16 minute read
An Interview with Andy Warner
Andy Warner by Audra McNamee
Andy Warner
Andy Warner creates nonfiction comics. He is the author of Spring Rain, This Land is My Land, and the NY Times Best Selling Brief Histories of Everyday Objects. His books have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish. He is a contributing editor at The Nib and teaches cartooning at Stanford University and The Animation Workshop in Denmark. His work has been published widely, including by Slate, American Public Media, Popular Science, KQED, IDEO.org, The Center for Constitutional Rights, UNHCR, UNRWA, UNICEF, Google X and Buzzfeed. Warner was a recipient of the 2018 Berkeley Civic Arts Grant and the 2019 and 2021 Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park Artist-in-Residency.
Interview with Andy Warner
By Forest Wihtol and Debarghya Sanyal
https://jsma.uoregon.edu/andywarner
Debarghya Sanyal: How did you go from completing a graduate degree in comics to becoming a comics journalist? And why do you think that comics are an effective form for telling nonfiction stories? Andy Warner: I had experimented a little bit with nonfiction before going to grad school. I went to grad school at the Center for Cartoon Studies. And I have done a memoir comic, and a little history comic. While I was in school at CCS, I did a mini-comic about the time I was living in Beirut in 2005, when Rafic Hariri was assassinated, and the government fell. There was a great response from the students. It was a story that was really important to me and delving into it was a very interesting experience. It set me on the path. I had gone to grad school thinking I would do fiction, but then I realized that I was really good at nonfiction. I realized I was getting more out of it than I ever did out of working in fiction. So, I just swerved from there. While I was still in school, I started doing freelance assignments for Slate. This was during the early days of the Arab uprisings in 2011. And then immediately after I graduated this kind of non-fictional, reportage-based work became my focus. They were my bread and butter during those years, primarily because it was easy to get assignments. Then I would do webcomics that were more history-based. Forest Wihtol: You’ve been instrumental in creating the transnational and really heterogeneous network of artists that contribute to The Nib or—before that—Irene; can you tell us about that process, both how you meet so many different kinds of artists, and then how you get them involved in nonfiction comics?
AW: One of the most amazing things about comics is that it’s still a small world, especially nonfiction comics. There are people all over the world that love comics and read them. There are different traditions of comics, like the American underground comics. A comics fandom exists everywhere, and wherever you go, you can find communities of people expressing themselves through comics. That was an experience I had had growing up and moving around as a kid. I often met people that were quite invested in comics. And then my interest in them bloomed again when I went to Lebanon. In 2006, after I returned from Lebanon, I was also introduced to comics artists and writers there who were working on a comics collective called Samandal. It was founded by four cartoonists, artists and animators. From the getgo, they wanted to publish the anthology in three different languages—Arabic, French and English, with artists from as many different places as they could find, so there were artists from the U.S., Lebanon, France, all over the place. So, I immediately, early on in my career, like 2007, had access to a really international community of cartoonists. And then when I went to grad school, it was this model of collaborative comics that became an inspiration for Irene, which was more fiction focused. Meanwhile, the nonfiction scene was brewing in the background with the help of people like Matt Bors and Erin Polgreen. When I started getting more heavily involved in the editorial side of The Nib, I brought this huge network that had snowballed till that point while working with these two international publications. In fact, in the last issue of Irene that we put out before it imploded, we had a cartoonist from every continent, including Antarctica. Both with Samandal and Irene there was always this really explicitly international focus to try to connect communities of cartoonists that exist all across the world, but are usually siloed because of language barriers.
DS: Can you describe your process for reporting and how you approach a story that you plan to draw? AW: Well, first the most important thing is thinking about where you plan to have it published. Thinking about where it’s going to end up and the audience is very important. That shapes the pitch; so you’re kind of thinking about all this stuff before you come to an editor with it. The basic idea of [the pitch] is why this is interesting to you. Because there’s a whole world out there, a billion things that could be interesting. The making of a chair could be interesting. I have a whole side career out of making boring things seem interesting. It’s a passion of mine and I have written a bunch of books about it. It’s the same principle; you’re finding the fascination in it and then explaining that fascination to somebody else. It starts with the editor; you should be able to hook them. So you come to them with an idea.
