In February 2023 my niece Cosmo asked to do an interview with me for
a school project. We chatted for about 25 minutes and Cosmo had a
number of really good questions. I’ve been wanting to share the
interview for quite a while, but since Cosmo is technically a minor
it makes it a smidgen tricky to post the full video. But! Why not
post a transcript of the interview instead, with a few screen shots to go with it? Yeah! What follows, then, is a
lightly-edited transcript of our interview where we talk about my
journey creating comics and graphic novels.
It was a lot of fun to do, especially when Cosmo asked me a pointed
question about the “fellas” who watch over me in my
studio! You’ll have to read the piece below to know exactly
what I mean, but I wasn’t expecting a question like that!
The Interview
Cosmo: Hello
and welcome to my interview with Von Allan. He is a graphic artist
and also my uncle. Hello.
Von Allan:
Hi!
Cosmo: Today
I will be asking questions about your career and possibly other
things.
Von Allan:
Okay. I will do my best to give you good answers.
Cosmo: Okay.
So… Question one. How did you start making comics and graphic
novels?
Von Allan:
Well, I’m a little bit weirder —
or my situation is a bit weirder —
than a lot of people. Because a lot of times you will hear interviews
with artists and they are saying things like, ‘oh, I drew from
the time I was two years old, and that’s what I did.’ I
was not that guy. I did draw when I was a kid, but I
didn’t draw [after that]. I didn’t have a lot of
self-confidence when I was a teenager. I was pretty confident about
one thing and that was I would not be able to draw. I didn’t
know how to draw and I would never learn to draw.
So I wound up
working at a bookstore in
my early twenties, and what was really neat about that experience was
I met a lot of artists and —
primarily —
a lot of writers. And I talked with them. And I started to
realize that being an artist of any stripe, broadly speaking —
not just a visual artist but a writer or what have you —
you’re not hit by a magic wand when you’re
born and you have these skills and everybody else doesn’t. I
learned that it’s work, it’s practice. You
struggle, you’re going to fail, and you get stronger as you go.
So, I always liked
comics. I was really into comics when I was young. And I was kind of
frustrated at the bookstore because I wasn’t paid very well.
And I decided that, ‘hey, maybe I can learn to do this.’
And I literally started drawing with a book called “DRAWING
ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN” by a wonderful writer named
Betty
Edwards. And I started to teach myself to draw.
Cosmo:
Interesting. Shall we move on to the next question?
Von Allan:
Yeah.
Cosmo: Okay.
Question two. Who or what really inspired you to make what comics you
have?
Von Allan:
Well, this is tricky because I think a lot of times what style is and
what we’re inspired to do is sort of almost subconscious. Like
it’s in the back of our heads, not in the foreground. But there
were a lot of artists I liked. As I learned to draw, and as I was
struggling to learn to draw, I was learning a lot about visual
storytelling. And one of the things I started to realize was that
some of the stuff I liked when I was a kid followed —
I don’t want to say ‘rules’ because I don’t
feel like there’s a lot of rules to art —
but certainly used kind of ‘tools’ that made me
like [these] comics. And I started to like their stuff more so than
other people’s stuff.
I started to explore
that a bit. ‘Why? Why do I like story “X” versus
story “Y” even though a lot of people like story “Y”?
I’m not so crazy about it.’ By trial and error and by
learning, I started figuring
out my own approaches to doing it. And I could rattle off
artists that I like and what have you, but it was more an approach
to what inspired me. An approach to comics, an approach to how panels
work —
the gutter space between panels,
why that’s important. And I started kind of
experimenting with my own stories, typically short stories, and
started figuring stuff out.
And I mean, part of
the thing is you never stop learning. So I’m learning to this
day about what works —
or what I think works —
what doesn’t work and why I think it doesn’t
work. And the learning and the inspiration never stops. I still find
stuff I really like, brand new stuff to this day. And that’s
part of the fun of doing art and being an artist.
Cosmo: Hmm.
