the next project. I think working with Derek took some of the edge off, because I know, if nothing else, it’ll at least look pretty gorgeous.

Was it important to take the work in a different direction, story-wise? You get a little more legroom with short stories, because you don’t have to carry a piece out for 200 or 300 pages.

Yeah. I think that I do end up hitting lot of the same notes, though. One of the people I work with makes fun of me for putting a twist in each story. So there’s that element that I think I’m a little tired of that, by this point. But that’s where I was, and that’s one of the things that kept coming out when I was writing. I didn’t really want to explore ethnicity again, in the second one.

Is there a reason for that? Is it a hard subject to keep hitting, over and over again?

I think there are definitely other ways of hitting that. I’m dealing with some of those themes in the new project that I’m working on with another artist.

It’s something people tend to shy away from. Sometimes it seems hard for people to digest it, in the form of entertainment.

Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think that different generations perceive that  topic very, very differently, depending on how old they are, and what part of the country they grew up in. it can be a difficult thing to talk about.

You mentioned before that you were surprised by all of the feedback from teachers and schools for American Born Chinese. Is that something that you’re taking into account now, as you’re working on new books?

No, I don’t. I really, for the most pat have tried to keep my cartooning life and my teaching life separate, but nowadays they’re kind of convergent.

–Brian Heater

It was 2006’s American Born Chinese that put Gene Yang on the sequential art map. The book, an exploration of Asian-American identity situated at the cross section of cultural struggles, stereotypes and fantasy, was nominated for a National Book Award—the first graphic novel to receive that prestigious honor.

Yang’s follow up to that much lauded project is this year’s The Eternal Smile. The book—the artist’s sophomore work for First Second Books—teams him up with fellow Bay Area comics veteran Derek Kirk Kim on three short stories that explore the sometimes thin lines between fantasy and reality.

In this first part of our interview with Yang, we discuss his day job as a high school teacher, the roles he sees technology playing in the creation and consumption of comics, and how his collaboration with Kim first came about.

It’s loud on your end. Are you at work now?

I am at work now, but I was only supposed to be here half the day, so I’m working on my own time now.

What’s your day job, if you don’t mind my asking?

I work at Bishop O’Dowd High School—it’s a Catholic high school in Oakland. I teach computer science and I also do computer stuff for them, like managing their database.

So you do interact with some of the students directly?

Yeah, yeah. This year actually, I’m only here part-time. I only have one student in an independent study course.  Later this year I’ll still be part-time, but I’ll have one regular class.

Does being a cartoonist make you the cool teacher?

Uh, not really. There are actually three of us here that are cartoonists.

Oh yeah? Who else?

There’s Thien Pham. He does a book called Sumo. He’s with First Second, too. And then there’s Brianna Miller.

How did that happen that there are three cartoonists at the same high school?

Well, I got Thien the job and Thien got Brianna the job. And we all kind of know each other from the Bay Area comics scene.

Is that your background, computer science? Is that what you went to school for?

Yeah, yeah. That’s what I went to school for.

Has that had any influence on your work? You seem to draw comics rather traditionally, on paper, for the most part.

Yeah. It ends on my computer. It starts on paper, but it always ends on my computer. I don’t use White Out anymore. I do all of the corrections on Photoshop. I fill out all of the blacks in Photoshop, and I also don’t letter anymore.  I do that in Photoshop, too.

Do you create works specifically for the Web, or is everything targeted to ultimately end up in print?

I’ve done Webcomics before, but they’re always formatted for print. I’ve never done anything that wouldn’t work as a print comic. I’ve never used Scott McCloud’s “infinite canvas” or anything. I’ve always formatted the pages so that they’re printable. But I have done comics where it’s up on the Web before it appears in print form.

Is that something of a personal preference? Would you rather read something in print, in terms of your own consumption?

I definitely read way more print comics than Webcomics. But I’m actually starting to get into the iPhone. I just got the Kindle application. I don’t have an iPhone, but I have an iPod Touch. I think that’s actually a really good medium. But I’ve also gotten some of those Uclick comics for my iPod. And while I think there are some problems with it—because they mostly take print comics like Bone and format them for the iPhone—I really thank that it’s something really exciting to explore, comics for the iPhone and comics for the iPod.

You’re sort of working your way to that end, and you mention Scott, who’s obviously written plenty about the Internet as the medium. Is that a space that interests you, moving forward?

