Colonial Comics Arrives at MICE This Weekend

This morning at 11:30, I’m moderating a panel on “History in Comics” at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo in Porter Square, Cambridge.

This year’s special guests are Raina Telgemeier, James Kolchaka, Dave Roman, Box Brown, Emily Carroll, and Paul Hornscheimer. And there will be scores of other comics creators showing their latest creations.

Among the debuts of the show is Colonial Comics: New England, 1620-1750, a collection of history comics edited by Jason Rodriguez, A. Dave Lewis, and me. I’m also in that book as a contributor, having created a story about the start of slavery in Massachusetts with Joel Christian Gill.

MICE is free, though it’s hard to walk through the exhibit space without seeing something you might want to buy. The show runs 10:00 to 6:00 on Saturday and 11:00 to 4:00 on Sunday, which also has special workshops for kids. Concurrent with MICE on Sunday is a “Comics in the Classroom” symposium starting at 10:00.

The Color of Drama

Color is an element of comics I have very little handle on. I can spot broad patterns, like the contrasting worlds of brownish-red and blue-green in the Artemis Fowle adaptations. But more subtle color schemes need to be spelled out for me. (Spider-Man’s early villains were often green and purple because those contrast with his own red and blue—ohhh!)

I therefore latched onto this passage from Graphic Novel Reporter’s interview with Raina Telgemeier about Drama:

You worked with design studio Gurihiru to create a color scheme for this book that perfectly complements the tone of the story. Tell us a little bit about how you went about that.

Gurihiru (a two-women team, Kawano and Sasaki) is responsible for some of my favorite art and comics of the past half-decade or so. They illustrated the rebooted Marvel Power Pack series, and they’re working on the Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Lost Adventures with Gene Yang right now. They have a really soft, pleasing color palette, so I looked to them to help create the jewel-toned world of Callie’s universe, which I love.

In some cases, I had really clear ideas—the story is set in a specific part of California, where the weather and atmosphere are very distinctive. And because Gurihiru are Japanese and work through a translator, there were a few instances where they needed solid American references. Soda cans, the bookstore scene, things like that.

In the New York Times Book Review, Ada Calhoun praised that element of the art: “Telgemeier’s use of color, created with the design team Gurihiru, is eloquent; Callie’s amethyst-colored hair complements her suburb’s sky-blue skies and pistachio-green grass.”

Frankly I don’t see coloring the skies “sky-blue” to be that much of a stretch. But once the interview called it to my attention I could see how Telgemeier and Gurihiru had found a rich, luminous palette even as they stayed away from the stark primaries.

Ooh, Drama!

There are three major girl characters in Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novel Drama: protagonist Callie, her best friend Liz, and a classmate named Bonnie who fills the three roles of middle-school queen bee, Callie’s romantic rival, and leading lady in the school play.

In contrast, there are six major boy characters, by which I mean characters involved on one side or the other of the story’s many crushes and tentative relationships. My count includes Callie’s brief initial boyfriend Greg, his younger brother Matt, twins Justin and Jesse, leading man West, and stage manager Loren. (I’m not counting male members of the stage crew who appear throughout the book but stay outside the romantic roundelay, nor Callie’s little brother.)

Numerically, that ratio is quite different from my understanding of middle-school theatricals: that a director has to find parts for about a dozen boys and four dozen girls. True, Callie’s on the stage crew. (In fact, she spends much of the book solving a technical problem involving a timed explosion—no sewing costumes for her!) But Callie’s circle is divided between people working in front of and behind the curtain.

Telgemeier’s male-heavy cast would also appear to present problems if Drama were headed for the classic comedic ending with all the boys and girls neatly paired off. The book is, after all, framed and structured as a play itself, with the cast members walking on stage in the first pages and a spread labeled “Intermission” partway through.

But this story is about a modern middle-school drama club. The book not only acknowledges homosexuality but puts it at the center of the plot. In fact, the only pairing that appears still to be on its feet at the end of the book is between two of the boys. But despite all the lines and color on cheeks, no one in the cast has actually died of embarrassment, and in middle school that’s about as much as you can hope for.

Will Comics Adaptations Push Out Originals?

A couple years back, I was part of a Cybils judging panel that gave top marks to the comics adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, which I for one preferred to the prose novel. This year I was pleased to see Eric Shanower and Skottie Young’s adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz win Eisner Awards not just for best graphic novel for kids, but best graphic novel for any age.

