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Nathan Massangill transcription
>> JOANNA: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com, and today I’m
here with Nathan Massangill. So, welcome to the show, Nathan!
>> NATHAN: Thank you very much, thank you very much. It’s an honor.
>> JOANNA: It’s great to have you on the show. Now, just as an introduction, Nathan
is the author and artist for the Viscera graphic novel series. His comic credits include Wolverine,
X-Men, Batman and other New York Times best-selling comics. He’s also collaborated with notable
creatives, including Joss Whedon on Buffy and also with Christopher Nolan. Now, just
uber-famous, Nathan – that’s an amazing list of credits!
>> NATHAN: Oh, no, no. It’s comics, it’s comics.
>> JOANNA: I know, but within the world – comics have this amazing audience, right? Fans of
comics are uber-fans.
>> NATHAN: Yeah, they really are. I’ve often said, and I just came back from a convention
in Pensacola, where they expected 3,500 people to come at the most, and around 15,000 ended
up showing up. They had to turn them away, it was more people than had ever been at a
convention in Pensacola before. So, this is a big change from when I started in comics,
when you were very lucky to get, you know, 100, 200, 300 people. The fans are growing,
you know, the online world is expanding exponentially, and, and comic book fans are incredibly loyal,
kind, supportive, generous: they’re the best, highest-quality fans any author could
hope for.
>> JOANNA: That’s, that’s amazing. So, yeah, you talked a bit there about starting:
can you just tell us a bit more about your career and how you progressed?
>> NATHAN: Um, well, I, I um – since kindergarten, that’s all I’ve ever done. When I got
out of high school, I went two years to a technical school run by Joe Kubert called
the Joe Kubert School of Art, that actually trains comic book artists, and I got to work
with Joe Kubert there, one of the great legends in American comics. And, um, it was a wonderful
experience, and from there I just, as soon as I got out of school, I started doing small
jobs, and, and about 1992, I worked on my first Wonder Woman comic book, who happens
to be my favorite superhero character to this day, so, I, er, and I’ve done it ever since.
>> JOANNA: And, and, I mean, and how about the difference between working on comics and
then working on things like, like Buffy? I mean, I guess, you know, you’ve got to think
of me as not knowing anything. How, how does that progression work?
>> NATHAN: Well, Joss Whedon decided um, a wonderful thing: you know, since Buffy on
television was canceled, and everybody wanted the series to continue, obviously, including
Joss Whedon, he decided, you know, why don’t we continue the, um, the TV show in comics?
So he did Season 8 and Season 9 of Buffy as a comic book, and it’s really been, um,
amazing to see a TV show live on, in a way, that otherwise, you know, it would just be
a piece of history already, and still it’s going on. And I got to work on a little bit,
just a little bit of Season 9, and since Joss Whedon is one of my favorite creators, it
was great to work on, on his project. And I love Buffy: I think Buffy is one of the
great characters in, um, in cinema.
>> JOANNA: Yeah, absolutely, that’s amazing. And you, you mentioned Wonder Woman there
as one of your favorites, and of course your comic, Viscera, is a female protagonist, very
kick-***. What, what is your, er, attraction to the strong female character?
>> NATHAN: Well, you, you could probably answer that as well as I could, er, with your wonderful
characters. And I think, honestly, um, I, I find female characters as leads to be, to
be much more interesting. We see a lot less of them: I think there’s a lot more you
can do with them dramatically, especially in um, in a, um, in a combat situations, and,
um, it just, it just is something that we see a lot less of. I enjoy them more: I would
watch – when Hercules and Xena were on at the same time, I’m a Xena guy, I was watching
Lucy Lawless as Xena. And I, I have always felt, you know, that, um, the female leads
were strongly under-represented, and I’ve naturally always written strong female leads.
>> JOANNA: Mm. And I suppose the impression with most of the women in comics is they have
kind of large *** and small waists and are quite, you know, isn’t the chain mail
armor, is that the kind of stereotypical-?
>> NATHAN: Yeah, comics, especially in the 1990s, went through this long period of, of,
of kind of, um, extremely sexist depictions of the characters, and strangely, although
the depictions were sexist, often the, the characters themselves, beyond the rendering
and the rendition of the characters, were actually kind of unusually, um, dominant and
powerful. They weren’t weak or submissive: they were very strong. But the drawings themselves
were very, um, were very, uh, you know, sexist in the way they were just portrayed.
