The Outhouse Von Allan Interview — June 2014

Back in June 2014 I did an interview with Jude Terror, then with The Outhouse, a site well-known for its snark and sarcasm, but also for really insightful pieces (such as this terrific interview with Chris Claremont and Jude’s commentary on comic book journalism, something that Four Color Sinners has recently covered, too). For me, The Outhouse was a breath of fresh air (ahem — re-reading that does imply a certain contradiction, right?!) and I thought Jude’s work there was great. Comic book journalism, such as it is, sometimes as an air of pretentiousness that can get in the way of actually good writing. Rather than trying to explain that, I’ll use an example from the film TRADING PLACES to make my point: I do not want my journalism to be the literary equivalent of this. The Outhouse, but in particular Jude’s writing, avoiding a lot of that. That, from where I sit, was and is a very good thing. Sadly it didn’t last and The Outhouse is gone. Jude is now writing what I call “review snark” for Bleeding Cool, but I definitely miss the days of him writing at the ol’ Outhouse site. It just ain’t the same.

With that in mind, I did stumble across this old interview in my archives. And with The Outhouse long gone, I decided to resurrect it here. The context of the interview was the launch of my series METAL GODS. That series only last four issues, but a lot of what I learned was later developed into WOLF’S HEAD, albeit with a very different underlying story. As you can see in the interview, I was pretty optimistic with METAL GODS, but I was still trying to find my way, especially after I finished the graphic novel series STARGAZER. We learn by doing and METAL GODS was definitely a learning experience, the first time I had ever tried an ongoing periodical comic book series rather than a graphic novel. That created a lot of challenges that eventually became a bit too much for me at that point in my career, so I (regrettably) pulled the plug on the series. That said, I did win an award for it that came with a bit of money. That really helped on a number of fronts.

This interview is also a bit of a departure for me. Sometimes my interviews are pretty serious, but given the nature of The Outhouse and Jude’s own writing I knew that I had to step up my game. So not only was it fun to do, I cut loose a bit more than I usually do! And how many “silly” interviews also dive into everything from Karl Marx to STAR TREK?! This one sure as hell did.

I’m very pleased to resurrect this interview. Thanks to Jude for doing it with me, too.

The Interview

Jude Terror: Thanks for joining us, Von, and my sincere apologies for the career hit you’re gonna take for associating with us.

Ruined! Ruined I am! Why did I ever agree to do this? Is it because you threatened my doggie? Or my wife?

Jude Terror: One of the things about METAL GODS I found really charming was that, despite nudity and cursing and demonic possession, it still comes off as sort of… polite. Do you think that’s a uniquely Canadian quality?

Fuck no. I’m not even sure I’d call it polite. I think I’d call it compassionate. I wanted to do a story where the heroes are heroes. Not dark and angsty. Not haunted. Decent people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances. If you fuck with them, then the gloves are gonna come off, but they aren’t going to murder, torture, or maim their opponents just because they can. In other words, this is clearly a shocking and innovative concept considering the last 20 years of increasingly violent and immoral mainstream corporate comics.

It’s weird; I’m doing a comic with influences of heavy metal, sex, violence, all that glorious shit. But at the same time, I really wanted Nick and Louella, the two protagonists, to be decent human beings. The influences for that decision come from a variety of different sources, but I can nail down a few. Gene Roddenberry’s STAR TREK is a big one. I love the humanity of both THE ORIGINAL SERIES and NEXT GENERATION, something that began to get lost after Roddenberry died (no offence to fans of VOYAGER, ENTERPRISE, and EVEN DEEP SPACE NINE (though DS9 is better in this regard), but something about Roddenberry’s vision was lost the further the various shows got from his death. Even Next Gen dropped in the Cardassians in season 4’s “The Wounded” and noted that they had been fighting a long war with the Federation, a war we never saw and which was never referred to previously. I realize that this was primarily done to set up DS9 and the “frontier” aspects that the new show was going to focus on, but it really marked a tonal shift from what had happened previously. The two recent (and godawful) movies ram this point home even further. Compare the spirit of those two movies to TREK episodes like “Spectre of the Gun,” “Errand of Mercy,” and “A Taste of Armageddon.” Or even the new STAR TREK CONTINUES fan series.

I also was thinking a lot of something Alex Toth wrote in a pin-up he did for ANYTHING GOES #1 from Fantagraphics way the hell back in the mid-80s: Toth wrote, “A toast -- to true blue, ethical, dashing, stylish, fun-loving, fair-playing, handsome, stylish (sic), sentimental, romantic HEROES of the news, histories, fables, novels, plays, movies and radio serials, and comic books of my youth -- may they once again, in spirit and substance, reclaim their popular stature and celebration! We do, sorely, need them!” I was thinking of that sentiment a lot when I was brainstorming METAL GODS.

So no, it’s not a uniquely Canadian quality or anything like that. It’s a deliberate choice to tell a story with decent human beings as the main characters. One big beef I have with a lot of contemporary pop culture is that much of this compassion has been lost. Which is not an argument that I want to back to the “good ol’ days” — far from it, especially since the good old days weren’t all that good. Rather, it’s an argument for more diversity.

Jude Terror: Your love of the Silver Age is clear in METAL GODS. Despite dealing with a somewhat dark plot and the elements I mentioned earlier, the comic comes off as the antithesis of the “grim and gritty” era that modern mainstream comics seem to have gotten stuck in sometime around 1986 and never come out of. For our readers who complain about the “grimdark” pretty much constantly, I highly recommend checking METAL GODS out. What are some of your favorite comics from that era, and how have they influenced your work?

YES! Fuck grim and gritty. I can’t believe that we’ve had almost 30 years of this shit. This boring as hell shit. It’s so tedious. Again, I don’t care about grim and gritty as long as there’s balance but I hate when it (or anything) becomes the paradigm. Then, worse, it starts to “infect” characters in ways that destroy their essence; Spider-Man willingly torturing Sandman is a good example. Superman willingly killing Zod is another. In some ways I actually feel most saddened by a character like Tony Stark; that ain’t my Iron Man. Some grim and gritty is and always has been fine; Wolvie, Batman, whatever. Obviously a character like Judge Dredd is built around that (but even then there was humour). Does everyone have to be Dredd? Does a character like Mary Marvel have to be tortured and full of rage? Is that the best that can be done? Are you fucking kidding me?

I was basically a Marvel guy for that era. I never could get into much DC stuff, though there were exceptions here and there. I was also a big fan of non-big-two books, even back then. So I was picking up Eclipse’s reprints of AXEL PRESSBUTTON (glorious!) and then the latter LASER ERASER AND PRESSBUTTON series. DNAgents, though I was never a huge fan. Dave Stevens’ truly brilliant ROCKETEER. AMERICAN FLAGG! from First. And, though it’s a tad later, I’m still a big fan of the pre-Unity VALIANT comics.

If I was going to single out some titles from Marvel, then they’d be Chris Claremont and Paul Smith’s UNCANNY X-MEN run, John Byrne’s time on ALPHA FLIGHT, Peter David’s INCREDIBLE HULK, Frank Miller’s DAREDEVIL, and Michelinie and Layton’s second run on IRON MAN. And, of course, Walt Simonson’s MIGHTY THOR. To me, those comics really brought Marvel back from a so-so 1970s era that never really floated my boat. Claremont and Smith’s X-MEN, in particular an issue like 168, are some of my favourite comics of all time. Claremont did a really nice job in that issue of having a strong single issue story (Kitty Pryde’s battle for respect with Professor X), a solid action sequence with Kitty, all the while balancing a number of subplots that continued to drive the overall arc and dealt with other characters, to boot. People can bitch and complain about some of the stylistic choices that Claremont and other writers used in that era; for instance, I’ll argue pretty hard that the use of expository captions went too far and tended to bog down the narrative. And Claremont did have an angsty tone that could grate at times. Sure. We can all nitpick almost any comic, any time. That said, these issues weren’t “written for the trade,” didn’t use so-called decompressed storytelling techniques, and any issue in this run had elements that stood on their own, giving a reader a satisfactory read, while still driving the overall story. In many senses, this type of structure has almost disappeared in contemporary “big two” comics. I think that’s a shame because I really like a lot of diversity when it comes to story structure; comics are a wonderful medium and there’s a lot of room to play with structure, especially when it comes to periodical comics. And many of these comics felt like real, permanent change was going on. Some of that, of course, was the illusion of change. At the same time, though, when Jim Shooter’s run as editor-in-chief ended with his firing, it felt that company made a concentrated effort to always return back to a status quo, something I don’t think has ever really stopped since.

I should also point out that John Byrne’s run on ALPHA FLIGHT (1-28) is also a big influence. Take the Omega Flight angle that culminated in Guardian’s “death” (sigh…) in issue 12. The initial set-up began in issue 6; the subplot sequences in issues 10 and 11 are terrific, partially because we see real change happening and, I’d argue, because we’re seeing real time elements play a big role. Again, real change and that wonderful feeling as a reader that I wanted to know “what happens next.”

DC did do some interesting work at the time and I think my favourite is probably Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” two-parter. Damn that’s a wonderful story. And while it did tend to get a bit “wangsty,” I enjoyed some of Wolfman and Perez’s TEEN TITANS (especially “Who is Donna Troy?” and “Crossroads”). More deep change happening to characters, even though the brief revival of real change was ending; I tend to argue that one of the things that made Marvel so strong in the 1960s was the deep change that characters went through. That really contrasted with DC, but then Marvel stopped (for the most part) doing it in the 1970s, with a few exceptions (Englehart’s CAPTAIN AMERICA and Claremont’s X-MEN). There was a brief revival of change during Jim Shooter’s run as editor-in-chief (though not line-wide) and then it all stopped. So not only are we in an era of grim and gritty, but we’re also in an era where the main characters can never truly change and, the few times they do, the “reset button” is pushed. It’s basically the argument that the “illusion” of change rules the roost and it’s a shame. In other words, we’re in a world of constancy. That doesn’t mean an individual issue or arc can’t be good; rather, it means that when you step back and look at the big picture, everything always resets back to a baseline status quo. It’s SO boring.

