Back in November, the third book in the very popular “Cardboard Kingdom” series came out: “Snow & Sorcery.” While the winter isn’t quite over yet here in the northern hemisphere, we thought it’d be great to sit down and talk about that book, the season’s hold over kids, and the process of making a book series as collaborative as “Cardboard Kingdom.” Thank again to Chad Sell for sitting down with us!
It’s been a couple of months since the third book in your series has come out. What’s the reaction been? How have you been feeling about it?
Chad Sell: Yeah, it’s been good. I did a great event just a week or two ago in Connecticut here, where I live, and it’s just awesome to meet young readers, to meet their parents. Our book was recently the source of some controversy in my area. The community really showed out, showed up and supported it. I had this sold out library event in support of the book and it was awesome. It was very surreal to see me show up on the television news and mentioned on NPR.
Oh, boy. Not the kind of attention you were looking for?
CS: Yeah, yeah. But I’m relieved that that’s passed and hopefully I learned something from it. For better or worse, I think I’m much better known within my area now because it seems like educators and families and librarians really mobilized and spread the news. It was this cancellation at at a school based on the content of my work, and they ended up re-inviting me after some community uproar.
Were the kids lovely?
CS: It was great. The kids themselves are awesome. I heard from some parents afterward how much it meant for the kids to meet me, to see characters that they could relate to in a book. It was definitely really rewarding because, at times, being an author can be a very solitary experience, I’m sure you can relate. Being a writer, and to actually see your work have an impact on the world, is all you could ever ask for.
Did any of the kids come in their own cardboard costumes?
CS: I don’t think this week, they did. There have been some really, really awesome school events and stuff, where the kids had been invited to create their own costumes and lined up and showed me and I got photos taken with all of them. There have been places that have made their own cardboard castle or a little mini cardboard city; there was one school where they dressed up stuffed animals in little construction paper “”Cardboard Kingdom”” outfits. One time, the librarian of the school greeted me in the parking lot dressed up as one of my characters.
That’s great.
CS: It’s super awesome. My books are all about creativity. They’re essentially me trying to recapture the sense of creativity and endless possibility I had as a child so the most exciting thing for me is seeing that same creativity in the kids that read my work.
On that, what’s been the process of, first coming up with the kid characters and their relationships, and then the costumes that they’re putting on and the places that they’re building in the comics?
CS: Well, I worry sometimes that credit isn’t given-
To all the other writers?
CS:To all the other collaborators, yeah.
So I just wanted to make it super clear that I write “”Cardboard Kingdom”,” the whole series, with a whole team of awesome collaborators. And, you know, they and I often base a lot of our characters on our own selves as children or what we were interested in or what we’re still grappling with today.
The seed of the idea for Jack the Sorceress is me kind of questioning why as a kid did I love all the villains so much? Why did I idolize Disney divas and then as an adult, why was obsessed with drag queens? What aspect of costume and theatricality and character was I working through? What would that be like for a kid sort of dressing up like a dark magic diva, and sort of feeling his truest self when he’s in costume.
Continued belowSo, yeah. A lot of the characters are rooted in stuff that we’ve all dealt with as kids, and then we hope other kids will see themselves reflected in.
And I really liked how that’s the very first story that introduces people to the “”Cardboard Kingdom”” series. It’s entirely wordless. It’s – I know, this is supposed to be about your new book, but I think that was the right tone to start it all off on.
CS: Thank you. That hadn’t been the plan.
Really?
CS: Yeah. A few years before we started working on “”Cardboard Kingdom” as a book, my friend Jay Fuller and I had done a mini comic together called “The Sorceress Next Door.” That essentially became the first chapter of the “Cardboard Kingdom.” I reworked the art but the story was exactly the same. We self published it, sold at conventions for a few years, and we both thought that it would be great to kind of expand that world and to figure out who the other kids in that neighborhood might be, that would play with Jack, but we just weren’t sure who those kids would be.