But, then again, as many of my fellow artists have pointed out, you know, um, we don’t
look like Superman either! And, you know, we’re not complaining about it. So, that’s
my friend, Adam Hughes, always says that. And, um, you know, so everyone in a superhero
world is extremely extreme in their physicality. Viscera was, is my, is in that range, because
of the particular theme that I’ve chosen, and she’s kind of, um, people are supposed
to expect one thing from her and get entirely the opposite. So, it’s kind of playing on
that paradigm of er what you see is not always what you get. And, um, I think that it’s,
it’s very interesting. And comics are changing a lot. There are,
usually they’re at the forefront of, you know, um, cultural changes, particularly related
to women, and I’ll hope they continue to go forward in that, although there are some
notable misses.
>> JOANNA: Yeah. Well, no, it’s interesting you say that, because I, you know, my character,
Morgan Sierra, I kind of see as my alter ego, you know, of course is perfectly proportioned
and can fight and can do all these things, it’s kind of near a superhero. So we all,
and I don’t complain when Thor takes his top off!
>> NATHAN: No, I haven’t heard any women complaining about Chris Hemsworth! None.
>> JOANNA: So, I mean, yeah, sexism in, in lots of things.
>> NATHAN: In fact, I think the beauty standard was pretty much reversed in the Avengers movie,
uh, that everybody, everybody was going to see the guys and, and, you know, the Black
Widow, as awesome as she is, and the actress is Scarlett Johansen, she was, she was overshadowed
by, by her male leads, which was something very unusual, and not unwelcome, just different.
>> JOANNA: Mm. And just on that, with the gender balance, I’m wondering, with actual
comic book artists like yourself, is it, is it a male-dominated industry?
>> NATHAN: Well, it’s, that was the thing when we were, when I was growing up and when
I started in the business: you would go to a comic book convention, and there would be
absolutely no women there. I’m not talking about maybe one or two or three: none. And
if one did walk in, it was the wife or the girlfriend of the guy who was, er, you know,
dragging her along, and she was very uncomfortable, because everybody was looking at her, and
like, “What is that woman doing here?” and, you know, “How?” you know, everybody
was just- and nobody likes to be looked at and singled out and stared at.
And particularly since, I think, women are finding a greater access to comics; anybody
can now go to Amazon and, and download comics and be involved in it, and we’ve finally
been able to disprove – you know, a lot of the things that the big bosses think about
what women want is obviously completely idiotic, and usually absolutely wrong. And it turns
out, you know, women can like the Avengers and the, and the old thinking was that, that
women would never like the Avengers, and that you couldn’t even have female leads in comic
books, because who would read them? Guys won’t want to read that, and women won’t – well,
they weren’t in the audience at that time. And now, I think women make up a significant
portion of the readership, and it’s growing all the time, and I, it’s, it’s revolutionized
comics, and it’s made it really a lot more fun to be involved in comics.
>> JOANNA: Mm, fantastic. And, and conventions like Comicon would be the famous one, right,
and everyone kind of dresses up-
>> NATHAN: Yes.
>> JOANNA: All the pictures seem to be men and women now; it just seems to be a lot of
fun.
>> NATHAN: Yes.
>> JOANNA: Do you, do you dress up at these conventions?
>> NATHAN: Oh, no, no. I- nobody wants to see me in a, in a Thor costume, it’s not
going to happen. No, no, I, I leave that to the experts, um. The cosplayers are amazing,
and they, er, they brought a lot of fun to a convention and some of the costumes they
create are better than movie quality costumes. It’s really amazing. Everybody has fun,
and, and women are feeling more and more comfortable at these conventions, you know, even though
they get a lot of the same flak they get in, in the world outside. You know, I hope that,
you know, the comic book community and the fandom for, um, science fiction and fantasy
will continue to be more and more, er, embracing of the cosplayers and, you know, people that
just go to have fun and have a great time.
>> JOANNA: Mm, I must say, I would really fancy dressing up in some of this stuff: it
just, it does look really – but just very expensive, to be fair!
>> NATHAN: Yeah, it, they spend so much time on these things, they build the things from
scratch, and they, they have, it’s like a whole lifestyle, and I can’t imagine,
I would never want to dress up as any character at all, but I, I admire it, I’m always stopping
people who are walking by my table to run out and take a picture with them, and, um,
I just, I admire it so much, and the enthusiasm and, you know, it’s, it’s an incredibly
exciting environment to be in. And I just- like I say, conventions today are nothing
like they were in the past.
>> JOANNA: Mm, and I wonder, I mean, what do you attribute the – I mean, it really
is mainstream now, you know, Marvel and, I mean, the movies we watch, a, a lot of these
blockbuster movies are superhero movies now, you know. I think recently I watched, I watched
The Man of Steel. I mean, I love explosion movies, so all these movies are, I really
love the Avengers. I mean, Wolverine: Wolverine was fantastic! You know-
>> NATHAN: Hugh Jackman, yeah. Women like Hugh Jackman for some reason: I don’t know
why!
