#myjetpack

The great thing about a graphic novel, as opposed to the short cartoons, is just having more space. If you want to draw something out over ten pages, you can. Or, if you want to compress a gigantic event into one panel, you can do that. That’s one of the things that I think comics are quite brilliant at. You can play with time in a way which the reader isn’t trapped in it. If you’re watching a movie and things are going slowly, you kind of have to sit there, and things are going slowly for you. Whereas, in a comic, where your eyes can move over the page at your own pace, you can almost depict boredom in a way that isn’t boring and lots of other interesting things. So, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of comics for me is laying out things on a page.

[With] graphic novels, the problem is that first step of coming up with an idea. I think a lot of the work is persuading yourself that the idea is worth doing. You need to persuade yourself to keep going and make it better, but it’s a sort of Catch-22: It’s not going to be good because you haven’t worked on it yet, but you have to sort of trick yourself into working on it long enough that it starts becoming good. Eventually, it turns into a snowball and keeps going, because then it’s getting good and it’s easy to work on. But, that first step of coming up with an idea and talking yourself into it, is the thing I find hard. With a graphic novel, you’re thinking to yourself ‘I’m going to work on this for a year, and it’s going to be a book that people are going to pay for and read for half an hour, an hour, or two hours.’ So, it’s harder to get started. Whereas, with the short comics, I say to myself, ‘It’s in a newspaper, so if someone doesn’t like it, they can read a different bit of the newspaper.’ [That’s] kind of easier.

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