And the way you get those ideas is just by looking around, being aware, listening to things, talking to people, remembering stories, and then once something catches your attention, digging into it deeper. Once somebody’s bid on a story, I generally write out a skeleton of it first, and then I’ll start doing interviews. That skeletal structure is really subject to change; it’s just a foundational idea that guides my interviews. Once I have the audio from the interviews and reference photos that I take, if I am able to do them in person or do a site visit—which has been harder over the last year and a half—I process those. There’re a ton of great AI transcription software out there, these days. (AIs are good at this point, they’re going to take all our jobs.) You get the transcriptions, then you break it up into story chunks. You have this one long talk that has unspooled between you and the person. I would suggest that if you’re interviewing, you have a little notebook alongside which you can then use to timestamp interesting stuff in the conversation. And that just reminds you that when you’re looking at the AI transcription the next day, that you can go and look at like, minute ten. It’s good to timestamp stuff because it lets you form the narrative in your head. And so, an interview is a collection of narrative blocks, and you separate out the blocks and figure out how to arrange them into the skeletal structure, thumbnail it out, start drawing it. And then hopefully people read it! With a lot of editorial process back and forth. I have worked as a writer, a writer-artist, an artist for somebody else writing, and as an editor. I have kind of worked in all of the roles. And the influence of the editor is not to be understated. You should be sharing the stuff as you’re working on it with the person who’s expecting to publish it, as often as you can. You don’t want a bad surprise and they don’t want a bad surprise, especially with comics because they’re so much more hard to revise than prose is. FW: As a follow up, when you teach at the Stanford Graphic Novel Project—you just gave a lot of advice—is there any additional advice you give your students for drawing nonfiction?
AW: Sure, yeah. There’s endless advice! (chuckles) The Stanford Project is interesting; it’s a group project. Some people are penciling, some are inking, and everybody’s doing everything. So a given page may be penciled by one person, inked by another, colored by another, written by another, and nobody specializes. One of the things I try to teach with that program is getting a little good at everything, which I think is important so you don’t get slowed down in the process. If you need to figure out how something looks in print, you’ll need to know a little bit of InDesign. You need to know how to do quick digital edits, so you’ll have to know a bit of Photoshop as well. If this stuff frustrates you, it’s fine! You don’t need to know everything, but just familiarize yourself enough that if something new comes at you, you don’t get scared of it or get stuck in technological ruts. I work digitally purely, and I have since 2007. I don’t draw using pen and paper at all. I’ve switched technological tools a bunch of times since then. I’ve switched programs as the stuff has gotten better and better. It’s helped me work faster, and it’s helped me stay on top of how to turn files into editors properly, how to not frustrate the publications that I am working on. As a freelancer, you’re your own boss, and you’re also your own tech department, and your own HR, and that makes it a big, difficult job. You have to take care of yourself and make sure that you’re doing all those things, because nobody else is going to.
DS: How much does your audience or platform influence how you tell a story? When you’re writing a piece for the UN do you have a different set of goals than if you’re writing for, say, Buzzfeed?
AW: Yeah, massively! I have a strange career since everything I do is nonfiction. But I work in a lot of different spaces— everything from kids’ books to anti-genocide advocacy stuff, like NGOs, to journalism (objective, paid journalism work) to memoir. All of those have different sets of rules. They’re all nonfiction spaces—a jokey history of a toothbrush is a nonfiction space—but it has different rules than a serious treatment of political violence. You can’t just flippantly jump between them. I always, from the early days of my career, was working on weird dark stuff at the same time as jokey fun stuff. It’s just like nonfiction code switching; you think about your audience, you think about how they would react, and then you tailor it for that. That doesn’t mean censoring yourself in any way; you just put yourself in the shoes of the person reading it: This person has picked up this thing to read because you’ve managed to interest them, and it’s fine to challenge them— you should challenge them—but challenge them on terms that they understand and accept. You can write very complex stuff for kids, but you can’t write for kids like you write for adults and vice versa. You also can’t write for screens like you write for print. One of the things that I really love about comics is that it’s one of the more complicated art forms that you can work in, in fiction or nonfiction. If you’re thinking about the page, it’s a graphic design problem; if you’re thinking about the narrative, it’s a story problem; if you’re thinking about how to draw people, it’s an art problem. You’re also thinking about journalistic integrity and ethics, and thinking about the audience and the reception of the audience and the medium that it’s appearing in: print, digital, size of the panels... FW: Since you first began producing works of comics journalism, what are some of the major changes you have noticed in the field, in terms of practices, tools and approaches? Which of these are you most excited about, and which ones not so much?
AW: [Comics journalism] is an old field. I came to it at a point where people like Joe Sacco had been huge in it for a decade and a half. Sarah Glidden’s star was on the rise. I didn’t have to make the case to editors that comics journalism was a serious enterprise, and I am wildly thankful for that. Not having to expend the energy cutting the path, and just walking down it is something I am so grateful for! Because all the editors that I was pitching to, at places like Slate or Popular Science, they had read Safe Area Goražde or Palestine. These [books] were assigned in university classes. The idea that comics were a serious way to treat nonfiction stories, including
something as sacred as journalism, that had been breached, and I didn’t need to make that argument to editors. So that was one thing, as I was starting my career, what’s changed is that there’s been a lot more people doing it. When I started, I could count the number of people on one hand, that I knew of. Also, a lot of times you think there’s only a few people, but they’re just not connected. That’s one of the beautiful things about something like Samandal or The Nib or any of these things that exist to bring people together. They can make people realize that they’re not alone in a practice, in trying to create good honest nonfiction work using the medium of comics.
