Q & A with Canadian Graphic Novelist, Von Allan
Graphic Novelist Von Allan, hailing from Ottawa, Canada
Allan's two debut graphic novels could not be more different than each other--the road to god knows... explores a teenage girl who is coping with her mother's schizophrenia, while Stargazer is more of a light-hearted, fantasy adventure into the supernatural. Allan has a serious knack for realistically drawing and capturing teens and tweens--an artistic trait that we've heard is quite hard to accomplish. If possible, we would definitely recommend reading these two novels back to back, as we did, to get the full scope of Allan's talent, depth, and versatility.
Both of these fantastic novels can be found on Amazon, via Allan's website, and road is currently available at the local favorite comic shop, Zanadu, where Stargazer is in the process of possibly being sold as well. OR! Check back here this afternoon for a Freeattlest giveaway of not one, but both of these debut graphic novels, where two lucky readers will be drawn out of our virtual top hat to receive a free copy of their choice, compliments of the author. Yes folks, that's right; Free. Comics.
It's interesting that as a graphic novelist you have to have the ability to both draw and write well; something many authors have a hard time accomplishing. What came first in your career, the drawings of your stories or the writing? If you had to choose one over the other, which do you think would be your first pick?
The writing. I actually came to drawing very late in life. I didn't start learning to draw 'til I was 24 and it definitely wasn't something that came easy right away. What happened was that I realized that I really wanted to work in comics in my early 20s, but I also realized that it's very hard, though not impossible, to make it in comics solely as a writer. It certainly can be done and writers like Robert Kirkman, Grant Morrison and the like are living proof of that. It does mean a few things, though. First and foremost it means you have to collaborate with an artist. And ethically, you have to pay them a fair wage while you're working with them. And since collaboration is a creative process, it means there'll be a lot of give and take in terms of your creative vision. Even if you find the perfect artist and you work very well together, there are no promises that your comic will actually get published and do well. It's very, very hard.
I was in a fortunate position at this time, though, to be running a bookstore here in Ottawa. That gave me a great opportunity to meet artists and realize the amount of work that went into making visual art. The bad days. The false starts. The frustrations. It probably sounds naïve, but I really didn't think at the time that artists faced those kinds of struggles. I kinda thought that they were hit on the head by a magic wand when they were born and automatically knew how to illustrate wonderful stuff. Once I learned otherwise, I started to realize that art is a learned skill. That it's something anyone can learn to do. Yes, there are geniuses and yes there are people who take to it quite young. There are other people, however, like Van Gogh, who struggled with it early before things clicked for them. This gave me hope. And so I decided, with the support of my wife, to set out and learn to draw.
It wasn't easy and it didn't come together right away. Far from it. I had many, many failures. Whew, boy, did I ever! Eventually it did start to come together, though. The thing about art (and I mean any art, be it writing or drawing or whatever) is that you do get better at it the further you go on. Part of it is to keep an open mind and be critical about your work without being overly self-critical. You don't want "paralysis by analysis" but you also don't want to think your the greatest thing ever, either. Like many things, there's a balance there, and with time and practice, you grow.
Despite the difficulties and frustrations, I also found that I really enjoyed it. I like telling stories and I like comics as a medium to do just that. Writing and drawing work together in a comic or graphic novel and you need both to tell a convincing story. It's hard for me to answer your second question with this in mind. Probably writing, but not being able to draw would be like losing an arm. It would be very difficult to deal with.
You were a huge comic fan growing up, when did you first begin working on your own graphic novels?
About five years ago. I loved comics since I was about 8, but I never thought (not in a million years) that I could ever MAKE comics. I was a fan who loved the medium. While I read super hero comics for the most part growing up, I certainly didn't stick to that one genre. One of the beautiful things about comics is that they can tell any story. There's really no limit in terms of what the medium can handle. There are pragmatic commercial concerns in terms of the viability of a story from a sales point of view, but that doesn't limit what can be told.
I first started to try and do the road to god knows... about 5 years ago. No kidding! That was a very difficult learning experience and there were a LOT of false starts. I grew a lot through that project and there was just a massive learning curve for me with it. I wound up redrawing the first 30 pages or so almost completely and I still kept tinkering with it, redrawing and reworking things 'til I eventually decided that enough was enough. I really could have worked on it forever, but it was time to get it "out there" and move on. It really took way too long, but there was so much learning I had to do.
I should add that I did a few little short story type things before that, but road was, by far, the biggest project I had ever done.
You managed a bookstore for a long time; did you give up working at the bookstore to focus primarily on your art? How has your experience been so far with quitting your "day job" and breaking into self-publishing?
