Glyn Dillon Interview Pt 2

This inter­view catches up with Glyn Dillon about a year and a half after I ori­gin­ally inter­viewed him. The ori­ginal inter­view was from a set of stock ques­tions I was ask­ing a lot of artists at the time, but with this inter­view I was inter­ested in speak­ing fur­ther with Glyn about his approach to work­ing on a large pro­ject, his cre­at­ive pro­cess and his thoughts on the Nao of Brown now that it is finished.

Can you explain where the Nao of Brown came from?

It bubbled up over a period of time but there were a few short days when a lot fell into place. Ori­gin­ally I wanted it was to be some­thing for an antho­logy I was plan­ning to put together, so I approached Alan Mar­tin with my very rough idea for some­thing called ‘2013’ or ‘1320’ (I can’t remem­ber) to see if he would help me write it. Any­way, he was pretty busy was Tank Girl com­mit­ments at the time, so things kept crop­ping up in my mind, new ideas etc, until I felt I had enough to go it alone. It had changed drastic­ally from what I had ori­gin­ally pro­posed to Alan, so he gave me my bless­ing and I forged on, solo.

There were quite a few serendip­it­ous moments that happened early on in the pro­cess, which really fuelled the fire and then I had a 2–3 day burst where I pretty much wrote the syn­op­sis for the entire story. Of course there were massive chunks miss­ing and lots has been dis­carded since, but I was really sur­prised at how quickly it presen­ted itself.

The short answer to your ques­tion — The ‘Ideasphere’.

I’m find­ing with my own work that I have to keep remind­ing myself to trust the ‘me from the past’ who wrote the script or drew the roughs. Do you find a sim­ilar thing with your work? How rigidly do you stick to your planning?

Because Nao was such a long form pro­ject, I decided the only way I could write it, was to do it in a screen­play format. It’s what I was used to get­ting in terms of story­board­ing, but also I just wanted to get that first draft done as quickly as pos­sible. I don’t really con­sider myself a writer (hav­ing never had any­thing pub­lished that was more than a few pages in Dead­line)… I had writ­ten a screen­play but that remains on the shelf as a first draft.

With Nao, I was nervous, the whole thing felt so BIG and unwieldy at first, I knew I’d feel bet­ter if I could just get that first draft done quickly. Then like every­one always says, it got easier from there on in — it’s just edit­ing. I had a three month dead­line to deliver the fin­ished script, six drafts later it was done. The sev­enth draft was done in the let­ter­ing pro­cess. Being able to move word bal­loons and cap­tion boxes around, or lose them alto­gether, was great fun. Now I can’t ima­gine going back to work­ing with a sep­ar­ate writer, unless he/she would be will­ing to give me the free­dom to re-edit things at that stage.

So yeah, I had to trust my ‘me from the past’ because there just wasn’t the lux­ury of time not to. Once the script was fin­ished I had to get crack­ing on thumb-nailing it. But hav­ing said that, a lot of changes were made along the way and right up to the very last minute too.

You said that see­ing the Hell­boy film helped you fall in love with the idea of draw­ing com­ics again. How do you feel about draw­ing com­ics now that you’ve fin­ished the book?

I think it’s safe to say I still feel the same way, in fact I love the medium even more now. Once I star­ted in earn­est, I felt the need to catch up a bit with what’s been going on in the world of comics/graphic nov­els. I’d neg­lected it for so long so there was a lot of catch­ing up to do. I even got a read­ing list of Manga titles to read from the artist Tonci Zonjic. I’d loved Kat­suhiro Otomo’s art­work from the late eighties when I first saw it, I read Domu and some of AKIRA but once I star­ted Nao I finally bought and read the entire AKIRA series, all in a week, mid blow­ing, and it also made me feel much bet­ter about tack­ling a 200 page GN.

I would hap­pily do com­ics full time, but unless Nao becomes a HUGE suc­cess, I have to go back to story­board­ing. I have two kids and I like liv­ing in Lon­don too much — and mak­ing com­ics doesn’t really cover that, financially.

Nao was a real labour of love, and a massive learn­ing curve. I mis­cal­cu­lated how long it would take me to draw a page because I was just going by my story­board­ing speed, which is much quicker. So now any fur­ther books I do I will have a much bet­ter idea of how long it takes and will be able to nego­ti­ate deals accord­ingly. I must say though, I’ve loved work­ing with every­one at SMH, they’ve been fant­astic in every way and very under­stand­ing when I had to rearrange the ori­ginal dead­line. They’ve also had me thor­oughly involved in the entire pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing of the book, the design, everything — so the whole book, as an object, is exactly how I wanted it to be. They’ve been won­der­ful for that.

It’s just the time that it takes. Until the audi­ence is big enough to provide a decent liv­ing wage, I’ll have to com­bine the two. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not miser­able about it, I feel very lucky that SMH gave me the oppor­tun­ity to do the book and I also feel lucky that story­board­ing pays enough to allow me not to have a full time job (well, just.)

