The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

It’s no secret that the DFC comic made a lot of fans among the FPI crew and a lot of our readers, including our (obviously) most important contributor, young Molly, who was kind enough to share her thoughts on the comic with her dad Richard. We were all upset when the comic ceased publication amid the dreadful global financial meltdown – a bold experiment that sadly looked like it wouldn’t get to grow to fruition. So we were especially pleased when we learned that the acclaimed David Fickling publishers would keep the DFC brand alive in the form of graphic novels – actually more like continental style BD albums (Fickling himself said he wanted to create a comics album reading culture here like they have in France and Belgium, no mean feat to achieve). This month Richard and Molly have been discussing the first wave of the graphic novels to come out under the DFC Library banner (more are due in autumn).

Among that first wave is Kate Brown‘s Spider Moon – it’s only March and already it’s shaping up to be a pretty good year for Kate. In January she won the Arts Foundation’s graphic novel prize, in March the collected Spider Moon makes its bow as part of the inaugral DFC Library range (see Molly and Richard’s review here). We caught up with Kate, who has kindly agreed to share some pages and the earlier sketches that preceded them from Spider Moon and to talk us through them; over to Kate:

Making The Spider Moon for The DFC presented me with several challenges! I wanted to try and make something that evoked the type of cartoons I watched when I was really little, like Mysterious Cities of Gold, Belle & Sebastian, Willy Fogg and those types of things… I’d loved them so much, and so in a way I wanted The Spider Moon to be a sort of homage and a “thank you” to that era of cartoons!

I tried out a lot of different story ideas in my notebook, but The Spider Moon came from this tiny rubbish sketch that I made in a café in Winchester:

(That’s a girl diving to collect something or other from under the sea. I wondered what she was collecting and why, and it went from there).

I wanted the comic to look chunky and bright, and above all I wanted to try and make it as easy to read as possible, as I knew The DFC was aimed at all audiences, not just comic-readers. So, I really wanted to try and make sure The Spider Moon was easy enough to follow. When making the actual comic, I tried to pay attention to the visual flow of the comic above all else. I did the main bulk of work building the visuals and the dialogue up on the actual thumbnails. I found this worked quite well for speed, and so that my editor could get a fairly good idea of how the comic would “read” in the end. So, I’d block out one whole part of the story (for instance, Episodes 1-12 for series 1), and then when we were all more or less happy with the draft, I’d go and produce the final pages. The original thumbnails looked like this:

They’re super-rough and quite embarrassing to look at! Anyway, these are the resulting pages from those particular thumbnails:

I don’t know if you can really read the scribble or not, but the dialogue changed a lot from the original thumbnails. This was the case for the vast majority of pages. I’m not good at settling with dialogue. (I should really try and get better at producing thumbnails…)

Often pages fell into “bands” of three or four, that I’d hoped would create a sort of rhythm to the reading that would make it easy to follow, too. I’m not sure I’m explaining that very well…! Here’s a visual example:

Doing this also made it much easier for me to pace and thumbnail the tiny episodes, as I basically had to block out the action into about 12 sections per episode.

The Spider Moon was a comic full of a lot of “firsts” for me! I’d not really written fantasy before, or children’s comics before, or written and drawn a long comic before, or made a long comic in colour. I do love colouring though, so I tried to use it for all types of things in the comic itself including a sort of mood-indicator… this page is a bit of an extreme example, but still:

If a scene was dangerous or of a character was shocked or upset I tried to reflect that in the unused space in the gutters, and in decorative things like the ropes that “hung up” some panels.  There’s an awful lot of reds and yellows in Part Two of the story, as the characters get really stressed all the time, haha! ^_^;

The whole story was to be about five parts long, with four main characters including Bekka. The first part really serves as an introduction to Bekka and her world and its situation. Though only two parts of the story were drawn, the rest exists in note-form and partial thumbnail-draft. What was awesome was that Playbox Theatre, who transformed the story into a wonderful stage production last year, took the whole story and told it from beginning to end. It was really great for me to see the story come to its conclusion!

I think one of the criticisms of the comic was that it was quite slow. I actually thought it was too quick… it was the “quickest” comic I’d ever made. The way it was cut into such tiny episodes did affect the way it was created. I really wanted it to read alright as a continuous story, not just in small weekly chunks, and that was probably one of the biggest challenges I faced when making it: trying to reconcile those different reading styles was really very tricky!

Thanks for reading! ^_^/

FPI would like to thank Kate for taking the time to take us on a wee behind the scenes ‘director’s commentary’ on Spider Moon. You can follow Kate via her website here or her Twitter;  Spider Moon itself is out shortly. And of Spider Moon’s Bekka young Molly told us that she was “a great character for girls to enjoy, really cheeky and fearless, so not scared of anything!…” and that the book was a  “great adventure book with lots of interesting things going on, I really liked all of the questions it made me ask – what will the end of the world be like, who are the bad men at the royal palace and I really want to know more about Bekka and her special diving skill.” And we never argue with Molly’s opinions round here. We know better.