You might know them from podcasts like “My Brother, My Brother, and Me,” “Shmanners,” or any number of others the McElroys are a part of, but coming soon, here there be graphic novels! The McElroy’s in July of this year have a graphic novel coming from First Second Books and artist Carey Pietsch called “The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins” based on the first season of their podcast of the same name. The OGN follows the brothers, Justin, Travis, and Griffin, as they embark on a D&D campaign with their father Clint. At C2E2 I had the opportunity to sit down with Travis McElroy to discuss his career, and what it’s like to transition into the world of comics as a creator.
Thanks for doing this Travis!
No problem!
So you do an insane amount of things with your family.
Yes.
Can you give us a little overview of all the fun projects that you all do and are a part of?
Sure! So the first one we started with was “My Brother, My Brother, and Me,” with me and my older brother and my younger brother. We do an advice podcast where we don’t try to give good advice. We don’t try to give advice really, it usually just spirals into making jokes and stories and stuff. Then we do “The Adventure Zone,” where it’s me, Justin, Griffin and our dad. It started with us playing Dungeons & Dragons, but now we’ve branched off into a lot of different role playing games and versions of that. My wife and I do a podcast called “Shmanners” where we cover etiquette and how it still applies in the modern world. I do a podcast called “Trends Like These” with my friends, Brent and Courtney, where we take the stories that are trending on Facebook and Twitter and we actually research them so we can tell people what is actually going on and not just what the headlines just make you think.
And then there’s a lot more weird ones we do. “Til Death Do Us Blart,” is a once a year podcast every Thanksgiving where me Justin, Griffin, and our friends Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery from “The Worst Idea of All Time” watch and review for the rest of linear time. We’ve done that I think three years now. Then we have “The McElroy Brothers Will Be In Trolls 2” where we are campaigning to be in the movie Trolls 2. Then we’ve also put stuff up on YouTube. We have done voice overs for a video game called 100 Foot Robot Golf, in which we were the commentators when people took 100 foot tall robots to play golf. And we’re working on the graphic novel! Oh and we made the My Brother, My Brother, and Me TV show, season 1. So that’s out on VRV, www.vrv.co. We do a lot of weird stuff together. All family stuff.
Very cool. So the graphic novel is called “The Adventure Zone” and the podcast is called “The Adventure Zone.” Could you talk a little bit more about the podcast, so people know what it’s all about?
Sure, right, so when we started playing originally it was just going to be like a one-off episode, because Justin, his wife was having a baby, and we needed some paternity leave episodes. We wanted to play D&D. At that point, I think Justin had I think played once, our dad had never played, I’d played a couple times, Griffin had played a couple times more than me. It was just supposed to be a goof. We did like a pre-rolled campaign from the starter kit. We mostly just didn’t take it seriously, you know? We played and made it funny, and then people really, really liked it. We kept playing, and over time…so the first big arc was called “Adventure Zone: Balance” and that was, or I guess I should say the first campaign was “Adventure Zone: Balance.” Over time it just got more and more attraction. It was kind of amazing. Not only did the people who were listening start to really buy into it but we did too, and we got really invested in the characters and the story to the point that it actually…it literally started as a joke and built to like a pretty satisfying kind of epic. But like an actual narrative, satisfying ending.
Continued belowSo then this graphic novel that is coming out in July is based on the first arc of the “Balance” campaign, an arc we called “Here There Be Gerblins.” It was the first one of us getting together and playing and figuring out the characters and all of that, and the first of 7 arcs that we played through. Our hope is to eventually do more and more, but this one encapsulates the first arc.
Very cool. So why a graphic novel? As opposed to some other form of media?
So it’s really tricky. We’ve dealt with this a lot trying to adapt our podcasts. We dealt with it trying to make the My Brother, My Brother, and Me TV show, which is “How do you take an audio medium, where a lot of the comedy comes from your inflection, and make it into a visual medium or a literary medium or anything that wasn’t the same.?” It can get really tricky to translate that. So I think that if we had just written it, like if it was just a novelation for example of “The Adventure Zone,” you’d lose a ton of the humor that we have in our descriptions and the way that we joked. Because if you’re just reading it on the page I think it could feel really flat. But with Carey Pietsch’s illustrations I think you end up…there’s another layer of joke below it where you’re actually watching the people say it, and I think it makes it a lot easier to read it in the right tone of voice and get the right comedic delivery as you read it. Plus, Carey is both a genius and has listened to the podcast a ton of times, so she has like jokes within jokes within jokes drawn into it. So you get this whole other…adapting it became less of adaptation and more of like creation where it really felt like making a new thing out of the pieces we already had. Where I think just a straight up novelization would’ve felt just like that. It would’ve felt just like copy and paste. Whereas the graphic novel for us just really fit with what we were trying to do.
