The Corner Box S1E21 - The Chris Eliopoulus Interview: Hardest Working Man in Comics

[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where we talk about comics as an industry and an art form. You never know where the discussion will go or who will show up to join host David Hedgecock and John Barber. Between them, they've spent decades writing, drawing, lettering, coloring, editing, editor-in-chiefing, and publishing comics. If you want to know the behind-the-scenes secrets, the highs and lows, the ins and outs of the best artistic medium in the world, then listen in and join us on The Corner Box.

[00:31] David Hedgecock: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm David, and with me, as always, is my good friend

[00:38] John Barber: John Barber. Hope you're not sick of us. We're here with somebody I've known for a really long time in comics. Somebody that David just met about 45 seconds ago. Mr. Chris Eliopoulos, thank you for joining.

[00:49] Chris Eliopoulos: Thanks, guys. I was always a big fan before I became a guest on your show.

[00:55] John: You're the first person to demand to be on the show. At the same time, you demanded that you were rightfully paid for a project that you hadn't been paid for yet.

[01:02] Chris: Welcome to comics. That pretty much encapsulates comics in every way. In just one moment. Yes. It's like “I need work that I needed to promote and get paid now.”

[01:18] John: Yeah, well, you're correct on all fronts. Chris, for anybody that doesn't know, I mean, I think we'll get into the actual career part of it. I met him in the context of him lettering comic books and running an excellent studio of letterers, Virtual Calligraphy, but he's also an acclaimed writer of many comics at Marvel and elsewhere, an acclaimed cartoonist of his own comic strips and comic books, and probably best known for drawing the I Am series of books written by Brad Meltzer. These really great kids’ books. I’m sure you know about them. If you don't, they're really great kids’ books, largely comics, that are biographies of people or sometimes characters from history.

[02:03] Chris: The main line is historical figures, and then we did a side hustle with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. So, we're trying to expand out into the fictional market as well, and then that got turned into a TV show, Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum. So, I like to just tout all of my credits just in case I need to impress somebody.

[02:27] David: I am impressed.

[02:30] Chris: It's really more likely just to explain to my wife why I don't come to bed until two o'clock in the morning every night, and why I'm always exhausted.

[02:38] David: Yeah, man, you’ve got to. You're pumping out some content. I was looking at the Ordinary People Change the World stuff, which is the I Am series.

[02:48] Chris: We go back and forth with it as well. So, don't stress.

[02:50] David: Okay, and the I Am Mr. Rogers book came out just in October, if I saw that right, and then you've got another one coming out in January, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You're staying busy.

[03:03] Chris: We do about three year at this point. Right as the pandemic kicked in, everybody was like, “we need more books, so, Chris, why don't you do six books a year?” and I was like, “Say what now?” But I did it. It practically killed me, and we decided that was enough. Don't kill the artists. We need to keep going. So, I'm trying to think it was a year's time, I did nine books, which is insane.

[03:34] David: Each one of those is 30/40 pages.

[03:39] Chris: Plus, the covers and stuff like that, and then I did my own books that I wrote and drew on the side at the same time. So, it was crazy. So, we just decided three should be enough.

[03:49] David: Got another Sergio Aragonés on our hands here, John.

[03:53] Chris: I wish I was as fast, I just have to take more time. So, I just worked day and night, like I said, weekends. It's constant, but that's always been my career. Even when I was lettering, I just always push, push, push. It's funny, when I go and talk to students or people who want to get into the business, they always want the secret handshake. They want the “what's the secret way to get in the back door?” type of thing, and it's just really, I remember I heard the first statement, when I was younger, which was “you have to be two of three things to do well in the comic industry, which is: be nice, be good, and be fast.” If you can be any two of those, you'll always have work. If you can do three, you'll always have work. Always. You'll have to turn work down. I've always tried to do that. Everybody thought, “you must love lettering because you just go crazy, and you do it all the time.” No, I always choose to do the best I can do, and it got me somewhere.