Yes. Well, one big thing that made the decision easier was that I wasn't paid particularly well. I was doing all the buying, hiring and whatnot but I was earning about $18,000.00 per year. Canadian. There isn't a lot of money in books at the best of times and I was actually finding that I was burning out a bit from the job. Leaving it wasn't actually that difficult, though I did have the financial support of my wife to help out. And I wound up getting part-time jobs here and there to help out, too. I'm pretty pragmatic when it comes to things like this. Eating and paying rent and bills are pretty important.
Self-publishing is a challenge and it's not for everyone. I feel better armed than some people because of my book retail background, but it's a bumpy ride. The advantage is that I have complete control over my own work and how it's marketed. The disadvantage is that I don't have a large publisher behind me to help with the marketing, outreach, travel costs, and the like. Distribution and visibility are always a problem when you're self-publishing and that's been a big behind the scenes battle.
I've certainly made my fair share of mistakes with self-publishing, though. One big one was exhibiting at conventions like APE and SPX before I was really ready to. The idea was to give away samples from the road to god knows... (including full-on galleys of the graphic novel) in an effort to drum up interest, but that never worked well at all. Probably a combination of the fact that my work was a little rough and the fact that I was completely unknown. We wound up spending quite a bit of money on travel, lodging and convention expenses that we never recouped. Fortunately, these trips also served as vacations so we were able to justify some of the expense from that point of view. But exhibiting at conventions with nothing to sell? That was a big mistake.
Do you feel that your work has been inspired by any other graphic novelists? Who do you read for enjoyment?
Yes and no. I didn't seek out any particular artist and slavishly copy him or her, but I certainly find inspiration in people like Matt Wagner, Barry Windsor-Smith, Dave Stevens, Mac Raboy, Jim Shooter, and David Lapham amongst many others. I do like realism in art and I'll generally gravitate towards that style more so than a "cartoony" approach. That certainly doesn't mean that there's only one way to draw and one way to tell stories, though. I've read all kinds of cartoony artists that I really enjoy, from Larry Marder to Sergio Aragones.
I really like comics and graphic novels with a compelling story and strong characters. I'm a big fan of Shooter's Valiant work, for instance, since I feel it had a very different spin on superheroes than most in that genre had. I have a major soft spot for Walt Simonson's Thor run and John Byrne's Alpha Flight comics at Marvel. James Sturm's The Golem's Mighty Swing is amazing. Jim Ottaviani's comics are typically fantastic. Geez, the list just goes on and on. There's so much great work out there right now.
the road to god knows... involves a teenage girl, Marie, who is learning to cope with her mother's schizophrenia--have you personally known anyone that has schizophrenia? How did you go about your research for the novel?
Yup, definitely. My mom was diagnosed schizophrenic when I was pretty young, maybe when I was around ten years old. I should add that she died when I was 20 so she never saw me draw let alone read the story. I certainly used a lot of my own experiences for the framework for the narrative. I observed a lot while my mom was going through all of these battles. She was a beautiful and very loving person, but she also had a disease that she couldn't beat. She exhibited a lot of courage through it all, though.
A lot of road is quite autobiographical, but I chose fiction for a few a reasons. The main one was that I wanted some distance from the subject matter so I could examine and explore it somewhat objectively. Pure autobiography also brings up pesky questions; things like how do you represent real people and how do you deal with time? Fiction allowed me to really muck around with character and sort of conceal the identities of people I knew. It also allowed me to compress time - a lot of what's in the story really did happen, but it was over months or years rather than weeks. That allowed the narrative to be more focused and hopefully more compelling.
What prompted you to write and draw a novel based around a family's struggle with schizophrenia?
Well, mental illness of any sort is one of the last big taboo subjects that we still deal with culturally and socially. Most people who have a mental illness are very good people. They are not bad or evil or anything like that. They are just struggling with a disease that is difficult to control. There's a lot of fear and confusion about mental illness by the public at large and that often has the unfortunate effect of making someone who has a mental illness a pariah. Just say the word "schizophrenic" to a random group of people and you'll see how few of them really even understand what it is. In my own experience, my mom had a lot of up and down days, but that didn't make her any less loving or any less compassionate. I wanted to try to show that side of mental illness and schizophrenia in particular in a story. In addition, ostracizing people isn't a particularly good solution for any society. I firmly believe that we're better together. And if we push people to the fringes, do we have any right to complain when they push back?
In the case of the actual story, I wanted to show that Marie's mom Betty is a good person. She loves her daughter very much but has a difficult time communicating with her. She finds it very difficult to talk about her schizophrenia and that creates some walls between them. Marie knows what's going on, at least to some extent, but has a hard time understanding it. It doesn't help that her mom is having episodes that are scary and confusing. I should add that I certainly don't think it's a definitive portrayal of schizophrenia; rather, it's one family's experiences with it.