Okay, okay. So can you describe more of the process of creating the graphic novel, working with Carey, and co-writing with the other three members of your family. What does that look like?
Yeah, so, one of the trickiest things about it was, I think in the first arc we ended up with like 8 or 9 hours of stuff, maybe even more than that, maybe closer to like 10 or 11, and putting that into a 200 page graphic novel there was a lot of paring down. What was really interesting is, there were a lot of jokes that really worked when you could hear us say them, and then when we drew them and wrote them you realized “Oh, ok, that doesn’t work.” Instead it kind of pushed us to find a funnier version of it. And that was the other thing too, cause we were talking about, you know, “The Adventure Zone: Balance” lasted like three and a half years. So over that time the tone of the show, the style of the show, shifted. So now we’re trying to go back in time to the first arc and translate that to make it feel of a piece of the rest of it. So it was, on one hand, really fun to go back over these jokes and the creation and start from the beginning. But it also was really challenging to be like, “Ok but now how do we make it feel new and make it feel like it fits in the thing.” Yeah so there was a lot of…rewrites isn’t the right word, but like I think adaptation is the right word, where we would take a thing and go, “Okay so how do we take what is a square peg and fit it into this round hole without losing what the show is?” Because the thing that’s most important as we were adapting it was, the people who are going to read this have most likely listened to the show before. If we change it too much, then they’re not getting the show they’re getting this brand new thing. I’ve had that happen to me as a fan before and it’s really upsetting and off putting. We wanted it to still feel like the show and also make sense in the form that we were putting it in. So it was a challenge, but a fun challenge.
Continued below[Laughs] No of course. What was the process like getting to pitch this to First Second and getting to work with them?
Oh First Second was great. They were immediately on board. Like they were great to work through and have been great to work with from the start. It’s always really nice to work with people who not only appreciate you, the person working on it, but also appreciate the subject matter and the thing you’re making. So they were all fans of the podcast and we were fans of them and so they were very collaborative. Their input and their notes, we have an hour long phone call every week and it is a very fun phone call that involves a lot of joke pitching and tweaking. Calista [Brill] our editor has been amazing. That’s the thing too, it’s also been really nice to work with a team of people to create the thing. There’s the four of us and Carey, but then there’s also like 6 other people from First Second that we work with. It’s wonderful to bounce ideas off of each other and actually talk about things instead of feeling like we’re all alone trying to figure it out. It’s been absolutely wonderful.
That’s really cool. Well yeah, so for someone who’s never listened to the podcast before, how would you pitch this graphic novel to them?
Well first I would say, you don’t have to have listened to the podcast before. We tried to cut out the in-jokes that don’t make sense. Like if we had to cut a scene we didn’t leave the in-jokes in related to it. We really tried to take it from the standpoint of, what if someone was reading this and they didn’t know anything about the show. So I would say this is as close to, in visual comic book form, as you could get to sitting around and playing a game with your friends. We still tried to keep it goofy while trying to live up to the expectations people will have for it. And really we tried to stay accurate to it, but without being so accurate that people wouldn’t understand it from the outside. I think it’s a really good time. I’ve worked on it for two years now, and I’m still not sick of it, so I really think the people who pick it up for the first time are really going to love it.
Very cool. Well thank you very much.
Thank you!
Is there anything else that you’d like to tease or promote?
Umm…well I mean we just came out with the second official season of “The Adventure Zone.” It’s called “Adventure Zone: Amnesty.” It’s set in the fictional town of Kepler, West Virginia, and it’s in a game system called Monster of the Week, where it’s very like Supernatural, Buffy, Angel kind of feeling where like every week is a different monster. I get to play a magician named Aubrey Little whose stage name is The Lady Flame who then discovers she has actual magic powers. It’s really great. I’m a big fan of it.
“The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins,” hits stores July 17th, 2018. You can find all the McElroy’s shows here, and some preview pages from the graphic novel below.