Okay, on to influences. When it comes to the art, specifically how the story is told, the big thing for me is clarity. Comics of the silver and bronze ages really show-cased the importance of panels and especially the gutters. Panels make sense and further a story. Plus, you can look at most panels in isolation and go, “yeah, I understand what’s going on.” That approach actually requires a fair amount of discipline; drawing a cool image or sequence is important, sure, but it always get trumped by story. Of course, someone is going to interpret that as meaning that I prefer six or nine panel grids ad nauseam. Far from it and guys like Todd McFarlane and Frank Miller showed what you can do within this structure. The point is to tell the story clearly; if you can be creative with panels and structure, awesome, as long as the story is clear. I should add that it really doesn’t matter what the genre of the story is, what the tone is, if the story is fiction or non-fiction, or even if you like the story. The point is whether you can understand the story, even if you don’t like it. Does the story make sense or are you left scratching your head, trying to play detective?

On the writing side: First and foremost, these comics weren’t “written for the trade.” Some people immediately assume that means that the stories were just “done in one” and, as a consequence, nothing mattered. I’d say that’s an utter bullshit argument. The difference is that the aforementioned comics focused on telling a beginning, middle, and end story in each issue while at the same time using subplots, hooks, teasers, and other storytelling tools to draw you into a much larger world. I’d call that continuity, but that often leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. Call it world-building, call it storytelling, call it whatever the fuck you want. I believe strongly that you can use single issues to tell strong stories, still build a larger and more nuanced world, and build up to future events that have a big payoff.

Does that mean I’m completely against a decompressed story? No, of course not. I am against it being used all the time, but decompression is one storytelling technique and there are often quite valid reasons for using it. It’s all tools in the tool box rather than hard and firm rules. I don’t believe that decompression works as an ongoing element of periodical comics, but if someone argues that the periodical is a chapter in a larger beginning, middle, and end story then I’m willing to listen. Hell, Charles Dickens used a periodical format to serialize GREAT EXPECTATIONS and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. I think that argument is stronger with creator-owned titles like SAGA then it is with corporate comics like Spider-Man. Why? With the former, you can structure the story so that there’s an overall conclusion. With corporate comics, they never end. Creators change, titles reboot, but the never-ending constancy continues. Using decompressed storytelling techniques to explore the latest battle between Spidey and Doc Ock is boring. Just get on with it.

Jude Terror: How do you find a balance in paying homage to the great comics of yesteryear without coming off as quaint or campy?

Or even old-fashioned? I think about it quite a bit, but when I get nervous I always fall back on trusting the fact that I fell in love with certain comics for a reason. And when I take ’em part to try to learn why I think they work, there’s a structure and philosophy in many of them that I like. When in doubt, those are the guideposts I use. Plus you realize that you don’t have to be all things to all readers. Some people won’t (and haven’t) liked my work and that’s just fine. Others will (and have) and that’s awesome.

You can also avoid it just by paying attention to tone. In the case of METAL GODS, it’s really fun to play with language, really fun to play with character, and really, really fun to play with sex and violence. I’ve got devil girls and weird cults and adult situations featuring grown-ups and that’s really, really different then, say, Claremont and Smith’s run on X-MEN. If someone were to point to METAL GODS and go, “look, buddy there is using fairly rigid panels and therefore it’s old-fashioned” then I say “fuck you, that’s a ridiculous argument.” Am I using a fairly rigid grid? Yup, and I’m doing it deliberately to tell a story. Does that make it campy? Nah… C’mon. I’d argue that I would be being campy if I was trying to ape both the structural techniques and the story themes. For me, I really like the structure of older comics and I wanted to see what I could do with that structure myself. I have no interest in trying to riff or even rip-off the actual stories that creators I like used. Besides, all kinds of hot current comics use structure to better tell their story, SAGA probably being the most prominent example.

Jude Terror: I can tell by your beard and leather jacket that you’re a fan of heavy metal music. What albums would you recommend someone listen to while reading METAL GODS? Only true metal please, no poseur stuff. I’ll know.

I’m a big, big fan of Power Metal. And since I like clean vocals, it means that some metal is not “my” metal. If you want the pure METAL GODS experience, there isn’t gonna be much Doom, Stoner, Black, or Death metal. Sorry, Electric Wizard fans, it ain’t happening. On the other hand, The Sword’s “Warp Riders” is a definite must. “But wait, you asshole, some people consider The Sword Stoner, right?” Meh. I like what I like.

Toss in “Bomber” and “Rock ’n Roll” by Motörhead. Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album. Budgie’s “Never Turn Your Back on a Friend.” Throw in a bit of Anvil’s “Metal on Metal.”

But I’m gonna throw in some curve balls here, too. Mainly ’cuz I’m a picky son of a bitch. If you want the true METAL GODS experience, then you need to be able to break out and try some other stuff. Mad Sin’s “Burn and Rise” is a definite must; I can’t say enough about a band like Mad Sin. What, psychobilly in a metal post? YES! And I’ll push it further; mix in some Pogues and even The Tossers into that.

Seriously, though, if it’s fast, if it’s heavy, and if the vocals are fucking clean, you’re okay by me. And remember to stay the fuck away from Guns ’n Rose, Motley Crue, and the like. No hair metal bands, man.

Jude Terror: Why do you think there aren’t more comics starring metalheads? Is it discrimination?

Who the fuck knows? Publishers might be afraid that too narrow a focus might restrict the audience. There was a time that no one thought that a zombie comic would have a broad audience so I don’t put a lot of stock in it. But! I’ve actually experienced this somewhat myself just recently; I contacted one academic who basically said that since he has no interest in heavy metal, he wouldn’t have any interest in my comic. I thought that was a remarkably closed-minded answer; if you don’t like the series after you read an issue or two, I’m fine with that. But judging it without reading it? Okaaayy. Whatever, man.

I’m hoping that longevity here may turn some people around; I know I’ll never convince someone like that academic to try it, but someone who is on the fence might give it a shot when they see the series hit issues 7 or 8. We’ll see.

Do the work you believe in and hopefully the audience is going to find it. I think it’s a helluva lot better than doing a riff on some superhero.

Jude Terror: You write, draw, and ink your comics, and I assume you do the lettering too? Can you walk us through your process? Do you script out the pages, or just kinda draw from the story outline, or what?

I do it all, baby. METAL GODS has actually been a challenge for me since I’ve had to learn to make the entire process go quicker. Before, with my other work that was planned out as graphic novels, I’d write full script. Even go through a number of full drafts While that approach certainly works just fine and has a number of merits besides, it’s just way too time-consuming an approach for me with a periodical comic. On top of it, I realized how much I’d change the “final” script while I was drawing it, so the script really was a “shooting script” more than something written in stone. If I’m going to change it, then why lock it down? A dirty secret in comics, something that Howard Chaykin has noted (here and here), is that visual artists really are co-writing the comic when they collaborate with a writer. Since I am my own collaborator, I’ve evolved a way of writing that works well for me. And that way eliminated the need for a tight script.

So, the basic process now is that I write a loose outline and draw from that. I tend to put a goodly chunk of dialogue into the outline, anyway, but this allows me to firm up the pacing while still having a lot of flexibility for when I start to draw. The outline is more detailed than something like a single-page Marvel Method outline, but not so detailed that it’s rigid. My wife is actually a professional editor and the outline gives her something to work off of, too. I like getting feedback throughout the creative process so this really helps me stay focused on structure.

I should add that the outline doesn’t just pop out fully formed, either. I go through a brainstorming process before tightening up the various plot beats and whatnot. What needs to happen in this issue to drive overall story beats forward. At the same time, I find one plot that I can develop that has — you guessed it — a strong beginning, middle, and end arc that gives a reader what I hope is a satisfactory reading experience. Then I start breaking all of those plots down into various scenes, experiment with dramatic order that those scenes occur in, before finally locking the scene order down. The actual outline is based on the scene order. In other words, it’s a series of building blocks, building upon one another, before the outline is finally done.

When I switch into drawing, I’ll start loosely thumbnailing out each page and then just build up from there. I’ve experimented and continue to experiment a lot with how I approach a page, even though I always tend to work with a panel structure. I like drawing with a nub of a pencil to help get my arm moving so I currently draw layout pages larger than other artists I’ve come across. Then I scan the loose page in and start tightening it up in Manga Studio EX 4. I letter at this point since I can play around with placement, though I’ll be thinking a lot about the lettering when I’m thumbnailing and laying out the pages. Then I digitally ink the page, again in Manga Studio EX 4, and I colour it digitally in Photoshop.

I should add (again!) that there are no hard and fast rules (tools, not rules!); sometimes I’ll draw a panel much larger on a separate sheet of paper. Sometimes I’ll draw small. The only thing I’m tending to do pretty regularly now is digitally inking and digitally colouring. For the longest time I inked with a sable brush, but I found the scan and clean-up work really time-consuming and really frustrating. It also made the colouring process much slower due to how hard it was to flat out the colours. Digitally inking means I can work on different layers (contours on one layer, details on others) and that means I can set-up my colours FAR faster; there’s no fussy screwing around with hatching or whatnot because that’s all on a separate layer. Very handy.

I’ll still tweak and re-write dialogue right through the final colours, too, another reason why locking the script down early doesn’t work for me.

Jude Terror: Are people who just write or just draw pussies?

Fuck yeah! Screw those assholes!

Though this is as good a time as any to make a plea to one of my favourite writer/artists, namely Matt Wagner. MAGE: THE HERO DEFINED debuted in 1997, 13 years after the first series MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED started. Well, it’s been 17 years since then and we still have no MAGE: THE HERO DENIED.¹ What the fuck, brother?!

Jude Terror: There’s a moment in issue #2 where one of the “bad guys,” Frank, is explaining why he wants to bring about the end of the world, and he says, “This world of ours is decayed. Broken. Have you seen Detroit? Have you seen Cleveland? Camden?” All of those are American cities. Don’t you have any dilapidated hellholes in Canada you could pick on? If not, would you say it’s because of your socialist healthcare system?

Canada is a place of glory, joy, and is also a living embodiment of the light on the hill. We’re Camelot, baby.

Well, okay, maybe not. And yup, we do have many, many problems. Austerity is everywhere, ordinary people struggle, and we’re not doing well on poverty. There’s a major fight to increase Ontario’s minimum wage to $14 dollars per hour. There’s a piece up at Dissent Magazine that serves as a good overview.

That said, it’s really hard to compare any Canadian city to what’s happening in, say, the rust belt cities in the States. Downtown East-Side Vancouver ain’t much fun. Toronto has had its fair share of inner city violence. Not to mention a boatload of police-initiated violence (the 2010 G20, anyone?). Still… Detroit being urged to bulldoze 40,000 buildings is remarkable. 40,000 buildings. I can’t get my mind around that. And now we’re seeing the city start turning off water to some of its residents. Unbelievable.