>> JOANNA: Oh, shirt-off fight scene, I mean, that was the best. With swords. Dangerous
stuff!
>> NATHAN: It’s amazing, yeah.
>> JOANNA: It was amazing, but what, why do you think people just want this, you know,
want the superhero stuff. I mean, what is it that’s wrong with our society that we
want that?
>> NATHAN: Well, that’s a very interesting question. Um, I think that – and it’s
something I’ve thought about a lot, because, you know, I loved superheroes when I was a
kid, and I just assumed, you know, I would do the same thing: I’d find girls and, you
know, get cars, get interested in cars or sports or something and just grow out of this
crazy phase. But, um, I never really stopped liking superheroes, because they changed.
Around 1986, when I was at that, you know, 16-year-old period, where I’m like, “OK,
I’m going to switch out”, Alan Moore’s comics started coming out: the Watchmen came
out. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight came out. And there was a renaissance of, of comic
books which were revisionist, that they didn’t follow the old scripts, where people suddenly
began to take it seriously, began to listen to what Will Eisner and the original generation
of comic book artists were saying comic books could be. And people start burning them in
piles, calling them the Devil’s literature, and all that stuff.
And they just, they just grew up, along with me, and so I’ve constantly found something
new to be interested in. You know, the reasons I was interested in Wonder Woman have changed
over the years as, you know, you begin to, you begin to think about what a character
like this means; you, if you’re a feminist, or into feminist theory, and you look at,
you look at Buffy, and a lot of Buffy fans have a great time saying, “Is she really
feminist? Is it really a feminist, um, series?” and “Is Wonder Woman really feminist, and
if not, why not, where’s the miss, where’s the disconnect?”
And so, you can really bring that kind of analysis to these power fantasies. But people
love them because everybody wants to be able to do what a superhero does. You like the
explosions and people making explosions; you like Morgan Sierra because, you know, what
other people would only think about doing, she just goes out and does it! You know, she’s
not afraid and she’s smart and she’s pretty and she shoots stuff: she’s just great.
You know, and who doesn’t want to do that? I mean, it’s a lot more fun than reading,
you know, a book about, um, you know, politics or something. Who cares?
>> JOANNA: I tot- I totally agree with you. And I also think that, er, I mean, a lot of
these characters have the dark side and they are complicated characters, they’re not
just simple anymore, are they. They’ve all got this dark side. And also they, you know,
there’s a battle and overcoming and- I mean, all the great character creation is in these
superheroes, really.
>> NATHAN: It’s true. I mean, they come out of, you know, they come out of myth. Modern
mythology, modern symbols of mythology have come out of comic books, you know. Everything
from Superman’s S to Batman’s bat symbol to, just there’s a million iconic images
that have come out of these myths, and every one is- Humans have always loved myths and
ideas of things bigger than ourselves beyond ourselves, to get out of our ordinary common
world, and, you know, comics came out of, you know, pulp fiction, which was really dark
and, and really harsh, and, and they came out of of that world, and it imbued all that
material.
And up until the 50s in America, comic books really had a lot of roundness and depth and
thought put into them, and then, of course the government censored comics, effectively
censored them and shut them down: thank you, McCarthy. And um, and they were kind of, you
know, after that point, put in this little image of “This is a child’s literature”,
and they’re only recovering, beginning to recover, from that, you know, in, in the past
few years. And now people take them very seriously, thanks to some very pioneering creative individuals,
you know, who’ve outlived that vicious censorship.
>> JOANNA: Yeah, I would agree with you. And, so, just getting to the more kind of technical
side of things, um, you’re, what do you actually do? Do you write stuff, on, you know,
type stuff, and do you then draw, with a pen and paper, or on a computer system? How do
you actually work?
>> NATHAN: Yeah. I, I do all the different aspects. I’ve always wanted to be a writer-artist,
which is a kind of a rare combination of, um, of, of creator, like Frank Miller, who,
who writes his own material and draws it as well. But typically, comics are broken up
into some subcategories, like a band is broken up into subcategories. A lot of my career
has been spent as a finisher or an inker, where I’m kind of a just a part of a, of
a team that’s creating a book, and um, other times I’ve been fortunate to write something
or color it or letter it.
And all the different aspects I’ve enjoyed doing, and um, it’s, it’s just very interesting,
but it’s, it’s broken down into a lot of little minute technical lingo and subcategories
and, you know, small, little kind of, very small teams to create the book, but they’re
almost always created by teams of people.
>> JOANNA: Mm. And, and, but if people want to have a go at drawing – I’m just thinking
of like, because a lot, your, Viscera looks like it’s hand-drawn, but I presume, is
that hand-drawn or is it drawn on a computer program?
