When the peace of a universe that has gone without violent crime for hundreds of years is shattered by murder, who is responsible? To help us pick up the pieces, we have venerated author N.K. JEMISIN & artist JAMAL CAMPBELL in conversation!
This was taken from a live event found here: https://youtu.be/eDYd69dMLN0
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MUSIC
The Whip by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4515-the-whip License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
hey good evening and welcome to the comics experience graphic novel of the month club uh it's our last show of the
year uh and it's a really good one i think uh it's a fantastic book um that
hopefully you have gotten and if you haven't gotten you should get this is a great book uh oh and i everybody keeps
reminding me that i have to i have to always remind people that if you buy it from us and the website will come up on the screen in the middle you'll you'll
get a signed book plate here by our two guests n.k jemisin and jamal campbell who i'd like to welcome hello
uh hi how are you both what a fantastic book this is um
i'll say especially that that we usually don't pick superhero comics uh for this
um uh so um it really stands out uh that that you
know that it's a good strong superhero comic that i think that normal civilian readers can read as well um so that's a
that's a credit to both of you i think um you prefer like indies is that what you mean uh we we do a pretty wide range
of genres and styles we try to pick like not the same book twice in a row so that
someone who's who's a member gets 12 really cool selections you know next next month's book is going to be this
book from phantom graphics no one else which um uh which is uh it's kind of like uh an
adrian tomine book um in sort of how it's it's told um and then last month
was time after time or time before time the uh the the time travel story so
we jump around you know we do different stuff um anyway uh thank you both for being here on the
show let's let's start with the first question which is always the same question that i ask everybody because i love this question so much um
why comics of all the things that you could be doing what attracts you to comics what what uh
interests you in comics um i'd actually like to start with jamal as the artist here um especially with one with the
larger comics background why comics for you jamal um
really it was just something i've always been into um specifically
i started off with superhero cartoons of the 90s so like batman the animated series and the
spider-man series and everything like that so that's just what i grew up watching so i was always interested in
it as a hobby and then really it was just because i could draw and drawing was the
only thing that i really sort of kept up with and was obsessed with from like a little kid into high school
into college i knew i wanted to do something pertaining to art as my career
and comics just happened to be one of the options that worked out for me
nice nice uh nora how about how about you why comics i mean you're uh you're a prose
writer so so what's the attraction uh especially you're not just a person you're award-winning prose writer what's
the attraction for comics oh well i mean i've always read comics just for fun um you know i i stopped
reading kind of superhero comics back when i was in college and i was broke but um by all
the crossovers i couldn't afford and eat but um but you know i really wasn't
particularly interested in doing this until gerard was basically like i've got this cool idea let me run it past you
and i was like whoa wait a minute this is actually really interesting i had not at all kept up with green lantern um
didn't even see the movie i knew diddley squad about it and you know basically he was like you get to be
you get to kurt blaunch write your own world using uh you know a character that's never existed before and that was
right up my alley you know the fact that i sort of tried to tamper into the the standing green lantern continuity
was just because i knew that it wouldn't necessarily you know i wouldn't be continuing that someone else would continue after me um but for the most
part i like the fact that i got a chance to do something original yeah that's interesting so it was it was
baked in that you knew that it was going to continue past the 12 like that joe would then go on to be a
regular green lantern or was that not baked into it no when we started this we
we started this actually years ago um back when a young animal was thriving
and there were a lot of comic books under that line um and then kind of as we started working on it then
the young animal line kind of shrunk down um and then suddenly we were like the last comic standing um
so you know and there was never any guarantee that joe would continue afterward i knew that um but because i
know enough about comics to understand that you know if you make a character who's popular enough that can happen the
the jump from you know one comic into another can happen plus also you know we never we didn't know whether far sector
itself might continue i'm sure that if it was a blockbuster hit it probably would have continued young animal or not
um so you know i just i tend to think long term if if i know that a character
what i what i was hoping to kind of do was create a character who was memorable and vivid enough that she could continue
if someone wanted to continue and i feel like i succeeded yeah they i
mean they immediately started a new green lantern book where she's effectively the star yeah so i see
i haven't read it yet i just finished my last book so i'm like tired right now that's interesting do they do they even
consult you about it at all or no and that's fine um when yeah jamal can tell you that
when i when i first put the ideas and stuff for this together i built a bunch of like
i don't know what to call them like series bible information um really long files i'm sorry about
that no they were like amazing to read so don't apologize really long you know like character
studies uh world building details you know basically i i built it so that
whoever came along after me because i knew i might not be able to continue um you know the the life of a book
writer is such that when the book takes over everything else has to kind of like fall by the wayside um but i set it up
so that if anybody wanted to continue after me they had all the information they needed to start so
yeah it's just a it's a very different way than you traditionally work right you're not usually working
on characters that you're gonna start and then not finish as it were i mean no i but i do create series
bibles for myself so those really long files i inflict that on me too it's just you know it came out of my own brain um
but yeah i i i did the same thing for this that i normally do for starting a new novel
um i just did it and gave it to other people that that was the only difference
yeah that's interesting uh i mean jamal you're obviously a little more used to things that you create going on and and
living outside because that's sort of the nature of serial comics right uh yeah i'd particularly point to naomi
who's immediately in the justice league you know since venice is writing uh that's got to be pretty cool right
yeah it's kind of amazing to see what that character has done in such a short amount of time
like yeah we just had that mini series and then from that she started in like justice league and young justice and now
she has a tv series oh wow i hadn't heard about that part january so like it's been this roller coaster
that's just been increasingly going faster and faster and faster i'm just sort of like