Which is not to say things are all red and rosy in a country like Canada; they ain’t. We just had an election here in Ontario that was a joke. That said, the reality is that things like health care are key planks in making life livable for many people. Canadians and Americans have a lot in common; we speak the same language, we have many shared experiences, and we have a lot of culture in common. That said, the differences are still pretty stark and one of them is, of course, health care. What can I say? I think health care is a right. Period. Full stop. I think that the cry in the States should not have been Obamacare but Medicare for All. And while I think our health care system, which does have flaws, can and should be better, I would not trade what we have for the US system. Our health care system is much better for ordinary people. Tommy Douglas, the father of Canada’s health care system, said it best, “I felt that no boy should have to depend either for his leg or his life upon the ability of his parents to raise enough money to bring a first-class surgeon to his bedside.”

Jude Terror: One of your protagonists, Lou, is a black woman. Is it more difficult, as a white guy (and, to make matters worse, from the Great “White” North), to write a minority character?

Nah. My goal is to write good characters. I just try to write the best characters I can and hope readers connect with them, believe in them, and learn to love ’em. White, black, male, female, young, old, whatever.

Jude Terror: METAL GODS is a fully digital comic. What are people’s options for reading it? Any plans for a DRM-free version? And why do you want to destroy print comics? (feel free to talk about the industry and the impact of digital comics in general here, I love that stuff)

Right now, people can read METAL GODS via comiXology (through their indy-friendly Submit program) for 99 cents an issue. The first two issues are out now and easy to get through them. But the series is not exclusive to them; if you don’t mind the PDF format, there a lot of ebook retailers who are also carrying it. And the series is priced deliberately cheaply; 99 cents US per issue. And you can read it on a laptop, desktop, tablet, or (using comiXology’s nifty Guided View technology), through your iPhone.

I would love to do DRM-free versions, but I’m still working out the easiest way to do it. Direct downloads via some shopping cart vendor? Pay what you want models? Donation driven? Personally, I hate DRM but there doesn’t seem to be a popular DRM-free platform for comics. I’m watching what Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin are doing with THE PRIVATE EYE, but I certainly don’t have that profile or pull. I also paid attention to various attempts to try free distribution; MISERY DEPOT by Hermes Pique and Juan Romera is a good example of a free comic that did seem to get a lot of readers trying it out, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere, at least as far as I know. This is actually something I’d love to get feedback on and have a discussion about; how do lesser-known creators get their work known, earn enough to live on, and build an audience?

We’re in a really weird space with digital. On the one hand, digital comics have clearly not harmed brick and mortar stores directly. There is something that will always be cool about a physical comic or graphic novel and digital doesn’t change that. In fact, I think digital helps create an audience for a physical version of a comic and that’s actually a really great thing. I’ve worked with Diamond and I’ve had physical comics distributed into the direct market and it is a fight to build awareness, connections with retailers, and everything everyone probably knows pretty well by now. Obscurity is the enemy. Always.



On the other hand, we’ve seen a lot of damage to brick and mortar bookstores by competition from Amazon. Comic shop retailers have what I think is a natural concern that now that Amazon has purchased comiXology, a lot of key consumer data is now theirs. They could, conceivably, use that data to begin a targeted outreach campaign to digital comic book fans. Right now the direct market exists in a really unique space; could Amazon offer dirt cheap subscription offers for digital comics down the road? Could they do the same thing for periodical comics? What if they decided to go balls to the wall and go after that Wednesday customer base with a really spiffy subscription model for actual physical comics? They did similar things to books. If that happened, direct market stores would be in one heckuva fight. We’ve been living in a one distributor world for quite some time, but this type of stability is typically an illusion, even if it’s relatively long lived. While I doubt we would go back to the multiple distributor world we saw in, say, 1983, market disruption in and of itself is not outside the realm of possibility. Who knows.

Jude Terror: METAL GODS isn’t your first published work. You also have an all ages graphic novel series called STARGAZER. What’s that about?

STARGAZER is an all-ages story that also featured kids, three girls, as the main protagonists. The plot in a pitch is this: Marni’s grandmother died. And as she and her parents are going through the funeral, Marni discovers that her grandmother left her this really weird object. Shortly after, she and two friends are playing around with that object and they find themselves reported somewhere else. Where they are, how did they get there, how do they get home, is the main arc of the story. Mixed with that is the fact that Marni keeps seeing something she thinks is her grandmother. The mystery of who and what that is eventually leads her to make a very bad choice, partially due to her age, with horrible consequences.

Y’know, there is a lot of understandable contemporary discussion about gender issues with comics. That’s, sadly, also not new and shows like TVOntario’s “Prisoners of Gravity” were trying to get a handle on this 25 years ago. We, both creators and readers, want to see more diversity in the stories that we read. More diversity in characters. STARGAZER was my attempt to try and tackle that. No boys at all. Three girls rather than just one, so I could play around with different traits and expectations.

The problem wasn’t that people read it, didn’t like it, and it died. The problem was that I couldn’t get many people to try it in the first place. Which is not to say I didn’t make a boatload of mistakes. I did. Doing a black and white comic for kids was not smart. Breaking the story into two volumes wasn’t smart. That said, it’s always frustrating to hear a lot and read a lot about folks crying for more diversity and then when you present a work that tries to change it, people won’t try it. The mistakes I just mentioned didn’t help my cause and being an indy and small press didn’t help, either. Oh, well. As Beckett said, “Fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” And I’m still proud of STARGAZER; I’m proud of the story, the heart, the humanity, and the magic in it. I hope it comes into its own one day and, who knows, anything could happen. The people who got their hands on it, loved it; in fact, it actually got the single best review I’ve ever had of any of my work. Seriously.

Jude Terror: Do you think comics will ever be as popular with kids as they once were? How can we get more kids into comics?

First and foremost, you gotta get comics into places where kids go. I don’t know where that is, but anywhere kids congregate should have comics. Good comics at good price points. Kids love comics. Shit, my wife and I give out comics at Halloween along with candy! And there’s a total audience for it; we actually have kids seek us out for comics on Halloween! But expecting kids to somehow find themselves at a comic shop…? I don’t think that’s been proven to work. And hey, I know some stores try hard and have awesome kid and all-ages sections. If we’re talking about comics that kids want to read as some type of mass movement like the old days, then even if every comic shop had a rocking kid section, it wouldn’t matter. There’s not enough direct market venues.

Go to where the kids are and hook ’em on good comics.

Jude Terror: Your first graphic novel, THE ROAD TO GOD KNOWS…, got a lot of press back in the aughts. An arch nemesis of ours, former Marvel PR guru Arune Singh, interviewed you for CBR about it. Is that still available? Can you tell our readers a little bit about it?

If STARGAZER was raw, then ROAD is very raw. It’s a story about a teen girl’s struggle with her mom’s mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, and how she learns that despite the love she has for her mom, she can’t solve those problems for her. So it’s a coming of age story with mental illness as a backdrop. It’s my most personal work, but it’s also the roughest since I was still very new to writing and drawing. That said, it got some very positive reviews, including one from The Library Journal and another from the American Library Association’s Booklist Online. Not bad for a self-published black and white graphic novel. And it’s still available to this day.² Some stores still have copies and it’s available on places like Amazon or through your local independent bookseller or comic book shop, too. Same goes for STARGAZER. The links are all off my main shop page.

Y’know, I barely remember talking with Arune Singh, though. Ah, those were the days, when CBR would actually talk with me.

Jude Terror: You won an award this past week, the Corel Endowment Fund for the Arts Award. What would you consider a bigger honor: that, or being featured on The Outhouse?

The Outhouse, of course. But if Peter Honeywell from the Council for the Arts in Ottawa is reading this, then it’s the Corel Award. Of course!

Jude Terror: When you’re not writing or drawing, what are you reading these days?

Oh, man, so many things. I’m slowly working my way through Karl Marx’s CAPITAL³ but it is a slog. Richard Wolff’s work is another big hook for me right now. His book CLASS THEORY AND HISTORY: CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM IN THE USSR (co-written with the late Stephen Resnick) is fascinating, primarily because of the way it challenges the reader with what so-called Soviet “communism” was and how it functioned. It, too, is a slog, but it’s a good slog and it’s certainly opened my eyes to a number of things. I love learning and I try to keep an open mind about what I’m learning.

One of my favourite things about Wolff, drawn from Marx, is that capitalism is a method of organizing production. How you distribute the goods and services as a result of that production is a very different question. In other words, workers can own and run their own enterprise, free of exploitation and far more democratic, but still participate in a free market as one way (but not the only way) of distributing goods and services. That insight creates a lot of fascinating implications; for instance, workers could own their own enterprises and not commodify the goods and services they produce. Or a number of worker owned and controlled enterprises could compete with one another in a market-based distribution system. This type of worker control also does not say one word about the government; one of the most fascinating ideas presented by Wolff and Resnick, though they’re not alone, is that the Soviet Union was organized on a state capitalist basis (because the state, not workers, controlled production). This is also a major critique in some Anarchist literature (for example, Voline’s THE UNKNOWN REVOLUTION).

It also means, and I think this is important, that while a workplace could be free of exploitation (in the Marxian sense), it does not mean that the workplace is necessarily free of discrimination. In other words, one hundred workers could own their own company and serve as their own board of directors. They could distribute the goods they produce in a market or not. But if, say, 55 of those workers are white, straight, young, and male, it’s very easy to see that the workplace could have major problems if those 55 vote on issues as a block. Especially if the other 45 workers are, for example, a mix of women, Hispanic, black, gay, and/or old workers. On top of it, how the actual jobs are organized is another key question as other voting blocks could arise (workers who do “creative work” versus workers who don’t). In fact, this is something that Michael Albert has talked about in regards to actual examples of real life worker control.

This may shock people who haven’t read much on this or come in with massive preconceptions, but Marx was a critic of capitalism. He only gestured, at least as far as I know, at what a new, different, better society would look like. And he was long dead before 20th century revolutions in Russia and China occurred. The Marxian notion of surplus and the critique that those who produce it should have a say in how it’s appropriated and distributed is really neat. That notion of class and class struggle is intriguing; we classify people by how they relate to the surplus. That we could have a far more democratic society is also really cool. How we practically do that is going to take a lot of experimentation and trial and error. That’s exciting to me.