And then, those spaces became entrenched and well-funded. Money started coming in from like v[enture] c[apital] places. They probably thought they could turn a profit. Joke’s on them; they didn’t. But they accidentally funded a beautiful and vibrant nonfiction comics scene, which has outlasted the venture capital funding. It’s no longer the golden days of a year and a half or two years ago when The Nib was rolling in money, and we were putting out four issues of the print quarterly a year and three long-form stories on the website a week. But all the people that were brought together during that era still know each other. The Nib still exists, and everybody’s still making comics, for the most part. People always come to comics, and they always leave, and the scene changes. I have been lucky enough to get there after you stopped having to make the argument for its existence. And then I was able to be around to watch it come together into this really global scene, where cartoonists from Australia know cartoonists from Lebanon, know cartoonists from Finland, know cartoonists in South Africa, know cartoonists in Brazil, etc. etc. And we hang out when we’re at different conventions. DS: What lies ahead? What do you think of the future— personally, for your own work, as well as the future of comics journalism? AW: Well, one thing that’s exciting is that there’s so many people who are mid-career and still more at an early career stage. The people who are mid-career, the people I came up with like Matt Bors, Eleri [Harris], Mattie Lubchansky, or the other people at The Nib, that first generation, are all beginning to do big, interesting things. Organs like The Nib and other places still exist and are publishing a generation of even younger cartoonists. And this was starting to happen with my generation of cartoonists and the generation before me, but the generation that I’m teaching right now in my classes in Denmark and Stanford are a wholly different kind of cartoonists. I got to know comics in the 90s, when it was associated with kind of nerdy white guys hanging out in shops that were impenetrable to anybody outside the fandom. But comics just looks different now: It’s younger, it’s browner, it’s queerer. It’s this awesome landscape that with every successive generation of people coming into comics in general, but nonfiction comics especially, what people are writing about, talking about, and using the medium to talk to each other about is changing. And that’s in such early days for the medium; it’s like 15, 20 years of this, that’s so young for an art form, watching that grow and blossom, and watching those people hit mid-career is what’s really exciting to me. The planet will be consumed by flames, you know, The Nib’s brand is doom, and we flog that a lot, but there is a hope that is an undercurrent in what I do and what, editorially, we try to do at The Nib in terms of trying to bring people together and make amazing stuff, that I still look forward to.
Personally, I am still making nonfiction comics. I have a book coming out in September of this year about animal domestication. I have another book coming out next year or the year after about plant domestication. I am writing right now a long form journalism piece about living along the volcano coast of Hawaii, where these cataclysms keep wiping out communities every 30 to 50 years in this really devastating way and how people rebuild from that. I don’t have an end goal; I just do stuff until I stop. FW: Do you have any more advice that you would like to give to aspiring journalists? AW: The most important advice is to be nice. You’re going to have to eat shit, like super hard, at several points in your career. And the important thing is to do that while smiling. It sucks but this is true of not just comics journalism, but of any power dynamic. The relationship between an editor and a writer is a power dynamic. You have to keep your editors happy to a certain point, because you depend on them for your work and for passing your work along to other editors, recommending you. And I cannot tell you how much in the early days of my career editors told me that they had recommended me to work with others, because I was nice and easy to work with. So, the biggest thing I could impart to any young journalist is to be easy to work with. It doesn’t mean you have to be an easy person. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to hold your ground and advocate for yourself and stake out your position and be honest and be ethical and be your own journalist. It just means if somebody gives you the edit that you don’t want to get, and it makes you mad, don’t respond to that right away. Give it a few hours, and respond then. If you’re still mad give it a few more hours and say you left your phone at the beach. Lie to your editors before you yell at them. Especially in the early parts of your career—that would be the biggest piece of advice. The other is recognize opportunity, and work hard when it comes. Because a lot of this is luck and chance, and privilege of course, but a lot of it’s chance. You can work your ass off and not have anything come at you. And then, you can be walking on a sunny day, and it lands in your lap. My first book came from an editor walking down the street from her offices and buying a mini comic in New York. I wasn’t even in New York. I had just sent a copy to this place, and she bought it and was like, “Oh, this should be a book,” and emailed me out of the blue. So, send your stuff out there, and then when something like that happens, jump on it, recognize that it’s an opportunity, and jump on it. Just don’t let go. There’s no map to a successful career. There’s no portfolio day where you go around to the magazines and show them your good work and get a pat on the head anymore. Just get your stuff out there, throw out a ton of lines, be nice to everybody and then, when a line appears, yank at it!
