Retrospective - Getting to "DD1"

Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, or "DD1," was published in 2013 by First Second Books, six years after The Treasure of Constantinople, which I talked about last week. I thought I'd be able to skip straight to talking about DD1, but then I looked through my books and realized it's just not that easy…

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But first, some other small items of note:

• Big images are in the carousel above, and the same images are included inline below.
• Happy New Year! It's 2024 now! I hope it is a healthy, happy year for you and the people you love.
• Comicraft had a New Years' Day sale, so I bought most of the Comicraft fonts we discussed in the Font Showdown. This was an extremely pleasing development, and since I learned about the sale via a repost on Bluesky, I am forced to admit that social media can, sometimes, be good.
• I added four more items to last week's list of inspirational things, most notably Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia. I highly recommend reading his account of the design of the game's packaging. You'll never guess who posed for illustration reference.

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If you read last week's writeup on the very first Delilah Dirk book, THE TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE, you will not likely have missed the significance of Kazu Kibuishi &co.'s FLIGHT anthologies. My first-ever published work — titled OLD OAK TREES — was a short comic I submitted for Volume Three. For Volume Five, I submitted a Delilah Dirk story called DELILAH DIRK AND THE AQUEDUCT.

Without a doubt, it was inspired by these old drawings of aqueducts from books like THE BEAUTIES OF THE BOSPHORUS (as mentioned last week). These constructions are such a beautiful, perfect portal into a historical world.  Water-on-tap is so easy to take for granted, and has been for all my life, but these used to be necessary (and probably still are in some places). Admittedly, modern clean-water is an impressive engineering feat too, but it's not this beautiful.

The story that turned into THE AQUEDUCT might have been the very first Delilah Dirk story. Sarah Airriess and I were discussing this in the comments of last week's post. She also pointed out something I forgot: DD used to fly a biplane. Sure enough:

Those drawings and the earliest version of THE AQUEDUCT might predate any of my work on THE TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE. I wonder how things would have gone if I'd stuck with the biplane. The design of the flying sailboat is anachronistic, but not as anachronistic as a frigging biplane. The funny thing is, I bet I could have made it work. It would have led to a lot of logical next steps and made DD's world very different — and I bet no one would have complained about the teacups — but it could have worked. I almost certainly abandoned it because Sarah convinced me it was tonally asinine and/or because of what it implied about the state of the internal combustion engine in the story's setting, and I did not want to lose the pre-industrial flavour I enjoyed in the Sharpe and Hornblower books.

Anyway, the driving motivation behind THE AQUEDUCT was almost certainly my excitement about trapping Our Heroes on an aqueduct that gets blown to pieces.

It also tells the story of a brash, impulsive adventurer coming to appreciate the cleverer qualities of her newfound companion. Selim starts the story as dead weight (in DD's mind) and is well-appreciated by the end. He also saves her life, an important beat that counters her saving of his life in THE TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE. If you're one of the hundred or so people who might have encountered both these stories when they came out, it might be pleasing that they work so well together.

Now, either people have asked me or I've imagined that people would want to ask me, "did you plan this all out from the start?"

The answer is yes and no. Since day one, I've been able to imagine the entire arc of DD's life, so yes. On the other hand, if you asked me to describe it on two different days, I might not give you the same answer, so no.

The question "did you plan this all out" suggests that the only way to fit two stories together is if they both adhere to some master outline. I don't believe stories are rigid like that. They are malleable as clay. If you want to get a story from Point A to Point B, the challenge is not in finding the right puzzle pieces to accomplish this, it's building the most interesting route.

Above: Selim saves DD's life. I like those last two panels, really putting animation principles to work for me.

As mentioned last week, for a while I moved in the direction of drawing my characters in a more graphic fashion. The original AQUEDUCT shows the peak of this. DD has a wedge-shaped face, Selim's is shaped like a square banana. 

When I compared the way THE AQUEDUCT appears in FLIGHT to Chapter Three of DD1, I was surprised to rediscover that I redrew many panels to correct for the extreme graphic quality of the original.

