Tyler Boss Brings Giallo to Comics and “Four Kids” To The Silver Screen

Tyler Boss is one of the most recognizable in the contemporary generation of American cartoonists, with an idiosyncratic style that pokes through on his collaborative projects like “Four Kids Walk Into a Bank,” or his solo passion projects like “Dead Dog’s Bite.”

Multiversity sat down with Boss to discuss the Image ongoing, “What’s the Furthest Place From Here?,” his recent leaps into film and TV, his hopes for a collaboration with Tom Reilly, bringing Giallo and John Carpenter to comics, plus a range of unannounced projects.

You have a very minimalist or graphic style in your comics, which makes your books really fluent, but then there’s also a lot of moments where you really fill a page and go as elaborate as possible. What do you find compelling about walking that line?

Tyler Boss: I think it comes from the old school of Scott McCloud, sort of talking about iconography in “Understanding Comics.” Comics at its purest form is about trying to convey information as quickly as possible with as little lines as possible. You know, it is like graphic design, basically. It’s just organizing shapes in a way that the reader can understand quickly without having to realize that they’re reading it, if that makes sense. It sort of just happens automatically in their head. And so my approach to storytelling is to start with clarity, and then everything after that is like window dressing. You could do an entire comic that’s just squares and circles and triangles and hopefully you can tell a story with that.

I think one example of that tightrope between fluent and elaborate pages is your approach to exposition. The narrator in “Dead Dog’s Bite” has this really long-winded and non-sequitur style that basically gives the reader so much information they’re still invested, when you’re plotting out a story how do you approach exposition and the general doling out of details to the reader?

TB: Sure. I mean, every story’s different, obviously, in how you want to put out that type of information. With “Dead Dogs,” I had the story, the thread of what the end was and where we were going to go. But I didn’t know how to get across the information that I felt the reader needed to feel like they were involved with the story, and were piecing it together with Joe [the protagonist of “Dead Dog’s Bite”]. And then the narrator character sort of popped up as, like, the ‘Rod Serling,’ the omnipotent voice of God, or however you want to think about it. And that’s all a much more fun way to do it. It’s that weird thing where it’s like, “Okay, now it becomes more surreal.” It felt less expository and more engaging in that way. Whereas in my book with Matt Rosenberg, “What’s the Furthest Place From Here?” That’s another one where we have all this information and backstory about how the world works, but the way we’re telling the story, it’s just this slow drip from a faucet rather than, you know, the man in a blue suit climbing out of a sewer to tell you what’s going on.

Yeah I was going to ask about that. So obviously you and Matt Rosenberg had longer on, I guess you could call it ‘pre-production,’ since you were both tackling other projects as “What’s the Furthest Place From Here” came together. Did a lot of that time go into world-building or did you mostly furnish the main plotline and then build this world around it?

TB: That was a little bit of both for “The Furthest Place” because we started from the conceit of it, which is, themed kid gangs at the end of the world with no adults. We had that and we knew what that story was, that through-thread. But then it’s sort of it’s almost like, I think it’s a George RR Martin quote, where he talks about the difference between writers who have their beats that they go through, and then there are other writers who treat it like a garden. They plant their little seeds and then they see what sprouts. That’s sort of what “Furthest Place” was like, where we understand the rules of this place, but let’s plant all these little seeds and then we’ll see what grows and follow that stuff.

So it’s a very different writing process for this one than, say, when me and Matt did “Four Kids” or when I did “Dead Dogs,” where that was very constructed. [In that] we went through beat by beat by beat. Where, with “Furthest Place,” we know the middle, beginning, the end. But we’re sort of letting our own interests dictate where the story’s going to go rather than be like, “We’ve got to hit this beat, and then this beat, and then this beat.”

Yeah that makes sense, it’s the difference between a heist movie and a road trip film.

TB: Yeah, exactly!

Do you have any more of your solo project miniseries in the works?

