Interview with Barney Smith of StoryComic fame

Barney Smith of the fantastic StoryComic site (https://www.storycomic.com/) was nice enough to have me on his show! And unlike some other radio/podcast shows, this was actually done live in front of the camera! Video! Shocking!

What is truly amazing to me is that Barney has now done 289 (!) episodes of his show. That’s 289 interviews of all kinds of writers and artists, many working in comics but certainly not everyone, and he does it with humour and grace along with a boatload of great questions, too. And since he’s based in Vermont, he’s also done a special subset of episodes that deal with creative folks that live in that state (I think about 42 episodes in that category). That is one hell of a lot of work and, as I noted to Barney, I’m not sure how he does it. A love of the medium certainly helps and he has that in spades, but still… I get tired just thinking about how I’d handle that many interviews, especially given all of the research and energy that goes into it.

And, of course, The Center for Cartoon Studies is based in White River Junction, Vermont. That’s important because the school, as they note on their website, “centers on the creation and dissemination of comics, graphic novels and other manifestations of the visual narrative” as is one of the few that do that sort of thing in North America. See? How cool is that?!

So, what do we chat about? Well, not only my background in art and comics, but also how I approach telling the stories I do. We’re talking art here (and by art I mean “art” that’s very broadly defined). In other words, there are no right and wrong answers to how one makes art. There are just tools and different approaches and a great deal of learning. Whew, boy, the learning truly never stops and that’s one of the joy (and, okay, one of the occasional pains) about art. I was delighted that Barney was interested in talking about this, mainly because I think it’s one of those things that can kinda get glossed over. In other words, how one (as a creator) thinks about and approaches the story they are trying to tell is very important. It’s very easy to confuse or otherwise lose the reader and, at least for my own work, I rarely want to do it and never want to do it by accident (for those interested, one of my most abstract stories is this older one, that really needs to be read at least twice to really “grok” what it’s about).

And, of course, we take a pretty deep dive into WOLF’S HEAD, my ongoing comics series, too. (and pssst! Don’t forget to check out the new snazzy trailer for it, too!)

Okay! With that out of the way, here is the interview itself from YouTube (and if this doesn’t play for you, you can jump directly to the interview on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P-TMAfNxMY). Alternatively, there’s also a terrific podcast version that you can listen to — or even download the .mp3. That’s on PodBean at https://storycomic.podbean.com/e/episode-289-wolf-s-head-when-an-ai-baby-teams-up-with-an-ex-cop-von-allan-exclusive-interview/

I hope you enjoy it! And many thanks to Barney for having me on to talk about a medium I love so much!

Lightly-Edited Transcript

Barney Smith: Welcome to “StoryComic Presents,” where we interview amazing storytellers and artists. This is episode 289. I’m your host, Barney Smith of StoryComic.com. We’re truly excited to have with us the internationally acclaimed artist and highly talented creator of “Wolf’s Head”, Von Allan.

Von Allan: Hello!

Barney Smith: Von, how are you doing?

Von Allan: I am doing good. Thank you very, very much for having me on.

Barney Smith: This is great. So I read “Wolf’s Head” and I am really excited to talk to you about that. And so do you want to give people a little bit of background on how you got into writing comics and creating stories and also a little bit of your synopsis of “Wolf’s Head” as well? Because it’s a pretty interesting story.

Von Allan: Sure, sure. I’ll do both. I’m weird, I think, with a lot of comic book creators, particularly artists, because I did not draw as a kid.

Barney Smith: Wow.

Von Allan: I actually came to art very, very late in life. I didn’t start till I was about 25. And a lot of that was, A) I was very insecure. And I really felt, particularly as a kid, that artists were kind of born and not made. And that you sort of knew you were an artist from when you popped out into the world. And when you did that you — it’s a cliche — almost being born with a crayon or a pencil in your hand.

Barney Smith: Right.

