Interviews 

Melanie Gillman’s “Other Ever Afters” Part 2: On Craft & Building New, Queer Fairy Tales

By | September 20th, 2022
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

Last week, we brought you part one of our chat with award winning creator Melanie Gillman and their newest book – out today, Sept 20th! – “Other Ever Afters.” If you haven’t read that one, it’s not 100% required reading but Melanie is such an interesting person with thoughtful ideas, you’ll want to anyway.

In part 2, we discussed a variety of things, including but not limited to: webcomics (including their own,) monarchies, queerness and its historical removal in fairy tales, creating new works in an old genre, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” the lack of respect for colored pencil as a legitimate form of art and the thematic resonance of this being a two-part interview.

Thanks again to Melanie and Random House Graphic for the opportunity.

So this collection is for all ages, and ostensibly fairy tales have always been for “children”, you know, the cautionary tale were aimed at kids with adults listening too, but they’ve always been kind of dark. And then there was the Disneyfication in terms of some. You’re kind of going back to those older ones where they are dark in what they tackle, how they tackle it, even if there is a fulfilling ending at the end, if not necessarily happy in the traditional sense. Why do you think people enjoy and tell these darker tales for everyone? is, you know, there’s this cultural thing of like, kids shouldn’t be exposed to dark and terrible things. But they see it in the world, so the story should reflect it in some way.

MG: Absolutely. I remember being a kid myself, and being really fascinated by very dark fables. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was a illustrated collection of Greek myths specifically and I really strongly remember just like reading and rereading until the binding fell apart in this book, and being really like, ~whoa~ especially about like, “Ohhhh! Someone just got their liver tourn out by vultures EVERY SINGLE DAY!”

I think kids are smart enough to understand that the world is oftentimes an unfair and violent and dangerous place and that many terrible things happen to people and that is a normal part of the way that the world works rather than an aberration. Hiding that information from them, I don’t think really benefits anybody. I don’t think that kids necessarily need to be coddled and kept away from darker stories. I should admit though that I definitely have a bias because I am also working on children’s horror right now. I certainly have strong feelings about like, yes, horrific images for children. They love them. They’re all about them.

I guess I think a lot of children respond to darker stories as feeling a little bit more honest for them. I think that kids have very good bullshit meters and they can tell when things are being sugar-coated for them. They appreciate when a storyteller is willing to level with them and be like, “No. Terrible things sometimes happen. Here’s a story about some dude getting his liver ripped out and you are a human being who’s capable of handling that information,” obviously in an allegorical framework here. I think kids respond to that.

I don’t know that our job as adults, whether we are authors, or teachers, or librarians or anyone else who’s managing what books end up in the hands of children, I don’t think it’s our job to sort of gatekeeper too much of what children can have access to. I mean, within reasonable limits, obviously.

But every kid’s gonna be a little different.

MG: Yeah, every kid is going to be a little bit different. I don’t think we need to keep darker materials away from children on a whole level because some of them are going to be interested in that and that is not a bad thing in my mind. Children have different interests and children are more aware of the like pain and imbalances of the world than we oftentimes give them credit for. If they want to find that in their fiction, then more power to them, in my opinion.

Where do you think the line between kind of like a dark story and an edgy story sits?

Continued below

MG: I guess it comes down to purposes and intentions. When I think of edgy stories, I oftentimes think of gratuitous violence, etc., that isn’t necessarily serving a strong and deliberate narrative purpose other than just being there as kind of ornamentation on the page. But a dark story, in my opinion, is one that is going to utilize those elements for very deliberate and very conscientious effects relevant to the themes of the story, the narrative direction that it’s going, and what the author wants to be saying in their piece.