>> NATHAN: Yes, yes. Viscera is, Viscera is definitely hand-drawn, although there are
computer elements to it. Uh, the, the, the genre right now is moving more and more digital,
more- all of the color that you see in the, um, in the mainstream books, in Marvel, DC
and Dark Horse, all of it is going to be done on computer. And the lettering: there used
to be, you know, people who made their living doing hand-lettering for comics; now people
make their living doing digital lettering for comics. And so a lot of the process, even
a hand-drawn kind of organic-looking book like Viscera, is going to have computer elements.
And so you, sometimes you’ll draw it on, on, you know, on your little drawing board,
and you put it on your scanner, and you put it in the computer, and then you think, “Oh,
my gosh, there’s a million ways I can improve this”, and um, and, so it’s a very, um,
integrated process, and a lot of people are doing it many different ways. I can do Viscera
entirely digitally and never touch a paper, but I feel like, with that particular book,
was very experimental in its style, and, and very organic, and so I was really interested
in minimalism and just going back to very simple um, simple style, um, black and white
only, no grays, nothing, and just seeing how little information I could put on a page to
tell the story, to make it more immersive for the reader.
Us crazy artists, we think of all that kind of stuff. You, you do the same thing as a
novelist, when you’re thinking, of, you know, “Am I going to make a really flowery
description in this, on this page, or is it going to slow down the narrative pace so much?”
– artists think of exactly the same thing. When I listen in to your podcast and authors
are talking about things that go into novels, it’s surprising how exactly similar they
are to the artistic process or the process of writing a comic.
>> JOANNA: Mm. Because, of course, you, I mean, you might have one line of dialogue
or maybe no dialogue, and you’ve drawn, you’ve drawn a scene with a background,
a backdrop, a physical setting, and an action. So you’ve actually- you only, you almost
don’t have to say a lot, you just have to draw it!
>> NATHAN: Right. And there’s an old saying in comics: “Show, don’t tell”, and I
think it’s a great rule for novelists as well, you know, that it, it’s a lot better
if you can suggest what your hero is doing, um, in a kind of parallel narrative or a parallel
idea, rather than just saying, “Now John is angry”. You know, in, in a comic book,
you show them as angry, you know. Hulk breaks a wall down and you know he’s mad. So, you
know, it’s a lot more fun to see him break the wall down than to say in the caption,
“Hulk angry”. Well, that’s kind of fun. But you know what I mean.
And so, with a comic book, you’re juggling like these multiple narratives. There’s
incredibly long sequences in Viscera where I have almost no dialogue, and I have that
opportunity, um, to, um, to, to move the reader through that scene much like you would with
quick shots in a, in an action movie, and um, you know, um, so it’s a lot of fun.
And when I’m getting into these, like, intimate moments, where they’re sitting by a fireside
and they’re talking, you know, I just switch it all to text, because that’s a data dump:
that’s a time when, OK, you can skip it as a reader, or, if you’re really interested
in the kind of, you know, fireside chat, which I think is one of the best parts of the book,
then you, you’ll sit down and you’ll be immersed in the dialogue itself, and not,
not distracted by um, the, uh, the two people sitting round talking, which is a very thing
to- it’s an easy thing to shoot in a movie; it’s a great thing to write in a novel,
but it really, really sucks in a comic book.
Because, you know, the last thing you want Hulk to do is sit at a bar and talk with the
other Avengers, you know, and then the camera goes back and the camera – you know, you
don’t want talking heads in a comic book, and that’s one way that comics are very
different than films and novels and everything else. There’s things that you can do in
the medium of a comic book that you can’t do in any other medium, and, uh, it gives
you all kinds of creative license, an unlimited special effects budget, and, um, you know,
just a really, you get to work with, uh – if your artist is very good, and he can make
your characters act and he can bring your setting in and make you feel like you’re
really in China, or really on the Moon, you know, then you, as a writer, can really cut
back on, on what narrative you need to put in place, and really just focus your words
on that, on that one iconic idea.
Alan Moore will often write a story in his dialogue that’s absolutely separate from
what you’re watching in the background, so that you have this incredibly textual and
visual experience that sometimes merge and sometimes move forward, but it’s, it’s
never replicated, you know, he’s never saying in his dialogue or in his word balloons what
you’re looking at, because they never need to be replicated.
>> JOANNA: Mm, it is absolutely fascinating, it really is. And then, in terms of, er, actually
producing and distributing a, a comic, so once you’ve made it digitally, um, how are
things working now with print versus digital: how are you getting work out there and how
are others getting work out there?
>> NATHAN: Well, it’s, it’s, it’s again been a real revolution, very exciting time,
because, you know, there was a huge barrier before the Internet world, there was an incredible
barrier, particularly to color comics, something you would have to order to get any kind of
um, really great reproduction, or really to make it cost-effective, you might have to
order 20,000 copies, you know.