A few years later, I had the idea of having collaborators pitch characters, and, you know, essentially using crowdsourcing online to find a team of people to work with. Even once I found the 10 people that I made “Cardboard Kingdom” book one with, the plan was not just to reuse that old mini comic as the first chapter. We were going to start with a different chapter, The Huntress’s second chapter, but enough people convinced me like, no. You need to have That sorceress origin story right at the start.
We weren’t sure if it was weird to start the book with a wordless chapter when most of the other chapters have words. That was one thing that we were just a little bit nervous about. Now that issue is coming up because they want to do an audiobook version of “Cardboard Kingdom” and we’re just kind of like, “Uhhh. Okay. Let us know how you think that’ll work.”
The complete opposite. Full pictures, full words.
CS: Yes. It is humbling to think about what an audiobook adaptation of your heavily illustrated story will look like. I think there’s a lot of potential there for cool voice acting and stuff like that – sound effects and music. It is a little bit sad to think of someone experiencing the story without my artwork. I guess that there is some market and interest in kids audiobooks and so, you know, I’m happy to abide by that.
You were mentioning your collaborators? Let’s dig into that a little bit. How does this the split of work go? Like, what is the process? Is it different for each collaborator? Is it fairly similar? And I guess, let’s start with finding them in the first place.
CS: Yeah. I think it was like 2014, or 2015, when I launched my epic search for my team. I think it was 2015. That was early on in the Kickstarter era, where pioneers were really illustrating the effectiveness of the internet in terms of finding people with similar interests and gathering around cool anthologies and community projects.
So that’s what had inspired me. I knew that I had struggled to get stuff published when I was writing it by myself. And I really liked the idea of collaboration. And I had a great time collaborating with Jay Fuller on “The Sorceress Next Door but I wasn’t sure how to find other collaborators. I didn’t want to just cold email people and be like, “Hey, you want to work with me?”
Oftentimes, artists who are looking for writers are kind of stuck illustrating whatever that writer wants to write about. I had that experience just once or twice before and I did not like it. With “Cardboard Kingdom,” I definitely wanted to have more of a hand in shaping that story. So I created a website with lots of concept art and even a link to “The Sorceress Next Door” story as an example, where I laid out my vision for the “Cardboard Kingdom” as this neighborhood where all these kids would play together, where each kid would have a chapter of the book and they’d all intermingle and have fun together.
Continued belowI even laid out the terms of how I thought like the royalties would break down and shared ownership and stuff like that. I think it was just a Google form that people could send in their pitch for their characters. For each of those pitches, for the promising ones, I had follow up calls where I got to know each creator a little bit better and get a sense of what they’d be like to work with. If I liked a certain thing about their pitch, but then wanted to see if they’d be open to changing this or that, I was able to float those ideas and get a sense of how flexible they were.
Working on the first book felt really charmed and magical. Largely, at the start, it was me working with each individual writer as we crafted their individual chapters. Then, once we got each individual chapter done for, like, the first 10 chapters or so, we did some more collaboration amongst each other, figuring out some of the final few chapters where the characters all start to show up in the story together and it builds to a big finale.
Books two and three were each kind of done with a slightly different approach as tried different things and figured out what works and what doesn’t.
What worked and what didn’t work about the most recent book, if you’re willing to say.
CS: Sure. In book two, “Roar of the Beast,” we told one story with interweaving plotlines. We all got on board; we made teams; we all we’re responsible for different storylines. And it resulted in a really cool book, and I hope it’s like an exciting story for young readers, but I worried that the overarching plot didn’t allow each writer enough freedom to tell the story they want to tell.
With Book Three, I wanted to kind of do a hybrid approach, where I had this idea for a big epic neighborhood battle that results when some new kids from another neighborhood enter the picture. I asked each collaborator, how would your character fit into that? Would your character be one of the instigators who is escalating and itching for a fight? Or is your character going to be actively trying to cool things down and to get people to stop fighting and inciting aggression?