[04:43] David: Did you have a love of comic books before you started working in comics? Did you have a goal of working in comics at some time in your life?

[04:53] Chris: Not really comics. When I was really young, my father would take us to the local candy store every Sunday and allow my sister and I to choose one item to buy, and my sister would buy a piece of candy which was gone before we left the store. I would get a comic book, which, if you look behind me, even though people can't see it, I have a spinner rack, and on that spinner rack are still the comics that I got when I was 5/6/7/8. They're totally beat to heck. They’re facing away, but they're totally beat because they were read over and over again. So, I loved them for a while and I would read them all the time, and then I fell in love with Peanuts, the comic strip, and that veered me into cartooning. So, I'd always be that direction, and then, it was weird, at high school, I met a friend who was really into comics. He introduced me to John Byrne’s X Men, and I won't say I was a comics fan. I think I was a John Byrne fan and really loved his work. So, I was collecting his stuff. I became an artist fan. John probably loves the writing. I love the art, as I speak for John, who's just probably like, “don't speak for me,” but Byrne and Simonson, and Art Adams, those were the guys that I'd love to look at. Then I went to college, I dropped out again, and I was back into comic strips, and then in my last year, I took a class in sequential storytelling with Gene Colan. Yeah, it was great. So, Gene took us to Marvel on a field trip, just as I was looking for an internship, and I applied and I got in. So, I started as an intern at Marvel, my last year of college, and they hired me directly out of school. I wasn't always into it.

[06:41] David: What do they hire you to do when you graduate? What was your internship like? And what did they first hire you for?

[06:47] Chris: What was interesting is, most people come into Marvel with a comic artist or writer portfolio. I came up with graphic design, because that's what I was studying, graphic design, because my parents were like, “you're never going to be a cartoonist in your life. You might as well choose a major that will get you somewhere.” So, I had all this typography and book design, and they didn't know what to do with me. They were so excited that it was somebody different who didn't have a drawing of Spider Man on every page. It was like “here's design stuff.” So, they split my time. I worked as an intern for Carl Potts half the time, in the mornings, and then the afternoons, I'd work in the production department doing paste up and all that stuff that used to be done by hand. That's done by computers now. Within two weeks of working there, they used to do this thing. So, the original art would come in, and if it was late, they would do the lettering on a separate piece of velum, which would be down the back, glued, and you'd past it up onto the actual artwork. You'd cut it out and paste it up. So, I was doing that, and I guess I got so good so quick, because I already had the skills from college, they started giving me freelance work within two weeks of starting as an intern, and they were stupid. They trusted a dumb intern with original artwork.

[08:04] David: I was going to say, man, what kind of stuff were you looking at?

[08:08] Chris: The first stuff I took home was Alan Davis on Excalibur with Tom Orzechowski lettering, and they were like, “come back tomorrow with it.” You don't even know me.

[08:19] David: I would have never come back. I would’ve been like, “so much for my Marvel career.”

[08:24] Chris: “There's 10/15 pages of Alan's work. Go.”

[08:27] David: You’re just looking at the originals as they're coming in on this stuff. How long is that the process before it changes to where things are happening digitally?

[08:38] Chris: So, I started at Marvel in ‘89. We had started, by 1991, Richard and Comicraft had started trying to do some lettering digitally, but the way it was being done was they would do it digitally, they print it out, and then they would send that over, then we'd still do the same process of whiting it out, pasting it up, and putting it on the boards. That lasted for a few more years, probably till about 95/96, I think, and then it started to kick in where they would digitally put it together. We originally used to work in Quark, which isn't long. I don't even know if it's still around, and then eventually InDesign

[09:19] John: We’re both laughing at this.

[09:21] David: Yeah, tell the story.

[09:22] John: Both of us used to be at IDW. I think, 2011/2012. We knew each other then. You remember me going.

[09:31] Chris: You were back at Marvel, I knew you. What are you talking about?

[09:33] John: I know. I'm just saying for the readers. I'm not reminding you.