Von Allan: I kept that sort of the stereotype that “I couldn’t do this.” I mean, I drew a little bit as a kid, but it never went anywhere. And I certainly didn’t grow or what have you. And I wound up working at a bookstore when I was around 20 years old, in my early 20s. And it was an independent bookstore. And I met a lot of writers and some artists through the course of that with book events and whatnot. And I talked with them. And it sounds so naive now, but in talking with them — I’d ask them pesky questions and stuff, because I’m nosy and I was curious. And it was dawning on me, slowly but surely, that writers and artists have bad days. And it is not something that necessarily comes easy to everybody. And yeah, there are the “Mozart’s” of the world that are geniuses and what have you, but a lot of people struggle. And through trial and error, you get stronger as you do this. So you have to maintain discipline, and you have to learn, you have to have an open mind.

So I basically was starting to absorb this. And I sat down with a copy of a book called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards, sort of a legendary book, and literally started to learn to draw. And I found I liked it. And I found that her book — and I still fondly remember that book — has a really interesting way of helping you, as a non-visual artist, start to learn how to do things in a really — and it’s amazing because it’s a book; it’s not like you’re in her class or anything. It’s a book — she has a really intuitive way of helping you get over a lot of the insecurities and frustrations that can happen with learning to draw.

So that was the starting point. And I ran into sort of a really quick quandary after that, because I was like, “okay, I can draw a little bit. I’m not very good yet. And I know there’s a lot I still need to learn, like anatomy and perspective and what have you.” But I want to do comics, because I had a love affair for comics as a very young kid. I mean, I started getting into comics when I moved to Ottawa when I was around eight years old. And comics for me were a significant escape because my mom was not very well. She was dealing with schizophrenia. There was a lot of mental illness and poverty. I found comics when I moved to Ottawa, through meeting friends and whatnot. And I got introduced to comic book stores and I just fell in love with the medium. But I never… I never thought I could do this. And when I was starting to work with “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” at the bookstore, I was like, “okay, well, this book is great, but this is… I don’t know how… I don’t even know the vocabulary of how to do this.” In the West, I mean, not so much in France or Japan, obviously, or anything like that. But [comics have been] dismissed as an art form. And to do comics well, you need to know figure drawing. You need to know colour for colour work. Certainly, brush and ink or pen and ink work for inking. Your perspective, colour and light theory and how that interacts. There’s just so many things you have to learn and then be able to kind of create a synthesis with. And that took time. That took a lot of time. And there were a lot of false starts and whatnot before I started to get even decent at it. And I look back and I probably showed my work before I was really ready for prime time. And my initial work that’s out there was pretty rough, but you learn by doing, you have to put it out there and you fail. You fall on your face all the time, and you get stronger and you keep going.

There was something about it. And I can never quite articulate what it is about comics and about art that — despite the difficulties and the frustrations and whatnot — didn’t stop me from keeping going. It took a long time to get to a point where I feel now, I’m a professional. The quality of the work, I think, is pretty strong. My draftsmanship is a lot better than it ever was. It’s just… it was a fight. It was a big fight.

So turning to “Wolf’s Head”. “Wolf’s Head” is probably my most mature work in the sense of me as an artist. I felt I could handle a story like this where before I don’t know if I could have. My earlier stuff was a little bit autobiographical, though from a fictional lens, and then some kids-oriented stuff, but I was still struggling. And with “Wolf’s Head,” a lot of things sort of came together where I felt I could do it. And the story is about a young woman named Lauren, who is kind of down on her luck and she is struggling with trying to find herself. She had decided to be a cop and realized, to her horror, that this is not the world that she wanted to be in, but she still wanted to help people. [Helping] as some sort of the most aspirational versions of what policing can be. And when she realized that [policing] wasn’t “it” for her, she quit. Quitting meant, “Oh my God, I don’t have any money. I come from a poor background. What am I going to do?” And just as she’s trying to work on this stuff, it turns out that her mom — who is working [as a] low-paid janitor — discovered, to her amazement, that there is this new life form that she doesn’t really understand, but what basically turns out to be an early form of an artificial intelligence.

And one of the things I really wanted to do with the story is not do a stereotype of [AI]. It’s funny; I started it before all of the contemporary stuff about AI is in the news, but I wanted to do sort of like the anti-”Terminator” or anti-”Star Trek,” where [those stories are] like, “Oh my God, this robot is going to replace humanity and wants to kill everything.” And I was like, “I wanted to do a story about an AI that is a baby that’s learning and growing and actually has a great deal of affection for human beings and is learning.”