this is normal but i'm just gonna sit here and enjoy this yeah yeah did you are you getting uh any uh input or uh
into these expansions where were the characters going um not too much it's very much that
comic book thing of like you do what you do establish what you establish do your best with it and then you pass it off to
someone else yeah so i had a short conversation with ava and jill for the tv series when the
first started doing the pilot just to see like so sort of what they wanted to do with it the sort of ideas
that i had um in the conception of naomi and then from then i just they just sort of like took it and ran with it so i'm
excited to see like what they actually do with it yeah that's that's cool it's it's congratulations
thank you congratulations for sure um so let's talk maybe about the the genesis
of far sector a little bit more um you know you said nora that that the gerard
came to you and pitched the idea of this
out of the blue like that had you had contact with him before did you i didn't know who he was
um i you know the the 90s was like my hip-hop face so you know i had no idea
who the hell he was and my my agent was like oh my god really
and it was like oh i guess i should know who he is um and then i listen to his music and i love it
but anyway um yeah i had just won i think
the second hugo of the three that uh you know kind of ended up making me a record
breaker hugo winner um and uh you know i was getting a lot of
attention already at that point and then suddenly he uh pinged me through dc folks and i was
interested in working on comics at some point um and i wanted to sort of try a
comics project that would allow me to sort of dip my toe in the comics waters but not go whole hog like starting my
own comics like starting my own uh indie venture because i didn't know what
the heck i was doing and i needed to know um and my favorite way to learn a thing is to do it so um
and uh you know when when they initially approached me they just said you know would you like to write green lantern i
said no because no why would i um but then um you know he explained that uh this would
be a young animal specific green lantern um that he had in mind a green lantern
that would be in a completely self-contained world apart from the usual continuity um that she would be a
black woman um and that was about it and you know beyond that he had kind of uh sort of
thought about the world a little bit and decided that he wanted uh the world to be one where people
uh did not experience love um and so i altered it a little bit to be all the
motion but then beyond that he had nothing else so uh the rest of that was was me but the
initial idea was definitely from him yeah that's that's interesting and so the and the the world building of the of
the three different species and sort of the whole back history that that all came from you then
yeah yeah i mean i think around that time um people
i guess i'd started to develop a reputation for being like good at world building or enjoying world building or
something this is before the master class on world building and all this other stuff um but people were reading uh the broken
earth series and realizing that basically this was a world that didn't have anything to do with like earth
um and that it felt coherent and cohesive which is great i i that was what i was aiming for
um and that was why he reached out like you know i need somebody who can build this from the ground up yeah that's what we did
yeah uh i mean i i know you have a master class and i guess i could go and watch it there but let me ask sort of
what broadly uh uh what's sort of the first step in
in the world building here like did you did you proceed did you try
to proceed in the case of far sector did you try to proceed from from joe's character or from the work
the science fiction part of the world or or was it all being developed at the same time
it's hard to articulate um for me the world caught my attention um
the character for a while kind of stayed fallow not fallow but just kind of dormant
because i didn't really have you know enough to kind of build her with you know a black woman green lantern is just
you know okay like whatever um but you know once i started kind of
working on the world and i started realizing what kind of person needed to interact with this world this would be a
an extremely futuristic world a little bit cyberpunk a lot bit afropunk um
a little bit of i mean you know afrofuturism is the the overarching term but afropunk in particular is and
afrogoth are subsets of that um aesthetically that that i found appealing um
and uh you know so i really just wanted to
kind of play with the the imagery of it or just you know like what was this world going to be about
if the goal was for these people to be kind of trying to find a way to escape from emotional oppression
then i needed a character who had the ability to deal with that um and of course if she was supposed to
be from earth and she was a black woman well she'd had personal life experience with that
but i also wanted to make it a little bit conflicted for her so as i started realizing you know kind of what needed
to be done i couldn't make her like an anti-racist activist i needed her to be someone who would have an internal
conflict about it so i made her a cop which was
difficult it was something that um you know this was around the time of like this is before the george floyd
protest so this was um not too long after like ferguson and things like that
and uh you know writing a black character who is a cop can be a really kind of
delicate balancing act between are you excusing a lot of the systemic stuff that cops do
or are you you know like how do you do this right um and i even reached out to the you know nypd uh they had a
kind of publicity division that supposedly would be willing to talk to
uh prospective writers and and things like that um to help them get more verisimilitude in the thing and they
never returned my calls or emails um so i just made it up so you know if i got the cop details
wrong blame nypd anyway um but beyond that you know she sort of
formed as the world was as the world kind of cohered
i began to realize what kind of person needed to be the green lantern for this world um and that dictated it yeah yeah
interesting and it sounds so it sounds like that the kernel of of i want there to be a world full of people who don't
feel love like really [Music] knock down a chain of dominoes for you more or less
but that's that's how all good ideas work um you know like
you tell me i want you to create a you know afrofuturistic world on the other side of the universe and i'm like okay
but you give me like that one little thing that that that starts it you know kind of growing from a seed and then the
world practically builds itself um you know so or at least that's how my brain works i you know i don't know if
that's the case for everybody um but you know once i started kind of putting the idea together i i was
i'm a i'm a nerd i'm a science fiction nerd um you know i was like i don't want to do it just a planet this doesn't you
know i'm going to put these people on another planet we're going to do a dyson sphere and then i was like no that's
corny everybody does dyson spheres okay we're going to do a ring world no everybody does ring worlds anyway i apologize jamal because i know
you had to draw all of that um but you just you you did the hell out of it so
thanks no there's nothing that i'm i'm sorry not sorry
well so i so then that's the question i want to ask jamal which is kind of the flip side of that of
of how do you approach this as an illustrator