[09:36] Chris:  Readers? Are there listeners?

[09:39] John: We have transcripts. Most of the people read. I told myself that. We don't track transcript downloads. It must be 1000s of people. Millions. Quark stopped being used at IDW four years ago. That's what I'm getting to.

[09:55] David:

We were at the point where people in our production department were working directly with Quark to get them to update their program in specific ways, and since we were literally the only customer left, they were like, “yeah, we'll make that happen for you.”

[10:08] John: So, my background is also in graphic design, so I knew this stuff going over there, and one of the first things I did is I brought in Ryan Hughes to design a logo for us, and Ryan's like “I'm going to send it over as an AI file.” I’m like, “could you send an EPS?” Ryan’s like “you don't need an EPS anymore. InDesign can just use native AI files.” Adobe Illustrator files, not artificial intelligence, again, for the listeners. “We used Quark, Ryan.” He goes “No, you are surely mistaken. No. In the year of our Lord, 2012, no one is using Quark Express to lay out comic books or put lettering in comic books.” Yeah. So yeah. Anyway, sorry.

[10:49] Chris: Yeah, no, it faded quick. I think Adobe really pulled the market. I mean, you remember, in the beginning, letterers went straight to Illustrator, colorists went right to Photoshop, and I mean, the gaudy ‘90s, you had all these bells and whistles. So, everybody was trying.

[11:05] David: Everyone was having a good old time.

[11:07] Chris: Oh, my God, it was like, “let's do a pink to an orange to a purple fade on Spider Man's costume,” and you're like, “do what now?” And it was just like, “This is so great,” and every lettering, everybody had a different style balloon and a different thing, and it became so distracting, and I think we self-corrected as the years went on, but it was a long journey. I mean, it took a while for us to figure this out.

[11:30] David: So, you're handling original art that's coming into the offices up until 94/95/96?

[11:37] Chris: I was in the office until 92, but, again, I left to go freelance lettering, and they would send original art. It was FedEx, to me.

[11:448] David: You’re still lettering on the boards.

[11:50] Chris: Yeah, as long as it wasn't late, I'm lettering on the board. So, you get this beautiful artwork and feel guilty about covering it up with this crappy lettering that I was doing, and I learned more up at Marvel in the year and a half, two years that I was there than I did four years of college. You learn a business, you learn personalities, you learn how to deal with people. There was a time when Jim Lee and that crew were coming up, and Jim would come into the office and just doodle stuff right in front of you, or Bill Sienkiewicz would send it, he was doing this thing called Stray Toasters, and it was so out there, where he was doing collage, and he was pasting, and everything was 3D artwork coming in, and you would be like, “how do we scan this thing in?” You just didn't know how to deal with it, and it was exciting, they put their first computer in there. So, you were doing typography on the computer for the first time. The new stuff was coming in, and then you'd see Jim Lee come in and do stuff, and then a week later, Steve Ditko would come walking by, and you'd be like, “what the heck is going on here?” Stan would stop in and say hello, and it's just surreal.

[12:58] David: Totally surreal. I would never get anything done. I’d just be fanboying out the whole time.

[13:04] Chris: Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a point where you are, I'm sure John did it too, when you first get there, do fanboy, and then it becomes a normal thing where you're just like, “let's just get the work done already. I'm so done with this nonsense.”

[13:16] David: “Here's another page of Alan Davis art. Get it out of my face.”

[13:20] Chris: I know, you forget. When you were lettering stuff, they would also have you do lettering correction. So, you have this finished artwork that is just gorgeous, and then you'd be fixing stuff. One of the jobs I did was Weapon X. Yes, it's a little-known series that Barry Windsor-Smith did. Jim Novak had lettered it. He did a logo for it, and Barry wasn't happy with the logo. So, they had me do a new logo. So, I basically ripped off the Wolverine logo and just turned it into a Weapon X logo. He loved it. So, he's like, “great,” and then he decided that he wanted to do notes and corrections on finished work, but instead of Jim Novak redoing it, they would do it in house. So, my job was to imitate Jim, and Barry would sit over my shoulder, hand me the artwork, and say, “make this balloon say this,” and I would have to change it and fix it with him over my shoulder

[14:15] David: and do it in Jim’s style.