So it’s not just violence for the sake of violence is sake or because some people like to read gory stuff. And that’s not a bad thing. It is fine for people to draw weird, exploitative, violent stories for those people, like more power to them. But dark stories are approaching those elements of gore, violence, terror, etcetera, with more deliberate narrative intent and purposes and I hope to God I was not being a jerk right there. If somebody is gonna take me to task and say “No! Edgy stories also clearly have narrative intent and purpose,” you’re probably right.

But you can kind of, if you’re reading something, be like this has a very different feel from each other.

MG: I guess it’s kind of a genre question too. Some people really like gore and violence for gore and violence is sake and I don’t think that that’s a bad thing necessarily. If that is the thing that you want out of fiction, then there are plenty of places where you can get that but I guess that’s also not quite what I do as a storyteller.

Some illustrated Grimm’s fairy tales. Some of those are intense.

MG: Yeah, yeah, for sure. A lot more frank with the violence and the gore and horror in a lot of those cases, which is also what makes them great really compelling.

Kinda like, weirdly when you’re a kid you feel more adult when you get to sneak that in. Like “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”

MG: Oh, god yeah. I love those.

I was terrible with horror. Still am. Like audio horror? Terrible with them. But I would always read those stories I’m like, why am I reading these? I’m gonna be up all night but then I’d read it again. I still remember that the one where there’s a vampire in the graveyard and they’re gonna sneak in to stake it and the kid dies of fright because he pinned his own leg to the ground.

MG: I really strongly imprinted on, I’m not going to remember the name of the story, but the ones whenever you would get an image of a beautiful woman’s face but she was also dead so she’s supposed to be both seductive and horrifying at the same time. I probably could have figured out that I was a big old gay kid if I like sat and thought about that for longer, but being like, this is so beautiful. It’s so terrible at the same time and I can’t stop looking at it!

I feel like for millennials, like we all kind of have one particular page from the collections that like burned itself into our retinas.

Yeah, for a long, long time. Someone should write a paper about that. Like, what does that tell you about a person? What star sign are you if you like this page?

…I’m trying to find a way of phrasing this question that’s not…that won’t come across as dismissive or shallow but what is the importance of telling queer fairy tales?

MG: I feel like the importance is kind of self evident in a lot of places. If there are queer people in the world, then queer people deserve stories in any genre, including fairy tales. So on some level, the basic answer is just queer people exist, therefore queer stories should exist.

Yes.

MG: But with fairy tales in particular, I guess one strength that they have as a genre is that allegorical treatment and the fact that you can layer in a lot of different subtle levels of meaning into an allegory in a fable which can be used to comment on a lot of different concerns that queer readers might have when they’re coming into collections like this.

Continued below

I think another way to answer this question would be: fables in the modern day often get cherry picked in a very cis-het format. Like the Disneyfication of fairy tales that we were talking about earlier is very much so about sort of shaving off a lot of the inherent weirdness and queer-adjacentness of some older fairy tales and moving them into a more mainstream, patriarchal context. I think in the year 2022 one of the strengths of queer fairy tales specifically is it is sort of reclaiming what has been a very classic and very historical human mode of storytelling and saying that no, we, as queer people have a stake in this too. We can tell stories using this narrative style in this narrative format that is such a rich part of our history as oral storytellers in general but we could rework this to suit our own narrative purposes.

We can insert ourselves into these stories in more ways than I think even just taking existing real fairy tales and reworking them into a queer framework. I’m not saying that that is a bad task for anyone who is interested in coming up with like queer versions of Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood or whatnot; more power to you if you want to do that. But I also like the task of taking that narrative structure and that narrative style and saying, let’s build something entirely new that has not been seen before and that can more directly address what I think readers are going to be interested in in the modern day but still let it be something that could be situated in that classic style and in that very rich narrative tradition of oral storytelling and fables and folklore.

That was what I set out to do with this, more so, and that’s why this collection isn’t doing any sort of re-envisioning Cinderella as a lesbian or anything like that. That’s not the thing that I was interested in for this collection. Certainly other people could do that if they wanted to.