That sounds good. Okay, next question. Can you tell us about one of
your graphic novels?
Von Allan:
Yeah, well, I’ll say the most recent one because it’s the
one I put a lot of time into. It’s a story called “WOLF’S
HEAD.” And it’s —
I never know quite how to describe it —
it’s set in the real world, in our time. It stars a
young woman named Lauren who is trying to figure out what to do with
her life. She’s in her early 20s and she’s living in
Detroit. And she winds up, through her mom, making a sort of a
stupendous discovery of this sort of sentient artificial
intelligence. And it’s really young; it’s basically like
a baby. So it has a personality and it’s also trying to
discover its way in the world. And she becomes friends with it and
she starts helping it. And through helping it and trying to protect
it, she’s learning more about herself and having a number of
adventures as the story goes on.
So I’m 18
issues now in, it’s been done in a few different forms. But I’m
starting to put them out in hardcover. So the first hardcover,
collecting the first six issues, came out a little while ago. And I’m
just starting to get ready to put the second one together. So yeah,
I’ve been working on that for like five years now.
Cosmo: I will
feature that in the video when I edit it.
Von Allan:
Okay.
Cosmo:
Question five. How exactly did you teach yourself to draw?
Von Allan:
Through a lot of trial and error. A LOT of trial and error. I’m
not kidding. I sat down and I didn’t know how to draw at all. I
could barely make a straight line. I didn’t know anything about
anatomy or storytelling or what have you. And I started with a book,
like I said, “DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN.”
And I… The problem with that book is that it’s really
good at teaching you to draw what you see. But it’s much
harder, particularly with comics, to try to figure out what’s
in your head and get that down on paper, as well. The ways that
comics versus other forms of visual art work.
So there was so much
trial and error. And I looked at… There are people,
particularly with the internet, people that talk openly about comics
creation. There were people I liked. So I wound up kind of looking at
other people’s work to sort of try and learn. Honestly, one of
the best people was a guy named Jim
Shooter, who was the Editor-in-Chief at Marvel Comics decades
ago. But he is a really… He’s a writer, not an [active]
visual artist. But he worked with a lot of visual artists. So he
spoke a lot about why
certain things work in comics, why other things don’t work
in comics, and things to think about.
So that helped on
the comics front, and then [I did] a lot of my own experiments. And
then, for things like anatomy, you start with anatomy books. And you
go to lifedrawing. I did a little bit of lifedrawing
classes at the Ottawa School
of Art. And I just, slowly but surely, made my way.
You have to be open
to try things, even if things will take you down blind alleys. So I
did a lot with watercolours. I did a lot with brush and ink, black
ink, to sort of figure out ways of approaching things. I tried
different tools that sometimes didn’t work so great. And you
learn by doing. You learn by failing. And you have to really
keep an open mind with this stuff. And you kind of muddle your way
through. So it was not overnight. Oh boy, it was not
overnight. But you do get stronger at it.
Cosmo: Yeah,
like, I’ve been drawing since I was four years old.
Von Allan:
Yeah! I never did that. I stopped. So, I’m jealous.
Cosmo: But I
taught myself more than when I was younger.
Von Allan:
Yeah, absolutely.
Cosmo: So,
next question. When did you decide —
how old were you when you decided you wanted to make comics
and graphic novels?
Von Allan: I
was around 26. So, I was a lot older than a lot of people are. But I
mean, one of the things that’s really neat about anything
creative —
visual art, writing, acting, anything —
is unlike something like athletics, there’s no age
limits to it. Often times with athletes, particularly professional
athletes, there’s a “window” of time where you get
into your 30s, particularly your mid-30s and older. And it’s
much harder. It’s much harder physically to be able to do it.
But art — anybody can
do art from the time you’re a little kid to the time you’re
really old. And there’s no age restrictions. I mean, there
might be something physically wrong, like a disease or some type of
limitation. But for the most part, people can make art right to the
day they die. And that’s one of the things that’s really
neat about art, because there’s no restrictions.