where where it's it's obviously it's green lantern so you know you know what green
lantern is but then it's set in an environment that has you as you've never seen before um
uh what's what's your approach in in fleshing out these ideas and trying to
wrap your head around three different species uh the the the emotional concepts uh the
characters well for far sector was pretty easy because nora had those lore bibles that
she wrote so they were very like like she said very long but they were very like detailed and
extensive so like right off the bat before i even started drawing i already had a very solid grasp of the world she
built and what she wanted out of it and what she wanted visually because she very like hopefully had
um images that should pull up of like oh this is what i want the fashion to look like or this is what i want certain
things to look like so i already had a good solid idea of what to base everything off of
and they're just both drawing what i think looks cool
just very simply like i like cyberpunk i like future i like sci-fi so i just drew
what i liked and also there's like little things of sort of head canon world building also
on my end where like kind of every character i drew even the
background characters because like drawing takes a long time it's a lot of like just sitting there so
for a lot of even background characters i started getting ideas of oh what would this character be doing in this world so
it's just a character like walking down the street behind joe's like oh this person is like
a specialist or an artist of this kind and they're on their way to work or they're on the way to a meeting and that
would sort of like dovetail into different details of like oh this building is an office building or this
building is like a nature preserve and that sort of dictated the design of
that building so like doing that over the course of 12 issues you start to develop this own
world in your own head and sort of like nora said everything starts to write itself so by the time i got to like
issue six i already had a good idea of both what nora what you wanted and sort of like my
own understanding of that world so everything kind of drew itself and designed itself after that point
yeah you were creating that world from like issue one as much as i was because i mean i'm
i'm not visual like you know i would send you like you know afropunk you know aesthetic
pages but you know i don't actually visualize what that [ __ ] would look like so
let me watch my language but uh anyway um yeah so like you actually did
it and i i had not imagined what these characters would actually look like you know beyond the sort of vague
aesthetic generality and then you gave them to me and i was like blown away
um you know yeah i mean it also hoped that even though like the write-up was super
detailed and very specific it was also open-ended and you were very like open to me doing whatever i wanted
basically i mean once i saw i when when they told me that they had um
found another potential artist for it because originally we started out working with sean martinborough um but
then due to the delays and that period of uh hiatus for why for the young animal line
um then sean wasn't able to stay on the project and so when i was looking at your stuff jamal i i first saw um
what was your webcomic oh my gosh i'm so sorry uh uh immortal nadia green yes yes
that one um and then they sent me nadia naomi um and i was like i was like
sorry about that but then i know wrong very silver names i do that too yeah and then at that point i was like okay you
know this is a no this is a master of his craft i need to stay out of his way
so like i gave you the basics and then at that point i was like well you know he obviously knows what he's doing um let's
see what he comes up with you know my father is a visual artist um i i am uh
actually this is one of his uh prints behind me um but my father is a visual artist and i have always grown up as the
the person who can't draw in a visual artist's house um so i have nothing but
respect for people who can um and i also understand that when you know when when
the inspiration comes to you you stay out of that inspirations way you let that inspiration do what it's going to
do um yeah so it was a joy and a delight to
work with a master of this form so thank you i learned so much
and it was a wonderful experience so so let me ask a question let me follow up there um were there things
that um that changed about your writing on the project as you
saw what jamal was producing and was capable of oh yeah definitely um you know i i
have said this in interviews but uh you know first and foremost my scripts got shorter um
my initial scripts were like super detailed because i wasn't sure how much i was supposed to put in there um you
know i was basically teaching myself how to write comic book scripts from books and um
yeah i didn't know what the hell i was doing um so apologies for that as well you were very patient
probably the fact that we didn't talk in person so you couldn't cuss me out even if you
wanted to anyway um but uh you know so the scripts were a lot longer in the
beginning and then as i started to realize you know okay he knows what he's
doing and i don't need to give more detail um you know i would do things like whole action scenes where i would
just be like here's three pages do what you wanna i just want like two two beats hit at some point during that sequence
and that's partly because i'm bad at action sequences but also because he had this thing in his head like he
had this vision and i i'm just like let me give you the space to do what you want to do
i i love that because i think i think that you're the first writer to say in
almost all of our interviews to say that you're that you're working with someone essentially marvel style because this is
this is the the way that they used to call this marvel style where stan lee would would write stories where you'd
have all the dialogue and the plot points but then the action would come he'd be like ah three three pages of fights
really um yeah whereas whereas most most uh writers are at least choreographing
something at that point um choreography like in terms of what you get from
you would agree with that jamal in terms of like what you get from i don't know say say bendis and david walker on fight
scenes in naomi right they're choreographing it to us yeah but it's also
i think it also shifts the more you work with him so for example when i first started working with brian and david on
naomi it was very much that scripted they do like
they had everything scripted out and then i just sort of changed things if they needed changing and then as we got
more comfortable with each other and more comfortable with our creative styles
um then it would sort of shift more to both marvel style where
they would just say okay we just need this on the page do whatever and also they would very much trust me
to make any changes that i wanted to make if i think if i thought it would flow
better or look better or read better and then pretty much for the back half of the
first season of naomi and for season two as well after
i finished drawing and coloring everything they would then go back and almost rescripted or
not fully rescripted but like sort of change around if anything needed changing to adjust to what i drew
yeah so it's very much a back and forth like they do this then i do this if
anything is changing i change it then they go back and adjust their scripting to what i've done
so it's very much a progression of when we first started to work together we didn't know like what exactly to do
so it was very rigid and then it became more free-form as we went along