Now, there’s wonderful print-on-demand um publishers, particularly my friend Barry Gregory,
who runs a company called Ka-Blam.com, and he will print a color book; at the same cost
he will print 100, he’ll print one, and you know, he will send them, you know, just
like the other print fulfilment orders, but they’re as good as books run on a, on an
offset press. They’re beautiful, every book he takes care with, so, you know, you might
run your comic book for a dollar or two, you know, and one copy at a time. So, an author
can, can invest in a, in a color comic, and not have to have, you know, those classic
boxes of books sitting around, and even comics can do that now.
And that, breaking the color barrier, um, that way, has been great, and of course the
digital revolution is even better, in a lot of ways. As it’s expanding, the devices
are getting better and better at displaying them, and so I’m hoping that comics will
get out of the, out of the, you know, boutique market they’re in, and come back into the
forefront of, um, of of literature, the way the movies have done for comics.
>> JOANNA: So, I mean, I’ve read about Kindle Comic Creator, which is a, a new thing: do
you know anything about that?
>> NATHAN: I did put Viscera into the Comic, the Kindle Comic Creator. It was a really
interesting process, because, particularly with- Viscera has a very unconventional, experimental
panel structure (panels are the little boxes that you read through one at a time), and
um, so I spent a lot of time like shooting the book, like I would, I would create where
the panel goes, and overlap the panels so that there’s like a kind of cinematic experience,
almost, for the book, and I ended up, like, some things even worked better in the Kindle
Creator than they work in the book.
But it’s, it’s awkward, because, you know, I think a lot of the things that Comic Kindle
– Kindle Comic Creator is doing now, is, is like, um, it’s difficult to say, but
it’s kind of compensating for the, the lack of resolution and the lack of screen size
that’s still there. The next generation or two of devices, or the larger devices presently,
are going to really change that idea. The Comic, the Kindle Comic Creator, instead of
displaying the whole static page, will zoom in and give you a guided panel view, so that
you’ll switch from one panel to another: it took me three days to, to set up those
panel views: three working days. Very long days. And it was very interesting, but it
is not a simple process, especially for a one-man shop. It’s not terribly easy. But
it was satisfying to do, and very interesting, and the software is great. Anybody can do
it.
>> JOANNA: Anyone with three days and is a comic man like yourself! But I guess what
it does show is that Amazon believe that comics are a market, otherwise they wouldn’t have
done this.
>> NATHAN: Um, comics are a huge market. The comic book print market, even, which people
have been proclaiming dead since about 1996, um, is, is resurging. The comic book print
market in 2012, I believe, resurged 12 %. So it’s coming back, even, and the digital
market is expanding exponentially every year. Um, we, we still, um, have a lot of issues
of comics being kind of segregated off in a different distribution chain than novels:
one of the things that I’ve enjoyed listening to your show for is because, you know, you’re
talking about how to put, you know, novels into, into the digital distribution chain,
how to get noticed, how to get brought forward, but for comics creators, it’s very difficult,
because we’re even in a submarket of a submarket.
So, I’ve been really interested in seeing if I could apply some of the rules and guidance
that you so generously and brilliantly bring forward on your show, and, and apply that
to a graphic novel, you know. I haven’t achieved success at it yet, but, you know,
the, the process is still on-going, and I’m really interested in, in getting out of, getting
out of the submarket and seeing if there’s a way to bridge um, novels and graphic novels.
I think it’s something that novelists should really- I’d love to see those markets integrate,
and, um, a lot more novelists do graphic novels, and a lot more graphic novelists do novels,
and maybe even make hybrid editions, um, really kind of supplement- I mean, there’s a lot
of potential to do novel and innovative things, and expand novelists, if they would go and,
you know, make novels, graphic novels, out of their novels.
Hey, you know, that’s an extra market, extra piece for your market. That’s something
brand new that you can market, even though it’s the same story that you’ve already
invested all that time and writing, suddenly you’ve got a new product, and everybody
that loves your book is going to want to read the graphic novel, and people are going to
read their graphic novel that didn’t read the novel. And there’s no other way, I think,
that a novelist or graphic novelist could reach a completely different market; there’s
not a lot of cross-over between the comic book market and the um, and the novel market,
but the fans of both are extraordinary, and it’s like, um, I think that, er, the more
these markets merge, and the more people consider there to be very little difference between
a novel and a graphic novel, in terms of what they will buy, the better it will be for both
genres.
>> JOANNA: Yeah, I mean, when you think about, I mean, when I write, I think about it as
a movie, because I love the action movies, and actually, I mean-
>> NATHAN: Yeah.
