Q&A 12: questions round-up

Mariel Tam-Ray asks:

Hazel, age 10, wants to know: "When can I read the book made by the absolute genius Charlotte Grote, Energy Crow?"

I have thought about writing the Energy Crow book (as featured in Murder She Writes and a couple of other places) so that ten year-olds everywhere could read it and have their minds activated, but Charlotte's genius exceeds mine, so I am a little bit scared to try to do justice to her wisdom. I hope that one day I will be able to write a good version of it. I might have to spend a few weeks living amongst crows to do it.

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Elizabeth Weber writes:

"I've been wondering about this for a while, but it dovetails with your response from a couple days ago about your "whimsy" and "post-whimsy" eras: can you talk a little bit more about that shift? I know you said in your comment that you were moving away from it before your friend's comment anyway... would you be willing to talk about why? Do you ever miss the the more whimsical side of your earlier work?"

My work is probably still quite whimsical. A lot of silly things happen in it. I think that what changed is that the main characters stopped behaving as if they were dotty. There was a point up to which I found that charming, then I ceased to find it charming. There's a transition between these two positions with the start of Bad Machinery. The child characters are whimsical in the way that kids are, but they are constantly forced into logical positions, increasingly so as the series goes on. 

Some characters didn't survive this shift, or if they persisted, I frequently found them at odds with the world they found themselves in. Shelley Winters' daffy outlook works in this new world, but a character like Tim Jones is increasingly viewed as a crazy, dangerous man when there are consequences for his whimsicality.

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Sean Kinlin asks:

"Most of your comics have of course been set in Yorkshire, or other places in the North of England.  When you have chosen other settings, such as Cornwall, or North Dakota, what has led you to those specific places?  Did you think of a story and then there was a natural place in which to set it, or did the setting come first?"

In the cases of Yorkshire or Cornwall, they were places I had a deal of familiarity with, which helps me block out stories. I've talked before about how tight time can be when I am making stories; a familiar location saves on research, or prompts setups and helps with ideas. 

North Dakota is a special exception. When I worked on By Night I was writing two series and drawing a webcomic, heavily overextended, and my aim was to create a series that would not leach ideas from Giant Days. So I used an unfamiliar location, and a setup very different to anything I had done, with a mixture of sci-fi and social realism. I wanted a setting with a certain economic outlook and that was the part of the USA that best matched what I was looking for.

Chris J. Zähller adds:

"Followup to this: as a lifelong Okie, I'm curious about Gibbous Moon, the Puerto Rican Okie from Scary Go Round."

Here we are: an entirely whimsical creation: her name, her ethnic background and her state of residence border on word salad. I think she might originally have been drawn from a picture I found in a hairstyles magazine. My good friend Jeffrey Rowland (of WIGU and Topatoco fame) is from Oklahoma and back in the day we often discussed his home state.

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I think that wraps up all the questions I received. Thank you for such interesting and fun ones!