Above, note the difference in the way DD is drawn in that last panel. 

Evidently I added a few new pages, too.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, talking about DD1 already.

FLIGHT Volume Five came out in 2008. All my Flight friends — Kazu, Raina Telgemeier, Vera Brosgol, Jen Wang, Kean Soo, Ben Hatke — were going off and making their own graphic novels. I wanted to do the same. I had a head start: I already had two stories which could be linked together. And I wasn't insane to think this graphic novel wouldn't be welcomed: THE TURKISH LIEUTENANT had earned an Eisner nomination (much to my surprise and gratitude), and in 2008 I received an email from a French publisher asking if I could show them my book. That was so early on, though, that I assumed it was a scam, and I did not even reply to the email. But I was encouraged, so I started to think about how I could do it.

To be clear: this was always the goal. Or rather, I knew that the way I liked my books was big, ad-free, and self-contained. I'd always preferred floppy comics in their collected trade paperback editions, and of course I'd grown up on CALVIN & HOBBES books. That's how you were supposed to read comics.

I'm glad I didn't try to make the whole 200-page book from the very start, though. Whether motivated by timidity or unsurpassed wisdom, approaching it this way — finishing small DD projects and hoping, somehow, they came together as something bigger — feels like I moved toward my goal in a smart way.

Kazu put me in touch with his literary agent, Judy Hansen, who told me that if I wanted to sell my first graphic novel to publishers, I'd have to finish the whole thing first, so that's what I did. Eating into my savings from my animation work, I took the time to write and illustrate a preface to lead into what had been THE TURKISH LIEUTENANT, as well as a chapter to bridge it and THE AQUEDUCT, and then one more chapter to close it all out. Apparently I also revised THE AQUEDUCT so that it looked more consistent with the rest of the book. I'll save the rest of the DD1 specifics for the next post — a lot more happens before the book gets to First Second.

First of all, in November of 2010 I get two very exciting emails in quick succession, and I'm glad I have them for the record. It really helped me puzzle out the timeline of the following events.

One email was from an editor at a major North American publisher. At a convention, a librarian had recommended my work to them, and this editor wanted to see it. THE TURKISH LIEUTENANT (DD1) was done, so I sent it. There were months of back-and-forth. This was my first exposure to how slowly traditional publishing moves, and in retrospect it wasn't that bad. I first talked to this editor in November, and by March or April of the next year, they had decided not to publish it. The editor told me the marketing department had said they, "could not sell the Middle East in America."

Insert "blinking white guy" GIF.

The other November email was from the same French publisher who had contacted me in 2008. The very persistent Richard Saint Martin of Editions Akileos again asked to see the book. I sent it, and the next week I received an email saying, "we want to publish this book." By June of 2011 I was drawing cover options for them.

I used the cover I designed for them to make this (below), which I hoped would help me find a North American publisher.

It is the "Secret 2011 Preview Edition." I took two copies with me to San Diego Comic Con that year. I do not remember what I intended to do with them. Probably show them to people and say "look! You could be publishing this!" In retrospect, this seems dumb. Except it must have worked.

One SDCC morning, Raina invited me to join her for breakfast waffles. There, I met many lovely people, including Ben Wilgus (who edited BUBBLE) and Gina Gagliano, First Second's publicity genius. I must have shown her this book, because I have a distinct memory of Gina saying, "oh yeah! We love Delilah Dirk!" like it was no big deal. She did? What?

I had started publishing DD online, as a webcomic. That must have started at some point in 2011, because how else would Gina have seen DD? If the timeline escapes me, the motivation does not. I remember reading a Bryan Lee O'malley LiveJournal post talking about how comics take so much time, it's valuable to find out if they'll have an audience before you spend years of your life working on one. Something to that effect. I wanted to find out if anyone wanted to read this comic I had made and — then as now — I liked the idea of contributing Nice Things to the Internet. It deserved them, back then. I didn't think the webcomic would attract publisher eyes. If anything, I thought posting it free online would be a liability. I was wrong.