Barney Smith: And so you, did you kind of fall in like, you know, basically like Asimov’s “Three Rules Of Robotics” in a way for this AI to follow a bit?

Von Allan: No, I didn’t. I didn’t do it that way because I started off with the AI. So basically the corporation wants to use the AI as a war-fighting machine. And what they didn’t really realize is that this AI has zero interest in doing that and was already struggling against it. It’s not even to a point — the Asimov “three laws” situation wouldn’t even apply because it was designed — or the hope — that it would be used to kill. It would be used to harm human beings through direct actions.

Barney Smith: Right.

Von Allan: What interested me, when I was sort of brainstorming the story itself, was I was like, “what happens when somebody — in this case, a machine — is put into a situation where they want no part of that. And what do they do when the corporation, in this case, is not willing to allow them to find their own pathway.” And a lot of the tension of the story is Lauren’s developing awareness that the AI actually is decent and that it’s not a trick or her mom hasn’t made a catastrophic mistake. And Lauren starts to, slowly but surely, develop a lot of affection for the AI and that affection is also reciprocated back.

Barney Smith: So, for those that are listening should check out the show notes. Go to vonallan.com — and that’s a V O N A L L A N.com — and check out a link to the book “Wolf’s Head”, because when we’re talking about an AI and we’re talking about robotics, it’s not like “Iron Giant” or anything or an R2D2. It’s not an actual physical robot. It’s almost this liquidy kind of T-1000 situation here.

Von Allan: Yep. Yep. And that was done relatively deliberately to sort of play with that. I debated, “am I going too far?” But I think it works, in the context of the story, fairly well that this thing — and I will see how far I can get with it, but it’s one of the fun things — was I wanted a baby. To have this not fully formed thing that you could really, as a reader, judge it too much because the form of it itself is really indistinct. So, if I hadn’t made it — well, “Iron Giant” is a good example or any type of classic robot with “hard edges” or what have you — it might seem more either malevolent or people might read into [it] more personality. And I wanted that to be a very strongly developing aspect of the story that what it is and what it looks like and how it manifests is sort of fluid because it hasn’t found itself yet. It’s still working on this thing, with the sort of the loose idea that the corporation behind it sort of gave it these abilities that even they themselves can’t quite understand how it happened. One of the plot points of the book is [that] the man who nominally invented it, a guy named Jeremy Hamilton, can’t figure out how he did it. So he can’t replicate it. And he is frustrated to no end that he can’t figure out why this thing does what it does and not what he programmed it — or thought he programmed it — to do. And that’s part of the fun of the story too.

Barney Smith: So it’s kind of like a ghost in the machine kind of analogy on that too, as well, then?

Von Allan: Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but in some ways, yeah. It becomes more of a subplot in the series, but this man who is desperate to be able to recreate this thing because he was sort of, “okay, fine. This stupid thing is on its own out there. Okay. We’re going to work to get it back, but don’t worry, everybody, I can replicate it. I, I, I, oh, I can’t. Oh my God. Like, what do you mean I can’t.” And then he’s, “well, we’ve got to get that stupid thing back. And I’m ripping out my hair trying to figure out how did I got to get this thing work?” And he can’t. So it’s kind of fun to do!

And what is an antagonist, but an antagonist who’s baffled by what happened and cannot figure out to save his life. And it’s fairly existential because he works at a corporation. He is very high up, but he has people he still answers to. And there is sort of a running plot is that they have expectations and they want answers. And he can’t answer them because he doesn’t know what the hell happened.

Barney Smith: And so talk about the world-building aspect on this. Is this something that was kind of — almost like the shape of the AI — was this an organic experience for you as well? Or did you already have an outline for the full story arc ahead of time?