Yes, yes. I would say, not necessarily the Internet, but definitely some sort of handheld device, like either the Kindle of the iPhone. I would definitely be interested in that. I think that reading in front of a computer, a desktop or even a laptop computer, is still a little clumsy. But the portability of the Kindle or the iPhone really makes is so that it’s much closer to the print reading experience.

The Kindle, for the most part, seems to want to maintain that traditional page-at-a-time reading experience. The iPhone gives the reader more freedom. If you were to format something specifically for the iPhone, what sorts of things are you taking into consideration as an artist?

Well, the page size would be different. I think just the size considerations would be different, like the number of panels on a page and that sort of thing. And even the way a page turn works is different. I think all of those things come into play. And I think the use of color, especially on the iPhone, is important. a black and white comic in print, I think there’s something that feels very native. Most of what we read in print is black and white. When we read prose, it’s black and white. I think black and white comics in print really feel at home. I think black and white comics on the Web or on these portable devices feels a little bit more foreign. People are used to seeing so much color when they’re reading on the Web.

The iPhone has such a beautiful screen that you want to take advantage of it as much as possible.

Yeah, yeah. That’s definitely true.

The new book is out this month, right?

It’s out next Tuesday, actually. [Yesterday, -ed.]

How did you first start working with Derek?

Derek and I met at an Alternative Press Expo a long, long time ago—maybe ten or eleven years ago. And we became friends soon after that. At first we’d just go to cons together, and eventually we would draw together every week. We would have this thing called “Art Night.” So we hung out a lot. He lived in Oakland for a while and so did I, so we lived within walking distance of each other. Around that time he was working for an animation company that never went anywhere. But he was feeling really creatively stifled.

He wanted to work on a project where he didn’t have to write the story, where he could just provide the visuals. So we came up with Duncan’s Kingdom that was eventually released as a two issue black and white from Image Comics in the late 90s. Derek had been published by Antarctic Press before that. That was my first experience working with an actual publisher. That story was a lot of fun to do. Larry Marder was in charge at the time.

And then after that we just did our own projects for a long time, but we always wanted to do something together, but Duncan’s Kingdom was so short that it didn’t merit its own graphic novel. After we both hooked up with First Second, we talked to Mark Siegel, the editor over there, about putting together the sort of themes that we explored in Duncan’s Kingdom, but it would take things in a slighty different direction.

So you do definitely see a common thread between the three short stories in the book?

Yeah, I think they’re all explorations of the intersections of fantasy and modern day life.

When you were trying to figure out what to do with the first story, did the thought of expanding it into a full-length graphic novel occur to you?

We hadn’t actually thought about it. I think in the beginning, we just wanted it to be short, because we both had our own personal projects that we were working on. And then Derek wanted to draw something fantasy, because at the time he thought it was really fun. I think since then he’s moved into more of a cartoony style that he pairs up with naturalistic stories. But at the time he was really into fantasy.

Looking through the book, it seemed like an opportunity for him to try out as many styles in as short a space as possible.

Yeah, yeah. I mean I don’t know if he really wanted to try out the styles—I think he was more concerned about using styles that would serve the stories. I think he did a really incredible job.

Yeah, it really looks like a different artist did the three stories.

Yeah, yeah, it really does. I was really luck to work with him on that.

[Concluded in Part Two.]

–Brian Heater

The Eternal Smile
By Gene Yang and Derek Kim
First Second

It’s a testament, of course, to Derek Kirk Kim’s abilities as an artist that, upon first glance, there are no immediately discernable similarities between the three short stories that make up The Eternal Smile. The artist adopts a vastly different aesthetic for each of the three pieces—three styles which might easily be mistaken for the work of three different artists. It’s a testament to Gene Yang’s ability as a writer, however, that despite the works’ clear differences, its the unified nature of the three pieces that ultimately stays with the reader.

On their face, the three works could hardly be more different. Duncan’s Kingdom is a fantasy story, set upon the backdrop of a medieval kingdom under siege by an army of glowing-eyed frogmen. A hero is tasked with the destruction of said army, so that he might win the hand of a fair maiden. Kim adopts a quasi-fantasy style for the piece, at times taking cues from artists like Mike Mignola.

The artist’s style shifts abruptly for the next story. Opening with a cover page paying a less than subtle homage to Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, the second story, which lends its title to the book, uses aesthetics borrowed from American and Japanese funny animal comics to tell of a covetous frog who will stop at nothing in pursuit of fame and fortune.