Com­ics are great! I just wish more of the world thought so.

I do think there’s a def­in­ite upsurge in the world of com­ics both in terms of qual­ity, interest and recog­ni­tion. Some great new Brit­ish pub­lish­ers that just weren’t around the last time I was involved in com­ics. Every­one got snapped up by DC in those days, cos they paid well. Now it almost seems like we could be on the cusp of a new golden age. The small press scene, which I didn’t know any­thing about until start­ing on Nao is alive with some great tal­ent. I’m excited for the com­ics medium as a whole, but I think it’s yet to reach it’s full potential.

What is it that you think that com­ics in Bri­tain need to con­tinue this upsurge?

A change in atti­tude, edu­ca­tion… people just don’t know what’s avail­able, when they hear ‘com­ics’ they think Beano & Dandy, there’s noth­ing wrong with those com­ics but what I mean is, com­ics is thought of a a medium for kids, some­thing of an in between from kids pic­ture books, to ‘proper’ prose reading.

I’ve work­ing on some of the par­ents at my son’s school, there’s one or two who are in the know already but most have no idea. I leant one of the SMH Sher­lock Holmes books to one of the Dad’s there, both he and his wife read it and his wife said, some­thing along the lines of “It was great because it felt like I’d taken in some qual­ity lit­er­at­ure, but at the same time it didn’t take as long to read.”

I’m not sure that 35–45 yr old par­ents is where the mar­ket is gonna make it’s money, but if more people of that age knew about it, who knows. They’ll be the ones who pay for it in the old fash­ioned way, rather than down­load­ing it for free though. I dunno, to con­tinue the upsurge, I sup­pose we just need to keep pro­du­cing qual­ity work that appeals to a main­stream audi­ence and by main­stream I don’t mean ‘com­ics main­stream’ ie super­heros. I mean proper main­stream. People who buy books.

The fact that we’ve got a few great inde­pend­ent pub­lish­ers seem­ingly flour­ish­ing at the moment, gives me hope. And shops like GOSH! Page45, Dave’s Com­ics etc etc Shops that try and push that real main­stream side of things, they should all be sup­por­ted. I wasn’t able to go to ELCAF this year but by all the accounts I read, it soun­ded great, again some­thing to be optim­istic about.

So do you have any plans for another book?

Weeeell, right now I can’t even think about it. I’m still tak­ing strong pain killers every­day. For the last 5–6 months of work­ing on the book I worked crazy hours, 9am till 3am, seven days a week, I only stopped to eat and put my boys to bed. Before that and pretty much from the start I’d been work­ing six days a week. A lot of this is due to the fact I thought I’d be able to draw two pages a day, when it got to the real­ity, I was only get­ting one done. By the end I was paint­ing two pages a day.

Again I don’t want to sound neg­at­ive, this was just down to not know­ing how long it would take when I star­ted. But once you start you have to meet the dead­line… and if you can’t meet that dead­line, then you have to give enough fore-warning and then def­in­itely meet the next one.

So I ended up with an unfor­giv­ing sched­ule, but at no point did I hate doing the work, I loved doing the book… but I did hate the fact that I hadn’t been able to work out a bet­ter sched­ule from the off. But it was no ones fault. My poor wife was very sup­port­ive and some­times under­stand­ably frus­trated. I missed out on a lot of stuff with my fam­ily, so it’s really nice to be hanging out with them again.

Then about two weeks after fin­ish­ing the book I ended up in hos­pital for five days with four of my discs bul­ging and cer­tain areas of my body going numb and every­one got a bit wor­ried for a while. I’ve always had a vul­ner­able back and this wasn’t the first bad epis­ode on this book but it was by far the worst.

At the moment I’m still hav­ing trouble sit­ting at my desk for too long. So as much as I’d love to do another book, the real­ity is, I have to con­cen­trate on get­ting bet­ter phys­ic­ally and also get­ting in some well paid jobs that don’t demand my body as well as my soul.

There are some things bub­bling up but I don’t think there’ll be any big graphic novel com­ing soon.

We’ll see. I’m a sucker for punishment.

Did you have a tar­get audi­ence in mind when you were writ­ing the book? What are your thoughts on writ­ing for a spe­cific audience?

I did actu­ally, just one per­son. And then after I’d been going at it for a while I read this quote from John Stein­beck… which made me feel all clever for work­ing that out on my own.

“For­get your gen­er­al­ized audi­ence. In the first place, the name­less, face­less audi­ence will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writ­ing, your audi­ence is one single reader. I have found that some­times it helps to pick out one person—a real per­son you know, or an ima­gined per­son and write to that one.”

Has this one per­son seen the book? How much weight do you put on their reaction?

Posted by Dan Berry
Categories: Articles,Buy This,Comics,Interview