Comics and Children’s Publishing—When Worlds Collide

As traditional children’s publishers issue material in comics form, their editors are being challenged to develop new skills and working methods. A couple of web interviews this month gave hints at managing the creative process.

First, at the Brown Bookshelf, Randy DuBurke describes his work on Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, scripted by G. Neri. With experience drawing mainstream comics that goes back to DC in the late 1980s (I think I have some of the issues of Action Comics that he contributed to), DuBurke was the veteran on this project:

Jennifer Fox at Lee and Low Books…contacted me partly because this was their first foray into graphic novels and since I had experience in doing comics they thought it would be a good idea if I worked on the project. . . .

Before I started, I told my editor I would need to make changes along the way, which is not unusual when doing stories for comics. Comic book stories are collaborations between the artist and writer. I did change some scenes to strengthen the visual impact. Once the page art was completed, Greg and our editor would do a rewrite to accommodate the changes if necessary.

Meanwhile, over at Cynsations, artist Neil Numberman writes about creating the art for the Joey Fly, Private Eye comics, scripted by Aaron Reynolds. One of his responsibilities is “to thumbnail the entire book”:

There’s a good reason they call these sketches "thumbnails," but even though they’re super tiny, they do give me a number of things I need to know before starting the real sketches. They help me pace out the entire book, to make sure scenes and act breaks end at the end of a page or spread. I also need to roughly figure out where everyone in the scene will be and their word balloons, in each panel. . . .

Our editor, Reka Simonsen, always requests to see these little thumbnails. I love that she wants to be so involved in the process, and she claims she loves looking at my thumbnails, but I have no idea how she gets anything from these sloppy little drawings.

That step was especially important in this project because Reynolds did not specify page turns, as his sample script shows. That’s how picture books are created; it’s up to the artist to decide what goes on which page. In contrast, comics scripts usually state where the page breaks fall, and often other details about page layout.

It struck me that neither DuBurke nor Numberman mentions interacting directly with their scripters. For example, Numberman describes a later stage like this:

So, after the sketch stage, I hand ’em over to Reka, and she hangs onto them for a month or two, making notes and passing them around to other folks at the publisher, so when I get it back, I have a giant printout of the entire book, with little stickie notes on them.

The editors of these two books appear to be working as children’s-book editors have usually done, standing between author and artist. In contrast, writers in mainstream comics—at least the more successful ones who get asked to write introductions to their collections—often describe direct interaction with their artists. They sometimes approach publishers as a team, and comics scripts can contain notes directly to the artist, though the editor is always in the loop.

There’s no evidence to suggest that one method is preferable to the other, or usually produces better results. Rather, these two parts of the publishing industry have different cultures, but now they’re starting to overlap.

Yummy: There Is No Rosebud Here

I remembered the case of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer from 1994 before reading Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty. I didn’t remember the boy’s name, but I remembered the news reports about an eleven-year-old killer on the run, eventually found murdered by his own gang in a tunnel.

I therefore knew how the title character’s story would end in Yummy, the comics-style retelling of that episode by G. Neri and Randy DuBurke. Younger readers might not, despite the phrase “Last Days” in the subtitle and the mention of death on the front flap.

G. Neri structures the narrative to maintain that suspense. It begins with Yummy Sandifer shooting a teen-aged girl, then circles back to his upbringing, entrance into gang life, and early crimes. When we return to the shooting, the story seems to have caught up with its telling. Though still in the past tense, there’s no sign of what’s to come.

The narrator Roger is another boy about Yummy’s age, a fictional neighbor and classmate. But he comes from a normative American family: mother, father, one other sibling. But we also see that Roger’s older brother was the member of the Black Disciples gang who recruited Yummy.

Like the reporter in Citizen Kane, Roger undertakes to find out more about Yummy, asking neighbors and friends. He describes his own encounters with the boy, who has sometimes seemed abused, sometimes a bully, sometimes just another kid. Neighbors share contradictory thoughts about Yummy and his behavior.

Unlike Orson Welles’s film, however, Yummy ends without an answer, even a facile one. (Citizen Kane was always more about audacious storytelling than about its story.) We never learn what made Yummy so much more violent than other “shorties,” or exactly why he shot two people on one August day.

We do, however, get a sense that Roger’s family has helped to keep him from that path. There’s even a family reconciliation at the end, providing the requisite “sense of hope.” But for the questions the narrator asks about Yummy Sandifer and the girl he killed, there are no adequate answers.

The artwork fits that stark story. Randy DuBurke’s panels are all in black and white; he uses hatching to create the illusion of grays, but there are no washes or half-tones. It’s a high-contrast world full of shadows and looming perspectives, with spindly-legged kids running for their lives.

(These comments based on a review copy sent by the publisher, Lee & Low Books.)