So instead of recasting existing stories with new molds, it’s building something within the with the same materials?

MG: Yes. Taking the same narrative tropes and the same storytelling style but using it to make something entirely new.

Alright. This might be too weird of an anecdote but it’s a story that I can’t wait to say. One of the things which is really cool about fables, and I think the way that you know when you’re doing a fable right, is that fables are very flexible stories. They can be retooled and refit into a variety of new contexts, which is one of the reasons why they last so long. Cinderella would not still be around as a fairy tale if it wasn’t a flexible enough story that it can be retold and reimagined and tweaked in small ways over and over again throughout history.

One of the moments that happened to be a couple of years ago, where I finally knew, Yes! I did this right, I found out that someone on Archive of Our Own had taken “Hsthete”, the goat goddess story, and had re-tooled that narrative into a story about their favorite Minecraft streamers.

In a lot of ways, it’s one of the highest compliments that you can pay me as a storyteller who’s trying to tell fables specifically is taking the narrative that I made and using that fable narrative but applying it to some other characters in a completely different content. Because that’s what fables are trying to accomplish! It’s this flexible mode that can be refit around a variety of different contexts. So I was like “Yes! I did it! I pulled it off.”

That’s really cool! Back to oral storytelling, that’s how it works. Like someone tells it, and then someone else tells it and it changes, and someone else tells it into changes, and at some point you can see where it’s the same but then it’s different or even just about different people. Someone’s telling the same basic structure in western Spain versus eastern China versus wherever. The story resonates. But the details change.

Continued below

MG: Absolutely. And the moral of the story also changes slightly over time. I think one of the classic examples of this are all the “Beauty and the Beast” style narratives, which there’s probably dozens of those. Like almost every culture had some sort of “young girl married to a horrible monster but figures out a way to navigate that situation successfully” story. In their original format, if you go back to the 1800s or earlier, oftentimes these are stories where the subtext is an allegory about arranged marriage in a lot of ways.

It’s like, “Okay. If you are a girl who is wedded to some older man who you find kind of abhorrent or you don’t love him, you barely know him, you find him kind of terrifying,” then these are stories that are meant to reassure you that your life isn’t over; there’s gonna be a way forward here; you can learn to navigate the situation and you can learn to find ways to make this work for you or to see the inner humanity in this horrible monster character that you’ve been wedded to.

But in the 20th and 21st century, when there are much fewer arranged marriages that are happening and that is not always – at least, if we’re looking at American audiences – that is not necessarily a thing that young girls are worried about so much, you can still have those “Beauty and the Beast” stories, but they become stories that are more about seeing the good in people who seem off-putting or like they have a rough exterior or maybe they’re not the most attractive person but you can still find those rich inner qualities in them and find things that are worthy of love, even in the most frightening of exteriors.

It’s the same narrative structure, but it’s a slightly different approach to the moral in a way and that was done on purpose to help it kind of be flexible around the needs and wants of the audience that’s going to be reading it. So again, my highest hope is a storyteller, the absolute pinnacle dream scenario is that if any one of these stories continues and it’s tweaked and retooled into different moral frameworks by future generations, then at that point I have absolutely hit the nail on the head. I have done my job for sure if that ends up happening, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

I’ve been wanting to ask some craft questions but I was just so interested in all of the the fairy tale discussions and I was like, Ah, I’ll save it for later.

So the way you work is very unique, using colored pencils specifically. Do you do the whole process with colored pencils? Or do you start with, you know, a regular pencil or pen or ink and then color it with colored pencils? Or is the start-to-finish all colored pencils getting slowly whittled down to nubs?

MG: There is a graphite pencil stage that happens with all of these comics and that’s pretty similar to like what any other cartoonist would be doing in their pencil stage. Graphite pencil is more useful than colored pencil in the sense that you can make mistakes and erase them, which is much harder to do with colored pencil. So yeah, there’s a graphite pencil stage. I guess I also do the lettering with pens rather than with colored pencils. Beyond that, everything else is 100% colored pencil.