TB: Yeah, I have a book I’m working on, on the side right now. One that I’m writing. It’s a horror…horror’s almost a misnomer for it. It’s more like a Giallo movie, like the Italian horror flick. It’s in that sort of styling where it’s like watching a slasher movie, right? It’s not scary. That one I’m excited about. This one should be different, it’s a little nastier and meaner, but also hopefully funny and all that stuff.

So it’s like Tyler Boss does Grindhouse?

TB: Yeah! Yeah, exactly. I’m excited about that one. The hardest part of it is, I’m working on it right now and I don’t have a title for it. I feel like it needs to have that ‘Giallo title’ like ‘Red Queen Kills Seven Times, and the Bird with the Crystal,” like it needs to have a long nonsense title that almost has nothing to do with the story, but I haven’t cracked that one yet.

That makes me wonder, when you have a story do you come up with a title first and work backwards from there, or is it more like this where you have the whole shape of an idea in your head and can only get the title at the very end?

TB: Oh yeah, I’m much more like “I basically have the whole story figured out, but I have no idea what it’s called.” It’s like trying to come up with a good band name. For whatever reason, everything sounds dumb until you figure out, at least to myself and when me and Matt are working together. Every title sounds horrible until we’re like, “Oh, that’s it.”

Your comics have a style to them that wouldn’t be out of place in an Ikea instruction book, in that there’s a clear A to B to C that you like to play with, where did that style start to influence your work?

TB: Yeah, I mean, that kind of storytelling is something that I really enjoy doing, and I think it works hand-in-hand with the sort of tone that I want to do in the writing. So it’s sort of like that symbiosis. It’s also a thing where it’s just coming straight from my influences of David Mazzuchelli and Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine and Dan Clowes, it’s that sort of throughline of cartooning that I really connect with. I feel like that’s where I’m coming from with it.

So it’s probably still too early to say much about your Substack project on “Ashcan Press,” but have there been any aspects of the format/publishing process of online comics that have enhanced your work so far?

TB: The thing that’s cool about it, at least in the sense of how I’m approaching the book me and Matt are doing together is, it’s paid for. So it can be whatever it’s going to be, and we don’t have to worry about cost. You know, there’s great digital comics like if you think about Dash Shaw’s “BodyWorld,” where he really took advantage of the infinite scroll, and then the interesting thing was how does he package that as a book? And the package was very different. So that playing with medium is very interesting. but at least for my book on Substack with Matthew –two books– I’m drawing one with Matt and then I’m writing another one with him for Joshua Hixson. It’s just an opportunity to be able to sort of expand our output.

When we were doing “Furthest Place,” we had this thing where it could either be seven volumes long or nobody likes it and it has to be one volume long. And so we had those two versions ready to go when the first issue went out. And luckily we get to do the long version. But with the Substack thing, we can just do it. And I think there is an avenue to really engage with readers through the digital media space of it. I’m not a big Comixology reader, but every once in a while, I really like to get one of my books on Comixology and see how the guided view works, because that’s how some readers read. It’s not that I really attune my storytelling off that, but I think it’s an interesting avenue, a different way readers consume things. It’s a big question for me, but I know what I’m doing with print, digital can kind of be anything.

The guided view would be funny with one of those 25 panel pages from “4 Kids.”

TB: Oh yeah. I went and did that and just clicked through, and I felt so bad for whichever worker had to…I don’t know what the job description would be. The programmer or whoever, who had to do that.

Whose idea was it originally to have those panel-heavy pages in the format?

TB: For the first one, the walkie-talkie one, that was me. It’s hard to say, I don’t like to say it’s me or Matt, because we work so hand in hand. I remember in that one, his page description was way crazier. He wanted to have zigzag lines to demonstrate the CV-ness of it. I played with it for a while and then eventually I was like, “I think this is the cleanest,” which is just, a 24-grid and we just do Brady Bunch acting. And hopefully it shortens the word balloons so that when a reader is going through it, they don’t open the spread and go “oh, crap. There’s so many words.” They’re just bopping right along and it feels like a quick pace, which also lends itself to the comedy of it.

How did your approach to pages change after going from cartooning your own series, to working with a writer again?

