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.
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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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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.
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
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