Cosmo: Next
question. How long does it take to make a full graphic novel?
Von Allan: So
long. So long. It’s hard to talk specifically about an
individual graphic novel because it depends on how many pages are in
it and what happens. So broadly speaking, what I try to do is pencil
and hopefully ink and letter a page a day. I don’t always hit
that. So that means I’ve already had to come up with a script
and story before that. And that is even harder to kind of pin
down.
If I have an idea in
my head and I’m building on a previous story…
So with Lauren and “WOLF’S HEAD”, because it’s
an ongoing and I’m doing them sequentially as comics first,
digital comics first. The stories are about 18 to 20 pages long, give
or take. So… It takes about a week to write one to the point
where I have the dialogue in place, which is the key thing. For me,
the [number of] panels, the page count, and the dialogue is the key
stuff. So, once I have that, I’ll actually start laying it out
—
typically digitally —
and then I’ll start drawing it. And I work a combination
of digital, as you know, and then some traditional stuff with pencil
and paper. And if I’m… if things are going well, it’s
about a page a day.
So for an individual
comic, that’s about 18 to 20 pages. We’re looking at a
month. A while. Yeah. And then if it’s a six-issue collection,
then it’s six or seven months of work to put out a six-issue
collection. Yep. So it’s not for the faint of heart because it
is a slow process. And that’s not even getting into things
where you screw up or you make mistakes and you have to start over.
Which does sometimes happen, too.
Cosmo: Who
are some of your favourite characters?
Von Allan:
Well, I really like Lauren in “WOLF’S HEAD”. And
I’ve done… because I’ve done some different
stand-alone graphic novels before that and some short stories and
whatnot, it really ranges. Like there’s two wizards, a guy and
a dog that I really like. Both are wizards, Bill
and Butch, that I have a lot of affection for.
The first graphic
novel I ever did was called “the road to god knows…”And
that was sort of a fictional autobiography because the main
character is female. But aside from that, she’s very much me.
And her name was Marie. And that was very much about me growing up
with my mom who was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was very
young and some of the experiences I had. I wanted to go fiction for a
variety of reasons, but mainly to give myself a bit of distance from
the real stuff I had been dealing with when I was a kid. But yeah, so
Marie is a character I really, really like.
And there’s so
many. I mean, it’s... what’s weird about storytelling is
so many of the characters are aspects of me. Even if they’re
not… like Marie is probably the closest to me as a character
I’ve ever deliberately set out to write. But, you know, Bill
and Butch are humorous stories. They’re kind of like comedy
sci-fi. And they have a lot of my smart-ass sense. There’s a
lot of smart-ass attitude in them. And even some of the more
stand-alone stories I’ve done in the past, there’s all
aspects of me in them. So I like them all. There’s no character
I’ve ever written where I’m like, ‘ew, I screwed
that up or whatever. I don’t like that character.’ I
mean, there’s antagonists, like the bad guys that are not
people I would ever want to hang around with. But they all still come
from me. And they had story purposes for being in there. That’s
part of the fun.
Cosmo: And
for the next question, it’s kind of a follow-up to that
question. How exactly do you create a character?
Von Allan:
Well, it’s tricky. It usually starts with…
Typically… how do I say this? Again, it’s tools, not
rules. But what I try to do is I have a protagonist. So in the case
of “WOLF’S HEAD”, it’s Lauren. And I always
try to figure out what does she want to accomplish in this story? So
what is she trying to do? What are her goals? And then I start
trying to figure out obstacles to those goals. And then I
[determine] what Lauren does to try to get around those obstacles. So
the obstacles can be internal; like she’s scared of something
or she’s angry about something. But they can also be external;
[for example] where she doesn’t have enough money. She needs a
new car or something like that. And when you create obstacles like
that, you give your main character opportunities to take action to
overcome them. You wind up having a really active character, a
really active protagonist. They’re not just reacting, they’re
trying to do stuff.