Von Allan: Yeah. Well, the way I write it’s, it’s a little bit different. In a way, this is very contemporary. Like a lot of people, I tend to write in arcs. So I had a pretty good idea of broad stroke ‘beginning, middle, and end’ of where I wanted the story to go. Where I think I’m a little bit different — and I don’t mean this in a good or bad way — is I really like the power of sequential storytelling. So in a periodical comic form, I have a strong belief that — I guess the technical phrase, a literary phrase, would be ‘episodic closure’. For the most part, I like having something in an individual issue have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So that was not as a blueprinted out or clear cut for me. I didn’t, so as I approach an issue, that is something I solve on an issue-by-issue basis. So I had broad strokes of what Lauren’s situation was, what her mom’s situation was, the situation with the AI, the situation with Hamilton. But part of the fun for me with doing the story is it’s not like I’ve scripted out — like in the case of the first book, like the first collection, the first six issues, which is what they were — of that story. Each story — each issue, rather — was sort of built as its own story with enough threads that continue to build, hopefully, so that by the end of the book — or the end of issue six — you’re like, “wow, each stands on its own, but something more is developing.”

I’m always hesitant. I think people sometimes will be like, “well, if you start referencing titles you like, you can get pigeonholed of, ‘oh, well, that’s a silver age thing, or that’s a bronze age thing.’” And it’s not so much that. I like stories that have episodic closure. And I actually looked back at people like Charles Dickens for this. When Dickens was writing — people forget this now — his work was serialized.

Barney Smith: Right, it was episodic.

Von Allan: Yeah, it was very episodic. And one of the concerns he had — and I did a bit of research on that. It’s very similar to contemporary serialized comics — is, “okay, I’m going to have this ongoing thing.” I think “Pickwick” was like over 20, 20 different issues. “So, how do I make sure that people can jump on board on any type of issue and — on top of it — get something satisfying so they will hopefully come back.” So I didn’t want to just look at comics, I wanted to look outside the medium of comics and go, “okay, well, how have other creators in similar but different art forms — like prose or literary fiction or what have you — handle how you do episodic storytelling.” And I kept coming back to Dickens, because I found actually a fair amount of research actually has been done on this, where they talked about his — scholars now talk about how — he was working on building episodic structure with episodic closure at the same time. And it’s fascinating to me. It’s endlessly fascinating. And I find it very interesting that — and I don’t mean to judge them because there are advantages, too — with the so-called decompressed storytelling, that that aspect, particularly with modern corporate comics — Marvel and DC and whatnot — that seems to be a bit of a lost art form compared to previous decades, where you will often pick up an issue of whatever and you’re in the middle of a storyline [and] there’s nothing to orient a new or lapsed reader to help you understand what’s happening in that story. And often the story doesn’t have an ending. It has a “things have happened” and you have to buy the next issue or the next series of issues to get the resolution. That might be fine for a trade paperback or a graphic novel collection, but I think it damages somewhat — and to what degree is an arguable case — but I do think it damages how people actually interact with the form of comics.

Now that doesn’t mean, and this is why I always have to be careful and it’s a hard thing. It doesn’t mean that I’m arguing for every single comic that’s ever done by anybody should be a beginning, middle, end story. You can read them in any order. No, no, no. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that there is a way to build what I would call subplots. I’m not sure if that’s the correct term, but longer narrative hooks that take longer to resolve, but still give some degree of closure of a story in a particular issue.

Barney Smith: Right.

Von Allan: And that “Wolf’s Head” is really my first attempt to put that into practice, to see what I can do to do that. It’s hard for me to judge it, but that is definitely part of my sort of storytelling thesis going into it. And I’m pretty happy with it, but readers will have to be the ones that, as always, have to judge this stuff.

Barney Smith: Where do you see the future of comics?

Von Allan: I think as a medium, it’s very healthy because I think there is something about the medium of comics. And one thing I always like to point to is that it is remarkably democratic as an art form. Even with something like animation, which in some ways is a sister to comics, it’s very difficult to do anything but very short animations by yourself. There are software tools now that are facilitating that — an individual person could do more — but it’s very hard. And so I think there, there’s something about the medium of comics. If you’re working traditionally — paper, pencil, ink, or markers, or something of some sort, and with some type of way of scanning it either with a camera or a scanner or whatever — you can put your work out there. So I’m worried at all about the medium of comics.

Barney Smith: Okay.

Von Allan: What exactly that looks like, what type of format we’re talking — if we’re talking print or online and how the panel arrangements work — that’s a separate issue, but comics — that sequential nature — I’m not concerned about. The industry, particularly in the West, is a completely different question. I mean, there’s been so much just recently, the distribution changes with the ending of Diamond’s monopoly.

