Get Out of the Gutter: Hong Kil Dong Goes Comics

Anne Sibley O'Brien's The Legend of Hong Kil Dong is a recent example of an American picture book that uses the visual vocabulary of comics. Earlier in the year I wrote about hearing O'Brien speak of the challenges, for her and her production team at Charlesbridge, of figuring out this new style.

Here's another wrinkle that probably became apparent only after the book had been bound. Hardcover picture books usually have a strong library-quality binding, so the pages don't lie flat. That produces a deep gutter, and an artistic challenge. If any illustration extends over two facing pages, and these days most picture-book illustrations do, the artist must be careful not put crucial details where the gutter will fall. In laying out the book, the Production Department must make each pair of facing pages meet at their join as seamlessly as possible.

Here's a scan of one problematic gutter from The Legend of Hong Kil Dong:
O'Brien drew two panels of the same place from the same angle--a common comics technique. In the first, her hero Hong Kil Dong practices with his sword in a walled garden. In the second, a man approaches him and speaks.

Unfortunately, the space between those panels and the borders that defined them fell into the gutter between the pages and disappeared. Because the two panels show the same sky, wall, and grass, they appear at first glance to be a single panel stretching across the gutter. There's even a bush that seems to provide visual continuity from one side to the other.

Only after "rereading" the spread did it become clear to me that the two young men with swords are in fact the same young man at different moments. This is a minor glitch in a book that generally uses comics techniques well, but it's a sign of how picture-book publishers will have to learn new tricks as more artists try the comics style.

Breaking the Frame with Hong Kil Dong

One highlight of last weekend's SCBWI New England conference for me was hearing from author-illustrator Anne Sibley O'Brien. First there was the cabaret act she performed with Charlesbridge Editorial Director Yolanda LeRoy and pianist Marilyn Salerno. I hadn't expected such professional-quality singing. Don't miss them if their tour takes them through your convention!

The next morning I attended O'Brien's workshop on new graphic novels for kids, and specifically on how she created The Legend of Hong Kil Dong with Charlesbridge editor Judy O'Malley and art director Susan Sherman. This legend of the "Korean Robin Hood" features a hero with some superhuman powers, so using the comics format made artistic/literary sense.

At the same time, some of the creative team's practical decisions seem to have led to trouble. The book's trim size and 48 pages make it look like a standard picture book, despite the panels on the cover. Some reviewers and librarians have had trouble categorizing the book: graphic novel or picture book? Just recently Booklist threw its weight behind the former category, including it in the Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth for last year. It’s really a hybrid of the two genres, I think, and more power to it.

Behind the scenes, O'Brien decided to draw all the speech and thought balloons into her art. That no doubt helped with composing the pictures and giving all the art the same line quality. (Korean-style brush work, not pen drawing, by the way.) But the text eventually had to be rewritten to fit well into those inflexible balloons.

I was sitting next to another old fanboy, Greg Fishbone, during the presentation, and we both knew that for decades comic-book publishers pasted the speech balloons onto their panels. Now most comics artists go digital at some stage, another way of solving the same problem. But O'Brien didn't feel confident of her computer abilities, so she and her team were reinventing the wheel with a kink in it.

Now Charlesbridge has the challenge of selling foreign rights in the book with the news that any translated text would have to fit into those same spaces. This sounds like a job for someone with superhuman powers!