So when it comes to
building Lauren, I initially was figuring out what I wanted “WOLF’S
HEAD” to be about even before I knew who the characters were
going to be. So I knew I wanted it to have a positive portrayal of
artificial intelligence, because usually a lot of movies, if you
think “TERMINATOR” or what have you, a lot of movies will
have scary evil computers that are trying to kill you or take over
the world or whatever. And I wanted to be like, ‘no, I wanted
to have a benevolent computer that actually likes humanity and
is a baby and is trying to learn and is screwing up.’ And then
I started to figure out what type of… I knew I wanted it to be
in the real world, because I like real world stories, particularly
for this story, and there were reasons for that. And then I started
figuring out the characters, and that took a while.
Initially, the AI in
“WOLF’S HEAD” is actually found by Lauren’s
mom. And I sort of wound up working backwards. Lauren’s mom is
a woman named Patty, and Patty was working at this sort of computer
complex and encountered the AI. So I worked backwards to figure out
more about who Patty was and then realized, ‘hey, she has a
daughter’ and who the daughter is. And then actually, as I kept
working on that, Lauren became the main character.
And the antagonists
are kind of similar. I tend to view them as… it’s going
to sound weird, but I tend to view them as dragons. The heroes are
dragon-slayers and the villains are dragons. So… the
antagonists are dragons. So you have your dragon-slayer good guy,
Lauren, and then you start building up some of these antagonists to
give her external obstacles and challenges. So right away, it was
‘who created the AI?’ ‘What did they want to do
with the AI?’ It turns out they were negative. They were trying
to make it an AI meant for war. And the AI rebelled against
that.
So it’s a lot
of questions. Particularly if you’re trying to figure out…
how do you build a character that is sincere and believable and real?
You wind up trying to figure out who these people are as if you were
meeting somebody in real life for the first time. You ask questions
and you sort of go through this process. And it’s a lot of fun.
It’s a lot of work. And it’s slow. That’s the big
thing: it’s slow. Because it’s the hardest part of
writing. For me, anyway, it’s not so much writing a script or
whatever; it’s getting a handle on who the characters are.
Figuring out narrative ways you can go with them. And do different
stories with them. And trying to avoid dead ends. Where you’re
like, ‘I can’t do anything more with this character. I’m
stuck.’ And that’s about the closest I’ve ever come
to anything like writer’s block is where you’re kind of
like, or I’m kind of like, ‘I don’t know how to
resolve this problem with this character.’ So maybe I should
just stop and do something else. Or go in a different direction.
Sorry, long-winded
answer. But that’s the hardest thing about writing. It’s
trying to get a handle on a character and figuring out who they are.
Cosmo: And
now for a final silly question. What are those?
Von Allan:
These are my biker trolls! I fell in love with these guys. They were
a toy line done years ago. And it was not popular. And I love them.
They’re my biker trolls. They were actually for a game. It was
a miniature game called SHADOWRUN
DUELS. “SHADOWRUN” was actually
a role-playing game. And they span out. And they were trying to…
A lot of figures for war-gaming and stuff like that are 28mm. They’re
very small. And they were...I can’t remember the name of the
company doing it. But “SHADOWRUN” anyway, and the gaming
company they were working with, were trying to do bigger [figures],
sort of merging action figures with 28mm wargaming. With rules and
dice and stuff.
And I love them. I
just love them. And I’ve got one unopened one. So there you go.
Like he’s a big biker troll. He’s called Wolf
Nev. And at some point, when I’m in the mood, I will open
it up. But these are not easy to get now. So I was like. ‘I’ll
keep one… Open up most of them. And I’ll keep one back.’
Because I love them. So you can see the dice that comes with him. And
all the extra stuff. So yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Very good question.
Because they are always in my studio. And I look at them and I smile.
So there you go.
Cosmo: Thank
you. I hope I had interesting questions.
Von Allan:
Yeah!
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