Usually what I’m doing is I’m working with a very limited palette. Oftentimes I’ll choose between three and five colors and those are the only colors that I’m allowed to use for that entire story start to finish. So every tonal variation that ends up on the page is part of the layering process of colored pencil, where you’re taking those three or four colors or whatever and layering them in specific ways in order to create specific types of effects. But there is definitely a traditional graphite pencil state that sits underneath all of that.

Colored pencils suit themselves very well to this fairy tale, kind of otherworldly, look, or storybook quality. That’s kind of what it evokes. How do you get such rich colors? Like I was just looking at the reds and the yellows and they’re just so vibrant. Is it a function of colored pencils in general or the ones that you use?

Continued below

MG: Probably some of it is that layering technique that I was talking about. Like any square inch of those pages you’re looking at, you’re looking at probably four to five layers deep of color. And it’s impossible to know that on either a printed copy or a digital copy because you’re just looking at pixels or ink that has been printed onto a page. It’s really a shame that there’s like no way to actually get the experience of looking at one of these originals into a printed version.

Colored pencils are a semi transparent medium and it’s a layering technique where everything is five colors deep, but since it’s a little bit transparent, you can sort of see all those layers when you’re looking at the original. It has a three dimensional depth to it.

It’s sort of like peering down into a pond, in a way, like a very shallow pond with different levels, from top to bottom. There’s no way to capture that in a scan, which is a thing that I will be salty about until the day that I die. I do think that because this is all a hand drawn medium and it’s done with these very rich and very vibrant colors throughout, and it’s all done in this very organic way – colored pencil has this like inherent softness to it but it’s a weird gritty softness too because it’s got all that texture to it – I think evokes a lot of classic children’s picture books and also fairy tale books too, in a way. So it feels visually like it fits in with an older style of storybook or picture book.

That was something that I was really deliberate about, especially when I was talking with Random House about this. You know, it’s like my ideal outcome here would be if this is a book that feels like it could sit next to those old collections of fairy stories that you would find on a bookshelf at your grandma’s house. It feels like one of those books. Like this little, magical, older, richly illustrated fairy book. At that point, I feel like I’ve done my job right.

With the layering, over the years, how have you changed your process to refine it? Because even in this collection you can see how your coloring has changed. And I don’t know how much of that is because, you know, “The Fish Wife” was drawn for 24 Hour Comics Day, and like “The Goose Girl” was drawn with all the luxury of time. But is it mostly that?

MG: It’s a combination, for sure. When I’m allowed more time to sit there and really finely tuned all the colors on the page, you end up with more layers of color and you end up with more attention to detail. It’s just harder to do that when you’re trying to color a page an hour and get them out the door. So that’s part of it.

But also, “Fish Wife” was drawn in 2016 and the more recent stories for this collection would have been drawn in like 2020, 2021. That’s a good four to five years of artistic development that you’re seeing between those stories. For sure, some of it is also I got better at drawing and that’s a natural process of drawing a lot of comics. I think I am slower in the pages where I’m allowed to take my time. Certainly I’m adding in more layers and being more deliberate about the way that I’m blending things together. So there’s just a little bit more care and a little bit more attention that’s being put into those pages.

On how long it takes to draw a page, you were saying it takes quite a while if you’re really getting into it. When you’re penciling, is that a fairly fast stage? And when you’re plotting out one of your comics, do you start straight to pencils? Do you thumbnail or storyboard beforehand? Do you have a rough outline or do you just kind of go “Eh I know where I’m going,” draw, and then you go back and color it?

Continued below

MG: There’s definitely a lot of planning and a lot of writing that goes in before I’m touching any part of the artwork and I think that’s sort of a part of telling a good fable, that they’re deceptively simple because you as a storyteller have been very conscientious about boiling things down to their purest essence on the page and being very, very careful about like every single panel, every single story beat that you are introducing into this. There’s no room for wasted moments or unnecessarily sidebars in a fable; it’s all like – boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You have to go straight to the point that you are making. So definitely a lot of planning goes into these before I’m drawing anything.