TB: I mean, me and Matt’s relationship isn’t such where Matt is writing a full, complete script for everything. But the way issues get written, is me and him on the phone or, he likes to come up to where I live in Buffalo, and he’ll come up and stay with me and we just beat it out. We figure out how we get every single place for each issue. So with me and him, it hasn’t changed so much.

You know, I did some work with James Tynion on a “Department of Truth” issue, and then we also did a little short story for this anthology called “The Last Comic on the Left.” That’s from the Last Podcast on the Left people, and this is going to sound awful. I don’t send thumbnails or pencils or anything to collaborators, and I didn’t realize that wasn’t a thing. I just send finished pages and I’m like, ‘Here it is!’ Which I’m now realizing is maybe not the most appropriate way to work with other writers. James didn’t seem to mind at all. He didn’t care. But I’ve heard that that’s horrifying to some writers, that an artist would do that. So I think I’ll just stick to working with James, Matt and myself, because they don’t seem to mind.

You mentioned as well that you’re writing for Josh Hixson on a new book. If you had the chance to keep writing for other artists who would be on your shortlist?

TB: So number one for me is Tom Reilly. I desperately want to do an American football comic with him. I haven’t super cracked it yet. I want to do the sports comic that people who don’t care about sports would want to read, which is a silly task, but Tom and Tom are both big football fans. And so for us, that’s the weird thing to figure out.

But you know, just recently me and Matt wrote scripts for Ricardo Lopez Ortiz and for Sweeney Boo [on “What’s the Furthest Place From Here” #8 and #9] and that was really cool too. Like, that was the first time I’ve written a script and gotten another artist to turn it back in. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is why people write comics.’ It’s really, you know, when you get those pages in your inbox, it’s like, Oh my God, it’s so rewarding.

Is there like a moment where it feels weird, like taking your hands off the wheel and letting go of that mental image of a page? Or are you just happy to have someone else decide and let your approach go?

TB: Oh yeah, I 100% take my hand off the wheel with this sort of thing. Now obviously, there’s minor edits that have to happen. For instance, Sweeney, her first language is French, and so she misread a couple of things. But besides that, no, I feel like I’d be a hypocrite if I tried to be too editorial, especially when I don’t turn in thumbnails or things like that. When it goes to the artist it’s the artist’s book at that point.

So you’re actually working on the film adaptation for “4 Kids Walk Into a Bank” at this point, what’s it like adapting a story, where so much of the tone is directly tied to the affordances of comics, into a whole different medium? How do you go about bringing something like that into a different medium and then retaining the same feel to it, the same texture?

TB: I mean, me and Matt were really annoyingly precious about who [option rights of] the book went to. Because we wanted to feel like it was the right talent. So we went with Picturestart because we liked their vision, and they’ve brought in –maybe I should be a little careful here, I don’t think any of this stuff has been announced– but they’ve brought in a director and a writer and people who gave us a lookbook and a script, and I’m very excited. It’s very much the same as the comic, but very different in its approach to certain things. It’s a little nastier, which is kind of cool. It’s like it’s a little meaner than the book is, while also still being fun.

It’s definitely a learning process, but, you know, things have to change because it is a different medium. The thing I always say is there’s no class or like school you can go to that prepares you for it. Like you’re just some bozo who draws little funny books in your room and now you’re on these phone calls with people at movie studios.

I like that, you kind of get to do a grubby version of your book in the film, because in the past I’ve talked about how a lot of the time you and Matt write a lot of the stories about teenagers –or I think were the kids in “Four Kids” were younger than teens, yeah?

TB: Yeah they were like eleven or twelve.

Right, it’s like you’re writing stories about these kids that they wouldn’t necessarily be allowed to watch if they were produced for them. So it’s kind of more real that way, but it’s a weird little paradox.

TB: Yeah, yeah. I will say, the next two projects I’m doing, both the one that we’re writing for Hixson, and the one that I’m doing. We’re finally dealing with adults. It’s always funny, we were in meetings about “Furthest Place” and potentially, if that’s going to turn into some other kind of media, motion picture stuff, or whatever. And the thing is, everyone thinks it’s YA just because there’s kids in it, and they’re like, “Oh, but it’s very nasty”. And yeah, unfortunately the audience you want to give it to can’t engage with it.