What else? Well, I’ve been working through Bill Walsh’s FINDING THE WINNING EDGE, a terrific look at how he built up the San Francisco 49ers as an organization. It’s unfortunately laid out in awful font that makes it far more tiresome to read than it should be, but such is life. I’m also re-reading a lot of Harry Harrison’s STAINLESS STEEL RAT series, something I do every couple of years.

The only thing I don’t often read now is long-form fiction. I used to, but that’s really faded as I swing into more non-fiction or novellas.

Jude Terror: What’s next for METAL GODS? Is this a finite story? What can we expect in the upcoming issues?

Nope, it’s not a finite story, though I do have a strong initial arc that I want to explore. If there’s an audience, it would be awesome to be able to do it for a long time. That’s actually something I’m hoping for because I think seeing characters change and grow over time is one of the things that periodical comics can do very well. It’s the real time notion again; I love seeing deep change happen in stories. Stories that feature constancy don’t interest me.

What do I want to get into with the series? A big one is class. That’s something I don’t see tackled in comics much (at all?) and it would be really interesting to explore that. Nick and Lou are going to head down to the States at some point and be able to directly experience some of what austerity has wrought. We’ll see more of what the antagonists are trying to do and why some of them have extraordinary abilities. And we’ll be exploring character; who Nick and Lou are, how they got together, and how and why they stick with one another.

Holy crap, we’re going to have fun!

Jude Terror: Thanks a lot for tolerating my nonsense. Any last words you want to leave our readers with?

Find and read good comics, not just comics from “the big two” and not just comics from creators you know. Try new things out all the time. Tell your retailer that you want to see more diversity on the stands and then support that diversity with your wallet. Share the love you have for comics you like. The biggest enemy to lesser-known creators is obscurity. Find titles you love and champion them. Tell your friends. Share the love.

Jude Terror: Please also let me know what links you want to plug in there and at the end. :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140822222924/http://metal-gods.vonallan.com/

https://www.vonallan.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20170718191621/https://www.comixology.com/Metal-Gods/comics-series/20279

Thanks!

Footnotes

1  Matt Wagner finally did do the third series beginning in 2017.

2  Sadly, it did go out of print for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with the book itself, but because of a documentary film I became involved in. More details here.

3  At the time I was reading the Penguin version of CAPITAL. I wish the new Princeton University Press version had been available at that time.

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.

Other Links

• Overview of my Comics: http://www.vonallan.com/p/comics.html

• Wolf’s Head (My Ongoing Comic Book Series): https://wolfs-head.vonallan.com/

• Von Allan Studio Shop Page: http://www.vonallan.com/p/von-allan-studio-shop.html

• RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Von_Allan_Homepage

• Mailing List Sign-Up: https://vonallan.us14.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=f6d06612e90503db886a31a24&id=7642c19478

Talk Ottawa Interview

One of my very first long form interviews and one that I thought was lost! This was done way back in 2008 with James Hendricks, then host of Talk Ottawa here in Ottawa, Ontario. This interview meant a lot to me since I was basically just starting out and he and the producers of the show were very open and welcoming.

James and I chat about comics and graphic novels, the challenges of being an indy artist, and the changing face of technology and how that applies to comics. We also do a deep dive into my very first graphic novel, titled “the road to god knows…”, that deals with parental mental illness. In the case of that comic, I drew on a lot of my own experiences growing up with my mom; she was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was very young. We talk about that, too.

Oh! My art that was presented in the original video was pretty rough, so I decided to update it with art revisions I did some years ago.

The player should work below. If not, or if you'd prefer to watch on Youtube, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS8ADTEwBcI

Addendum

2025 Update: I was shocked to learn that James died on January 21st, 2019. “Shocked” isn’t the right word. Heart-broken is more appropriate and I’m going to explain this as best I can. To be clear, James and I weren’t friends, but he and his wife Susannah Jane Sears-Hendricks were incredibly honourable to me back in 2008. Why? Well, as best as I can recall, I had reached out to them during the early days of my very first graphic novel, “the road to god knows…” Susannah was, if memory serves, helping James do a program on mentally ill folks. Somehow, through a miscommunication most likely on my part, James and Susannah thought I was struggling with schizophrenia when it was actually my mom who was. They had invited me to be part of the program and then we all realized that this would not be appropriate. If I’m remembering this correctly, the episode of “Talk Ottawa” went ahead and was a sensitive portrayal for the people involved.

Susannah and James, however, remembered me and decided to have me on in a dedicated episode. I was blown away — and nervous as hell! — when they asked me to be on the show. Context matters. At this point, I couldn’t draw very well, though as rough as my visual art still was, it had improved significantly over where it was a couple of years before. By all rights James, Susannah, Rogers, Ed Hand (the producer) would have been well within their rights to tell me “no.” But they not only went ahead and had me on, but they did quite a bit of research into both me and my work, too. I was actually stunned with how much they put into this. When you watch the interview or even just read the transcript below, that is very clear. James treated me with respect and honour and it something that I’ve always remembered, but was especially driven home when I discovered that he had died.

For those who don’t know, one of the weird things about doing things in the public eye is that you do meet a number of folks, often journalists and whatnot, but also fans. Sometimes the relationships develop and sometimes life takes you in other directions. James wound up leaving Ottawa, first to Toronto and then eventually Kingston. I regret to say that I lost track of him and I only looked him up when I was working on creating the transcript. And that was when I discovered that he died far too young, at the age of 56.

I wish I had the opportunity to get to know him and Susannah better. I will always be honoured that he took the time to do this on screen and that Susannah and the other folks “behind the camera” did so much work to not only make the interview happen, but make it as it is. James was, by all accounts, a helluva person. And I extend my condolences to Susannah and his family for their loss. Life is hard sometimes. Very hard. Here’s to you, James.

Lightly-Edited Transcript

James Hendricks: Hello, and welcome again to “Talk Ottawa.” Thanks for tuning in. And you may be pleased to know that we have something a little different for you tonight. No panel of politicians or pundits this time. Instead, we have one man who has embarked on an adventure in art. And not the kind you usually find in museums. Have a look at this.

Von Allan (Voice Over): Really storytelling when you boil it down is do interesting things happen to characters we care about?

James Hendricks (Voice Over): It is the traditional litmus test for a good yarn, but the yarn spinner is anything but traditional. His name is Von Allan, and you could call him a storyteller for the 21st century. He writes graphic novels, a sort of long format comic for adult tastes. And his marketing is a do-it-yourself enterprise with the internet as his bookstore.

Von Allan (Voice Over): It’s really tough because fundamentally I am my own publicist, and that’s been one of the tough things in this whole thing. I write, I draw, and now I have to market myself.

James Hendricks (Voice Over): And when Allan markets himself, in a way, he’s marketing his life. His first opus, “the road to god knows…,” deals with a teenage girl growing up with a schizophrenic mother. It draws heavily on Allan’s Ottawa upbringing by troubled parents. And bringing it to fruition was almost as long a journey.

Von Allan (Voice Over): I came to art very, very late. Compared to most people who learned to draw when they were three or four, I learned to draw when I was 25, 26. So I am kind of different than a lot of artists.

James Hendricks (Voice Over): But Allan has made up for lost time by being a tireless self-promoter in a notoriously tough market.

Von Allan (Voice Over): It’s a job. And for me it’s a full-time job. That doesn’t mean it’s not a fun job. It doesn’t mean I don’t get up excited or what have you. But I draw Monday to Friday — feeling good, not feeling good, if I’m having a good day, if I’m having a bad day — every day.

James Hendricks: Old-fashioned work ethic. New-fangled medium. That’s the road ahead for Von Allan, our focus tonight on “Talk Ottawa.” And joining us now in the flesh is the author of “the road to god knows…”, Von Allan. Thank you very much for coming in, Von.

Von Allan: Oh, you’re very welcome.

James Hendricks: You know, I think we should start maybe with a primer on graphic novels, just in case any of the uninitiated are out there. A lot of us grew up with comics, and we grew up thinking that comics are something you find in the Saturday papers, you know, maybe “Family Circus” — if you’re really unlucky — or “Iron Man.” But a graphic novel is something else. What is it?

Von Allan: Graphic novels can be really anything. Primarily they’re long-form comic book stories. So most people who are reading comics would read comics that were about 22 pages in length, came out in a periodical form and, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, they’d find them on magazine stands. And then in the mid-1970s, comic book shops that were actually dedicated to these things started forming. But graphic novels took a longer time, and really they can be any length. Usually they come with a ‘spine,’ which is an odd thing to say. Usually they come with an ISBN now. And you can find them at bookstores, comic book shops, certainly online. And one of the things I love about them is that the subject matter is far more diverse than what would be typically found in a regular old comic. And by that I mean superhero comics. There’s nothing wrong with superhero comics, but superhero comics are one particular genre in a far more diverse medium. In North America, the genre and medium have tended to be confused and people will tend to think of comics as superheroes. They can be so much more. And graphic novels really open the floodgates of any possibilities of what they can be.

James Hendricks: So you told one of our producers when we were talking to you earlier in your home that when it came right down to it, you had to define yourself. You said, “I’m a comics guy.” And you have a background with comics. You read the superheroes when you were a kid, probably still do.

Von Allan: Yup.

James Hendricks: Now, so when you decided to take the plunge into the world of art and to actually put your hand down to this, why did you decide to go this way? Why not try to break into Marvel or DC and write superhero comics? Why not write comic strips? Why graphic novels?

Von Allan: Well, first of all, breaking into Marvel and DC is really hard. It’s not an easy thing to do. You have to have a portfolio that’s sort of set up in a particular way. And it’s a very expressive, very dynamic style of storytelling. And it’s awfully hard. I mean, it’s hard to do it as a Canadian. It’s not impossible. A lot of people will move down to New York City — still in this day and age — to do it. And there’s a lot of competition. Particularly with what Marvel and DC put out, it’s really hard to be a solo creator. It’s very, very rare for those companies to have a single writer/artist doing one title. There are some people who’ve started there and have grown, like Frank Miller, who did “Sin City.”

James Hendricks: The “Dark Knight” Batman.

Von Allan: Yeah, exactly. I mean, he started writing and drawing with “Daredevil” and then sort of moved on. So when I looked at it, I knew it was going to be a really tough challenge. I’d be competing with a lot of different people. And superheroes, as much as I enjoy them, I just kind of felt that doing that type of story — really to start off — with wasn’t for me. I wanted to try doing some other stuff and I really wanted to try writing to start off with. And I always came to art a little bit late, so I always thought I’d do writing of some sort anyway. And writing and drawing — telling my own stories — is really what I enjoy the most. So when I came up with a story, I think it has heart. I think it’s got some decent characters. And I decided to, with the support of my wife, to really to pursue this end. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going and how it’s going to play out, but part of the fun — part of the challenge — is trying.