For me, what I tend to do is I’ll start in my sketchbook where for oftentimes a couple weeks, I’ll sit there and just be writing furiously, like jotting down plot narratives, story ideas, snatches of dialogue and then, you know, doing that process for a very long time until it starts to feel like it kind of coalesces in my brain. I know that it’s getting to the right point when it starts to feel like I’m writing a poem rather than writing a narrative, because it needs to have that poetic cadence to it, that oral storytelling style where I have to be able to boil the text, especially, down to something which could be told in that very musical intonation in a way, in very simple, boiled down intonations, like a poem.

Once it starts getting to that point, that’s when I’m like, “Okay, this is getting ready to go,” then I’ll generally move into thumbnails. The thumbnails in this case – for the ones that I was working with Random House on – I would send them to my editor so that she could take a look at them and give me feedback before I actually sit down and do the pencils. But after we’ve gotten that round of feedback, and after I have changed things to benefit the story according to feedback from editors, and sometimes also from friends too. I definitely have a group of cartoonist colleagues that I will bounce ideas off of or will do script swaps with each other so that we can get feedback on each other’s work, which is a wonderful thing to do.

I benefit enormously from getting feedback from other people before I actually sit down and commit to drawing all these pages. Because comics takes a really long time, so you do want to always make sure that you are doing this right, and that if there are mistakes on the page, or things that people are unsure about, you want to know that before you sit down and spend all that time coloring in all of those landscapes.

Because for me, each page for this collection – for the ones that were not 24 hour comics. Because for the 24 hour comics, it’s like, okay, I got an hour. Go! – But for the ones where I was able to take my time, that’s usually more of an eight hour process per page, just because colored pencil is such a slow and deliberate layering medium, where everything is very laboriously and meticulously done by hand. You want to feel really confident in your story before you get to that stage. Otherwise, that is a lot of wasted effort that you’re putting into those pages.

Do you start with like background and then add character details? Walk me through a bit of an example of a layering page.

MG: Sure. It’s more often that I’ll start foreground to background, and the foreground is often going to be like a character or whatever else the important focal point of the page is going to be and then from there I will move backwards in the frame and start filling in landscape, background, etc. There’s kind of an atmospheric perspective trick that happens with comics where you want to have the things in the foreground be the things that are more clear and more present and more eye catching and then you can sort of futz the details in the background a little bit more because those are the things that the reader, hopefully, is not going to be paying quite as much attention to as the, like, characters etc., that are dancing around in the foreground. So yeah, usually I work foreground and background but it can vary from page to page, depending on what the composition is and what needs to be drawn there

Continued below

Do you think you would ever try drawing with a different medium?

MG: I…I do on occasion. But the thing for me with colored pencil is it’s a slow and laborious medium but it is also a medium that I think fits my brain in a weird way. It’s very deliberate and it’s very organic and it’s also very detail oriented. Colored pencil is a good medium for anybody who is like, “I want to know exactly where all the colors are going and I want to be able to lay down the details in exactly the place that I want them to be with no room for fluctuations or inconsistencies or errors.” That’s kind of the person that I am too. I’m very slow and deliberate and conscientious and very detail oriented and all these things, so it sort of fits my brain in a weird way.

I think that’s also why colored pencil is not a popular medium with cartoonists [Laughs.] Because it is not fast and it is not efficient and it is difficult to work in and will slow you down and also cause a lot of hand strain over time. If you are a person who wants to be able to more efficiently get your pages out the door, it is not the medium for you.

How do you work to try and alleviate your hand strain?