[14:19] Chris: In his style. You've got this gorgeous artwork that looks like it belongs in a museum. You've got the artist sitting over your shoulder. Don't spill the ink. Don't shake too much to let them see that you're freaking the hell out, and make it look good. So, there were moments on staff where I could have used an open bar to calm my nerves. I became friendly with so many of these artists and writers that it becomes a little club. I became the Kevin Bacon of comics. I always knew everybody. Everybody would come to me for somebody else's emails or connections or introductions or whatever. There was a point where I was lettering, by hand, 30 books a month. Dude, again, I told you earlier, I don't stop. I just keep going and going and going.

[15:14] David: That's an incredibly prodigious amount of work.

[15:18] Chris: I was young and stupid. I didn't know better.

[15:22] David: You were basically doing 20 to 22 pages a day, and it was legible. Well, I don't think that I could write 22 pages of comic book, with cursive writing, and make it legible.

[15:41] Chris: I would say, it lasted very long, but there was a period of time where I was, I mean, there was stupid stuff that went on and it was right at the Image boom, too. Everything was chaos and the rates were going up, and I was like, “This is great.” I was making more money as a letterer than most artists were making penciling, inking books, writing books. I was just taking them down, and they were doing stupid stuff. The Image guys were doing stupid stuff with their money. Jim and Marc Silvestri were doing a crossover with Valiant at one point. Deathmate. That big winning series. So, they hand me a book. It was 30 pages, and they needed it done overnight. So, I had to letter the whole thing overnight, got paid my rate, and they were giving me 1% of the sales. So, in that one night, I made, I forget, I think it was $24,000 for one night’s work. That went into the downpayment of my first home. So, Jim and Marc bought my first home for me.

[16:52] David: Wow, the 1% thing blows my mind. They really were just out there trying all kinds of stuff.

[16:59] Chris: Well, again, the original model behind it was “we're going to take care of all the creators.” We got treated like garbage. Remember, Todd's big manifesto, we all had to hear it. You would get the two-hour phone call from Todd, giving you his manifesto. He had called me up once to say, “I need you to help. I want to figure out a Spawn logo. Is there something going on?” And it just turned into two hours on “this is why we're going to be the greatest thing ever.” That was the moment where every creator on a book was supposed to be treated well and paid well.

[17:38] David: We’ve got to get back there.

[17:39] Chris: I know. That's gone, believe me.

[17:43] David: That mandate has fallen off a bit, but to the detriment of the industry, in my opinion. We’ve got to get back there.

[17:50] John: So, I'm curious about that. This, I think, it's hard to tell because of inflation and stuff, but were hand lettering rates higher than digital lettering rates? Or did those rates stay the same? Or did they drop the rates?

[18:04] Chris: So, I mean, it's probably my fault too. The Marvel, the DC rates had gone up because Image was paying well, I think. It was also because I was there, but the work was so lucrative. I mean, you remember, early 90s, they were printing anything. It was like, “The New Warriors is doing well. Let's do single character books for all the characters.”

[18:31] David: Except for Speedball, of course.

[18:35] Chris: What are you going to do? I mean, I was doing that. I was like Night Thrasher and Nova. I was doing all of them. So, my rates had gone up, and then obviously, the industry crashed. We remember it all too well, and then Marvel went bankrupt, and they were trying to figure out how to get back in, and Jemas was there, and we tried to do it digitally, and there was an agreement of amount of work versus pay. So, I agreed to do a large portion of the Marvel books for a lower rate.

[19:08] David: Basically, a bulk discount price.