Barney Smith: Right.

Von Allan: You know, DC first breaking away. And then Marvel not completely breaking away from Diamond, but going with Penguin Random House. Image just recently going with Lunar. The industry is in a great deal of flux. And part of it is if you ever look at the pricing — and I did a little essay, about a decade ago now, even a bit longer, just looking at the prices of what were then contemporary comics against the United States’ Federal Minimum Wage, and the ability of people purchase periodical comics and it’s incredibly unaffordable just from that point of view. And that’s not so much a critique of the prices of comics; I think some people misinterpreted that. It’s also a critique on how crappy wages are for people. They can’t afford to buy literally all that much because I think — correct me if I’m wrong — I think [the US Federal Minimum Wage] is still $7 and 25 cents. And that’s awful for human beings to actually live on, let alone buying things for pleasure or what have you.

At the same time, where the industry has really diversified is libraries and bookstores and online marketplaces and what have you — not to mention getting into WebToons and different structures of how comics look and being able to read comics on your phone or on a computer of any sort. That is so different than — obviously the technology is different than when I was a kid, but the idea that libraries and bookstores would be carrying comics. I vividly remember — and I actually used to work at the Ottawa Public Library when I was a teenager — they didn’t carry comics. They carried a little bit of bande dessinée for French language kids. And there was not all that much. And I still point to “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” not so much because of the content — though that’s obviously very important — but because it won a special Pulitzer Prize. And when it won the special Pulitzer Prize, it helped put comics — it wasn’t the only thing — but it certainly helped put comics on the map for sort of the more literary — like, “ooh, wait, wait, I thought they were just superheroes” or whatever stereotype you want to use. And then certainly Jeff Smith’s “Bone” and on and on and on. There’s just been a transformation. There were picture books for kids, and there were obviously illustrated prose novels, but publishers like Scholastic were not doing comics of any format of any type.

That’s been just a quantum shift in not only what gets made, but where it’s positioned and how kids can find them. Kids are not reliant on going into one of the 3,500 or so comic book shops; there are a lot of other places where a kid can find a comic. And that’s wonderful. And I think online — particularly with platforms like WebToons, but old-school webcomics — is probably going to do nothing but grow. And that is, I think, very healthy for the art form.

Barney Smith: What do you enjoy most about being a comic creator?

Von Allan: Honestly, I think the biggest thing is challenging myself often to see what will happen next. I love learning. One of the things I find most rewarding about the art form, broadly speaking, is I like learning as a writer and I like learning as a visual artist. So, not that long ago I did a deep dive. I found there was a weakness in my work with some of the way I was approaching tones and values. And I revamped how I was approaching colour. And I also revamped more recently — it’s not so much in those issues of “Wolf’s Head” — how I was approaching using value, specifically like hatching and some zip-a-tones. I was looking at both how manga artists and then traditional artists like Wally Wood and what have you were using it. And I tried to learn, I tried to explore what I could do with it and how I can incorporate it into my own style. And I find that always rewarding.

And the same with writing. I’ve learned how — hopefully — to better approach writing a story and breaking a story and approaching it both in an episodic way and then in a more arc-based way. The funnest thing is seeing how an issue is going to turn out.

The best way to define this is by an example. So “Wolf’s Head.” The first hard cover is the first six issues, [but] I’m working on issue 18 now of the ongoing series. And those are mostly on digital format. And where I’m at now I never thought I would be in [this] narrative place for “Wolf’s Head” when I started writing issue one. And that’s a lot of fun for me. Lauren has gone places with the story and the situation with her mom. There is a dog that’s also a main character in the story — her mom’s dog — that plays a big role. And it’s just the story. That’s one of the things that excites me about sequential storytelling is it’s a lot of fun, and I’ve done it, to do a ‘beginning, middle, and end’ graphic novel that’s designed as such. But sequential storytelling — figuring out where the story is taking you — is, for me, always exciting. It’s a great deal of fun. And it’s that I really think, at the end of the day, is: I wrap an issue and then I’m like, “huh, geez, okay, I got to figure out where the hell I’m going with this next. And what’s going to happen and how this is going to play out. And what are the consequences?” Like, I love asking questions like that. And that is a truly exciting part of what, for me, makes comics comics.

