Yesterday, Calvin Reid, PW senior news editor who oversees comics coverage, moderated a graphic novels buzz panel, “The Graphic Novels You Can’t Miss.” We asked the authors of his favorites—Blue Delliquanti, David Small, Ngozi Ukazu, and Tim Fielder—about their upcoming books.
Tell me about your new graphic novel. What was your inspiration for it?
BQ: Meal is a romance about a young woman moving to a new town, falling in love, and getting her dream job at a restaurant that serves insect cuisine. Eating insects is a topic that my cowriter, Soleil Ho, and I both kindled a passion for, and it’s a very exciting time to watch more cooks and restaurateurs in North America experiment with insect dishes and pay homage to the food cultures where insects are beloved traditional ingredients. Similarly, comics have become a vibrant medium to discuss food, lovingly render your favorite dishes, and educate your readers about the preparation of a meal or the origin of a cooking technique. I wanted Meal to be a love letter to the art of insect cuisine.
DS: I’ll quote from Roz Chast’s sensitive comment on my book: “Home After Dark is the story of Russell, a teenage boy abandoned first by his mother and then by his father. It’s about Russell’s adolescence but also everyone’s: learning who you can and can’t trust, the complexities of relationships with your peers, and figuring out who you are and the kind of person you want to be. [It’s about] Russell’s struggle to survive and not be crushed by the indifference or cruelty of the world.”
I was inspired at first by the stories a friend told me about his growing up in rural Marin County in the 1950s. That was also my era, though we had vastly different experiences. I thought I had a solid narrative until I realized I was trying to tell my friend’s story in his voice. When I finally found my own voice and put myself into the book, it morphed into a radically different kind of tale, one darker in tone and more honest.
NU: Check, Please! is the story of Eric “Bitty” Bittle, a former figure skater from Georgia who joins a college hockey team in Massachusetts. Bitty is this small gay Southern kid in a big new, hypermasculine, East Coast environment—and he loves to bake. There’s quite a bit of romance as Bitty falls for his brooding Canadian captain. I got the inspiration for Check, Please! while writing a screenplay about hockey my senior year of college.
TF: My graphic novel, Infinitum, is the Afrofuturism epic I’ve always aspired to do. I was compelled to do a book that was wide in scope, with all of the narrative tropes inherent in the best of hard and psychedelic science fiction. As a practitioner of the form, I also wanted to pay homage to the great science fiction writers and filmmakers who formed my view of the world.
How do you work? Do you start with an image, or images, or a narrative that needs to be told?
BQ: Because eating insects is an experience unfamiliar to many of my readers, I put a lot of thought into how I would present the story we wanted to tell. It was important to Soleil and me that we present the details of cooking these dishes accurately, and that we put our characters through a journey of understanding where their food comes from and how something on our plate goes from being a traditional dish to a hot local trend.
But as the artist, I also put a lot of thought into how to convey taste and flavor in a purely visual medium, especially for readers with no concept of how curried mealworms or honeybee larvae might taste. So I found myself coming up with signifiers to convey the idea of a warm comfort food, or a fragrant dessert, or a smoky fishy flavor. And that led to some very fun visuals.
NU: I wrote Check, Please! like it’s a TV show. We have the overarching narratives of Bitty’s four years at Samwell University, and I broke those years into semesters, and then finally episodes. I write my scripts before and during thumbnailing, and work on fine-tuning my dialogue while doing pencils, inks, and colors.
DS: My work often grows out of a single image or group of images, sometimes a single word or phrase, or all of these. I am definitely a visual thinker more than a verbal one.
TF: Infinitum began as an attempt to codify the field of Afrofuturism for the New York Times. After that project was aborted, I continued the work in full graphic novel form. A story fluctuates between visuals first or words first from project to project. The story determines how it wants to be told. I am completely digital in the story creation. As a result, my working process takes on characteristics similar to nonlinear editing. I remake the story as needed.