[19:11] Chris: So, yeah, I mean because it was also a point where I was losing work. ‘99 was my worst year, which coincided with my kids being born, which was not good, and then soon after, they were like, “we'd like you to do a whole bunch of books. We want to pay you a little bit less, but you're going to get a large amount of them,” and I said, “Okay.” As time has gone on, the digital lettering thing kicked in, where you don't need to have the dexterity, the hand skills of a hand letterer. You have the fonts. You just really need to know graphic design, and there are a lot more of those people than there are letterers, so the rates go down.

[19:47] John: I think probably, always at some point, people thought they could letter books because it's not like you can go back to the 70s, and the good-looking comics, they were lettered well, but there were a ton of comics that were not lettered well. Some, I'm sure there are people who always thought they could do that, but there's also a real definite, “I can do that myself. I don't need to know what I'm doing.” Turns out atrociously. 

[20:09] Chris: I used to get people all the time who would say, “I want to get into comics. I can't write. I can't draw. I have good penmanship. Can you get me a job that can teach me how to letter?” It was always looked down upon as the base part of the industry. It's like, “well, I can't do any of this other stuff. I can letter. Anybody can letter.”

[20:28] David: And that's so wildly incorrect as you know, and I know, John knows, but as editor and editor-in-chief of a big comic book company, I've seen a lot of samples, and I've seen art samples, I've seen a lot of pitch packages where somebody's come in with a really good, visually pleasing, interesting story or interesting hook, and they've just lettered it themselves or not given any attention or thought to the lettering, and it will kill a book. If you notice the lettering, it could be trouble, and it certainly is, and I think people certainly don’t give enough attention or credit to good lettering. I think it's also a harder thing to maybe understand as a fan, as a non-professional.

[21:17] Chris: Yeah, I mean, there's a mixture of typography, there's a mixture of graphic design, there's a mixture of storytelling, the way you place things. That's the thing is, I've always said, you never notice good lettering. You only notice the bad stuff. So, I always got upset when people noticed my lettering. I felt like I wasn't doing my job right. When people “I can tell your lettering from anywhere,” and I'm like, “that's not good,” but I've also learned that there are people like Tom Orz and John Workman who use that to their advantage, where their work is so unique and pleasing that you aspire to like having that thing. Tom was the X Men artist. Wherever the X Men appeared, his art unified everything. It made it uniform across the board, no matter who the artist was, but yeah, it's not understood too well. I think, obviously, there was a lot more skill involved, and craftsmanship, when you were hand lettering. It really was like you were a Jedi. You had to take a pen and you had to shave it down and get it to the right size, and you would learn how to dip a pen and not splatter ink and create letter forms that were unique, and yet, almost similar to every other one, all the way through, and keep it consistent. You had to be almost like a machine, and then when you became a machine, it became easier, because then it was really just knowing where the balloons go, how to shape them properly, and then these days, every editor thinks they know more than everybody else on a book. Sorry, John. They'll tell you what to do.

I mean, it's funny, when I was lettering books, I had people who were younger than my years in the business, telling me how to do my job, which was insane. I'm like, “you were not even born when I started in this business, and now you're telling me I don't know how to do my job.” So, it's a very humbling business, I'll tell you that. If nothing else.

[23:15] David: And that's when you're like, “I think I'm going to go cartoon some books for Brad Meltzer.”

[23:24] Chris: Even now, people tell me how to draw right, and “you're not doing it right.” It was actually more of, I always just wanted to get into cartooning. It really was the dream. I fell into lettering, and then you get suckered in by the money, you have a wife, you have kids, and you're like, “I’ve got to pay the bills, and nobody's going to pay me to draw anything, especially in the comics market.” I did a couple books that did fairly well, even though most people are adverse to all-ages stuff and kids’ stuff, and cartoony stuff, but I finally was able to get the attention of enough people and do enough work, that I got better enough that people wanted to see my work.

[24:13] David: Do you think that's what it is? You finally got to a level where you were able to command attention?