MG: Oh god. This is a constant issue. Literally every professional cartoonists that I know has some sort of like body issue that they are dealing with on a daily basis. Some of us have like wrist problems, some of us have back or shoulder problems. Any number of things can happen; you can do a lot of damage to your body as a cartoonist.

For me, what I’m doing is, for one thing, I’ve kind of learned by terrible, brutal process over the years how to do things like make sure I’m gripping my pencils in a way that’s causing less strain on my hand. I’m also taking breaks a lot and I am making sure that I’m moving slowly. Anytime that I am like that I feel pain in my hand, it’s like: Alright. Stopping! We’re not gonna push this. Because for me, I don’t want to burn out in a couple of years doing this process. I would much rather be slower at production overall but hopefully have a longer career and be able to like make my hand last.

So it’s little things like taking breaks. I also definitely will do like stretches, things like that. If anyone wants a specific recommendation, Kriota Willberg has a wonderful book called Draw Stronger,. It’s full of stretches and exercises specifically for cartoonists to alleviate the damage that drawing comics does on all of our bodies. So it’s a constant negotiation and comics can do a lot of damage to people so we’re all navigating that as best we can.

I feel that. I type for a living, so…

MG: God, yeah. That’ll do it too.

Well, I say that but I’m also a librarian by day so I also have the claw for pulling books off the shelf.

MG: You’ve got a wrist bracelet on, I see!

Oh yeah! Oh yeah.

MG: We’re all finding various ways to keep our hands clenched in little claws. [Laughs]

Is that one of the reasons that you put “As the Crow Flies” on hiatus?

MG: Honestly, it is just that I am really busy. It’s on hiatus publicly, but it’s not entirely on hiatus privately. Like it is something that I am working extremely, extremely slowly on in the background; it’s just not something that I’m at a place where I would feel comfortable like posting any pages because I’m producing them so slowly that it…it just doesn’t feel like the right time.

It’s not that I have decided: “I’m done with that story. I’m never gonna finish it” or anything. It’s more that capitalism is hard and you have to constantly be juggling like eight different jobs as a cartoonist. So there’s questions about which task do you need to prioritize in order to like be able to pay your rent that month? How much stress are you able to put on your hand on a daily basis? That is the unfortunate part of being a cartoonist, that there’s always going to be limits both physically and financially to literally how many pages you can draw in a year. You have to kind of delegate which projects you’re able to work on first or fastest.

Continued below

That’s really all that it boils down to. It’s a very depressingly practical reason why many cartoonists are not…and I know a lot of people who are in this situation, where they have a webcomic that they loved and were able to work on very passionately when they were younger and, for lack of a better term, less hirable than they are in their, like, older age. So this is a common story amongst web cartoonists, though it is not a fun one I guess.

It is one that I hear a lot. Like, Random House pays! They pay well. Webcomics don’t pay.

MG: Yeah. When you’re a person who is working, when you make that transition over to working in traditional publishing, you start thinking about, ideally, you would like to be in a situation where you put books out that are going to eventually be earning royalties for you because that passive income is going to circle back and free up some time for you. Because when you’ve got royalty checks coming in, that will be a source of income that you don’t have to continue doing active work for, which then that also changes the calculus of how you’re able to delegate your time and which projects you’re able to choose to work on. That’s also a consideration for a lot of people.

Is it hard not getting to work on that project more? Like, personally? Is it very difficult? Or is it kind of something that you’ve resigned yourself to?

MG: It’s a mix. The thing that I feel most badly about is that I still get emails from readers being like: Hey! Are you still working on this?” And I think, especially when you’re working with children’s books, it’s like, “Okay, I’ve got all these readers who like probably found the first book when they were like, 12, and how old are they going to be when the second book of this middle grade graphic novel comes out!? For sure that is a thing that is on my mind. But at the end of the day, it’s kind of…this is the the economic realities of working as a cartoonist, and you know, we’re all we’re all doing the best that we can.

