Popular teen author Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles) is among the many YA authors making a move to graphic novels with The Good Neighbors: Kin, the first of a three volume series, an urban fantasy inspired by a true story of murder and faerie mischief. The book, which has art by Ted Naifeh, was released this month by Scholastic's Graphix imprint.
Black explained that she has always been interested in the story of Bridget Cleary, an Irish woman who was murder by her husband, Michael Cleary in 1895 on suspicion of being a faerie changeling. She was fascinated with the idea that someone could be taken and replaced with a changeling.
“This isn’t a retelling of that store,” said Black. “What I wanted to do was tell the story of a girl named Rue whose mother has gone missing, and the police think her father is guilty of the murder of a different person.”
Rue, whose mother is missing at the beginning of the story, must determine whether she believes her father could be a killer, whether her mother could be something other than human and where these revelations leave her. Black explains that by the story’s conclusion, Rue has realized that she can have an effect on her world and the people in it.
“She’s stumbling toward heroism; she’s stumbling toward what her role is in the world and whether or not she can handle the burden of knowledge that has been placed on her,” said Black.
Black says she’s been writing two different types of series up to this point; The Spiderwick Chronicles which is much younger and her modern faerie tales which are older and far grittier. The Good Neighbors falls in between her two existing sets of works, and allows her to draw on the same faerie folklore in different ways.
“I think the thing that I always come back to with writing about fairies is that people often think of fairies as being tiny, sparkly, girly,” she said. “Faerie folklore is so rich that people wouldn’t say the word faerie because they were afraid that the fairies would take notice of them.”
In faerie folklore, the term “the good neighbors” was used to describe faeries without saying their name, and with the hope that faerie would hear kind words and pass by without causing any mischief.
The concept behind The Good Neighbors was something Black had tossed around because she really liked the story of Bridget Cleary, but wanted to do something more visually intense, ultimately deciding on a graphic novel. Black said she has always loved comics and considers them to be a formative part of the reading experience. Learning to write them, however, was hard though Black enjoyed both the experience and the challenges.
“It’s really great to be able to do something in this format and challenge myself and learn something new and make mistakes and hopefully make something I’m proud of,” she said. One of the big adjustments was the inability to set the mood through description. It requires you to “really trust that other person,” she said in regards to working with an artist. She was very pleased to have worked with Naifeh, creator of How Loathsome, Courtney Crumrin, Polly and the Pirates, and many other acclaimed graphic novels, saying that he did “an amazing job.”
“When I went to meet with the art director at Scholastic he was at the top of my list and he was actually at the top of their list too,” said Black. “I was so happy because I know he’s doing a lot of his own stuff and he’s really busy.”
Naifeh said the story had taken him by surprise, he found it to be both intense and mature and yet still relatable to teenagers, explaining that he enjoys mature stories about young people.
“I liked that it didn’t talk down to the readers,” he said. “It seems like it’s kind of about learning to forgive your parents for being imperfect, for being human as it were, although in this circumstance it’s not literally.”
Before beginning work on The Good Neighbors, Naifeh worked on the Goosebumps graphic novels for Scholastic, and experimented with a style that lead him to develop the look of The Good Neighbors. By trying to “blend the Courtney ascetic with How Loathsome” he created something gritty and dark, yet at the same time lyrical, using his line work to create a contrasting, dualistic environment.
“I wanted to do something that was really intense, almost ugly world and at the same time almost soft and beautiful,” said Naifeh. “This wasn’t really a funny story. It wasn’t cute, it was supposed to be very dark, very serious, and almost emo. I wanted it to be emo; I think it’s a phase that kids go through of taking the world very seriously.”
“I wanted to go the opposite of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he said with a laugh. “I’m really happy with the way it came out; the line work was really pretty and had this dark; it’s scary and it’s a little punk rock looking.”
Naifeh said he feels it the job of comic creators to experiment artistically with things that would not ordinarily be seen or heard in other types of media.
“One of my rules for comics is on some level do something that mainstream media hasn’t done yet or is afraid to do,” he said. “I think its [The Good Neighbors] going in a direction that I haven’t gone in before. I’ve done children’s books and very adult books.”
The trick, Naifeh says, is to handle the mature concepts found in the series from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know how to handle them, someone who is suddenly forced to confront entirely new realities and deal with conflicting feelings.
“I remember being a teenager and feeling exactly like that,” he said.