James Hendricks: Now, what were you doing when this came upon you? As you mentioned in the piece that opened the show, you came to this late, which actually begs the question a lot of people would ask, “hey, aren’t artists born, not made?” How’d that work out?

Von Allan: I really don’t believe that. I really don’t. I’ve had debates. I’ve had arguments with artists that have drawn. I never drew as a kid. I mean, I’m sure I doodled and drew with a crayon and what have you, but I was never the kid in the back of a high school class doodling away, while totally ignoring what the teacher was saying. I ran a bookstore. I had pretensions of maybe being a writer and doing scripts. And part of it was a lack of self-confidence. I grew up pretty poor. You know, art does take some money to do, to get the materials together. And I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence to do it. And the bookstore actually was a really transformative experience from the point of view that I started meeting not just writers, but I met other artists — cover designers, graphic designers. And then also actual practising artists.

And I really learned — and I always say this is I felt so incredibly naive — that artists don’t get hit with a magic wand when they pop out of the womb. It takes work. They have bad days. They sometimes have bad weeks. And when you actually start looking at how an artist works — and you can, actually; not that I spent loads of time with other artists — when you’re discussing some of the frustrations — is it’s work. They have bad days. They learn to figure out that creativity, particularly for ones who are able to make a career out of it — unless you’re you’re some mad genius — you don’t draw when you feel like it or you don’t produce art when you feel like it. There has to be a sense of craft. There has to be a sense of discipline to it. And a light bulb kind of went off for me. And I literally sat down with Betty Edwards’ “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” when I was 25 years old.

James Hendricks: It’s a “how-to book.”

Von Allan: It’s a how-to book. And I started and I was like, “I’m not really sure.” I just started at nights and on weekends and stuff. And I really wasn’t sure where it was going to go. And one thing I stumbled upon at around the same time was a line: “just basically suck less.” So you start, your terrible. You get a little less terrible and you try not to tie your self-esteem to it too much. You try not to beat yourself up too much on the bad days. You try not to get too high when you have a good day — and things start happening. And that’s basically what it was. I had terribly rotten days that I thought I would stink at it forever. And then I had another day or another little cycle where I actually wasn’t half-bad. You know, “this is okay.”

James Hendricks: So at this point, you know, surely you must have been when you decided that this was going to be the gig and that you were going to focus all your energies on this. Because there was a little overlap when you were still managing the bookstore, right?

Von Allan: Yup.

James Hendricks: And I guess that took a bit too much out of you.

Von Allan: The bookstore was tough. It’s an independent bookstore [Perfect Books]. Independent bookstores, as most people know, certainly industry people would know, it’s a tough thing. I mean, we had a lot of competition from Chapters [Indigo]. We certainly had a lot of competition from online, Amazon and whatnot. And it’s hard. Part of what makes independent bookstores fun is that it’s a sense of community. It’s a sense of the staff knowing individual tastes from customers and being able to pinpoint books. I did all the buying. So it was it really was interesting to seeing things that I ordered in actually selling. But it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. There’s not a lot of money in it. I mean, it’s not about money, but there’s not a lot of money into it. And it was really coming to at the end of the day was it wasn’t that satisfying anymore. I kind of felt that I had sort of proved the point. And the next step — I had gotten as high as I could go. I managed an independent bookstore — you either buy it, open up one yourself, or that’s it. There’s really there’s no vertical mobility. And I was starting to — I don’t know if ‘burned out’ is quite the right word — but I was starting to get a little bit frustrated that I had done, tried, felt I had sort of succeeded. I had learned from my mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes.

James Hendricks: But it’s still a steady job. Did you kind of have your heart in your mouth when you decided to walk away from that and take a plunge into comic art, which let’s face it, ‘Ottawans’ don’t normally think themselves that people are going to go out and conquer the comics world.

Von Allan: I felt that way. And I still do, because it is still a crap shoot. And it’s I’ve been lucky in the sense that I have a very supportive [wife] — Samantha is my wife — she is very, very supportive. And, you know, she has a decent enough job that we’ve been able to make ends meet. I mean, you have to eat. I will never be one for — you do things you love. You do things because you enjoy it. You sacrifice as much as you can reasonably. But you have to survive. You have to be able to pay rent. You have to be able to pay bills and you have to be able to eat and have some fun. And if if I ever felt that my art was truly getting in the way of our ability to do that, then I would figure out something else to do. Still do it, still do it part time or what have you, but it wouldn’t be full time. It wouldn’t be fair.

James Hendricks: So still, it’s you know, it’s quite a leap to take. And especially these days, we’ve got a job market that’s fluctuating, from moment to moment, and people who can never expect to cash in their chips and get a gold watch from the company they worked for since they were 20. People are always looking for the next opportunity. And this is, you know, I think a dream come true for a lot of people, people who maybe did draw when they were six years old, as well.

Von Allan: Well, I’ve only done a little bit of art instruction. Some people might rag me about that, but I remember talking to one teacher and he felt pretty strongly that ‘something’ makes you stop. Either you get insecure — particularly for the kids, unlike me, who drew like voraciously, drew all the time, drew on their parents’ walls and whatnot — for those that stop, something makes you stop and either you get insecure, either you can’t make the living that you’d like to do — there’s no market for your work. I mean, something makes people stop. Everybody has to make a personal decision — at a fundamental level — if this is something they want to try doing full-time or something that is going to be a hobby.

It’s hard. Art is unforgiving. It is a cruel mistress, but she is her own rewards. It’s not easy. I’ll never sort of paraphrase it or joke about it from that point of view. It is not an easy thing to do. But I really don’t believe you tie your self-esteem to work. And I mean, I’ve never understood artists — I will never be Van Gogh lopping off my ear, you know, with some of the anguish. And part of it is, too, is you never know. Van Gogh is actually an example I really like to use because he really wasn’t a very successful artist in his lifetime.

James Hendricks: Wasn’t a very happy man, either.

Von Allan: No, no. That’s a huge part of it, too, right? You have to enjoy what you’re doing. And I will always say that as much as a particular painting or drawing might frustrate me, I really enjoy, I really love what I’m doing.

James Hendricks: Well, when we come back, we want to talk about what you’ve been working on — feverishly — these past couple of years that is now on the Internet and hopefully coming to printed publications sometime in the near future. That is, of course, “the road to god knows…”. And you’ve got plenty to say about the origins of that particular work in your own personal life.

We are talking to Von Allan, the creator of “the road to god knows…”. Right now, it’s an online graphic novel. It’s a medium that a lot of people aren’t accustomed to yet, but you may be getting accustomed to it just by watching this show. So, we will be back in about two minutes, here on “Talk Ottawa” with Von Allan, and we will see you then.

[Ad Break]

James Hendricks: There’s more than one way to join the discussion on Talk Ottawa. Just log on to rogerstv.com, follow show listings to “Talk Ottawa,” and send us an email with your thoughts or ideas. We want to hear from you on “Talk Ottawa,” the right choice for your voice.

Some of the art of Von Allan. You will find it on www.girlamatic.com or www.vonallan.com through the links. Von Allan is a graphic novelist. He is working in a medium that is still becoming familiar to the public at large, and that medium is going out through another medium that is not a familiar venue for works of art, which is to say the Internet. A fascinating story and a fascinating background of the story. So again, Von Allan, creator of “the road to god knows…”.

This graphic novel, it concerns the story of Marie, who is a teenage girl who is kind of learning about the world and about herself, and she’s got this monolith in her life — a sad one, which is to say that her mother is mentally ill — and coming to grips with that I guess is a large part of it. Could you tell me about the story? Just lead us through the story and tell us how you came to it.

Von Allan: Well, the story itself is fiction, but it is about a teen girl really coming to grips with her mom’s schizophrenia. So there’s been a suspicion within her that’s kind of hinted at in the narrative that things haven’t been that great with her mom, and — just before the story starts — things sort of really go downhill for her mom. [Marie is] trying to pick up the pieces, being confronted with things that she’s never seen before, never experienced before, and trying to cope with it as best she can. And what she’s learning is that there’s no easy answers for it. What I’ve tried to do with the story is not cure mental illness, not try to make it some type of naïve, very optimistic happy ending. It doesn’t have a terrible negative ending either, but mental illness is something that is still very much taboo in our society, and it’s not something that anybody can deal with in a very easy way.

So particularly when you’re a teenager — boy or girl — trying to figure out, trying to live your life, trying to discover everything that a teenager discovers, and coming to grips with everything that’s happening in your own life, and then dealing with this on top of it is very tough. And it is one of those things that you don’t see… It happens to a lot of people. We don’t discuss it very much. And I really wanted to try dealing with that.

James Hendricks: Is that why you came to this particular narrative, this story as a subject of your first graphic novel?

Von Allan: Partially. I certainly think that it is really relevant, but by the same token, it’s something that speaks to me personally. I went through this, and in that sense, the story is sort of a fictional biography.

James Hendricks: Tell me about that. How did you come to this? What do we find of you in Marie, and what do we find of your life?

Von Allan: Quite a bit. My mom died when I was 20, so she died at 48 [years of age]. There are always problems with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, but she had a number of nervous breakdowns, and she was diagnosed this way. And there was a lot of mental illness. And very much like Marie — who was like a female version of me in a way — I wound up, over time, seeing friends’ parents, seeing friends’ families, the ones that kind of worked, the ones that didn’t work so well. I started to realize that everything isn’t ‘right’ with my mom. And probably unlike Marie, there wasn’t a magic moment where it just happened. I just gradually became aware that things weren’t ‘all right.’ And things got worse for my mom as I got older.

One of the regrets I have, but it’s almost not a regret because life’s life, is I wish I had been a bit older. Maybe I could have helped her a little bit more. Probably not, because one of the things with mental illness is it’s everybody’s personal purgatory. It’s very difficult. You can support. You can offer support to a point. But I was a kid, and there’s only so much a kid can do. And I’ve never had any real problems differentiating that. I miss my mom. I think… my mom never saw me draw. My mom died before I picked up a pencil. So that kind of thing I regret. But she was a remarkably strong woman, too.