interesting so i'm i'm wondering in terms of uh the first couple of scripts
that nora gave you she said that she wrote out a lot um uh but then you've got to translate that
into how how it works on a comics page right because because i think i think you'd agree nora as well that a
prose page and a comics page flow very differently right in terms of um a comics page needs to
have an action uh at the end of every page more or less to get the page turn going um
there's certain structural things that have to happen in the pacing of a comic for it to work
right where you don't you know the rules aren't necessarily as rigid in prose so
um so jamal as you when you get a script like that uh i mean i guess first off how how
how naturally did did nora take to the comics process like how much changes
need to need to be made on your side uh and then um yeah i guess to sort of talk about that
for a minute sure um well really it was pretty natural like
nora is obviously like an amazing storyteller so that very much translated well to like a good story is a good
story and then the thing with comics is
as a visual language like you can turn pretty much any moment
you want into a page turner just based on like the action that's going on even if
there's no action the conversation that's being had and how you frame it and compose it visually
so there isn't very much you don't there isn't much thought that you have to put into it it's very much natural like this
is the last panel on the page how's the best way i can compose that to make it interesting
okay okay so so like that's just the
that's just the idea i take to going panel by panel and how i compose my layouts and everything like that so
it's not very it's not a conscious thing it's just the way i work in the way you naturally would
lay out and draw a comic okay and and nora for you the the
change to having to think about things not merely as chapters but also
as individual page units right that have a certain kind of pagination and flow in a certain way
was that a difficult change at all um was it a refreshing change
it was refreshing um you know i it felt a lot like writing a short story um
because you know you don't you can't put as much material into even 12 issues of a comic as as you can in a book
obviously but i also write short stories um and uh you know i did a kind of rough
draft uh of the whole series actually because i'm used to writing books so 12 issues
of a comic book was easy uh not easy okay let me not say that um but you know like all together in terms of word count
it was a fraction of the size of any novel um and so you know the format was hard
understanding those you know sort of visual uh understanding how
visual storytelling works is a thing that i had to wrap my head around because i'm used to sort of
using metaphors and turns of phrase to sort of get emotion across and i had to
pull back on all of that and just leave plain dialogue or you know interesting dialogue hopefully but um
you know i had to kind of allow there to be a lot of room for it for the visuals to kind of get things across and also
part of it was that i was i was studying other comic books at that point um i'd read scott mccloud's understanding
comics i'd read other scripts and things like that so i was i was really just kind of cobbling together my own comics
writing style like in media rez and um so the the
like there was an example that i thought of which was from the very first uh issue where
i had i don't remember what it was i'd read uh
oh my gosh i can't remember the name of the book that i was i was trying to uh steal ideas from
but uh anyway so i i made some recommendation about how the panels should kind of splay out in a particular
pattern um to kind of try and present flow and i i you know left some
some mention in there of like if this doesn't work don't do it you know because i don't know what the hell i'm doing you understand this right um but
you know when i saw the actual issue when i saw what jamal had done i was like holy [ __ ] that was so much better than what i thought of
um and he'd done it but he'd done it like i can't even describe it i said
something about like what if these things are kind of arranged in a semicircle and he had them in this
flowing slant i don't know visual work anyway um but what he had done was so
amazing that at that point i was like i'm not going to make any more recommendations about how the panel should be arranged beyond there should
be this many or that many or maybe like whatever because you understood more about the
framing than i have yet figured out um it takes years
in in a genre to understand those nuances and subtleties i'm not going to understand that anytime soon um so
fortunately jamal did yeah was it um
comics tend to be more dialogue driven than than narration driven um whereas in prose there's an awful lot
of narration and description but jamal's doing all that work in a way
depends on the author absolutely i i was i was speaking broadly um [Music] was it was it a challenge for you
to sort of figure out that balance between caption and dialogue
uh or did it or did it come smoothly enough it was a challenge in that i just needed
to do it enough to feel like it was flowing
and that was why i went ahead and and did the rough draft you know of all 12 issues up front um because the only way
that you can learn something like that is by doing it um you know you can also try reading other comic book scripts and the other
thing that i did to kind of help teach myself to do this was um i read
um this uh 2080 script book
um which is actually kind of amazing if you guys haven't seen it but the 2018 comic uh was this uk thing you're
probably more familiar with it than i was because i've never heard of it um but where you can see um side by side um a comic script page
and then how that page got rendered by the artist this was invaluable for me
um because i could not only learn different scripting styles i could start to understand how you communicate with a
visual visual artist um in such a way as to not be insulting or
get in the way and still i had to do it to get better at it so
yeah did you did you have um editorial feedback at this point
uh when you were writing these first scripts or yeah
andy cowery if i'm not mangling how his name is pronounced uh was the editor at
that time and uh he uh would give me feedback on all of them because i asked for that um you know i
knew that the best way that for for me to learn how to do this was to actually like do it show it to somebody and then we hack out all of the problems with it
um so yeah he was he gave me great feedback um you know he's unfortunately no longer with dc but um
you know but that was what i needed so that's what he gave me yeah and did you did you end up telling you to hack out a
a fair amount or not much no i did that um you know mostly
the the i didn't want to
underwrite or overwrite this um i did err on the side of overwriting
in the first drafts and then like i said when i saw that jamal clearly like i just needed to move and
just let him do what he did um then i went back through the rough drafts and i did additional versions where i mostly
just chopped out unnecessary dialogue and unnecessary um everything um so yeah that was actually
it's it's no different from the process of writing like i said a short story with a novel you aren't as constrained
by space but with short stories if you know that you've got to hit a particular word count target every extra v and ah
takes up too much space and i was mindful also of uh the letterer darren bennett uh had to
try and fit everything within those tiny little boxes um and you know i was i was