I asked each character creator to kind of pitch me their story. Most of the characters have their own chapter nestled within the larger plot of “Snow and Sorcery.” That way, I was able to sort of make space for each creator to kind of tell the story they wanted to tell. But it also fits into this larger story of two neighborhoods entering into conflict and misunderstanding.
Do you see this expanding out in future books? More neighborhoods? Or trying to keep it close enough, small enough, that it’s still manageable? If there are plans for more.
CS: With the closing of the trilogy, I’m not actively planning more books in this series. I’m trying a few different things right now with my books, but I end things on a note, in “Snow and Sorcery” that is very open ended, and I think suggests if there were more books I would probably, as you suggested, incorporate a lot of new characters from the new neighborhood, to bring in new creators, bring in new ideas, but then still have that space for legacy characters to appear and play a role.
I almost imagined it being like, the original “Cardboard Kingdom” characters become kind of the elder mentors. That’s kind of the vision I have. Of like, “Ah, here’s how we dealt with it back in the day.”
I’m absolutely open to the possibility of more books in this series because I love the world. I love the characters but it working with a huge team is really tricky. We’re just gonna see how it goes from here.
I want to ask him little bit about your process for creating your art. Where do you start? Is it all digital? Is it a hybrid of digital physical? I’m assuming it’s not all physical?
Continued belowCS: No. I mean, some authors do still work entirely traditionally but I am a child of the digital age. I grew up with a tablet and my dad was a technophile so I do work entirely digitally. The biggest advantage that gives me is, you know, working in Clip Studio Paint from a very, very, very early stage in the process of making any book, I write on every page of the document what happens; where the transitions are; how many pages will this chapter be; and you get this big, bird’s eye view of how your book looks. Is it fitting within the desired number of pages? Or is it way too long or way too short?
What I think is key about collaboration is being able to communicate and see how things are working from an early stage. I’m a huge fan of making readable rough drafts, where I do a rough draft illustrated of the entire book with lettering so that it’s absolutely fully readable. I can share chapters as they come along; I can share a draft with my great collaborators; I can share a draft with my editors, with my literary agent, and incorporate their feedback early on and adjust as needed rather than investing a year into doing the final art for the book and then being resistant to making any changes after that.
You know, what I mean?
What are some of the inspirations for your art style for “Cardboard Kingdom” in general? Are there any other comics? Are there any other stories, movies, etc?
CS: One of my favorite kids comics is “Bone” by Jeff Smith, and I hesitate to call it a kid’s comic because it gets really dark and mature, but the playfulness and liveliness of his characters are just incredible. I’m an artist who grew up feeling like more detail means it’s better art – like the more realistic the better. Jeff Smith is at his best when he’s drawing the simplest characters like the “Bone” characters. It was a really good lesson to me for scaling back on the detail, that sometimes that makes characters more alive rather than less.
A real guiding light for me in terms of what level of complexity and representation we could bring to the story was Steven Universe. To me, it was like, “Oh, wow. All this great queer representation is in this cartoon. So that must mean that the world is open to that and it’ll be easy to make this book and everything must have been great working on Steven Universe.” And the sense I’ve gotten is that actually, it took a lot of work and persistence on the show creators’ part to actually get a lot of that representation on screen but me in a somewhat naive state was like, “Okay, this means that this spectrum of representation is awesome and beckoning to me and we should aim just as high.
Did you experience any of that resistance internally, while crafting the book for your publishers? Or is it has it been more the outside reaction?
CS: No, no. It was great. Several of editors I’ve worked with are queer people at Random House and I don’t think we censored anything based on LGBT content in the books. I haven’t even come across all that much controversy or resistance in the outside world, with the exception of just a few weeks ago. I’ve heard that “Cardboard Kingdom” is a banned book, that it isn’t allowed on all library shelves, but it generally doesn’t blow up into controversy that is on the TV news.