*Shakes fist at capitalism.*

I’m gonna circle back to your coloring process. Did it change when you were working on “Stage Dreams?” Also, was the process of working on “Stage Dreams'” coloring different from the process of “Other Ever Afters,” for the new stories? Were they just because one’s full page – I think they’re even art books sized or even larger- versus the smaller square, fewer panels, and also a different kind of narrative? Was there a functional difference? Or was it just more?

MG: Yeah. For sure, the scale of the pages was different. I think my “Stage Dreams” pages, I was probably drawing them on 9×12, so they’re sizable. All of my originals are relatively small, just because with colored pencil the more square inches you add on to your originals, the longer they take. So I’m always working relatively small compared to other cartoonists. But yeah, those pages were bigger because the format of the final book was going to be bigger.

With “Other Ever Afters,” the size of the page is extremely small. Like I think my originals for all of those are like five and a half by five and a half inches or so. They are tiny. And the reason why that happened was because originally I was doing these for 24 Hour Comics Day and I was like: “I’m going to be working as small as possible to be able to color a page an hour and get them out the door.”

I think the thing that changes with that is you’re really boiling images down to their essence rather than, like, “Stage Dreams” is so much about the landscape and the beautiful New Mexico vistas and I’m definitely not doing that in “Other Ever Afters.” But a story which is more about fables and allegories and these deliberately pared down and simplified stories, they don’t necessarily need the sweeping historic vistas that a Western like “Stage Dreams” would benefit from. So yeah. Different processes, different approaches.

Continued below

I guess in terms of coloring too, something which ended up being really fun with “Other Ever Afters” is, since it’s between seven and eight different stories, depending on how you count them, each one of those I was able to work in a wildly different color palette. It was a lot of fun throughout to approach each new story and say “let’s just go crazy. Why not? I’m gonna try this color palette here. This feels right for this story. Let’s just go for it and see how this ends up looking.” I took a lot of inspiration from older picture book color palettes, which were oftentimes really bright and inventive and fun.

Also I deliberately challenged myself to be like, “Okay. We’re going to pick some weird colors that don’t feel like they make logical sense sitting next to each other but I’m going to find a way to make them work in this.” Like I think “The Fish Wife” was navy blue, salmon pink, and lime green all paired together. That was very much so me being like I can imagine the pages in my head with these three colors and this is a weird combination of colors but I think I can make it work here for the things in this story that I want to depict in the way that I want to depict it. But it’s a challenge each time and you learn a lot about coloring when you’re allowing yourself that freedom to approach every new story with a wildly different set of colors and just see how it goes on the page.

So you don’t do color tests beforehand to say what did these colors look like together with three layers, four layers, that kind of stuff?

MG: No, I definitely do. But oftentimes it’s more like I’ll know in my head that I want, like, the navy blue salmon and lime green and then it’s kind of a matter of going into my colored pencil collection and figuring out which specific combination of these three genres of color are going to work best and feel best together and layer best on top of each other. There’s definitely some tests that go into it but it’s much more so about refining the palette after I know the general direction that I want to go in.

You said “the colored pencil collection.” Do you constantly just go out and be like “Ooh, I’ll take those and I’ll take those” or have you just bought giant boxes of them and slowly just put them away?

MG: I definitely hoard my collection like a dragon. I have a ton of different colors with lots of different slight variations. I’ve slowly organized them over the years and it helps with the thing I was saying about choosing what specific salmon pink is going to be the best one, since there’s all sorts of different shades that will be very slightly different from each other. It’s kind of a question of picking which one is going to be best in context.

But yeah, for sure that is a thing that I am doing frequently, going into my collection and picking out like which particular pink, which particular orange, is going to be the best choice for this story or another.

Colored pencils are so cool but I don’t see them anymore. Like on a day to day basis, I just don’t see colored pencils. It’s kinda sad.