To the question of “why this story,” this story was something that spoke to me. It was a story that I didn’t really see represented in comics very much. And it was a story that I thought — when you’re trying to do something new, there’s risks in doing something new — but it, at least, would be different. It would be different than a lot of what else is out there. That can hurt a work, but I think it also can help elevate a work, as well. I really wanted to do a story for my first book, because I knew how hard [first book’s are]. I ran a bookstore. I wasn’t under any illusions about how hard it is to break in. I wanted to do a story that would be just something that I could stand behind no matter what.

James Hendricks: Writing what you know.

Von Allan: Writing what you know. I really do believe it. Drawing what you know. I know I was going to get better. I know I was going to become a stronger artist. You can’t wait for a magical day when that day is here. So you get your skills as good they are — writing and drawing — and you take a shot. You go. And I’ll always say this, no matter whatever happens with “road,” I’ll stand behind that book. If it gets published, great. If I make a million dollars, fantastic. If I make nothing, that’s okay, too. It’s something that was very personal to me and I believe very strongly in the characters.

James Hendricks: Not to indulge in armchair psychology, far be it. But it tends to be the case that when children grow up with parents that are in trouble in one way or another, especially single parents, there’s a sense that you kind of alluded to before that, you know, “I wish I could have helped. I wish I could have done something.” You find people eight, nine, ten years old and they’re — in their mind — taking on adult responsibilities. They’re saying, “I should be taking care of my mom. I should be making a difference.” Is there any sense that you would know of, of maybe a little bit of guilt that hangs over from that? And maybe I can fix it if I make myself into Marie and like re-write the story?

Von Allan: I had to confront guilt on a personal level pretty well just before my mom died. I made the decision that I wanted to move out and part of it was the home life wasn’t very good. I had just started at the bookstore that I would eventually start running and I wanted to live my own life. And by making that decision, I knew that I’d be leaving my mom alone and she would have to sort of manage her life as best she could. I moved out in July and she died in October. And the last time I saw her alive, it was very clear that things weren’t quite right. She was having really big problems with perceptions of time. She didn’t think that much time had passed since I had moved out. It was really odd. It was really weird. It was bloody uncomfortable. And then when she died, I had to deal with, “what if I had stayed? This probably wouldn’t have happened — maybe — if I had stayed.” It eats at you a little bit, but I really realized that I have a right to live my own life. And I have to — I deserve that. It doesn’t make it — I’m not happy with how things turned out for her, but if the price had been me instead, or at least a part of an emotional side of me, or a psychological side of me, that’s not really a price I was willing to pay. I think some people might call that selfish. I tend to think of it as a reasonably healthy selfishness. I was 20 years old. There were different things I wanted to do. But I regret that we didn’t get to talk much as adults. I regret that she — again, she never got to see me do artwork or anything. But I don’t regret moving out.

It was an interesting thing. When that hit me, when I was in mourning and dealing with the circumstances — money was a big, big problem at the time because there was no life insurance or anything like that for my mom. When I was confronting all this stuff, it hit me — through tears and grief and whatnot — it just hit me that I don’t regret moving out. And that really helped.

James Hendricks: So when we look at the work of fiction, it’s based on a bedrock of real experience. But this is a different life. Marie’s life is a different life. Was Marie’s life tweaked in such ways to maybe create closure where there was none

in the real story or to tidy things up or to maybe produce a more positive outcome?

Von Allan: Well, one of the things I did with the narrative — though this is online, this has not been completely revealed yet, because the conclusion is not there yet — is I wanted Marie to… I wanted the story and the situation with her and her mom not to ever be really resolved. So the idea is that when you finish the book, Marie is stronger. She’s in a stronger place. But things haven’t changed that much for her mom. And you don’t really know what happens next. And I worried — I wrestled with it because I didn’t want to wrap up schizophrenia in a bow and be like, “end of problem, there you go, happy ever after.” I certainly didn’t want that to have happened. But I also didn’t want there to be some type of animosity or hatred or some type of big explosion that was a huge melodrama or a soap opera. I wanted to bring them to — hopefully — an emotional place where Marie is pretty well an adult now, on an emotional level and a psychological level. And while her mom isn’t okay, [Marie’s] more okay with her mom not being okay than she was when the story started, if that makes sense.

So it’s tough, because no kid can really cope with schizophrenia — can cope with mental illness — in a way that makes sense. It’s just your life and you try to live it. So there was no way to wrap things up or even give it a conclusion — or even a wishful conclusion in my life — that would have been true to the characters and would have been true to the story.

James Hendricks: But all the same, do you find that… was it hard to write that? Was it emotionally difficult territory or was it cathartic?

Von Allan: It was both. It was weird to revisit it. It was weird to revisit it in fiction. One question that sort of popped up halfway through it was, “would my mom like this?”

James Hendricks: Yeah.

Von Allan: And I was like, “you know what, I’m not so sure.” I was kind of scratching my head going, “I don’t know if she would…” Marie’s mom isn’t my mom, but partially because I’m fictionalizing certain events and I’m playing with time a lot. That’s one of the big things that’s different; the things that happened in my life happened over years. The things that happened in Marie’s life are quite compressed. So I took a lot of events and some fiction, some not, and sort of compressed them into a narrative that takes place over about a month. But I don’t know if my mom would like this. I’m not so sure my mom would… I think she would respect my personal viewpoint on it — trying to maybe capture what a kid’s perceptions are of this type of stuff. I’m not so sure my mom would be like, “yeah, you got it.” I suspect my mom would be like, “no, you’re way off on this part, damn it. Yeah, you missed this completely.”

James Hendricks: So the dialogue still goes on.

Von Allan: Yeah, I don’t think it’ll ever end, either. It’s partially because I never got quite the resolution in my own life with it. There’s no simple way of answering it. Some people have asked me, “can you do a sequel? Is there a way to continue the story?” I was like, “well, I could follow Marie’s story,” which is interesting, but there’s no real way to follow the relationship between her and her mom and sort of continue it because I’m capturing elements from my life — and some fictional elements — and I think it would be really challenging to try to pick that up and do the same thing or somehow continue it. I’m very happy with how it ends.

James Hendricks: This may sound like a silly question, but was it a tough decision to put it in Ottawa? This book is very clearly Ottawa-based. I mean the splash or the first page has big panels of Parliament Hill and the streetscapes are recognizable. It’s like, “oh, that looks like a couple of back streets behind Elgin or near Bronson.” Was that a difficult decision? Did you think about making it something more generic, more American, more market-friendly?

Von Allan: A little at first because I had to do design work. That’s one of the things with graphic novels — or even comics, to be fair — is that you write the script but then you have to do basically pre-production. You have to sketch out the characters, figure out what they look like, figure out what their world is like, and what the buildings are, [and] the key set pieces. And I wrestled with it a bit and I was kind of like, “no, I like Ottawa.” I really enjoy the city. It’s too hot. I really do enjoy the city. And it was important to me to put it in a place that was recognizable. It’s a bit of a nod — maybe a little egocentric — but it is a bit of a nod to where I come from. And Ottawa hasn’t been represented in comics very much, either. So it was kind of neat.

James Hendricks: If at all. I mean, apart from the odd issue of Canadian superheroes like “Captain Canuck” or “Alpha Flight,” have you ever seen Ottawa in a comic? Well, you’ve done it.

Von Allan: So it was neat to do it. I always call it a fictional Ottawa. It is Ottawa. I mean the story, it’s not hitting the reader over the head. The story is not really taking place in the present. It’s taking place around 1987, 1988. And there’s a few little touches that imply that. But I wanted Ottawa to be an Ottawa that I kind of remember, an Ottawa that I’m playing with a little bit. And I didn’t want to be going out and getting exact reference of every single thing either, taking photos and really referencing it. Because I wanted to create sort of a ‘spirit of a place’ and call it Ottawa. And I think some people will be like, “you nailed it.” And other people will be like, “that’s not the Ottawa I know. You got it way wrong.”

James Hendricks: I don’t know. It’s the most recognizably Ottawa comic art I’ve ever seen, frankly. You don’t find the postcards — in those old comic books — as a matter of fact, a hero of yours, John Byrne, a Canadian artist who drew “Alpha Flight,” the first Canadian superhero team. When you see Ottawa in a John Byrne book, it’s well, “here’s Parliament Hill” or some generic building that’s supposed to be the Department of National Defense or whatever. In the pages of “the road to god knows…”, that looks like Ottawa. You may not know which back street that is, but you’ve been there. You may not know which storefront that is, but you’ve seen it.

Von Allan: Well, that’s kind of what I was going for. And I also was really making sure I didn’t put in street signs or anything like that. I didn’t want to have it pinned down that exactly. I will say, to be fair to John Byrne, when you’re doing superheroes, you’re doing Canada’s superhero team, it’s got to be Parliament buildings. It’s got to be the Peace Tower. That’s it. For me, because it’s much more of a ‘slice of life’ story, I wanted to show the back alleys. I wanted to show some of the rougher parts of Ottawa — some of the nicer parts, too. And I wanted to try to balance it a little bit more than I think somebody like John Byrne probably could get away with. He might not have been. Because I think if he had just shown everyday ordinary sites of, you know, Guardian walking, Sasquatch walking down a back street of Ottawa, the American readers would have been like, really?

James Hendricks: Yeah. Here’s Puck walking into the Mayflower.

Von Allan: Yeah, exactly. I don’t think anybody would buy it. Not in the Marvel Universe, anyway. You don’t see the Incredible Hulk hanging out in the streets that you recognize.

James Hendricks: But, well, you know something, Von? You may do for Ottawa what David Cronenberg did for Toronto back in the 70s. That’s something we’ll take up when we come back from the break. We’re talking to Von Allan, graphic — or I should say, comic artist, graphic novelist — the author of “the road to god knows…”. You can catch his work through the links at www.VonAllan.com. That’s www.VonAllan.com. And we will be back in about two minutes with more. See you.

[Ad Break]

James Hendricks: There’s more than one way to join the discussion on “Talk Ottawa.” Just log onto RogersTV.com, follow show listings to “Talk Ottawa,” and send us an email with your thoughts or ideas. We want to hear from you on “Talk Ottawa,” the right choice for your voice.

