The graphic novel format, it’s interesting because when Jenny and I were growing up we read probably equal amounts of picture books like Dr. Seuss and Charlie Brown comics, you know we had all of these old collections going back to the 50s that our eldest brother had collected.
And so, we were just used to reading comics, and it just seemed natural that you would learn to read from reading comics because you have the pictures, and you have the words right there, and they kind of guide you along hand in hand.
And so, now that we’re making comics, the format, it gives you some freedom to do different kinds of things that you can’t do in a regular novel or a chapter book, you can show a lot more than you ever could in a novel or a chapter book, just like if you’re doing a movie you can show things, you don’t have to sit there and describe everything, and it kind of takes the wind out of the sails if you’re like explaining everything.
Instead you’re showing every single thing that’s happening, which is amazing. But then the text can sometimes, you know it’s always fun in Babymouse to sort of puncture Babymouse with the narrative text. Because the narrator will come in and give snarky comments back to Babymouse, and give her advice which she usually ignores, or you know, he even has his own ideas about himself, and he should be the star of the show sometimes.
And Squish is very similar, and a lot of that sort of commenting came out of Jenny and I actually writing notes to each other in the margins of the layouts when we were working on them, like, “Oh yeah, this is going to go well for Babymouse, right.” When she’s trying to do this thing that’s impossible. And we just had to work that in somehow. And Squish same thing, we had these little arrows that sort of like make fun of squish, but also identify things.
So you can have sometimes a really concrete way of just cutting straight to the point like, you know saying, “Squish, he’s an amoeba,” you know, “a single celled organism.” And really get some information across very quickly.