MG: Colored pencil doesn’t get taught in a lot of schools. Except at a children’s level, like, kids for sure will have their Rose Arts’ and their Crayola’s that they can play with in art class. There’s actually a weird history behind this, where colored pencil has been classically considered to be a “not true Fine Arts medium.”

There are organizations out there that are trying to like combat that stigma right now, like the Colored Pencil Society of America. If you go on their website, like their mission statement is all about, like, “We want to raise the profile of colored pencils and make them medium that’s like right up there with oil paints as a classic tool for fine artists.” Color pencil is interesting too because there are specific techniques that allow you to use them in ways that oftentimes people don’t get taught in art schools because there’s been this kind of historic dismissal of it as a medium.

Continued below

That’s a sidebar topic. My mom when I was growing up was also a colored pencil artist and she was also very briefly, I think she was the treasurer of the Colored Pencil Society of America for a while.

That’s really cool!

MG: So I have this weird insight into colored pencil industry drama in a way. There’s a surprising lot of it. But also those colored pencil people, like the fine artists, are not super aware or excited about comics in general so I’m definitely not on their radar at all.

I feel like the more niche the industry, the more intense the drama gets and comics is already a niche industry.

MG: Oh, yeah. And the thing that they are going after is like respectability politics in terms of fine arts mediums so comic books are not going to get them there in the fight for respectability. So yeah, not on their radar at all.

[Laughs] I mean…you’re right.

MG: Things are changing! But slowly, yeah.

To close us out, a question about intros and epilogues. With “Other Ever Afters,” you open and close with two parts of the same framing device story – or, it’s less of a story and it is purely a framing device. What was the decision to have it be both intro and epilogue instead of just intro or just epilogue, and to have it be one connected thing instead of two separate bookends?

MG: The book that really inspired me, in terms of doing that narrative style intro and conclusion, was actually “Through the Woods” by Emily Carroll. In that one, Emily Carroll is also drawing short comics for both the intro and the conclusion and the conclusion comic that she did especially has really stuck with me. Because it’s a commentary on the style of horror story that she was telling through the medium of another horror story. And that was something that, gosh, it blew my mind when I first read it probably back in like 2014 or something. It felt like doing something similar for this book would be would be a good use of that intro and conclusion space; telling a sort of a narrative in a way, which is really a commentary on the story structure that you’re using throughout this entire book collection.

I like the idea of taking a single narrative and kind of breaking it into chunks and putting it as bookends for this story, in part because as a storyteller, I really like making readers wait for things sometimes. And also it’s really fun to have those callbacks to an earlier moment. It feels more satisfying in a way when you get to the end and you’re like, “Oh! Okay. I see the whole picture now and those themes that I have been primed to think about early on in this story.” Especially the relationship between Village-Woods-Castle and the allegorical role that each of those settings play, I kind of primed readers to think about that in the intro so that those concepts are sort floating around in the back of their mind but it’s not until the end when I, hopefully, bring it home and kind of explain why I think that this is relevant and here’s what I am saying specifically about this journey and this narrative path that we’re exploring here.

My hope is that it ends up feeling like a small and tiny and quiet revelation in a way by the time that you get to the end because you’ve had to wait for it a little bit. In the meanwhile, you’ve been thinking about all of these other different narratives that you’re being introduced to along the way. Then once you hit that conclusion, then it’s like, “Oh. Okay. I see the thematic principles that are tying all of these together across the board and I’m also being given a framework to understand how the author was approaching all of these stories and the thing that was making them excited to work in this genre in the first place.”

Delayed gratification is really what it is [Laughs.]


Elias Rosner

Elias is a lover of stories who, when he isn't writing reviews for Mulitversity, is hiding in the stacks of his library. Co-host of Make Mine Multiversity, a Marvel podcast, after winning the no-prize from the former hosts, co-editor of The Webcomics Weekly, and writer of the Worthy column, he can be found on Twitter (for mostly comics stuff) here and has finally updated his profile photo again.

EMAIL | ARTICLES