trying to keep everything basically like tweet length old school twitter not even like new twitter
so that helps yeah yeah no overall i would say you did a very good job in uh you know because a
lot of times you see pros or authors come in and they do overwrite on on the comics page and it and there's a very
good balance here um i think it's it's really fantastic did gerrard give you uh feedback as well or or was he was he
involved in the creative process at all at that point yeah at the beginning of the process uh when i was doing the
world building um that was where he gave most of his input because that was the part that he had asked me to help him
with um and you know that was sorry i heard something else
um but yeah that was that was when we were um you know kind of the high level concept testing i
guess for lack of a better description um you know how does the world work how do the characters make sense um sean
martinbro did some initial sketches of the characters at that point so all of like the the top level you know uh
basic stuff was where gerard did his input um and he had input on every issue
thereafter um he didn't always kind of speak up because it would be like a round-robin conversation between me
jamal andy and some several other people um
but where he had feedback to to bring in he did yeah nice um
so there was some concept art done by by sean jamal um did how how much did you
use of that how much did you rework um
how much of it worked how much didn't i don't know um well i very much used it as just
this is my starting point yeah so i think um
the sketches that i saw were one of joe and one of
uh a not character so in terms of the dark character i very
much kept like the wave he drew like the fins and the tail
and sort of like the fins coming off the end of the tail because i really like that shape
though his snow was pretty much a bit more lengthy than mine um a bit more the
arms were a bit more i guess octopus-like
um if i were to say it and then i very much kept like a more humanoid i kept the
chest made the chest a bit broader um the hips a bit broader um
so i took like different elements and then sort of shifted it to more my style in terms of the anatomy of
that species and then for joe is very much just like
general vibe so for um sean's um sketch he had like the poncho and she
was wearing like kind of like a swat vest or a bulletproof vest
um so like my joe sort of she has the vest she has the same sort of color color blocking of
the green on top the black on bottom um she had one of um nora one thing you
said is you wanted her just sort of like her costume to shift a bit with her
powers so like there's a point where she's wearing the poncho in the first issue she
um summons a trench coat in one issue and sort of like that so i kept the idea of the shape of the
poncho and stuff when she had it then but from there it was kind of just like okay what is my design sensibility which
is like very much more cleaner lines a bit more modern um i really wanted to give her the
current log in visor um goggles just because i'm a huge fan of gurren lagann
and it very much fit that futurism afropunk
just like really sleek very sharp style that i wanted to hit on with her
so it's very much like i used i definitely use shawn's um sketches as a base
but i very much also just went through a ton and a ton of just different design iterations just to see like
what i would be best at drawing at which was different from him but
sort of like the same starting point there's there's not a tremendous amount of of back matter in here but there is
one page where there's i want to say 35 or 40 different uh
designs of joe and the iterations that you went through and like oh how about this and how about
that and um how much how much sort of previz time did you did you put it because this
looks like a lot did this this looks like it's two or three weeks worth of design work
yeah it was about that much um because i started far sector like right
off of the back of naomi season one so i finished that i had
maybe like two weeks off that where i just didn't want to try at all because drawing comics is a lot and then i went
right into sketches in previz for about two or three weeks for for our sector
and then straight into issue one from there yeah how long have you been working
on the book at this point nora because it you said that you started at the second hugo nomination
or the second hugo award so that must be five years or so 26
no 2017 that would have been 2017 so uh
or 16. well okay i don't know somewhere in there um but remember that there was
a fairly lengthy hiatus during which young animal's future was completely up
in the air um and and just all of the lines stalled for a while i don't
remember how long that hiatus was like almost a year or a year or so um so yeah i mean i had i had done the
baseline scripts um sean had done some very baseline sketches and then suddenly put the
bricks on we're not doing this or we might not do this um and i had books to
write so i went off and wrote books and then when the pro you know young animal kind
of rose from its grave then we
we were able to start proceeding at that point but a lot of things had to change such as sean um you know going off to do
other projects and jamal coming on instead yeah yeah
um yeah what was i going to ask there is was there a change in uh because because
of the the time that it passed and that you had written i i imagine two more novels in that space did that did that
change the nature of far sector at all not really um i mean i was
writing novels even while i was working on far sector right right basically i've been working on novels for like 10 years
straight now um and i'm about to take a break but um uh but because i just
finished book two of the the great cities duology but uh um yeah so i mean it for me it was kind
of a refreshing palette cleanser um you know and it i like doing new things i
like trying new projects uh you know i started writing short stories just to kind of
try my hand at it and see if i could be any good at it and it helped improve my novel writing so
now i'm willing to try all kinds of new things um i wrote a media tie-in novel for
a mass effect at one point right and i would love to try game writing at some point although
you know the industry would have to change a little bit before i'd be comfortable with that
but uh at the time i thought i wanted to try game writing that that pretty much killed that um now i'm writing a film
script so you know i just like trying new things i get bored easily i have a creative short attention span
yeah well as a as an artist jamal right that's it's much easier uh to to not get
bored right because you're designing new things and building new worlds it comes and goes
like it's very much a process of the initial part is super fun because you're
that's where all the designing is that's where all the thinking and problem solving happens in like the sketches and
the layouts and then once you're done that and you're actually drawing
there is some problem solving but it's pretty much i did all of my thinking during the layouts so that i know
by the time i get to pencils and inks i know exactly what i'm going to draw so i can just do it and focus on the details
and the anatomy and making sure it looks good and then by the time i get to colors
i've already thought about the colors during the layout so that's very much the okay i'm kind of just doing this let me
put on a podcast with some music to make sure i stay awake while i'm doing this and then you get into the next issue
where you start the layouts again and that's all the thinking and problem solving so it's like a cycle of like
