Thirty
years ago my mom died. It’s mind-boggling to think about that. It’s
mind-boggling to think that I’ve now lived far more of my life
WITHOUT her then I have with her.
As
some reading this will already know, my mom struggled with
schizophrenia for most of her life. I suspect that she actually had
early onset schizophrenia. And by “early onset,” I mean most
likely in her teens. Am I sure? Nope, far from it. One of the tricks
with mental illness is that it’s very hard to know when it starts.
To put it another way, there’s a chance —
probably a pretty good chance —
that the mom I knew was never NOT struggling with schizophrenia. All
of my memories of her are tinted with that disease, especially
because she died so young (she was only 48 years old).
Since
I don’t want to get maudlin about this (you don’t wanna read that
and I sure as hell don’t want to write it), I thought I’d take a
different angle on it this time. When my mom died, she was on
welfare, struggling with intense poverty. There
was no life insurance policy. No inheritance. No nothing. If an uncle
of mine hadn’t stepped in, she would have had a pauper’s
funeral1,
Canadian-style. Since she
didn’t have any assets, there wasn’t much “stuff” to inherit.
I did, however, manage to take some things that were important to me.
Some photos and other keepsakes. And her notes. She wrote a LOT of
notes.
I
think, but I’m not sure, that these notes were part of her therapy.
I’ve never actually managed to sit down and read them all, mainly
because they are actually very difficult to read. Part of that
difficulty is emotional; these are written, after all, by someone I
loved, someone I miss to this day, and someone who had a very unfair
life. It’s MORE
than that, though. They are really “stream of consciousness2”-type
writing, very difficult to understand. These are also not a diary, at
least not a diary that most people would write. Like
a diary, my mom’s writings were not censored. Unlike a diary, she
clearly showed at least some of them to her therapist, though I’m
not sure exactly how they were used in her
therapy.
What’s
really hard about reading them, though, is that they are all over the
place. Contradictory, nonsensical, rambly,
very emotional, and so on.
She wrote in cursive, and
even her cursive would change depending on the day and her “mood.”
It’s
actually difficult to try and describe these to you in words, so I’m
going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m
going to SHOW you some of
them.
Some
caveats first.
The main reason I’ve never shared
them before is that they were very personal to my mom. And to me.
Sharing them felt like an intrusion…
or maybe even a violation of her privacy.
What’s
changed with that? Two things:
The
first is TIME; simply put, a lot of time has passed. I don’t feel
as protective about her
writing and her privacy as I
once did.
The
second thing is that schizophrenia and mental illness are still
difficult to discuss openly in our society. Some would call this
“stigma,” but I’m on the fence with that term. I’ve seen
some push-back against it and I’ve seen push-back against that
push-back. At any rate, SHOWING some of my mom’s writing might be
useful to some. I hope so, anyway.
The other issue was that my mom, in
much of her writing, named people. Her parents primarily. Me. Her
therapist. And a few others here and there. I was concerned about
privacy issues, especially by posting anything like this online.
However, time has passed and
most of the people that my
mom addresses are now dead (my grandparents foremost amongst
them). I think (he says
cautiously) that I’m on firmer ground3
then I might have been once upon a time.
The last major issue was trying to
put my mom’s writing in some type of chronological order. Simply
put, it’s impossible. I have a giant box of her writing as well as
a large
binder full of even more
of her writing.
With only a few exceptions, these are a jumble and it’s hard to
know when something was written. That’s made harder by both her
tone and the context of her writing. That’s a big part of why they
are so hard to read; there
is no page one. There is no beginning. There’s no “right place”
to start. I don’t even know when she started writing these in the
first place.
That
said, there are a few helpful occurrences. First, she did date some
things. Second, she occasionally organized them, even page numbering
some groups
of them, I presume to share with her therapist. That
helps. And, of course, I only wanted to share some fragments of her
writing, not try and share (let alone read) everything. Whew, boy.
There’s no way that would
be tenable.
Mixed
with her writing are
photographs of my mom.
I took some time over the past few days to scan in some old photos of
her
that I have. Most of these are childhood photos. The sad reality is
that after my parents split, when I was around 5 years old, all
photos basically stopped. There are a couple of exceptions, but my
mom’s deteriorating health (both mental and physical) combined with
poverty meant that there just wasn’t “space” for photos. I
don’t have photos of her as I grew up. I rarely have photos of
myself from that era, too. So it goes.
The
main reason to post photos of my mom, though, is to help document her
life, to contrast the photos with her later writings, and to pose a
question to everyone reading this. Can you tell when her
schizophrenia started? Can you tell when the disease was really
sinking its claws in? Was she
20? 14? 11? 7? 5?
What’s
my point? Simply this.
There’s
no way to look at a photo of her and say, “yup, THERE it is. That’s
schizophrenia right there. Got
it!”
Our
society is better (not great, but better) at dealing with physical
illnesses, at least when compared to mental illnesses. When someone
is having an “episode” in public, it can be scary. My
mom’s episodes would certainly
scare the
hell out of me. Even
now, all of these years later, I
can still get uncomfortable thinking of them.
And
yes, certainly some episodes can be physically violent. That’s
terrifying, too. However, I
find it important to remember that the perpetrator is also the
victim, ravaged by a disease that we can’t see. Is it any wonder
why people struggling with mental illness
might turn to self-medicating to help? Especially if they are poor?
Especially if they are victimized twice over; once by the disease
itself and then again by the lack of societal support?
The
late actor James Garner was in a 1986 film titled PROMISE.