Lately we’ve seen announcements of more adaptations of bestselling fantasy novels, including Jonathan Stroud’s Amulet of Samarkand and Rick Riordan’s Lightning Thief. All this attention and money for graphic-novel versions must be good for the comics form and its creators, right?

Actually, I worry about what those high-profile adaptations mean for new novel-length comics.

Several years ago, soon after lots of upper- and middle-class American couples were having babies, there was a little boom in books for pre-readers, including original board books. There was also a boom in adapting established picture books, such as Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon, into the board book format—though fans complained that the adaptations were too simplified.

In a short time already-known titles drove out the original offerings with any more text than a few labels. Parents recognized the older books, perhaps from their own childhoods, and saw them as a safer buy than unfamiliar titles. The expense of printing board books made publishers reluctant to invest in poorer sellers.

Will the same dynamic play out in comics? The Lightning Thief has already enjoyed many months on bestseller lists, lots of fans, and a Hollywood marketing budget that—even if the movie sank—dwarfed what the publishing industry can pay for. How will an original comics adventure compete with that, even if it’s been conceived from the start to make the most of its format?

An additional pitfall, though not as deep, is that publishers, knowing they have a ready audience, will issue comics adaptations that aren’t very good and leave new readers less than thrilled by the format. The treatment of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight has already prompted worries along that line.

Of course, the comics business has long thrived on adaptations, whether they’re Classic Comics, TV spin-offs, reworked newspaper strips, or the endless new adventures for established characters. And brand-name properties can offer work for budding talent. As one encouraging recent example, Raina Telgemeier was able to establish (and feed) herself by adapting Ann S. Martin’s Babysitters Club novels into comics form while she completed her own Smile.

Still, I hope that the next Bone won’t get lost behind a pile of production-line Harry Potter comics licensed soon after the movie revenue has started to fade.

Reasons to Smile

Today Roger Sutton announced that Raina Telgemeier’s memoir Smile is an Honor Book in the Nonfiction category of the 2010 Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards.

Even before that news, the book’s first printing sold out—despite the fact that it’s still possible to read Smile on the web. Like Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid (discussed here), Telgemeier’s book took a path to publication that seems paradoxical yet worked.

Both Kinney and Telgemeier shared their stories on the web before finding publishers. That exposure helped them to build a following as they developed their vision. Lots of people liked the result. Some of those people probably still see no need to buy the books, but many more did buy, and told their friends as well.

Since I ended my SCBWI New England conference workshop on comics scripting by suggesting that this model looked like the best route to publication, I’m delighted to have a new example of success to point to.

Jason Green interviewed Telgemeier for Playback:stl about her choice to display finished pages on the web as she created them, starting in 2004. Telgemeier explained:

I really love the print medium, and so [that] was always what I wanted to do, was to make books. And the webcomics thing happened because people kept saying, “Put your stuff on the web! Put your stuff on the web!” I didn’t know how to do that! I didn’t know what an FTP program was, I didn’t know how to get comics from my page to a screen. I had to have it all explained to me, over and over again, in detail, before I sort of figured it out.

And once I did, it was like, “Oh, I get it, you can get a much bigger audience this way, and you can really do a lot of interesting things with page layouts,” and stuff like that. But, because I came from print, I was still not stretching my wings too far as far as the format of the story, and I knew that I wanted to print it someday. So, I think it was like I was making a print graphic novel, but I was serializing it on the web on a weekly basis.

Before then, Telgemeier had self-published her mini-comic Takeout, another way of developing an audience. That route was easier years ago, given the economics of comics distribution, but today the web is clearly more affordable and powerful. Of course, you’ve gotta have appealing content and the energy to promote it.

In the same year that Telgemeier started to share Smile, Scholastic’s David Saylor announced that the firm had commissioned her to adapt Ann S. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club into comics form. The success of those books helped put her name on booksellers’ computers.

Telgemeier could probably have published Smile herself, based on that success, but the effort would have taken a lot of her time. Instead, she signed with Scholastic. That firm has a powerful distribution arm, including those school book fairs. It has the capital to invest in color printing, as with Jeff Smith’s Bone, which sets the print edition of Smile off from the web pages. And there’s still cachet in coming out through a major publisher—but that’s not as valuable as an already established readership.