I think in a lot of ways a picture book is a graphic novel. It’s just maybe three pages from a graphic novel and with each spread or each page being a panel. It very much works in the same way except you have the page turn, which is kind of a dramatic moment, you know. I mean you can use that. With graphic novels you have panels and you can see a lot of them before you turn the page.
But the work is obviously a lot more involved with a graphic novel because it just takes forever, and it doesn’t feel like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for a long time. With a picture book you feel like oh, 32 spreads. Check. With a graphic novel, it’s just endless and having to draw the same character over and over and over and over again, it’s relentless and very tricky.
But a lot of the process was the same for me. But I found that I did a lot more sort of winging it with the graphic novel, which was really fun for me. With a picture book, you have to be so — well, you don’t have to be, but, you know, you have a limited number of words that you’re going to use, and it almost needs to be like maybe not a work of art but just this perfectly contained thing.
The graphic novel, it felt like you could just sort of put stuff in there on the fly and it would work and so you would leave it, and it was much more organic way — much less planning almost. You could let things sort of flow, at least I could. And a lot more — a lot more back and forth between the words and the pictures and just letting them sort of become what they were supposed to become.
It was fascinating to me how different it was, and I have to say in a lot of ways I like working in the graphic novel format better except for the amount of time that it took, except for that. So for me, I almost feel like a project that I would really enjoy would be that sort of hybrid picture book graphic novel for younger kids. I totally want to try that out because I think it would — it just brings out a different kind of storytelling for me, maybe even a better form for me.