>> JOANNA: It’s such a tiny percentage of people that will ever see their books as a
movie, but realistically, a graphic novel is kind of the, the closest you can get, really,
isn’t it.
>> NATHAN: Yeah, it is the bridge, um, a lot of people view it as the bridge, a lot of
um, I know a lot of directors now, major directors, who are saying, you know, “If you want me
to read your script, make it a graphic novel, then I’ll look at it”. They won’t even
look at the print scripts anymore: they are pulling all their work out of graphic novels,
because if you think about it, the graphic novel is a movie that’s already way down
the line. I did, I’ve done a small article on my website about this, so maybe I can,
I go into more depth on it there, but it’s like, a novel is, um, an enormous work of
imagination to translate into film, but a graphic novel is already, the sets are built,
all the characters are cast, um, you know, the complete world is designed, all these
elements are there, the pacing is there; the storyboards, the all-important storyboards,
um, are there.
And the difference between a storyboards, which directors shoot from, and a graphic
novel are really not that different. In fact, it’s usually comic book artists and illustrators
who are doing those, um, those storyboards for the director, so it’s like already their
movie is moved five steps forward, and they can really see it. They can see what’s wrong,
they can see what’s right, they can see what they can improve, which is probably great
for them, because, you know, they’re going to look forward to changing things around,
and, um, so I think it’s the gateway between the two.
It’s particularly to, hard to get a- it’s easier to get a novel read than a screenplay,
perhaps, because directors just have piles of them; it’s a lot easier to pick up a
graphic novel, you can look through it in a few seconds, and know if you’re going
to like it or not. You can’t do that with a screenplay. You can’t do it in any other
way. It’s very, very um, appealing to time-strapped people in Hollywood.
>> JOANNA: OK, so now I’m really excited, and I’m sure lots of people listening are
also excited. So, um, if people want to work with a graphic artist like yourself – because
most novelists or writers are not going to be able to do this on their own, because you
need an artist – so how would people find and work with graphic artists who are up for
doing this kind of thing?
>> NATHAN: Well, um, the article I’ve done on my website covers a lot of this, but the
basic thing you want to do, is you want to do, um, you know, if you know a comic book
artist, ask them who’s good, who’s available. Um, I do a lot of consulting work, people
often, um, you know, write me and say, “I’ve got a novel, is it, is it a good graphic novel?”
I have a friend of mine who’s a brilliant novelist, and he’ll often bring me his concept,
and I’ll say, “Ah-ah, no, that’s not a novel, that’s a graphic novel”, and
he’ll completely write his, his novel in that form, and I’ll say, “What you have
is primarily in your novel visual, therefore, you know, it’s going to play better and
quicker and be more immersive as a graphic novel”.
So you can go to a consultant and really decide whether or not your book is appropriate for
a graphic novel, whether, if it’s a lot of just talking heads, you know, then you,
you have words, but if you have action scenes, if you have sequences, if you have a mystery
that involves a lot of visual elements, if you have, you know, a celebrity bio, a techno-thriller,
all these things make fantastic graphic novels, and so you should go to a consultant, and
they will recommend you, um, to an artist, who-
Always go with somebody that has experience doing comic books: just a graphic artist,
as you say, will not necessarily be a good comic book artist, a comic book artist is
a subspecialty of a subspecialty, it’s one of the hardest and most difficult fields of
all commercial art, because you have to draw so many panels, so often, you have to be able
to draw everything in great volume, very quickly. And so you, you want to go with an expert,
with somebody who’s done it, has a proven track record, and, you know, so that’s why
you want to, um, talk to people who, who’ve done it, and, and get linked up with somebody,
but if you do that, and it’s not hard, because it’s the online world now, um, you know,
you can find an artist who’s excited about your work, who gets it, who has this, this
style, and you can have this mutual admiration society of people, and you can get it funded
pretty easily, you know.
If your book, I would say, if your book, er, is already successful, so you published your
novel, and it’s sold over 3,500 copies, then I think you should definitely begin to
consider making it a graphic novel. If you’re over 5,000, yeah, you definitely should have
one. Why not? And if you’re over 15,000 in sales, it’s a no-brainer; I mean, you’ve
got to do it, because you should have the fan audience to easily crowdfund it, and,
and get it done, and it’s just going to expand the, the, the, the, the amount of um,
difference it will make, I think, to a novelist’s audience is, is, is incredible.
It’ll get you into comic book audiences, you can merge your fanbase with an artist’s
fanbase, you get these great fans that you’ve never had before, you know, you can all-important,
add to that catalogue. You’ve talked on your show so often about getting to that magical
number of, of, of books, and graphic novel, you can put one right in there, you know.