This is Von Allan’s artwork. You can check that out at girlamatic.com, or you can go through Von Allan’s website at www.VonAllan.com. He is the author of a graphic novel called “the road to god knows…”. It’s the story of Marie, who is a young Ottawa teenage girl who has a schizophrenic mother and a bit of a difficult life. A lot of challenges, a lot to learn about herself, a lot to learn about life in general. And we learn a lot about that in this graphic novel. It’s not an idiom you may be familiar with. Maybe your novels come 180 pages packed with print. But this is another way of approaching it. And arguably, Von, it’s in sync with the modern world.

Graphic novels have been around for a while. As a matter of fact, the ones that I remember from my youth were the early graphic novels of superheroes, which just meant taking a year’s worth of issues and collecting them together. But not the same thing. This is actually telling a real human story with nuance and with complexity and with feeling. The kind of stuff traditionally reserved for print — literary novels — and putting it into an idiom that may be more understandable to a society that just doesn’t read anymore.

Von Allan: Well, because I was a bookstore guy, I do believe that people do read and read fiction. I don’t think fiction is going anywhere. But comics, particularly long-form comics, what do graphic novels do? One of the first things they allow you to do is tell a longer story. I could never tell a story like this in 22 pages. And if I even did it as a monthly book — which I sort of debated when I was coming up with the idea — is you’d have to have a cliffhanger. Some reason to hook them to come back. And it’s tough.

James Hendricks: Tougher when you’re not using a superhero. They’re the ones who tend to hang off the cliffs.

Von Allan: Yeah, exactly. It would have been tough for me to do it that way, and I just decided to take the leap and not worry about that. It was going to be too tough. But because the medium of comics can be anything, and they can tell any type of story, or almost any type of story, as differently as literature and film can, and they can do it differently. One of the things that makes comics work, and one of the things I always try to work with in the art, is what happens between the panels. The gutter space between panel A and panel B. That space is incredibly important. So important, in fact, that it’s what makes comics work.

James Hendricks: What do you mean by that?

Von Allan: Well, if I did a drawing of a guy standing beside the driver’s side of a car, and in the next panel he’s inside the car, you — not me, you, the reader — has figured out that he got in the car and drove away.

James Hendricks: Like the edit in a film.

Von Allan: Like an edit in a film. But film — unless there’s an edit — film can actually show that motion. They can show the guy open the car door, sit down, put the seatbelt on, drive away. Literature can describe that. Comics, we have to show it, and we have to pick the ‘action spot.’ I don’t mean action from superheroes; just the ‘beat’ of conveying as much visual information in a way that the reader understands that also progresses the story forward. That’s, in a way, the art of comics, but it’s bloody hard. [Laughter] It’s really difficult to do that.

How I view things and how the reader views things may be entirely different. And that means that if I’m not very clear in what I’m trying to convey — and yet hopefully doing it in an artistic, maybe stylized way — the story won’t work. Because if you’re the reader, and if you’re like, “how did that guy get in that car? It doesn’t look like a car to me, or is he in the passenger side or the driver’s side?” If I blow it — and it’s really on me, if I blow that — then the reader gets pulled out of the story. The story doesn’t work anymore.

So trying to do this, trying to figure out a way to do it, trying to do it in a way that’s… I’m not spending days on days trying to solve the problem, so that I’m drawing economically, and the story has to finish at some point. I have to try to stick to a page a day as much as I can. If it doesn’t work, it completely doesn’t work and the whole story falls apart.

James Hendricks: So is that another one of these things that you literally had to sit down and make a study of it and figure out the mechanics and say, “oh, she’s doing this here, he’s doing that there, so that’s how you make a transition from this to that?” Or is there a ‘feel’ to it?

Von Allan: There’s a ‘feel.’ It is really ‘feel.’ A lot of the feel came at the script stage — let alone even before the art stage — trying to figure out what would work and then I would start drawing. Again, this was sort of the advantage of writing it; because I wrote it, when I started drawing it, I could go, “oh, you know, the way I conceived that in my head when I wrote it actually doesn’t work that well.”

James Hendricks: Yeah.

Von Allan: A really good example of that is on page 5 of the story; there’s a big splash page of Marie introducing her character to the reader. That was never in the script. I drew it and I got to that page and I went, “I’ve not really established who the main character is. And I really should do that.” I just never thought of that when I was scripting it and I decided — as the artist guy — I actually have to put this in.

So things happen and you try to make it work. Getting that gutter space to work properly so that the — it’s storytelling — is trying to get two disparate images working in connection. [That] is really the art of comics. And human beings have been struggling with this forever. You go back to hieroglyphics, trying to communicate visual ideas — or communicating ideas in a visual way — is remarkably challenging. But when it works — it’s the rhythm of the story and the people lose themselves in the story — it’s magic. It’s amazing.

James Hendricks: You know, it’s interesting. Once upon a time, and ironically back when films were still brand new, back in the early part of the last century, when directors like D.W. Griffith were getting around to using shots — like going from the long shot to the medium shot to the close up to the transition shot, you know, what they call a ‘jump cut.’ People were saying, “you can’t do that. If you don’t show somebody walking down the street, going in the door, and then climbing the stairs — if you just cut from the street to the room upstairs — people won’t know how he got there. They’ll be confused.” But people figured that out. But of all things, you know, in your time, Hollywood directors started drawing comics to make their films. They call them storyboards.

Von Allan: They call them storyboards.

James Hendricks: But they draw the comic first, they draw the graphic novel of the film first, and then they shoot it pretty much panel-by-panel.

Von Allan: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s amazing. I mean, people… it catches people by surprise — when you actually stop and analyze what is your reaction to film, to a comic. And when you really start deducing, like, “do you follow what’s happening? Are you ever confused?” The few times I’ve talked to high school kids, talking about art and writing comics and drawing comics, this is one of the things I always ask is, “you know, when you’re watching something on TV or watching a movie or watching the new George Lucas flick or what have you, or you’re reading a book, do you understand how you got from point A to point B to proceed? And if you don’t, why? Was it because you’re not paying attention? Or is it because the storytellers, whatever medium it is, blew it?” You try not to blow it all that often, and you try to not blow it for most people, and there’s always going to be a few people that you lose.

Frank Miller has talked a lot about when he was going up with “Daredevil,” he was sort of told over and over again that what works in comics would never work in film. And it’s laughable now. It’s totally laughable. Because we’ve seen “Sin City,” we’ve seen “300,” we’ve seen a lot of his visual ideas get incorporated in the early “Batman” movies, and they work, and they work remarkably well.

One of the things I love about comics is, comics when they work the best — even in an abstract way, you know, some artists are… I’m fairly realistic, some artists are way more cartoony, or way more abstract, like Bill Sienkiewicz, where you can hardly tell what’s going on sometimes — but the story still works. If the story works, then it’s worked. And art styles don’t matter; whoever the writer is, if it’s the same person as the artist, if it’s a different person, it doesn’t matter, because the story worked. And if the creators can bring you — or if the single creator can bring you — into a world and tell you a story, and you can follow it, and you can lose yourself in it, it’s wonderful. That’s all I aspire to do.

James Hendricks: The irony is that being somebody who managed a bookstore, somebody who’s familiar with the world of letters and the people who populate it, you chose what amounts to screenplays and storyboards instead. Why was that the idiom? Why didn’t you sit down and write an autobiographical novel?

Von Allan: What I learned very quickly when I was running the bookstore and thinking about writing and stuff like that — I got into comics when I first moved to Ottawa when I was eight years old. I was born in Arnprior, moved to Ottawa, my mom brought me here, and some neighbourhood friends — one of them’s got a PhD now — got me into comics, and I just fell in love with them. But I never thought I could draw. And that’s again the self-esteem thing. Never thought I could draw. And every time I wrote, even when I was in high school and doing terrible writing and stuff like that, I tended to do it visually and I tended to do it with a lot of dialogue. And when I got into the bookstore — still mucking around with writing in my spare time and whatnot — I found that I kept on coming back to plays and screenplays. But I kept coming back to those that do that in a very visual way. And I guess I could have tried to become a playwriter or scriptwriter or what have you, but because I was meeting artists at the same time and because I loved comics, I just was, “I want to try this. If I blow it, fine, I’ll blow it. I tried, you know. I can at least say I tried. But I want to try this.”

And it’s taken time, it’s taken a long time, and I keep working at it, and I’ve learned that you never get better. You do, but you keep extending horizons further. So, you know, I’m way better than I was when I started. But I still hope I can get better than this. And you keep getting stronger. And ‘better’ is a very subjective, personal thing. But you keep pushing boundaries. You keep trying to get stronger.

And it hasn’t… comics art, I like it a lot. And it hasn’t beaten me down. I’ve never gotten to a point where I’m like, “I quit! That’s it! Screw it! You know, I don’t care anymore.” It’s gotten me… it really… you know, I have bad days. But man, I really enjoy doing it.

James Hendricks: Is that basically the thing that still fires you through this process at the moment?

Von Allan: Yeah, that’s it. I’ve never felt that going to work — sitting down at my drawing board — is an absolute chore. And because of that, I keep going.

James Hendricks: Well, we’re going to keep going when we come back from the break. We’re talking to Von Allan, graphic novelist and the author of “the road to god knows…”. We will be joining you, or you will be joining us, when we come back. See you in a minute.

[Ad Break]

James Hendricks: There’s more than one way to join the discussion on “Talk Ottawa.” Just log on to Rogers TV dot com, follow show listings to “Talk Ottawa,” and send us an email with your thoughts or ideas. We want to hear from you on “Talk Ottawa.” The right choice for your voice.

I you had to tell the story of your life or maybe even a reasonable fact about your family. Would it look like this? Well, probably not, if you’re not Von Allan. But this, the artwork that you’re seeing from “the road to god knows…”, which is currently an online graphic novel. It will be published, I assume, in the near future. In the meantime, you can catch it through the links at VonAllan dot com. That’s VonAllan dot com and Von, Again, great to have you with us.

I’ve seen your work via the internet. You’re working in a medium, comics, which is traditionally a newsprint medium. Or Baxter paper, whatever. Depending on how much money you have. But this, so far, is something that you have rolled out over the internet. First on your own website and now through a website which is exclusively a showcase for comics called girlamatic dot com. Again, viewers can find that through the links for girlamatic dot com through VonAllan dot com. But why the internet? Why is this the way that the comic has been presented to the world? Is this the wave of the future or is it something more complicated?

Von Allan: I think it’s both. I do think the internet — the great thing about the internet — is it’s remarkably democratic. You have a way, unlike traditional book form publishing, that you can create space. And people can find you. And they can find you in a way — you think of Oprah’s Book Club, books piled high, where somebody else’s book is spined in the back corner somewhere. The internet gives you the potential for visibility, the potential for developing an audience, particularly an audience that’s disparate. They can be everywhere. So in that sense, I do think it’s the wave of the future.