The third story, Urgent Request, adopts a much softer style, telling Yang’s story of a lonely secretary through various shades of purple. It’s dark and stark, and despite the cartoonishly adorable appearance of the protagonist, Janet, the visuals do an effective job painting her lonely desk-bound existence.

Upon reading through the three stories the first time, one immediate thread begins to emerge: they all share Yang’s penchant for plot twists. All three open with a basic, largely familiar premise—nearly familiar enough to their respective genres to convince the reader to abandon the story, halfway through. After some build, however, Yang happily makes an abrupt shift, calling into question the reality he spent so many pages establishing.

It soon becomes apparent, too, that these two diametrically opposed forces—the real and the fantastic—are, in fact, at battle with one and other another for the heart and mind of the stories’ protagonists. The real, in each case, is fairly bleak scenario—the fantastic a technicolored escape from reality’s dregs.  In each case, Yang offers up an ultimately redemptive outcome in the struggle between the two, imbuing his characters with good decision making skills when tasked with determining their own fate.

In the end, it’s easy to see why each of these tales was relegated to short story status. While Yang has a point to make with each, he’s careful not to let any overstate their welcome, like a set of modern day fables all more or less hitting upon the same basic truth. While none is strong enough to warrant its own book, grouped together, the stories that make up The Eternal Smile are a journey worth taking.

–Brian Heater

“We’re sold out of Pop Gun War,” the comics retailer told me. “They’re teaching it at Portland State University.” 

“Teaching it?” 

 ”They’re using it in a graphic novel class.” 

I went to the fourth floor of Neuberger Hall and stepped into the English department office. The guy at the desk and a middle-aged woman were laughing about Moby Dick. My presence must have signaled back-to-work because she stepped out and the guy looked up brightly and supplied all the information about contacting Michael Ward, the teacher who had chosen Farel Dalrymple’s book, Pop Gun War. 

At 12:45 on Friday, I walked in Shattuck Hall and sat down next to a girl near the door. A group of 35 students spread out among four stepped rows of desks, each with a copy of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. I asked the girl next to me if Pop Gun War was on the syllabus. 

“We already read it.” 

She told me some people liked that the story was so open to interpretation, and other people didn’t like it for those same reasons. “We can’t analyze it because it’s so surreal, and there’s no plot.” She said the class tried to figure out the point, and some social implications of Addison’s story–-the way we treat the homeless. 

“Did the class talk about the author?” 

The author was compared to the puppet master character and she said, “That was the most the author was touched on.” Before the professor arrived I asked one last question, “Where did you buy the book?” 

“Amazon.” 

Amazon quotes Farel on Pop Gun War, “If you wanted to get literal, it is about an inner city boy, Sinclair, who discovers a pair of discarded angel wings. With these wings, Sinclair flies around the city and gets into adventures.” 

I got in touch with Dalrymple through a mutual friend and called him on Sunday at noon. I mentioned the classroom, and the author answered that he had once visited a graphic novel class that had read his work, but the students’ response had faded from memory. When I asked what he wanted to communicate to the younger generation, he said he just wanted to tell stories. “I have stories in me that I want to get out.” Dalrymple wrote Pop Gun War using his intuition, one issue at a time, thinking about the next one while drawing, but each chapter is self-contained. 

Now, he’s working on a story that will extend over more than 300 pages, and he just finished the first chapter at 30 pages. “The Wrenchies script took a long time,” Dalrymple told me. “It’s not a super tight script: it’s a plot.” He thinks of the characters first and then come ideas for stories and scenes. “The Wrenchies characters are fun for me. . . Sherwood is the funnest, and Hollis.” 

First Second will publish The Wrenchies in 2009. “Bernadette Baker got me the book deal,” Farel said, referring to his agent. “I don’t know if I could have got the book sold without her. She had the relationships with First Second.” As a graphic novel imprint of Roaring Brook Press in New York City, First Second is more established in the literary world than the three major comics publishers. An independent comic book artist can get lost amid the franchising deals of Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse. Not that independent comic books don’t see the light of the screen, but video games? “I was looking for a publisher that wants to do books, quality books.” 

Working from Jonathan Lethem’s scripts to create Omega The Unknown, a ten issue series for Marvel comics, Dalrymple had to draw smaller. “He is a very dense writer, very specific about panel layout–-how many on each page. The challenge affected the way I drew. . . I’ve worked with a handful of other writers. I make an effort to try to get exactly what they want on a page.” 