The film deals with two brothers. Bob (played by Garner) is the
eldest and he winds up inheriting his mother’s estate after her
death. He also inherits custody of his younger brother D.J. (played
by James Woods). D.J. is, you guessed it, struggling with
schizophrenia.
Jimmy [Woods] researched the part of D.J.
by spending time at a halfway house in Santa Monica called Step Up on
Second…
People in their late teens or early twenties —
usually men, but it happens
to women, too —
can suddenly develop
schizophrenia. Their odd behavior is often misinterpreted and they go
undiagnosed. They self-medicate with alcohol and illegal drugs, and
many wind up homeless, strung out, muttering to themselves…
I
had no idea what schizophrenics have to endure. I learned that they
inhabit a terrifying world of hallucinations and inner voices that
seem completely real. Even when they’re well, they have the burden
of knowing they can lose control in an instant. I’ve never
forgotten what one of them said: “When I was awake, I seemed alone,
even when I was with people. My life was narrated by thoughts that
weren’t mine.”
… One
day at Step Up on Second, Jimmy Woods met “Sam,” who gave a
beautiful, eloquent description of what it’s like to be
schizophrenic, Richard Friedenberg put it in the script:
D.J.:
Do you want to know what it’s like, Bobby? It’s like, all the
electric wires in the house are plugged into my brain. And every one
has a different noise, so I can’t think. Some of the wires have
voices in them and they tell me things like what to do and that
people are watching me. I know there really aren’t any voices, but
I feel that there are, and that I should listen to them or something
will happen…
I can
remember what I was like before. I was a class officer, I had
friends. I was going to be an aeronautical engineer…
I’ve never had a job. I’ve never owned a car. I’ve never lived
alone. I’ve never made love to a woman. And I never will. That’s
what it’s like. You should
know. That’s why I’m a Hindu. Because maybe it’s true: Maybe
people are
born again. And if there is a God, maybe he’ll give me another
chance. I believe that, because this can’t be all I get.
Accepting
the Emmy for Best Teleplay, Richard Friedenberg said he hoped the
film would help schizophrenics by calling attention to their plight.
I’m sorry to say that twenty-five years later, schizophrenia is the
worst mental health problem facing the nation. Asylums have been
closed, and government spending on mental health has been cut to the
bone. There are new medications for schizophrenia, but though more
expensive, they’re not much more effective than the old ones. And
there is still no cure.
Garner
and Winokur wrote that in 2012. I’m writing this in the early fall
of 2024. Has anything changed? From where I sit, no. In fact, in June 2022 the World Health Organization (WHO) published
WORLD
MENTAL HEALTH REPORT: TRANSFORMING MENTAL HEALTH FOR ALL. In it,
they note the following:
Schizophrenia, which occurs in
approximately 1 in 200 adults, is a primary concern: in its acute
states it is the most impairing of all health conditions. People with
schizophrenia or other severe mental health conditions die on average
10 to 20 years earlier than the general population, often of
preventable physical diseases… The most impairing state across all health conditions…
is acute schizophrenia, which is given a health state weight of 0.78.
Put simply, this means an individual experiencing acute schizophrenia
is expected to have only one fifth of the health and functioning of a
fully healthy person.
They
then added that “On average, countries dedicate less than 2% of
their health care budgets to mental health.” What an
unbelievable policy failure that is.
I’ve
said it before and I’ll say it again. My mom had dreams. My mom had
hopes for the future. She didn’t want to be sick. And she didn’t
want to be dead at the age of 48.
In
all of her writings, the most haunting line is this one:
“I’m afraid I’m going to die alone.” But that’s exactly what
happened.
Thirty
years later, I still feel her death is a tragedy. I never got to know
her as an adult. She never got to know me as an adult, either. She
never got to meet my wife. She never got to meet my dogs or my cats.
She never got to see me draw.
And
I never got to see the things that she could do, either.
THAT
is the awful part of her disease. It took her away. Yes, she had good
days and bad days. It’s hard for me to remember or to know which
good day was tied to medication and which bad day wasn’t. I suspect
it was a mix, but I’ll never know. And as she got into her 40s, her
physical health declined. That was mainly due to years of not taking
care of herself. That wasn’t a conscious choice. I view it as an
example of the spoon
theory. She simply didn’t have the spoons for proper hygiene,
exercise, nutrition, and so on. Sadly and inevitably, that caught up
with her.
Since
so much of her decline was tied to my own teenage years, I don’t
have memories of my mom being healthy. I wish I did, but I don’t.
I’m left, as always, with questions and “what ifs,” but no
answers.
I
wish that there had been better supports for her, in all senses of
the word. And I dearly wish that other people who struggle with
mental illness had better support, too. That my mom’s death, as sad
as it was and is, might have led to change. But her death didn’t
change anything. In fact, if she had lived, she would have been
victimized by the so-called “Common
Sense Revolution” that the Mike Harris government enacted in
Ontario in 1995. These social service cuts eviscerated welfare income
and other public health supports, as Scott Sørli
so aptly demonstrated4.
I do honestly feel that if my mom had somehow lived to experience
those cuts, they would have killed her.
She
was a deeply caring human being who was given a brutally unfair
disease through no fault of her own. I am proud to have known her.
And I miss her.
I’ll
leave it with that. Please do look at her photos. Can you tell when her
schizophrenia started?
Photos of my Mom
These are photos travelling back in time, from when my mom was pregnant with me to back when she was a baby herself.
Samples of my Mom’s Writing
A quick note: I’m not going to explain these or try and clarify them. I’m far happier to let them sit “as is.” But to clarify one point: I use the pen name “Von Allan” for all of my art-related work. My real name is Eric. So when you see that name in her writing, you know she’s referring to me.
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.
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.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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