Yeah. How do you actually divide your time up now that you’re splitting between so many different paths? It’s not like you’re just a cartoonist anymore. You’re writing and drawing and doing the Hollywood stuff on top of it.

TB: Drawing “Furthest Place” is still very much my “day job.” So every day I get up, and I do pages. There’s some management to doing a book at Image, where it’s very much on you. Image is great, they help you with a lot of stuff but it’s very much on you to keep the books on track and move it along. So that’s like Monday through Friday doing that, and then I generally write at night. So it’s like if you want to think about it, “Furthest Place” is the 9 to 5, then there’s dinner and hanging out with my wife and dog, maybe go see a movie, do something like that. And then by 10, 11, I sit down and I write for a couple of hours. It’s very schedule oriented, you know, and some days are different. Some days you get a cover in here or there, if you get that opportunity.

Does your approach to a page change when you letter your own work?

TB: I mean, I want to be better at lettering. I feel like with “Dead Dogs” I did a decent enough job. I know I probably don’t want to show it to professional editors because I’m sure there’s obvious mistakes I made that I just am not aware of, but lettering is such a deep craft. I originally wanted to letter “Furthest Place,” I did a pass at it and eventually I got to the point where I knew I couldn’t be helping write and draw and color and lettering it. So we brought on Hassan [Otsmane-Elhaou] to letter it, and Hass –I mean– he’s just awesome. So it’s one of those things where with the Giallo comic that I’m doing, it’s this thing where I’m having to decide whether I want to ask Hass to do it or I want to take another crack at it myself.

It’s like graphic design, I don’t have any real formal training in it, it’s just a thing that I think it’s cool. So, I read a lot of books about it and try to learn about it, and then put that into the work. Whether I’m doing a good job or not is up for debate. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s just another craft.

When you cartoon, do you write for yourself Marvel Style, or do a full script beforehand?

TB: Sure. “Dead dogs” for the first three issues, I did full script just to do it, you know what I mean? Just as an exercise, if I’m going to write for other people I need to make sure I can describe these panels the way that I want to have them described to somebody. Then by the fourth issue, I had sort of turned into this weird amalgamation where I would take like a legal pad, and I would write an index card of the things that had to happen on a page. I’d write that out, and then I’d tape it to the legal pad and then I’d sort of doodle the layout for the page. Then that was the script page and if there was dialogue, I’d write the dialogue on the side and then, you know, I had a stack of 28 or whatever pages of that. And that was the script.

Yeah, it’s like the whole drawing in the margins idea, except it’s on your own script too.

TB: Yeah. So I think that process, I’ll probably still I think at the start of projects, it’s good to sort of go full scripts just to make sure that you’re like for me, at least, to make sure that I’m like doing the due diligence of connecting all these different thoughts that need to be connected. But I did really much prefer that and, and style of scripting for myself now.

If you could make a comic adaptation of any story from another medium, what would you pick?

TB: Ah that’s tough. I never really thought about it. I don’t really do licensed work. I had one a couple of days ago that I was thinking about. I really love what James Stokoe does when he does an “Alien” book or a “Godzilla” book, because I never really think I would want to read those comics, but then he does them and I have to read it. So in some ways I think it’d be really fun to do some sort of slasher property, like do a Halloween comic or do something from John Carpenter’s oeuvre. You could get it done in 70 pages or like 90 pages, right? Like the ‘tight 90,’ but do it as a comic. That would be fun.

Last Question, who’s the creepiest gang you’ve come up with for “Furthest Place?”

TB: We have, man there are some bad ones coming. I think if you get to meet The Carnival again, there’s some weird stuff going on there. They’re all kind of terrible, eventually.

I’ll say this, the least creepy one is coming up in issue #10. They’re called The Scrappers, and they’re my favorite people ever. They’re like weird metal yard hippie people and they just drive around on go-carts, they’re great.