i'm very much engaged and then i'm kind of judging through this but it's kind of fun and then i'm very much engaged again
right is that it so that's as true for the actual penciling stage for you as well because i've heard i've heard a lot
of artists say this about inking right that the inking process is is where they just go into automatic and they
they put on some other art to to distract them from the thing that they're doing which i don't i could
never function like that it blows my mind but uh but it's the
same for penciling for you as well yeah because for me um because i work digitally my pencils are pretty much my
inks like they constitute the same stage for me so like i said i do all my thinking and
problem solving during the layouts like my layouts are pretty detailed and like pretty thorough
so that when i get to my pencils like there's always like you're trying to figure out
how to make something look good and that always like takes some thinking and brainpower to figure out but also at the
same time like i know what i'm going to draw at that point it's just figuring out how to do
it and how to make it look good so then once once you figure it out then it's the
put on a podcast put on the music put on a movie and just like autopilot through it
yeah when you um uh when you're actually
you know in production in full production of the book i i'm assuming that you're a page a
day man at least yeah i have to be yeah yeah
yeah i mean 12 issues is you know at a time that's a that's a that's a really big commitment for a book
yes um it's actually like the longest run i have done at this point
because before that i was always like either guesting on an issue or helping out an issue of like supergirl or
nightwing for a couple pages and or doing like six issue runs on naomi so far such as the first like
big 12 issue run that i've done at this point and i very much felt it like
at issue like around eight or nine it was like i've been doing this for a long time and that was like
in the middle of the pandemic and everything that was going on so like i was very much feeling like okay i have
to keep drawing i'm a bit tired but i have to do it but also thankfully at that point um
thank you to andy who like um sort of like
how do i say sort of like not bargained but fought for us going bi-monthly
yeah because before that point it was a monthly um we're gonna book monthly like you have
to do a page a day and there's no breaks and you have to keep up that consistency but he could very much see that i was
starting to lag a little bit yeah so he fought for us going bi-monthly and that very much helped me
like okay i can take rest days when i need to take rest days i can like actually take care of myself and my body
yeah just let me be refreshed and actually like attack this full force and put out the best work that i could do
yeah and i think it helped the book overall to be honest because when it went to bi-monthly people
started talking about it and word of mouth had more time to spread so you know i don't know
what the norm is in the comics world but um you know i get that the norm is monthly
maybe it shouldn't be but you know i'm new here
i think the comics world is still figuring out a lot of things i think that the new norm is starting to become full graphic novels
so that you know putting this whole book out as one object rather than serializing it i i
i don't think that's the best for the medium because i think that serialization
i think it changes and informs the work over time
so so actually this is this is a question then nora um were you were you
producing monthly as well and then bi-monthly towards the end or did you you wrote all the scripts at once how
did you i'd done the first draft scripts already um i did them all at once because like i
said it's it's easier for me and i was also between novels at that point so i wanted to work while i knew i didn't
have a deadline looming overhead um so i did the rough drafts of the scripts
uh all up front um and that was how i worked with andy on kind of making them
good um but then each month uh once jamal came aboard i would do a new like i
would refine those up to a publishable version um and i'm also used to doing
that from the book world too where you usually work on a book four times before it ever goes to print um
so you know i would do that but that's that's easy compared to the
utterly grueling work that it must have taken for you to do the drawing
um you know at that point i i was just kind of horrified that i mean i know that that's normal but um but it was still
horrifying to look at so i was just like this poor man but uh you know and just out of
curiosity on those on those draft scripts uh how long did it take you to write the
12 was it 12 weeks 12 days about somewhere between about 12 weeks
i'd say um like i said it's about like a short story for me um and short stories are
relatively easy to crank it not crank out that that makes it sound like a factory or something but um but you know
it was writing itself past a certain point i i enjoyed the story all i needed
to do was really refine um the the thing that i was working on at
that point was making it exciting enough um because i'm not used to the comics format of you know there's a fight and
you got to have a fight in the first issue you got to have some action in almost every issue you know for me
action is a thing that i kind of dribble in very sparingly in my own work um and
so that was like i had come up with the plot already and
you know sort of given a summary to andy of what i wanted each issue to contain and then we ended up having to rearrange
a lot of that because there wasn't enough action in the first half of the series um and so that spread out the story more
it meant that i had to cut out some elements of the story and so on um
they initially asked me if i was interested in doing after the hiatus they were interested in they were
interested in whether i wanted to do uh far sector as a [Music]
black label is that what yeah it's black level that's the big oversized yeah that's it
yeah and i and i fought to keep it uh in floppies i i you know later on i could
go to compilation but i knew that if i wanted this character to have any legs and for
the readers to accept her as you know a legit real green lantern she couldn't be
sort of shoehorned off into a graphic novel that a lot of kind of true blue comics fans um would not read
um so you know the floppies were a way to build up the audience and and give her the support that she needed to
eventually transition into something you know somewhere else so it worked yay i'll i'll uh i'll i'll
just make one small point of order this is this is really minor but as a guy who sells comic books for a living i
hate the term floppies i i it was what do you usually call them then yeah
no it was come up with um by people who are in alternate comp alternative comics to kind of um to put down the superhero
comic because they're floppy you know and they're not all comics are flappy
i understand but but it's it's it's actually meant as a derogatory term believe it or not so
we had no idea periodicals or serializations or whatever that just small tiny point
of order oh keep that in mind okay i didn't know that thank you yeah um uh i know we're almost running
out of time here so we got a audience question i am told let's put that up
jordan uh from rodrigo hey putrigo he's he's a great member he's been a member of the club for years i really like the
uniqueness of each species in the trilogy how did these come about was it difficult to make them so unique but at
the same time and this is the important part i think part of the same world no um scratch that