[24:19] Chris: I think so. I did a series for Marvel called Franklin Richard, Son of a Genius, where I was thrown in the deep end. It was like, “I’ve got to write it, draw it.” They let me do it. God knows why, and it did fairly well. It really didn't do great in the comic book marketplace, in comic shops, but once they made trades, it started to sell, and kids picked it up, and parents who are into comics could share with their kids because they couldn't show them the other stuff. I did a book called Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers, which everybody thought was a joke, and then that one did well, and then I did a book with Nick Cosby called Cowboy, and that was nominated for Eisener’s and got me on the map a little bit, and I did a few other little things here and there, and then Brad had seen my work and was like, “we should do children's books together.” So, that's where it came from, and then I was doing a daily strip on a webcomic online, not making any money, but it got me better. I did it every day.

[25:25] David: You did that for a while, too.

[25:26] Chris: I did it for three years.

[25:28] David: What was the name of that one again?

[25:29] Chris: Misery Loves Sherman.

[25:31] David: That's right. Misery loves Sherman.

[25:33] 

The first time I saw your lettering, I'm pretty sure was on X Men, but this time, I, no offence, recognized your lettering and was like, “I know who that is,” was Savage Dragon. You were on Savage Dragon from the beginning, and there was some really dramatic lettering in that comic, especially that initial limited series. I mean, I remember when Badrock punched Savage Dragon in issue three. I remember the lettering on that. I also remember, you were doing Desperate Times somewhere around there, and that started getting run in the back of Savage Dragon, on its own page or the letters page or something.

[26:09] Chris: The sequence of events is I was working with Eric on Spider Man, and he didn't like the lettering that was going on at the time.

[26:20] David: Amazing or an adjective-less or both? Do you remember?

[26:23] Chris: Just Regular Spider Man. So, I did Todd's last issue, and then, because he wasn't happy with previous lettering, he wanted me on there because I actually saw what he was doing. He was doing his own sound effects, Eric was, and so I saw what he wanted. He was basically doing a John Workman-style thing, and that Simonson Thor stuff, I worked with him, I would draw out a sound effect on a separate piece of paper, I would send it to him for approval, and if he liked it, I would letter it on to the board, so that he got what he wanted. I think he liked the fact that I was willing to put a little extra work for him, so when he decided to go off to Image, because we started calling each other every day, we were on the phone every day, and he's like, “you cannot tell anybody. You're the fifth person outside of our core group that knows this. We're starting this new company called Image. I want you to letter my book.” I didn't think much of it. I thought of it just like Valiant or any of the other little startups, they were doing a little something on the side, and so I began lettering that book, and he just was like, “Look at Workman on Simonson and do that.”

So, I'm taking no credit. I just was ripping off John left and right, but then people said, “that's your style,” and I’m if you go back to the 80s, and look at John, I'm just doing that. So, we did that for a number of years, and then, like I said, we were on the phone all the time, and I had mentioned that I really wanted to get into cartooning. This is where I wanted to be, and I feel like I got stuck, and so he goes, “I'll give you two pages a book every month, in Savage Dragon. I always used to like those old comics that would have other things in the back. So, you get two pages. Oh, by the way, it's due tomorrow.” So, I had to literally draw two pages up overnight. God forbid anything not be overnight in comics, as you both probably know all too well. So, I just started doing that every month. In between lettering 30 books a month, I would write and draw two pages, and I got better at that, and then, like I said, I went out to Franklin, and I did other stuff, and then I improved enough doing it daily that I got the call of “let's do a book.”

[28:42] David: So, Brad contacted you out of the blue, or did you already have a relationship with him? How did that go down?

[28:48] Chris: As I said, I was the Kevin Bacon of comics. I knew everybody indirectly. We knew of each other. We knew of each other's work. I knew him from his TV shows that he had done on the History Channel. The one good thing that ever came out of Twitter was that we became friends on Twitter. We would message back and forth. I think I was texting him one day because Scholastic wanted to take this pitch that I had done for a book, which eventually got made later under a different publisher, but I didn't know how to deal with the business. So, I sent him a note about, “what do I do? How do I find an agent? How do I deal with this?” And I was in the middle of typing it, and I get an email from him saying, “Hey, man. I think we should do some work together in the kids market. I want to do these shirts, you'll draw something, and I'll make a statement, and it's historical figures,” and we did that, and everybody was like, “You do books. Go to books. Don't worry about T-shirts.” So, he said, “let's go do books,” and I said, “okay,” and he handed me a paragraph of Amelia Earhart, her biography, and said, “Go make a children's book out of this.” So, I just took it, broke it down, created a book, and then he took it from there. He took it and shopped around for an agent, picked our agent.

