While I’m linkblogging to interviews that cropped up over the weekend, I should point out this one between Tom Spurgeon and Nick Abadzis, author of the rather excellent all-ages graphic novel, Laika:
SPURGEON: Why did you decide to go with such densely packed narrative pages? I’m not used to seeing that many panels a page in a standard-sized trade, and your comic is stuffed with them.
ABADZIS: I had a lot of story to tell and I took the decision to condense some stuff down rather than dispense with it completely. A lot got excised. I found myself thinking, at one point, that I could distill everything down to pictograms — ultimately, you can boil comics down into a form of hieroglyphic writing, but I think in this case it would’ve been at the expense of emotional punch. You can play with the focus of comics, how near or how far you get to your subject but you have to be mindful of what you might sacrifice if you lose all your nuanced material. Pictograms with emotional punch — that’s an experiment for another book (I can imagine it looking something like ancient Chinese paintings). I wanted to make the reader less passive, and one way of doing that is making them work, both emotionally and with the rhythm of the panels, the arrangement of text and imagery and the ratio between those elements. It’s all important.
