Gingerbread Houses, by webcomics stalwarts Alexander Danner and Edward J. Grug III, starts today on Modern Tales. Danner and Grug have both published work on Modern Tales in the past, Alexander with Picture Story Theatre and Grug with The Bizarre Life of Charlie Redeye. Now they’re back with an unsettling fairy tale written by Danner and drawn by Grug. The guys were kind enough to let me ask them a few questions about comics, collaborating, and their favorite fairy tales.

Shaenon Garrity: How did you get started in comics?

Alexander Danner: My first work in comics was actually an editorial internship at Marvel, but I was there at a bad time. This was in 1996, right after they filed for bankruptcy and laid off a third of their staff. It was a great opportunity, but the general atmosphere was pretty depressing, so much so that I actually stopped reading comics after that. I didn’t come back until my (now) wife picked up the first issue of Andi Watson’s Breakfast After Noon. That was the book that opened my eyes to the world of independent comics and got me excited about writing them again.

But my real opportunity to start making comics didn’t come until the webcomics boom. Before that, it was just too hard to find an artist, and I’ve never had much desire to illustrate my own stuff. I don’t like drawing enough to get good at it, and the pleasure of seeing how another artist interprets my ideas is too exciting to give up. Once I was able to start hanging out in comics discussion forums with a bunch of talented early-career artists, things really started to come together for me.

Edward J. Grug: After drawing comic pretty much just for myself and then, in high school, drawing small books and photocopying them for my friends, I discovered a local anthology in a record store. They were looking for new artists, and I hadn’t really considered the idea of publishing before, so I submitted. They liked my work, and printed it.

We’re talking small runs and photocopied printing here, but to me, it was amazing.

They folded after a few more issues and a friend of mine, Matthew Langfield, and I eventually started self publishing ourselves. Again, small runs and photocopied books, but now with colour covers. We got extremely cheap printing and could sell them for a dollar and actually make money. (You know, if you discount the time we actually spent working on the comics).

In 2001 I discovered James Kochalka, and that lead me to find webcomics. In 2002 Matthew and I pitched our first-ever webcomic to Modern Tales, which they accepted, and we basically abandoned print. We went from a readership of a hundred or two, to thousands.

I’ve gone back to printing stuff again, but I never stopped putting my work online.

SG: Alexander, what was the inspiration for Gingerbread Houses?

AD: I’ve always been deeply disturbed by the ending of “Hansel and Gretel.” Not the burning a witch in the oven part–the part where they get back home to find that their evil stepmother has conveniently died in their absence, leaving them free to live happily ever after with their adoring father. But their adoring father had already tried to murder them, not just once, but twice! How do you live happily ever after with that? Just because the kids brought back a bag of gems, now he’s suddenly a good father?

Ultimately, it was my curiosity about the children’s parents. The father’s flaws are vastly underackngowledged. I’m willing to buy that he really does have love for his children, but that just makes his willingness to leave them to die of exposure at his wife’s say-so that much more fascinating.

And besides that, I think the stepmother gets a worse rap than she deserves. Yes, she does exhort her husband to murder his children. Most stepmothers do, according to those old fairy tales. Usually it was just about petty jealousy or outright malice–see Snow White or Cinderella. But Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother had a very different motive than the rest: she was literally starving to death! The story takes place during a famine, and this is a deeply impoverished family. The stepmother is basically a staunch pragmatist: the fewer mouths she has to feed, the greater the chance of survival for the ones who remain. Not that I think she should be commended for this–certainly not!–but I like to think the decision wasn’t as easy for her as the traditional story would have us believe.

SG: Grug, what are some of your artistic influences?

EJG: These days I am really excited about European comics, especially French. The work of Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Christophe Blain… All those guys that are finally being translated here just blow me away.

I recently decided to “go the next step” with my work. I’ve been using a brush, and finally working at double size and just trying to take the things I love from the French style and mesh it with my own.

SG: What kind of mood do you hope to set with the art for this comic?

EJG: Alexander has given me a surprisingly dark script for an adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. I’m going to do my best to keep it dark and creepy.

I love a slow-moving, moody comic.

SG: What made the two of you decide to work together on this project?

AD: We’ve worked together before, on a shorter story called Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. I loved how that story turned out, and I love Grug’s enthusiasm for the work. His character designs blew me away. I don’t tend to put a lot of description into what my characters look like, because I really enjoy being surprised by what artists come up with. The downside of that is that I end up with Generic Guy a little more often than I would like. But despite having a pretty large number of characters for a 30-page story, every character in BYDTWD has a unique and memorable look, from build, to face, to wardrobe, everything evocative of real personality. And that was all Grug. Gingerbread Houses doesn’t have nearly so large a cast, but I’m completely in love with his depiction of Father.

I’ve had the script for Gingerbread Houses sitting on my hard drive for a few years. I originally wrote it for Bill Duncan, back when we were doing Picture Story Theatre. These days, though, he has a couple of very small roommates who deserve his attention way more than I do, so I’ve been on the lookout for someone else who could capture the aesthetic I was looking for. I wanted someone who could subtly capture the dark core of the story, without sacrificing the childlike quality. After working with Grug on BYDTWD, I knew I’d found my artist.

And on a whole other level, Grug has amazing fans, I have to say. Seeing their responses to each new page of BYDTWD, such open delight and worry for the character, was really energizing for me. More than anyone else, I’m hoping they’ll enjoy this story.

EJG: Ha ha…what made me decide to work on the book was that I got an email out of the blue from Alexander. Another part of me wanting to “go the next step” artistically is to start working more with writers. I can write a comic, but art is my strength and I have a wealth of writers to work with who write challenging scripts and stuff I would never write for my self.