You could make deluxe editions of your novel bound with the graphic novel in a digital
world. So many possibilities.
>> JOANNA: Hm, it really is. And, I mean, you mentioned, I mean, really, we’re talking
funding, so we’re talking Kickstarter
>> NATHAN: Crowdsource.
>> JOANNA: Things like that. And I don’t want people to think it’s easy, because,
I mean, I’ve always shied away from Kickstarter, because, you know, even, I’ve been online
for a while now, but I don’t feel, like I would doubt that I have the, you know, a
big enough audience. I, you know, I think we all feel this, you know, sort of worry
that it wouldn’t be there. So, if people do want to do Kickstarter and get funding,
what sort of funding level would we be talking about for a graphic novel?
>> NATHAN: Um, well that’s a tricky thing, um. I think that, and it’s tricky because
when you go with Kickstarter, or Indiegogo, or some of the others, it’s not only Kickstarter,
each one has different um, you know, different attributes and different value, um, and different
accessibility levels. Um, particularly with Kickstarter, you have to have an Amazon account
to make that contribution, so for people who are contributing to it, it gives them a little
bit of a barrier, you know, for, which reduces their ability to impulse purchase.
So, it’s, it’s very different, in terms of which crowdsource to pick, and it will
depend on, you know, what incentives you’re offering, and how you want to, um, your time
frame, how quickly you think you can raise the money. But you want to look at, let’s
say we want to create a 64-page graphic novel, which usually will – you can get a lot of
novels condensed into a 64-page graphic novel. And you’ve got to consider when you’re
doing this that the, your artist is going to spend a very long time doing this book,
so they need, they need money to do it, particularly if they’re not getting a, a split of the
creative rights.
There’s a lot of issues that come into this that hopefully that article on my website
will help. People really access this idea, but you want to look at what it would cost
them per page. Um, novelists work on advances, um, you know where you’ll get, from a traditional
publishing company, an advance for your book, and comic book artists work on page rates.
So you want to figure out, “OK, what do I really need to pay my, pay my artist per
page, um, to do this”, and then you would multiply that by the amount of pages, and
you’d begin to need to figure out at that point, you know, what you’ll need to clear
to get your book done in a reasonable amount of time. Um, and, er, that’s, that’s the
way to get it, to get the book funded.
Getting it into print is, is, is relatively very simple. You can usually, um, you know,
that’s, that’s not the difficult part. The difficult part is the patience it takes
to, um, to get it done, and the um, the page rate, you know, to get it produced. It’s
a very, it’s a different process to working on a novel, um. It usually will take the artist
longer to do the graphic novel than it will take the writer to write the novel! I know
novelists who can write three novels in the time I can do a 64-page graphic novel! So,
you know, especially if it’s a color, if it’s in those beautiful painted colors,
you know, there’s a lot of –
Artists’ prices will, their needs will vary, so, you know, you just- But I would look at
the number of pages versus what your artist will need, um, to spend as close to full time
as possible working on the book, because that’s what it’s going to take. You can’t just
casually do the art on a graphic novel; it’s a, it’s a, it’s a big process. They, you
can shoot a feature film in a shorter period of time than it takes to do a graphic novel.
>> JOANNA: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it is pretty major. And just a question on rights. I mean,
it’s fine if, like me, you’re, you self-publish and you own all the rights, but if people
have signed contracts with people, what, what is the subsidiary right that graphic novel
would come into? So if they’ve sold print rights, have they sold graphic novel rights,
or does it come under multimedia, or do you know about that side of it?
>> NATHAN: Well, that’s an excellent question, and there’s a lot of um, legal considerations
to be – especially when you’re, if you’re negotiating with a traditional publisher,
or you’re negotiating with anybody where there’s rights issues involved, I would
highly recommend that, you know, you reserve to yourself the graphic novel rights or the
adaptation rights, or negotiate it with your publisher, because, believe me, they’ll
want to, they’ll want to have a say in that. And it’s very important that, you know,
the, the, the graphic novels and other types of media adaptations: web comic adaptations,
audio book adaptations, all these things um, need to be, need to be spelled out, in any
legal contract.
It needs to be spelled out in a legal contract between the author and the artist, you know,
because, um, the artists are doing a lot of original designs, a lot of things, so if it’s
going to be a work for hire arrangement with the artist, that needs to be spelled out;
if there’s a certain um, percentage of creator rights that are going to switch, or, or, or
change hands, that needs to be spelled out. Um, it’s something that has to be looked
at at every level and every detail, you know, in order to avoid misunderstandings. It’s
better for everybody and, er – but it’s not that complicated. It just needs to be
addressed directly.
>> JOANNA: Mm, yeah, I just wanted to raise that, because I know some people listening
to the show have sold some rights, so it’s just, just a question that is important.