That’s good to hear. Because it is such a wonderful set of books, in addition to showing the breadth of people and kids experiencing, not just fun, but also internal hardships within their families, within their extended families and how people navigate that. I appreciate that. It’s nice to see. I’m a librarian, so I get to see kids checking these out all the time. They’re always having fun with it.
Speaking of fun, did you ever get tired of drawing all that snow?
CS: It was tricky. “Snow and Sorcery” takes place during the winter and I knew that we would want to have a lot of fun snowy adventures for the kids. But when you as an artist are drawing a snowy landscape, you first have to conceptualize the landscape itself – which I’m not good at in the first place – and then imagining what all this snow would look like layered over it.
Continued belowYou’ll probably notice in the book, I basically have three different snowy trees and bushes that I draw repeatedly, over and over and over again, with a few exceptions. I tried to keep it kind of like light and fluffy; I don’t think it really ever gets to be the gross, mucky snow that gets mixed up with like mud and dirt and salt and everything. For the most part, I keep it pretty idyllic and fun and cartoony.
I mean, drawing a 200 page book, definitely there’s a lot of stuff you get a little bit sick of drawing over and over again. I use landscapes pretty sparingly. A lot of pages have, like, one panel with the background in it and then I use colors in the backgrounds for the other panels. I don’t consider myself an artist whose strength is world building or scene setting.
That surprises me because you’ve got that drawing at the beginning of each of the books showing the neighborhood where people are located, a ye olde mappe for the fantasy. So do you have, like, in your head, a general layout of where everything is in relation to each other? And it’s just the details within, like how does the road curve, those are the stuff that you’re not so worried about?
CS: What’s funny is, I think we only came up with the map of the neighborhood in book one after the book was basically done. Like, if I remember correctly, it was one of our editors who suggested putting a map at the start and end of the book, so then I had to look at the stories as I’ve already drawn them and figure out, well, who’s next to who? Who might, you know, maybe they share a backyard; they will be down the street from this person; so it was kind of me reverse engineering a map.
I’m not someone who typically plans out a whole neighborhood like that, I kind of operate more on The Simpsons level where the town can be any town, it can be anywhere in the country, where you’re not really worried about what you can see from your window. Once we had that map set in book one, it was a really useful resource for books two and three, because in those sort of larger storylines, sometimes where kids are in the neighborhood is a more important part of the story.
Do you like the snow? Not in the comics, but in general.
CS: I love snow. When you’re not the one who has to shovel it, it’s great.
I just love like the fluffy, perfect whiteness of it. You can shape it into snow balls or make forts or tunnels, sledding and skiing. I grew up in Wisconsin, which got really snowy and very cold. Just like cardboard does for me, I think snow represents the endless potential of something that you can shape with your creativity and imagination into basically anything you want. In this book I do that to extreme lengths, making giant snow fortresses and creations like that. It’s like a fun world of imagination. It’s like if the whole world was made out of Play Doh, and you could shape it however you wanted.
Get to live out some of those some of the dreams of kid you.
CS: Yeah, exactly. You know, before working on “Cardboard Kingdom,” I had worked on some, kind of more intense, adult oriented projects that were moodier or more intense or depressing. When I shifted to kids books, the appeal of it is, I felt like I could still tell emotional, meaningful stories but the overall vibe was a lot sunnier and sweeter and it was more fun to live in day to day, as I need it. So it’s been nice.
Are you thinking of sticking around and kids books for quite a while?
CS:Yes and no. We have two more books in my “Stupendous Switcheroo” series coming up this year but I’m working on an adult memoir project right now and some YA pitches. I’d love to tell a straight up queer romance story, and that would be more for teens. So we’ll see. I’m kind of in an era where I’m trying new hobbies, learning new skills, trying new things. And I have no idea where where things will go from here.