And you can capture the same thing in a novel or a film or whatever. But there’s something about the pace of comics. There’s something exciting about that magic of how comics go. It’s such a unique art form compared to so many others.

Barney Smith: What I love about your work is you really do well with just having engaging conversations between characters. Talk to us a little bit about how that process is of how you actually write dialogue for your characters.

Von Allan: Well, the dialogue is actually — this is kind of funny — one of the things I realized… When I was working on “Wolf’s Head” — more so than previous work — I kind of did a breakdown — so this goes also to learning — I did a breakdown on both comics from the 1960s and different eras [compared to] contemporary comics. And I did some research to try to go, “exactly how many words — captions, speech balloons, even thought balloons — how many words can you put on an individual comic book page, standard form, American/Canadian-style. What becomes too much? What doesn’t? What works? What’s the happy balance?

So I started from there and I made detailed notes. I literally broke down every single page that I would use. Everything from a splash page to sixteen panels. I sort of worked out, “okay, based on an overall word count, which is around 235 240 words overall. How does that break down on a panel-by-panel and balloon-by-balloon basis?” This is fascinating! Something really interesting has happened with the medium of comics. And at the same time it started to dawn on me that artists like Steve Ditko — and even Jack Kirby to some extent — were often using nine panel pages. Like Ditko was renowned for it and even Kirby was using six, seven, eight, nine panels. There’s not a hard and fast rule, but they would often use a lot of panels. And that’s another thing that has changed with a lot of contemporary American English-language comics. A lot of comics are down to three or four panels. So less words, less panels.

Then, of course, one of the big ones is the way the gutter space is defined. That wonderful space between panels that help you actually navigate comics. The sequential storytelling of this — and people like Scott McCloud have written about this quite a bit — is there’s also been a weird fusion where there’s so many “design things” and overlapping of panels and almost the elimination of the gutter space. I would argue [that] in many ways the comics are a lot harder to read.

Okay, that gave me some “ballparks” of what I needed to look at. So when I write I tend to overwrite dialogue. So in the editing process — using all the guidelines I just spoke about — I’ll tend to bring it back down. I basically did quite a bit of research and just sort of my own affection for certain authors and whatnot. You know, it’s sort of the classic — “If I read out loud some of this dialogue and close my eyes, could I tell who’s talking.” You don’t want all the characters to sound the same. So Lauren is a good example; she speaks in a particular way. But her mom has a pronounced sort of French accent, particularly when it comes to swearing. So she tends to swear in French. And the two women do not — hopefully from my point of view — do not, at all, sound alike. And that sort of carries on. Hamilton has a more — I don’t know if aristocratic would be the right way — but a more privileged language. So he tends to use bigger words, not very many contractions and whatnot. I sort of played this game through it all. And then the AI — because the AI is a baby and is learning — the AI actually generally speaks in musical tones. And playing with that was sort of interesting, too.

So the rhythm of it becomes a — how to say this. The structural approach is “I’ve got this scene.” Okay, so I’ve written a scene and I know how many pages I’ve got for this scene. So just to pick something: I’ve got three pages to do this scene because, when I broke down the issue, this is what I what I gave it. This is what this scene has to accomplish. These are the characters that are in this scene. And this is the thrust of what’s happening — these are what Lauren wants to do, these are the obstacles she’s trying to you [solve], whatever. So then it’s trying to figure out the best way to use dialogue to get across where she’s at, what she’s trying to do, who she’s talking with, and their situation. And in the back of my mind, I sort of leave notes to myself constantly, to remind me. “Does the reader understand what I’m trying to do?” Because to me — and again, this is not a right or wrong thing. Comics are art. So there’s no right way or ‘one size fits all’ policy. But for me, I want my comics to be very comprehensible. I don’t need to read a scene or read an issue and go, “what? What the hell just happened? Who are these people and what are they doing? I don’t understand.” So that, for me, is anathema, unless you are doing it very, very deliberately, you have a very specific point in mind. For me. There are no rules; it’s up to individual creators to solve this or to tackle it. But that’s sort of what I think about. What is the function of the scene? What am I trying to do with the story? And, you know, how does the dialogue… And I don’t know. I mean, dialogue is in some ways its own art. So if you’re asking me, “well, how do you choose?” I don’t know. The characters… It sounds good to me. I try to verbalize it and make sure I read it out loud so that it has its own kind of rhythm and it doesn’t sound mechanical. It sounds like an actual human being would talk, but that’s probably one of the hardest things to do.