>> NATHAN: Yeah, and, and, and, and, when you’re looking, if you were a novelist working
with a traditional publishing house, um, they may be very interested if you approach them
in, in adapting your novel to a graphic novel, and they may be able to provide the funding
for that themselves. So they may be interested in doing that. So, it’s well worth approaching
them and saying, “Look, I’ve got a great artist who’s willing to do this, you know,
we’ve got to figure a certain percentage of the sales we’ve already made, we can
definitely make with this graphic novel, all the ancillary benefits; the increased um,
benefit and likelihood of the book being translated to film.
A lot of traditional publishing houses, HarperCollins is working with Neil Gaiman and graphic novels,
and, er, I mean, those are big business. So, they’re definitely worth, definitely worth
talking to traditional publishers about it. And indie publishers, self-publishers, you
know, they still have these, you know, these issues to address with whomever they’re
going to subcontract or work with as a partner to do their graphic novels.
>> JOANNA: Wow, it’s so interesting, and we could, we could talk forever on this, I
have so many questions, but we’re, we’re running out of time. So, just tell people
a bit more about Viscera.
>> NATHAN: Um, Viscera is my attempt, er, to do an actual feminist superheroine. Um,
you know since Gloria Steinem put Wonder Woman on the cover of the first Ms. Magazine in
1972, I believe it was, um, you know, people have been looking for what a feminist superheroine
would be. What would she look like, what would she do? And Viscera is my attempt to create
that character.
She’s er, in the mold of Sarah Connor from the Terminator, and also she’s got a lot
of Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a lot of punk sensibilities,
and she’s fighting um, really, ah, the *** culture. I figured if a feminist super superhero
was going to exist, what is she going to fight, what is the frontline of the feminist struggle?
And I thought, well, it’s, it’s, they’ve been the ones that have named what *** is,
they defined it and began to fight for those rights, you know, in the 60s and 70s. And
um, I think that that’s what a feminist superheroine would do. Wonder Woman would
not come to man’s world to bring hope to it: she’d come to destroy it. She’d come
to say, “OK, it isn’t a man’s world, this is a world for everybody”.
And so Viscera’s a very dark story, it’s a very, it’s a story, it comes with trigger
warnings, and it’s, it’s about very, a very dark subject that is, I think, suitable
to a feminist philosophy where feminists are always having to come out and say things nobody
wants to hear! You know, they don’t want to hear that stuff, but- And it’s a not
a book designed by the rules which you often discuss on your show. I broke most of them,
knowing what they were! But it was a book written out of passion rather than out of
er, some sort of er, desire to create a, a, a best-seller, and I know it will never be
that, you know, but I, other projects hopefully will come along that will, that will sell
more.
But people, some people have been kind enough to say that, um, that it’s meant something
to them. It’s dedicated to survivors of violence, and I think more people need to
speak about it, particularly more men, and um, so, it’s not an activist book, it’s
a paranormal thriller, it’s, you know, really dark, experimental, and hopefully people will
like it.
>> JOANNA: Yeah, and I really, I, I think ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word, I mean, it’s,
it’s not a light, it’s not a light-hearted, enjoyable kind of read, but it’s, in terms
of the fact that I like women who are kind of, you know, I like writing violent women
as well!
>> NATHAN: Yeah, there’s a, there’s a, with a superhero, there’s a great cathartic
relief, you know, because she gets to fight this *** culture directly, you know: she
can stab it, she can stab it in the chest, you know, and kill it, you know, whereas people
in the real world, you know, it’s much more, it’s much more shadowy, it’s much more
difficult to get a handle on. And so, uh, in that sense hopefully it’s a cathartic,
um, you know, release for people, and um. It does have humor in it.
>> JOANNA: Yeah.
>> NATHAN: And, um, really, um, the, the great trauma, the, the tension they build up, is
really never going to happen. Viscera is always five steps ahead of everybody around her:
she’s smarter, she’s 4’11”, 89 lbs, but you wouldn’t want to mess with her.
She will have outwitted you long before you entered the room, and so she has that kind
of, um, that, that’s the source of her strength, that she’s always got tricks in reserve.
>> JOANNA: Hm, fantastic. So, where can people find you, and also the Viscera comic online?
>> NATHAN: Um, well my website is nathanmassangill.com, and er, that’s the site, anyone can get
in touch with me if they want to talk more about graphic novels, or how to adapt any
of their work. Um, ringrunning.com is Viscera’s website, and um, people can, can, um, access
the article that I mentioned, um, on both, through both sites.
>> JOANNA: Hm, fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Nathan, that was amazing.
>> NATHAN: Thank you for, so much for the work you do: it’s very inspiring.