yes in the sense that world building is difficult no in the sense that
i enjoy world building so it was fun um so you know once i had come up with the
history of the trilogy races um then it became you know just a matter of like
putting them in the right position um but yeah i mean i i i grew up on
star trek and you know all of these shows full of multiple species getting along and having great relationships or
terrible relationships or whatever um so it was not that difficult to to come up with that um i did want to kind of play
with that concept like for example making the um ketopley predatory plants
um you know i i like i said i'm a fan of star trek but
i'd never seen anything in star trek where like you know a species was just
that wasn't an enemy was just a hundred percent inimical to the other species
around um the ketoplay would just nosh on everybody everybody would be snacks
if it was up to them and you know it would be deeply religious snacks to them um they would
feel really bad about you know killing you against your will but they would actually do it um and you know i wanted
to build in a predator species basically um and i wanted the nah to be deceptively human
you know there's a tendency for humanoid characters or human-like characters in science fiction to just be
human proxies um i wanted the na to be physically very similar psychologically
extremely different um they are extremists they are a race of sort of natural like you know
zero to a hundred miles per hour in 0.02 seconds people um the reason that they live in a
space station is because uh basically they all got mad at each other and then not blew their planets up because that's
how they solve problems um so um you know that's basically what i
wanted to kind of play with was you know standard science fiction concepts of
uh multicultural multi-species societies and that was fun to do
yeah and jamal is visualizing it's sort of the same question was it was it at all tricky to you to find a way to make
these things work in the same world not really just because
concept-wise nora had done all that hard work in the world-building part of it
so then all those details were already sorted and then for my part
visually it was actually important to make them look as different as possible
design wise just to make sure just storytell like storytelling wise you could differentiate them properly and
also to further enhance like the differences in their mindset of like
the ketople being giant and predators and towering over everyone
and the nas humanness being like slightly in the uncanny valley
so i worked specifically to make them visually as different as as possibly
good and then in terms of cohesion like that's just in the art style like i draw
the same on every page i treat the characters the same way in shading and
how i draw like their anatomy and everything like that so that just happens naturally so i could just focus
on this is the design of the knot this is how their clothing works this is designed to get topless this is how
they're clothing and they're um like the way they carry themselves and this
is that and and the same thing like i can make those as distinctive as possible and then my
art style just draws that together on the page i have one more question about uh about
and i'm not quite sure if this is an art thing or if it's a lettering thing but
the the use of the um the untranslatable untranslated language um as a design
element um was that you jamal was that the letterer
uh and and that it's such a design element of
certain scenes where did that come from um that was
kind of a bit of everyone so for example in the scripts nora you put
it as an alien script or city script i think it was called yeah i think that was it
and then from there um darren took it and sort of
uh grabbed the font for that and then i took that from darren and
started incorporating it into the art scenes and like the background on posters and on billboards and in like
holograms and so it was kind of like a bit of everyone just working off each other and taking bits
and pieces of each other and then that came together um in the final product oh that's really interesting yeah my
only contribution to that was like i said i wanted the script to show some
circularity um i don't remember why i wanted it that way though
it's been a while but anyway but it looked fantastic so darren did an
amazing job and in the and in the scripts it was was it uh
it was it an english was it in was it in some i don't i i
the the the the words and stuff did you did you put any of that into the script yourself i guess is what i'm asking did
that make sense i don't think i asked that question no no i i get what you mean um so i would say things like you know um
marth is looking at the their equivalent of a newspaper um
or a news uh you know cnn online um you know so it should look like a news
report and beyond that you know i i was just like make it look like whatever you think makes it look like a news report
but i see okay and i would say it's in city script obviously because they wouldn't write in english yeah yeah
and then joe's ring can translate anything but joe deliberately made the choice to not
use her ring because she was trying to actually learn the language um
anyway and they had also given her like a fancy dancy city translator too
right yeah very good um well cool i think we are running out
of time here by your time limit so um i got two more questions as the as the
wrap-up questions um the the first is the the easy one for y'all which is is there something that you'd like to plug
that you've got coming up uh soon um there may not be you know
maybe you may be all set but i i always want to give everybody a opportunity to do that um
jamal you want to go first is naomi season two i'm assuming yeah um we just announced um naomi
season 2 is coming out march 11th i believe
definitely like mid-march so look out for that it's going to be another six issues and then the tv show
um is january 11th also i think on cw so check that out
nice are you um are are you uh going to continue doing it in that sort
of that six issue format in the foreseeable future is that is that the goal
yeah i think that's we sort of like fell into that with season one
um and then it sort of just worked out well so it's definitely like the plan to you
know uh in the foreseeable future and also helps for me just because i like to refresh on new things creatively
yeah so like i can work on something else after that and then if we want to do a season three we could do that or
just sort of like be more free form in how we plan stuff out so so does that then imply that there's
always going to be a year year and a half between between seasons and naomi
i wouldn't say always like we're very much taking it step by step so right now we're just focusing on season two and
then if we do a season three that'll happen whenever it happens basically yeah it could be a year between it could be
right after we don't know yet okay yeah just just just being pushy
is there anything that you'd like to plug do you have any other comics work coming up that that maybe is a question
well i literally like two weeks ago finished uh the first draft of uh
in the thus far unnamed second book of the great cities duology and um
i gotta finish that um you know we're we're going through the process of making it print worthy we're going to
pick a name um and some other stuff um and i can't even really plug that because like given
the the vagaries of how publishing works it'll be like at least a year before that book is out
um so i guess i'll just plug this because this is all i got out for a
while um i'm gonna take a break i need a vacation
