One of the books I’ve been looking forward to the most since January’s Image Expo was the return of Nick Dragotta, Saul Griffith, Joost Bonsen and Ingrid Dragotta’s “Howtoons”, a comic that isn’t just a comic, but an educational science how-to comic. The web series had earned a lot of publicity for teaching kids science through experiments laid out in one-page comics, and when given the opportunity to bring it back as a mini-series at Image, Nick couldn’t resist the opportunity.
Bringing in the all-star team of Fred Van Lente, Tom Fowler, Jordie Bellaire and Rus Wooton, this new mini-series – titled “Howtoons: [Re]ignition” – finds Tuck and Celine confronting a powerless future without their parents after a corporation made a rather large mistake in an attempt to defray the evils of the sun. I’ve read the first issue, and it’s a whole lot of fun, and perfect for readers of all-ages.
Today, I’ve got a conversation with both Fred and Nick about [Re]ignition, and why this project is such an important one to the both of them. Tom was on vacation, so he didn’t have time to participate, but don’t you worry: we’ll be running a special edition Artist Alley with him on August 6th, the day of release. Thanks to both Fred and Nick for the conversation, and if you want to learn more about “Howtoons” and this project overall, take a look at my previous conversations with Nick and both Fred and Tom, and pick up this book, folks!
FVL: If you want to get kids in the comics stores, you want to offer them things they might be interested in, same with any other reader demographic. And what’s Nick shown, doing Howtoons all these many years is that kids love this stuff. So that’s partly why we thought it was important to do the series as floppies first.
ND: I love doing it. I love making things, making comics. So it’s cool to be able to share that with kids and show them all these different disciplines. Hopefully we can provide an entertaining story first, that will motivate them to build the projects in the book. Maybe learn something through play. With my own kids, I can see the effects of too much TV or the iPad. I want them off the couch and interacting with the real world.
For those that don’t know, can you share how the three of you worked together to bring this project to life? What was the story for bringing Howtoons back, and for Fred, Tom, Jordie and Rus coming in?
FVL: Nick asked if I would be interested in writing a Howtoons story that had a beginning, middle and end, more of a fictional narrative, and so I flew out to the San Francisco Bay area where he, I, Ingrid and Saul Griffiths sat around in Saul’s rather spectacular 19th century pipe organ factory converted into mad scientist wonder lab (you can’t make this stuff up) and hashed out the story together. I wrote an outline but Nick’s East of West duties prevented him from executing it himself. Then, at New York Comic Con, there was a fateful chance encounter…
ND: 2014 is our 10 year anniversary and we’ve been wanting to do a book on energy literacy for sometime. The hope was always to get other creators to get involved and bring their talents to it and expand this universe. Like Fred said above, we’ve never done a story this ambitious before, and to do that we needed a writer of his caliber and talents. Tom and I have been talking for sometime about doing a Howtoon, but it was really just going to be a 2 pager. Somehow we tricked him into doing a 5-issue miniseries. Tom brought Jordie and Rus in, both of whom are amazing and really bring it all home each issue.
Continued belowCreating Howtoons are a lot harder than doing a straight story. There’s a lot of work that goes into these from the project design to integrating the educational content to having to draw and write around all that, yet still keep it moving, entertaining, and clear enough a child can read and grasp the concepts. Also, we have to make sure all the science is accurate. This creative crew has taken all this extra work on and really went above and beyond. There’s really nothing like this comic.
FVL: Howtoons are definitely supposed to spark action. Not even necessarily about the projects themselves, even, but with the ways we relate to and use energy, particularly as it related to the current climate crisis. It is a book with an agenda, and we definitely make no bones about that.
ND: We strive to make the projects as simple as possible, made from materials easy and cheaply to obtain. When you get feedback from readers making the stuff it feels great, if they don’t make it so be it. That’s what’s cool about this project. Fred, Tom, Jordie, Rus, and I come at it from a comic storyteller point a view, so maybe we reach the kids that we were, in it for the story. Ingrid, who designs the projects, is a product designer by trade. Maybe we reach the kids who like to build and design new things. Saul’s contributions, the scientist and engineer behind it, might speak directly to our next great inventor. If the book serves as any kind of primer to opening a reader up to something new, I’m all for it.
Visually speaking, Tom’s art with Jordie coloring him is pretty perfect for this book, as Tom does a phenomenal job of capturing both the effervescence and energy of Tuck and Celine, and Jordie’s colors truly help build and ground the world of the story. For both of you, what makes them such an excellent art team for this book, and how do you think the world of Howtoons plays to their strengths?
FVL: I worked with both Tom and Jordie on Hulk: Season One, and it’s terrific to be reunited with them. Tom has such great dynamism and expressiveness to his figures that he’s really perfect to work on a kids-oriented project that needs to be full of energy — no pun intended — and he and Jordie have done so many projects together they’re kind of mind-melded. It’s mildly frightening.
ND: I think they’re having fun, and it shows in the work. I think they’re in sync because they both put story first and aren’t mucking anything up with superfluous detail. There’s big ideas in this comic and they want readers to grasp them as quickly as possible. It also doesn’t hurt that Tom is one of the most talented dudes in comics. From his cover paintings, to his color pencil creature concepts, to his B&W comics. He’s always producing at such a high level, and the things I see are always new concepts. I’d love to see Tom write and draw his own book one day at Image with Jordie on colors. I’ve admired Jordie’s work for a while and I love what’s she’s doing here using a really earthy palette. Aside from how talented they are, I think communication plays a big part. These two talk non-stop when they’re working, constantly pushing and evolving the work. They both work so hard.
Continued belowI need to mention our secret weapon Rus Wooton. Rus’s lettering really brought the whole book together, he’s a terrific designer. His signature is all over the comics. He comes through time and time again. Everyone on this books has worked so hard, Fred and Ingrid included. I hope they’re proud of it.
FVL: Thanks, David. The whole team really came together on that one. I think that people have a natural aversion to people trying to proselytize them. So really all I want to do is provide the facts about how energy works, both in the physics sense of light, and heat, and all the rest, but also how we use energy as fuel for our lives and machines and so forth, and let people draw their own conclusions from a policy perspective. You don’t shove people to a conclusion, you just lay your case out and more often than not, I find, they come to the right judgment on their own.
ND: It’s important that we’re just as literate in energy as we are about anything else in school, since it looks to be the greatest challenge future generations face. Energy is all around us, with more knowledge and imagination we’ll be more open to harnessing cleaner sources of energy and being less dependent on fossil fuels. It’s important to me because we all got to enjoy this party, but it’s my kids generation who have to clean it up and deal with the repercussions.
ND: It’s really the whole point. Howtoons has always been the merging of real science and comics. Hopefully it makes good primer material for readers to take that next step of learning and seek out more answers. Geoengineering is very real, and hopefully blowing up volcanoes stays a hypothetical.
FVL: It’s the absolute most important of things. While we sometimes use the Howtoons in impractical or fantastical ways in service of the stories, the actual instructions for them, and the science of them, have to be completely accurate.
I really enjoyed the back matter in the first issue, and between Saul’s afterword, the icon glossary and the “Cut to the Point” saw page, we get even more educational items delivered in entertaining and engaging ways. Do you plan on including elements like this in each issue? I think they’re fantastic additions to the overall Howtoons [Re]ignition package.
FVL: Yup.
ND: Yes, and hopefully we’ll get reader feedback that we can also include in the back matter. I’d love to start a dialogue with the readers and feature projects that they build, maybe they’ll even draw their own Howtoons we can print. The goal is, along with the fun educational content to also build a robust letters page.