Publishers reached out to me, but I had not yet found an agent. It must have been at SDCC 2011 that I asked the late Nick Harris — who was Kazu's film agent at the time — if he could put the book in front of First Second, officially. By August of 2011, I was emailing with Calista, who would eventually become my lovely editor there.

I printed the "Secret Edition" with Lulu, just as I had done for THE TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE. It does have a little bit of that laser-printer quality (above) that you got with on-demand digital printing at that time, but the colours were wonderfully vivid (below).

I made it "trade paperback" size because that's the size TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE had been, as well as THE AQUEDUCT in FLIGHT. Plus, I just thought that's the size it should be.

This opening page (above) sees the return of the map from THE TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE, plus I mirrored the sailing-to-Constantinople spread on the right-hand side, presumably to create the illusion that, by turning the page, we were plunging into the world of 19th century Constantinople. A cute idea, but I don't think it was successful.

Was that "Secret Edition" necessary? I'm not sure, but I'm glad I had it printed. I like having it on my shelf, at a nice size and with all the cover and spine typography just so.

Meanwhile, Editions Akileos released DD1 in two gloriously huge, traditional bande-desinee format editions. "Tome Un" features the first two chapters, "Tome Deux" chapters three and four.

We've talked here on the Patreon about the various sizes of the editions before, and I was surprised to learn that most people are fond of the smaller editions. To me, there's something about presenting the artwork at this huge size that lets a certain quality of the painting style shine through, in a way that I don't see in the First Second edition, and which I didn't notice until I was taking these photos just now.

Of course, I realize how futile it is to present these photos and expect them to properly convey the same feeling as holding the books in your hands, so I hope you'll take my word for it: the bigger size gets you something — at least with the artwork in this book, with its more-Photoshoppy painting style — that the small editions don't. And I think the two-page spreads are more absorbing.

They more-easily fill your complete field of view, and it's a good effect, as long as you don't scrutinize the occasionally-sketchy linework too carefully.

I will admit that the advance that Akileos paid was not amazing, but I didn't really care back then and I especially don't care now. For one, it felt amazing just to see my book in bande-desinee format. For another, they invited me over to France to do book tours. Twice! The first time, to coincide with the Angouleme festival, the second with the St Malo festival. And though I'm aware that I am not offering an easily actionable truth here, I really do have to say: few things in life are more wonderful than being able to travel to a foreign country and meet complete strangers who speak the language and will take you to their favourite local restaurant for dinner. Especially if you think you don't particularly like duck, but the owner of the comic shop in Le Mans takes you to a nearby tabac (corner shop), where there are three tiny tables in the back and someone brings out the crispiest, most delicious, most convincing home-cooked duck confit. Especially if your convention accommodation is an old stone farmhouse with stuffed squirrels fencing on the buffet console, where you shuffle through the morning dew talking about rap with the English graffiti artist who's in the room next to you. Especially if you are walking the ramparts of St Malo at night while your publisher smokes his hundredth cigarette of the day and a fellow author gets excited because there's rare Pokemon up there.

They were strange trips that totally put me out of my comfort zone, were wholly unanticipated, and I don't feel comfortable talking about DD1 without acknowledging this wonderful way in which it changed my life. This will sound schmaltzy, but it's an idea that gets repeated because it's true: I set out to chase a goal, and the thing I remember most clearly is not the days spent at the drawing table, or (as evidenced above) the revisions I made to the story, but the people I met and the places I got to go while trying to accomplish that goal. I don't remember how I felt when I finished colouring the last page of DD1, but I'm so glad that FLIGHT introduced me to so many people who I now call friends, and I'm grateful for the vivid memories that Richard and Emmanuel at Akileos made possible.

And that's all before the book was published in English, which I will try to talk about next week.

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Until then,
I remain,
life-changing duck confit,

TC