We had worked together on “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day” previously, and that meant of course that I knew any script I was going to get from Alexander would be really great and suit me well, so I said, “Heck yes, send it over!”

And it was and it did!

SG: Do you know how long Gingerbread Houses will be?

AD: Exactly 74 pages, including the title page and chapter dividers. A novella, I suppose, and the longest single story I’ve published online. The whole thing is scripted and has gone through three or four drafts. Of course, about a week after I sent the final draft to Grug, I had an idea for a whole other chapter I could add, but I didn’t let myself do it. Sometimes you just have to declare a story done.

SG: What do you hope people will get out of this story?

EJG: I hope people will find it entertaining, obviously, but also “real” and kind of disturbing. Obviously it has fantasy elements: there’s a witch that lives in a gingerbread house! But I think the characters are real, and the reactions are real.

It’s a much darker story than the usual thing I would work on, and that’s one thing I really love about it!

AD: I hope readers will see the original story in a new light. My goal isn’t to reinvent “Hansel and Gretel,” but to draw attention to elements that are really already there.

SG: what’s your favorite fairy tale, and why?

AD: I have vivd memories of a story called “The Little Half Chick” that my grandmother read to me when I was little. It’s a Spanish fable (typically an Easter story, though I’m not sure why) that relates the origins of the weathervane. The main character is a baby chick with a very bad attitude and horrible congenital deformities–it’s missing a leg, a wing, and an eye on one side of its body. Artistic representations I’ve seen typically show the chick as just being flat on one side, but still yellow and fuzzy. This image never occurred to me as a child–when I heard “half chick” I pictured a neatly bisected chick, an actual cross-section, hopping around, having mean-spirited adventures. I could never figure out how his organs stayed in.

As an adult reading that story, I can see the logic of it, the connection between the flat, bird-shaped weathervane and the flat little chick. But to a kid, it was just the most bizarre thing I’d ever heard, especially the way I pictured him. And the fact that this deformed little baby bird was a complete jerk on top of it just made the whole thing perfect. Someday, I have to do a retelling of that story, but I haven’t the slightest idea how!

EJG: I always loved “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats.” That’s the one where a goat leaves her kids at home and warns them not to open the door to anyone. Of course they do, and it’s the wolf and he eats them all except for the youngest who manages to hide.

When the mother gets home the little one tells her what happened. They find the wolf asleep and the mother cuts open his stomach with a pair of shears (somehow not waking the wolf) and out come the kids. The mother then fills the wolf with heavy stones and sews him shut.

The wolf wakes up thirsty and tries to take a drink from the river, falls in, and drowns. Then the young wolves dance.

I had a book and cassette of that as a kid and I loved it!

SG: What other projects are you working on right now?

EJG: As always, I have a bunch of projects running at the moment. Aside form anything I may randomly update on my site, I have a series that is about to launch called Glorious Bounty. I’m not going to give too much away right now, but when it launches it’ll have its own dedicated site. It’s written by local playwright and cartoonist Luke Milton.

We’re working on it behind the scenes and should be launching it in the not-too distant future.

The other big project is issue three of Love Puppets, which is running over at Top Shelf 2.0. They run them as each issue is completed, and the art for this chapter is only just starting now, so it may be a little while before this project sees the light, but it’s coming. It’s written by my fiancé, Jessica McLeod.

I’m still in the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge (Yes, that thing is still going on), so I have to post a page of something every day.

AD: The next project that should turn up in the near future is “Uncertainty,” a 30-ish page story that Tym Godek is illustrating. It’s a new office story, with themes similar to The Discovery of Spoons. I believe that will be starting up as soon as Tym finishes his current project, the exclamatorily titled “!” Which is, I might add, a wonderful comic itself. Once “Uncertainty” is done, I’m hoping to put out a print collection of all my office stories.

My biggest news, though, is that I’m working on a series of YA novels to be published by SLG Publishing. It’s an interesting situation, in that the project originated with the artist, the immensely talented Shelli Paroline. She self-published the first few pages of a story called “Trouble Is,” a few years ago. SLG saw it and approached her about publishing the finished book. She jumped at that opportunity, of course, but she didn’t want to write the books herself, so she offered the writing duties to me.

It’s a real challenge–I’ve never had to start writing from someone else’s ideas before. Fortunately, I have a lot of freedom–she had a loose outline, laying out where the story starts and ends, but there’s still the vast middle for me to fill in. I’m about a hundred pages into scripting the first book, and so far we’re both really enjoying the results. It helps that the story is right up my alley to begin with–it’s a bit reminiscent of Young Love vs. the Shambling Monster, the last Portraits of Nervous Children story I did with Bill.

I hope to have the first script done by the beginning of summer, but I have no idea how long it will be before the book hits print after that.

Also, I’m very excited to be teaching Writing the Graphic Novel at Emerson College, as part of their certificate program in Graphic Novel Writing and Illustrating. It’s a new, but growing program, and I hope anyone thinking about putting some time into formal study of the comics craft will give it a look.

SG: Any final thoughts?

AD: Sure, one last plug: anyone making, reading, or otherwise experiencing comics in the Boston metro area should make a point to drop in on the Boston Comics Roundtable. It’s an amazing and rapidly growing community that does a lot to support local creators and promote their work. We give each other feedback on works in progress, pool resources for convention displays, and are even publishing “Inbound,” a biannual anthology of work by Boston-area creators. Issue three will be out next month. Other webcomics creators who frequently turn up at meetings include Dirk Tiede and Dan Mazur.

EJG: None, except that it’s cool to be coming back to Modern Tales!

Read Gingerbread Houses now!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Modern Tales News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.