Was it Cormac McCarthy? I think it was Cormac McCarthy who removed almost all punctuation — quotation marks and what have you — so you very rarely read, “Bob turned to Fred and said, ‘quote,’” and “Fred said in reply to Bob”… you don’t get that. He kind of throws you in. And that can work. With comics, you’re always going to have the speech balloon. So it’s a different thing. But I never want to lose readers. I want readers to be able to understand what I’m doing, what I’m saying. And at the end of the day, my feeling is if somebody doesn’t like my work, that’s okay. If somebody doesn’t understand my work and is baffled with it, then I failed. Then I’ve just terribly failed. And that’ll bum me out for days, because if you like it or if you don’t like it, but you understand it? Good. We’re good. If you read it and you’re just like, “I don’t understand who these characters are. I don’t know. Lauren? I don’t understand what her motivation is or what she’s trying to do.” Like that. That’s the worst.

So I try very hard — and I’m very lucky because my wife is a professional editor and she works for the government. She’s had a great deal of editing experience. And so she always is looking at my work and I sort of pester her with these type of details. And I could get you the issue. I don’t remember it offhand. But Jim Shooter, back when he was Editor-in-Chief at Marvel — actually did in a couple of his little columns — talked about what, for him and therefore for Marvel at the time, made a good story. And it was things like, “do characters have clear goals? Are they trying to accomplish something? Are they failing?” And on and on and on. And I tend to think about that type of stuff a lot, to make sure that goals and motivations and obstacles and whatnot are very, very clear. Not in a hopefully didactic way or I’m hitting you over the head with it, but in a way that, if I’ve done my job right, it’s very, very subtle. And the reader is oriented in a way that they’re never questioning why these things are happening. I always want things like that to be very, very clear, but very, very intuitive as you’re going through the story.

Barney Smith: Let me ask you, Von, if people want to pick up your book and read this, where’s the best place they could go to right now?

Von Allan: For the book, for the hardcover, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anything like that, because they have them. They never stock them deep, which is one of the tricks about being an independent author. They are never going to have tens of thousands of them in stock or anything, but they’re easy for them to reorder and there’s no problem getting it. I know it’s a hardcover. It’s a bit more pricey, especially as an independent. But if people are also wanting to try “Wolf’s Head” more inexpensively and don’t mind reading digital, it’s easy to find on Kindle, as well. And then, you know, on top of it, there’s excerpts on my website. And I have also short stories I’ve done and all kinds of stuff like that, too. So if you people really want to sample for free and just want to sort of get a sense of how I draw and how I tell stories and whatnot, there’s all kinds of short stories on my website that people can take a look at.

Barney Smith: Good. So Von, listen, when you get volume two to come out, you got to come back on, because you and I can literally talk for hours.

Von Allan: Yes.

Barney Smith: We can talk for a long time about this and just incredibly impressed by the fact that, as you said, you’re basically a self-taught artist and your work is amazing. So congratulations on that.

Von Allan: Well, I mean, that’s lovely. Thank you. It’s such an exciting time for comics, and that’s not to say there aren’t frustrations and there aren’t difficulties with it. But it is such a wonderful time for comics. And I hope people are just always reading them and always passing on recommendations — word of mouth — because find stuff you love and share the love.

Barney Smith: Because it’s a good point. If you find something you love, you got to share it.

Von Allan: Yeah. It’s got to spread like an infection. And again, in the best sense of the word. That’s is one of the things that I love. And I’m weird because I’ll read stuff from the 1930s or right to the present. I’ve got my hands on like old Fawcett Comics right to you [comics] translated from Japanese or Korean or French and it’s right to the present. Damn, that’s fun! You know, that is so much fun!

Barney Smith: All right. Well, thank you so much, Von. This has been great.

Von Allan: Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.