“I drew small, drew the characters really small. Now, I noticed doing that with Wrenchies, and it’s something I might have started doing anyway, but maybe not.” And to get the setting of the high school, Farel adds, “I had to use so much reference.” 

I remembered picking up Omega from the “local” rack at Bridge City Comics. I liked the book’s realism. I recognized the world. The illusion on the page filters the world through a stylized shorthand; it’s real cartooning. 

Jason Levian at Floating World Comics said that Dalrymple is pretty modest about his achievements, but to other cartoonists in Portland he is a hero of independent comics. From his small press comic being collected into a graphic novel published by Dark Horse, to a book with Jonathan Lethem for Marvel, and onto his own epic for a company that represents artists in the U.S. and Europe . 

Dalrymple went to the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France and seen the French edition of Pop Gun War. He admired the European aesthetic applied to his work. “The Italian edition is hardcover. It’s really pretty; it looked better than the graphic novel published here.” 

“When I first went to Angoulême, I met some guys from Belgium doing an anthology, an issue a week. It was rushed, but immediate . . . a cool attitude. It really impressed me.” Dalrymple went to that comics festival in 2000 with James Jean and Tomer Hanuka. “So when we got back to New York, we got together with Chris McDonnell and decided to put this anthology together to show our work.” They called themselves the Meathaus Collective and published an anthology. This year, they released the eighth edition of Meathaus. 

“People tend to look at a color book more,” Dalrymple concedes. He doesn’t necessary prefer color to black-and-white comics, but he has an illustrious brush. He uses watercolor and guache and says they’re the best medium for coloring comics. “I’m more proficient with hand coloring,” Dalrymple says; gauging that for him, it’s faster than using a computer. “I like the happy accidents.” Only a couple of his students are familiar with comics, but if you want to study with Farel Dalrymple, he teaches an experimental painting class at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. 

I caught up with Michael Ward as students disembarked from his graphic novel class on Wednesday. “I inherited the syllabus from a previous professor who taught the class,” Ward explained, adding that he started reading Pop Gun War before it was released as a graphic novel. 

“I was drawn to the surrealism,” Ward elaborated. “I wanted to know, is this narrative going anywhere, because there’s always this desire for the narrative to go somewhere . . . I don’t want to keep using the word ’surrealism’. The metaphorical art. The symbolism of the images. A piece that has meaning beyond the strictly narrative. You look at sections and see if they combine.” I noticed the students each had a copy of Fun House, and Ward added, “The meaning is a gestalt of the whole.” 

He explained that the class is set up to be a giant discussion; when presenting Pop Gun War to the class, Ward wanted them to think about this work in comparison with the other work that is narrative. “To consider if this is a graphic novel,”Ward told me, “there was some debate. You can’t define the category. We couldn’t come up with one definition. People working in this medium are constantly redefining what’s a graphic novel, and Farel’s book does explore that.” 

–Arthur Smid

[Above, what's that smell? Below, oh, just another Dispatch.]

• Toon Books has a couple of cool titles on the way. Eleanor Davis introduces Stinky and Dean Haspiel and Jay Lynch present Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever. The releases correspond to some events taking place around NYC. First off on Sept 5th, at Desert Island (Brooklyn, NY), Davis and Haspiel will be doing a reading, signing, and launch party. The following night the tandem will appear at McNally Jackson, NYC, with special guests Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. (Note: Mr. Spiegelman will not be signing. You can breath again.) Then Monday, Sept 8th at Jim Hanley’s Universe, Davis and Haspiel will do one more reading and signing if you miss the others.
• The LA Times‘ Dave Strickler  has compiled an online database of every comic strip the paper has ever run. The database lists run dates and some details for every comic from August 21, 1904 to present.
• James Kochalka redraws page 17 of Fantastic Four #9.
• Barack Obama didn’t pick Savage Dragon as his vice-presidential running mate, but no love is lost from the ol’ green fin head. Savage Dragon, a former presidential candidate himself and no stranger to bad-guys taking pot shots at him, will give the Democratic nominee his full-endorsement on Sept 3, when Savage Dragon #137 hits newsstands.
• Everything’s going digital, so it’s not a wonder that publishers are looking at a variety of models for delivering what you love most, comics, digitally.
• Robot Dreams makes Oprah’s kids’ reading list.
• Always wanted to see your favorite comics in the backdrops of your favorite TV shows? Now’s your chance!

–Jason Owen