It’s not been totally figured out yet. I mean, people haven’t quite figured out a way to make a living doing it. It’s worked pretty damn well for bands. Because, I mean MP3 is this technology that’s very, very similar to how we’ve listened to music anyway. It’s not that different downloading an MP3 and listening into an iPod than it is listening to it on a CD with headphones on. It translates very, very closely. Comics, prose, that kind of thing online, it’s a different reading experience. Amazon has been getting some interesting stuff done with the Kindle, but there’s still resistance to reading, like reading a piece of plastic and reading a screen and sitting down there. You can’t do it in a tub. It’s hard to do it in bed.

James Hendricks: Why not print it off? Same as an MP3. Burn a CD, print off the story. It’s harder for people.

Von Allan: Well, one of the things is that art, if the source file size isn’t big enough, if the visual information isn’t accurately in the file, it degrades when you print out a hard copy. So one of the issues is that if you print off prose — not so much because you can print off, just turn it into a word document or something — but with art, I mean, my art is at 72 DPI as a resolution on screen. It looks fine on screen. If you print that out, it’s going to look terrible. It’s going to absolutely look terrible. One of the things I’m hoping to do is just create it — collate it — into a PDF so that people could read it, download it, and actually maybe even do high enough quality that they could print it out. But if you think if you’re printing out a 145 page book on your printer at home, it’s going to take a while. It’s going to use a lot of ink. And at that point, you’re probably better off buying the book anyway.

James Hendricks: It might cost you as much or more than actually buying the book.

Von Allan: Exactly. And you’ll hopefully get a nicer edition with a nicely printed bound book than you would ever at “Sherlock’s Binding” at your local print shop with something you downloaded online. And that’s where music and print publishing are very, very different. They’re just different technologies and we haven’t quite figured out a way to maximize that yet.

James Hendricks: But do you foresee a day when you can actually post the comics online, get the same resolution printed out, and create a reading experience that people would… that would be the destination. That people wouldn’t be thinking of the comic store. They’d be thinking about going to the website and catching up with their favourite monthly comic, daily comic, or to read a graphic novel.

Von Allan: Well, I think in some senses it has. I mean, there are cartoons online — like “Penny Arcade” is the one that jumps to mind — that have millions of viewers and they’ve been so successful that they’ve set up their own convention. And they’re courted by the gaming industry because “Penny Arcade” is primarily a comic that focuses on games.

I could do something with much higher resolution. The load times would be slower. People do still pay for bandwidth; it’s cheaper, but the load times would be a lot slower because over the internet, the data has to be parsed and translated, still through basically either cable high speed or DSL or what have you. And it can be slow. And then to print it out, well, it’s… I don’t know. What I tend to look at right now is that print-on-demand is changing traditional offset printing. So offset printing is — somebody prints off a thousand copies of something and binds them and hopefully can get them into bookstores and other distribution channels. Where print-on-demand, if somebody wants it, they go, they ‘click,’ and that book is produced for them and shipped to them. And that, I think, is probably where — at least for the short term — publishing webcomics are going.

James Hendricks: The short term, yeah, but the technology changes quickly. And I know people are worried very much about bottlenecks right now, as far as the Internet goes, but inevitably some ‘deus ex machina’ pops out of the technological sky, and we have a solution to a problem that we didn’t think we would have two years ago. So we can almost bet, come back in five or ten years, and the ground will have shifted.

Do you foresee a day when being a virtual comic artist is a practical proposition?

Von Allan: I hope so. I really do. I mean, I think that would be terrific. I have a soft spot for retail stores, for bookstores and comic book shops, good ones at the very least. Because I think they do add something to the community, I think they add something to culture. However, it would be nice to be able to interact with my audience directly at the same time, and not have any middlemen in the way. And I haven’t quite figured out a way to do that yet, where I’m not hurting or destroying small business in particular, and, small bookstores, small comic book shops. Because I think that they are important. They serve us in a way that people can underestimate. But I have biases towards this too.

At the same time, traditional distribution, the marketing, the whole thing that goes into it, I’ve done it. It’s really hard.

James Hendricks: How hard is it? Because this is still in process. “The road to god knows…” is still being rolled out on the Internet. You’re up to, what, page 119 now?

Von Allan: Yup.

James Hendricks: And it’s four pages every Monday. So like a serial, people are tuning in every Monday to find out what happens this week. But how difficult is it to, A) get yourself online and to that size of an audience, and B) to get yourself published? Because that’s still in the future.

Von Allan: Getting yourself online isn’t hard at all. The barrier for entry is lower than almost anything I could even imagine. It’s unlike — we are in an age that people forget — that is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before. Anybody can now produce something and get it online. There are a lot of free, easy websites that you can do it with. You can upload things. It’s pig easy. It’s not hard to do. The craft is a different thing, but just getting stuff out there isn’t hard to do. You can put kids’ drawings up really, really simply. But distribution, traditional distribution, even new modes of distribution, that’s a very different thing. It’s hard. Even though there’s new technologies — print-on-demand being one of them — that’s changing things, it’s getting into bookstores, getting into comic book shops. There are a lot of barriers of entry.

James Hendricks: You’ve been working tirelessly. You’ve been promoting “the road to god knows…” when it was still a work in the early stages. Why did you do that? Why did you decide to go out and promote something, most of which you hadn’t written yet?

Von Allan: Well, I knew from running a bookstore that most books fail. And most first books fail. A lot of people don’t realize this. The majority of books, the majority of the dollars — billions of dollars in revenue for the book trade — are coming actually from a select group of authors and a select group of publishers. Most ISBNs sell less than a thousand copies a year. A thousand copies; you’re not living on a thousand copies a year sold. Even if you self-publish the bloody thing, the odds are that you’re — in some cases, that’s a couple of pizzas. That’s it.

James Hendricks: Yeah.

Von Allan: For the cost of manufacturing, plus the discounts you’re giving to distributors and retailers. So, I knew that for a work like this to find an audience, I had to start it early. Perhaps too early, but that’s a tough thing to say. I had to make a decision to go and start marketing it and start sort of promoting it. And I was really worried. I mean, I believe very strongly — I’m not the first person to say this — but I believe really strongly that the danger is obscurity. I’m never worried about people pirating my work, stealing things, or passing it around, or anything like that. Nobody’s ever heard of me. I’m an unknown author. I’m a Canadian unknown author. I’m a Canadian unknown author with a weird, different book, that’s tackling subject matter most of these don’t. Or most people aren’t familiar with.

And as much as I believe that there are strengths in that, there are also weaknesses. And the weaknesses are, “nobody’s ever heard of you. Why would somebody read that thing?” And I dealt with that as a retailer. Some sales rep would come in and be like, “wow, there’s this book. I love it. You should try it, too.” And I’m looking at it going in the catalogue going, “really? You think? Yeah? Yeah? I don’t know about that. I might… maybe one I could sell?” And when you spin that off in your head and you’re like, “well, if my bookstore, which is fairly progressive, would order one copy of something, how many stores in North America are ordering ‘onesies’ and ‘twosies’ of something?

James Hendricks: So, how do you get over that? How do you get past that bottleneck between you and the audience?

Von Allan: I wish I knew. I really don’t. There are no simple answers. There’s no simple solution. Nobody has figured out a magical way of doing it. You do good work. You do work that you stand by. You do work with a sense of craft. And you hope to god that you’re not like Van Gogh and that people will actually support you early. It takes time. A lot of first books fail. And I risk that going into something like this.

James Hendricks: Right.

Von Allan: And I’ve had to sort of face the reality of “the road to god knows…” may not do very well. And it may be something like the best case scenario or one of the best case scenarios might be that ten years from now, when I’m much more established, then I can like re-bring it out or what have you.

First book, out it comes. You don’t know. I wish there was a way. I ran a bookstore. I talked to many sales reps. I saw books sell. Why do certain things work? Why does the public — which is almost like a group — why do people catch onto something and yet something else — that I believe would have merit — fails? We don’t know. The only thing I’ll say is that there are certain things that help. Awards help. Oprah certainly helps. As crass as it is, there’s certain things — there’s a difference between a book that wins a Governor General’s award and the ones that’s [don’t].

Elizabeth Hay, who has become a very famous author and is an Ottawa author, I remember her coming in with “Small Change.” Her little short story collection into my bookstore.

James Hendricks: International bestseller now.

Von Allan: Yeah, go figure. And that’s an excellent example of a book that was repackaged later on. It was done by a little literary press. I think it was Porcupine’s Quill. And it was subsequently repackaged, I think, from a different publisher. Things happen. And was the fact that she didn’t have profile something that meant her work didn’t have merit? Of course not. But how do you find out who somebody like that is? I mean, you keep hammering at walls. And the walls for traditional print distribution are very high.

Comics, because comics are — the Direct Market is different. It’s a separate channel from the book trade. They have their own unique problems. And one of the problems, it’s also its strength, is that retailers buy non-returnably from one company, Diamond [Diamond Comic Distributors]. Diamond distribution is a functioning monopoly in North America. People don’t realize that. They don’t realize where the comics come from. It’s a functional monopoly. And on top of it, it’s a monopoly with functional dominance with Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and Image. It’s tough.

James Hendricks: Well, I’ll tell you what. One thing that does break monopolies is cyberspace. And we just want to remind everybody that the website is www.vonallan.com. That’s https://www.vonallan.com. Check it out. Check out his artwork. And check out the links to his full length graphic novel, “the road to god knows…”. Really enjoyed talking to you, Von.

Von Allan: Me, too.

James Hendricks: Best of luck with the graphic novel and everything in the future.

Von Allan: Thanks very much.

James Hendricks: And we hope to have you come back and tell us about it when it happens, alright?

Von Allan: That’d be great.

James Hendricks: Alright. Hope you come back, too. We’ve enjoyed having you and we will see you again soon. We’ll see you later.

Other Links

• Overview of my Comics: http://www.vonallan.com/p/comics.html

• Wolf’s Head (My Ongoing Comic Book Series): https://wolfs-head.vonallan.com/

• Von Allan Studio Shop Page: http://www.vonallan.com/p/von-allan-studio-shop.html

• RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Von_Allan_Homepage

• Mailing List Sign-Up: https://vonallan.us14.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=f6d06612e90503db886a31a24&id=7642c19478