after this are there are there other comics that now that you've worked on far sector are
there other things you thought that you think hey maybe it would be interesting if i could do this kind of a story in
comics i would dearly love to do a a you know
kind of owner developed something like monstrous
um by sana takeda and marjorie liu or um you know the wicked and the divine
i use this experience in order to try and you know make contacts within the comic
world and also start to understand how the process works because it was all greek to me before you know it was like
magic magnets how do these things work somehow people get together comics appear um now
i understand a little more of it um but i still haven't done the you know nitty-gritty of it and uh you know so i
may try and join some uh existing property and learn a little bit more of
the ropes and at some point i may be willing or able to uh to do my own thing
i would dearly love to try that um right now though i i'm not ready i need
to learn more i am but a padawan oh very good no it's i i gotta say
though i i do think you really kind of knocked this out of the park i i for a first
comic i mean it's not your first story obviously but for a first comment this is this is really really really good for
a first comic thank you yeah i mean but there's still a lot more i have to learn so
um and you know the folks at dc made this a really good experience working with jamal made it an amazing experience
um you know if you ever need some help with writing anything in the future just keep saying you know give me i'll
put you on screen okay all right i love that all right and then
the final question um this is this is a series of interviews i think this is we're at our 250th uh interview here
about comics and comic speaking um so we have uh we have uh a lot of people who watch
this series who are interested in making comics and in a lot of cases they're they're just they don't know how to
start they don't know what to do um uh i think nora you you may have you
know the the least part of the answer here so maybe it's not on comics maybe it's on writing in general how do you
spur yourself to create something if you're if you're not sure if you can do it
it's how i would reframe it for you you do it that that's the only thing you can do
you do it the only way to learn is to literally go and do it um but you can
study things done by other people i'm showing this because it's a great way to start
in this business and i mentioned this already um you can study well-made books that you want to emulate
like naomi season one and things like that um and you know you
you learn by reading and you learn by doing um and you know if you feel uncomfortable about it the only way to
get over that uncom that discomfort is to do it um so you know i i always uh reframe
what octavia butler uh apparently said um per an interview um when she was
asked what advice that she wants to give to kind of up-and-coming writers which is persist
and and by that basically you you start out writing you're going to be
terrible at first you know up front that you're going to be terrible you're going to feel like you're terrible but you
have to continue doing it until you become not terrible and that is what the persistence is
about persist in improving and growing and learning and your your step your
talents will eventually match up to what's in your head yeah that's i love that answer that's
that's such a perfect answer jamal uh wrap it up for us here uh what what's
the advice that you would give for someone who who wants to get into comics uh now not quite sure what to do
kind of the same thing like the best way to get started is to just do it start
like you don't have to be good at it at first no one is um
but just do your first thing start small you can do like
a comet can be as small as one page four panels and just do that
and once you've done that you've made a comic you are a comic artist or a writer
or both and then you can move on to the next thing and focus on getting better bit by bit piece by p piece by piece and
slowly build yourself up to where you're more comfortable you get to
an inkling of what you're doing what you want to do what you actually want to get out of it
and then you're on your way and it kind of just writes itself from there and you know
what you want to strive for from there so yeah just do it that's all that's
pretty much the only thing that i can say just start don't wait for anything just
do what you want to do and do something that you're having fun with
yeah also yeah if you're like struggling with it if it's not something you're actually into you're never going to
enjoy it or finish it so make sure you're actually enjoying yourself while you're doing it
yeah i love i love both those answers and i i i love both of you for making such a
such a great comic and for taking the time and being with us tonight i i i
thank you so much i uh i love it um uh i want to say to everybody who's
sitting at home if you're sitting at home and uh uh you don't know what to read and you're looking for something to
read far sector it's a it's a cracking piece of science fiction it's a solid piece of
superhero writing it's really good and again if you buy it from us you can get a free signed plate
because because why not right and you know you can join the club too because every month we we bring interviews like
this jordan give me one shot will you um uh i want to say that um the next show
we have coming up is uh sunday um is the kids club uh we're talking uh to kelly
fernandez about manu i'm sure that she is a first-time comic book person so
that should be a fun conversation because i love i love talking with the newbies i love talking with the newbies
um next month's uh adult club book um will be totally very
different than far sector it is no one else um by our kiku johnson um which is
a a family melodrama in hawaii it's a very fantastic piece of work and then for the
classics club uh we'll be talking to greg rucka about white out uh and greg
is uh greg is a great person to talk to so that should be a fantastic conversation that's uh that's the
january show so so do that um i would like to uh i would like to take a moment
here to do one special thanks and that is to jordan uh who has been running these shows for the last seven years um
this is his last show that he's behind the camera he is going and getting a getting a more adult job in a different city and so
he's not gonna be able to sit here in the comic book store and run this for me um jordan thank you so much for the the
years of help and service and uh you'll still be the producer you'll still do a lot of the back end stuff but uh but
starting starting next uh starting sunday my my son is going to be running the camera so so that'll be fun uh i
also yeah absolutely jordan uh i also want to thank my staff uh i want to thank zoe
cat for keeping the store going and uh and running it and and letting me have my little dreams of sitting in front of
the thing for seven years and talking about comics so it's great and thank all of you who are sitting there watching at
home because you know we wouldn't do it without your interest and all of you members so thank you all and then
finally thank these two nora jamal thank you so much for making good comics for for
creating things that that that fill our mind with passion and thought and and
emotion and i it's just it's you probably don't get told enough but
you're you you're great for doing that for us and and making our collective imagination that much bigger and
stronger thank you for hosting us yeah that's what i have for you that's our show
we'll see you next month well next week