I also tried very hard not to try and "solve" schizophrenia. The story does not have a definitive ending from that point of view and I think that's very important. I didn't want to be didactic with it and I certainly didn't want to wrap it up with a neat little bow. If I've done my job right, the story ends and the reader is not too sure what will happen next, but hopefully has confidence that Marie will be in a stronger place to cope as time moves forward.
Marie seems to share many of your own childhood interests, such as wrestling and science fiction; would you say that Marie's character is loosely based on your own childhood?
Yup, definitely. I'm a big believer in "write what you know," especially with a first book, and I really wanted to have the story echo a lot of my own experiences with it. While my love of pro wrestling is pretty much gone (I loved the kayfabe era and not what it's become now), science fiction and fantasy are still big parts of my life.
The title of the road to god knows... makes us think of travelling or going on a journey. What road is Marie taking and where would you say that she is trying to go?
She's basically trying to figure out how to grow up. She's an only child from a split family and her mom isn't doing all that well. Marie is having to cope with a lot of things that are coming at her; things that she doesn't want to have to cope with at all, really, but life isn't giving her much of a choice. Her decision (it's an implied one) is whether she learns to stand on her own two feet and try and take some control of her life, or just continue to be hit by circumstance. Maybe a better way of saying that is that she can either be crushed by circumstance and bad luck or learn to live with it. I think the story has a very definitive conclusion on that front, but I'll leave it up to readers to draw their own conclusions.
Both the road to god knows... and your second novel, Stargazer, primarily include tween and teenage girls as the main characters. Is there a particular reason that you chose to have your main characters be female?
Well, with road it was pretty simple. As soon as I made the decision to make the story fiction, I knew that I had to change the gender of the main character. Why? If I made Marie a boy, then it would be very, very clear I was talking about myself. Too clear, really, and I think it would have interfered with both my telling of the story and a reader's immersion in the story. Making Marie female just opened everything up.
Now, when I was writing and drawing road I already was thinking of doing a follow-up graphic novel. And I knew I wanted it to be an all-ages story, though I wasn't sure if it what the subject matter would be. Part of the reason that Kelly's little sister is in road in the first place was because I was thinking of this idea. So as I went ahead and started working on what would become Stargazer, I realized that three young friends would form a key component of the narrative. And since they were going to be kids, making them the same gender seemed like a more natural fit then mixing things up. Part of the reason for that is I find it interesting to explore characters that are the same gender, mainly to showcase similarities and differences. You also avoid the pesky issue of one character representing an entire gender on their own. Which should never be the case, but it seems to happen for one reason or the other. In Stargazer, having three girls with three very different personalities hopefully avoids any of that.
the road to god knows... and Stargazer are incredibly different from each other--one being about living with mental illness and the other as more of a fantasy adventure story. What encouraged you to switch gears?
I don't like being pigeon-holed. It's almost as basic as that. There's a danger in only doing one type of story (say "slice of life") and being restricted to that tableau. That restriction can be self-enforced but, either way, I'm not a fan of that. The two stories are VERY different and that was both a challenge and part of the fun. I really like doing different types of stories that push me as a creator, both as a writer and as an artist. Regardless of genre and setting, the story really should be immersive, regardless if it's a pure fantasy or if it's taking place in the here and now. Ideally you lose yourself in the narrative, y'know?
We see as well that Stargazer is titled as being a first volume, how many volumes do you plan on including? Will it be an ongoing series?
Definitely two, with the possibility for more. The script for the second volume is done and I'm just starting to work on it now. The reception of the two volumes will influence how things go from there. If there's an audience and people are buying it, then I'd really like to do a third volume. If that doesn't happen, though, then that will be that. I don't mean to sound crass, but pragmatically I like to eat. If there isn't an audience, then it's time to do something else.
What can readers expect for the future?
I'm just starting work on the second volume of Stargazer. I'm hoping that will be ready in about 8 to 10 months or so. And then we'll really see. I'm itching to write and I have an idea for a very different story, so I'd like to explore that and see where things go. It's hard to project these things now, of course, so my immediate concern will be just to get the second book done and see where things stand at that point.
Can readers find more or any of your previous work online?
If readers visit my website, they'll find links to online ebooks and the like. Plus my portfolio and whatnot, too. I'm just trying to finish up the ebook version of Stargazer: Volume One (whew, a lot of work and it may wind up being in two parts).
Things are changing so fast: there's the iPad, the Kindle, the Nook, and on and on. It's amazing what's happening to publishing. It's very positive, I think, but a little scary as change often is. What I love, though, is that more people than ever are reading. And that's phenomenal. I'm all about literacy and I don't particularly care what people read on as long as they're reading. There's so much good work out there in all kinds of mediums and genres. And in terms of comics, there's just unbelievable work out there. I encourage readers to seek it out. You'll be dazzled for sure.