[30:09] David: You did finished pages for the Amelia Earhart thing? Or was it finished pages and then sampled breakdowns or something?

[30:17] Chris: I want to say, about half of the pages were finished and the other half were broken down. Yeah, but it was based on a paragraph. It wasn't fully written, and then we went to a few different agents. Our agent was the one person who said, “The artwork is fantastic. The writing needs to come up and meet the art.” So, I liked that she talked truth to power, because he didn't really do any work on it. He just dumped the paragraph on me. So, when we liked her, we brought her on, and then they went to publishers, and then we chose which publisher we thought was going to do the best job. So, I was just riding his coattails into this, which worked out well. I think we're up to our 35th book.

[31:01] John: Was Amelia Earhart the first one that came out?

[31:05] Chris: Abraham Lincoln and Amelia Earhart came out together.

[31:07] John: Okay, yeah. Amelia, that was actually one of my favorites. I've read that one quite a few times to a couple of kids.

[31:18] Chris: Yeah, the fun part is, now I've reached a point where contemporaries in the field are like, “Oh, my God, my kids love your book.” So, it's weird. I went from “we liked your lettering” to now, “my kids read your books.” Yeah, it's fun.

[31:34] David: Do you find the cartooning stuff more creatively fulfilling?

[31:41] Chris: Oh, yeah. I think the biggest is when I do my own books. When I've been writing and drawing my own books. I come out with about one a year on top of my Ordinary People books, and that’s the one I wanted to do. I mean, I always wanted to be a comic strip artist, but newspapers are dying. So, this comes as a close second as to what my dream was, to just have it be myself. I get to make all the decisions. I choose what I want to do. I put it out there. Luckily enough, they've been doing really well.

[32:13] David: I was reading up on your book, A Little Emotional. I thought the concept behind that was just brilliant. I loved the idea that giving kids the tools to help describe how they're feeling, and just to give them the language that they need to help understand, “what is going on with me?” Just knowing that there are these things called emotions, and what they're called, and how they influence you, and I think, I saw something about, you would come at it from a doctor's chart perspective. I thought, “what a brilliant way to spark creativity.”

[32:50] Chris: Yeah. The actual the book, the premise came about because of the pandemic. The first book I did was coming out just as we went into lockdown, so every bookstore was shut down just as the book was coming out, and most publishers chose to put a pause on any releases, and they were going to push them off to the falls. All these books were getting pushed off to the fall. Mine was set to come out in June, I think, May, and so, when it came out, nobody could get it because there was no way to get it. Everything was shut down, and I got really, really angry and upset. I was like, “here's my big book, my big breakout. I finally have my own book that I wrote and dew.” Luckily enough, the good story is, Amazon picked it up. They have one of those gift boxsets or whatever, and they pick it up, and it sold like crazy after that. It got on the charts, and it did well, but at that moment, I was really angry, and I wrote this book up of this kid dealing with his anger, and having to deal with anger, “what do you do with all these feelings?” And I sent it to my agent, and she just said, “I know you're upset, but you can't just turn it into an anger screen in a book.” All right. I guess I can put it aside.

So, I put it aside for a year, and my wife said, “I really liked that book. You should re-look at it and send it back to her,” and so, I tweaked it a little bit. I sent it back to my agent. She said, “It’s perfect the way it is. Let's send it in.” Within an hour of her sending it, I had an offer, and we talked about it, and I said, “I want to have something where if you look on the inside covers, that has all the listings of the characters and their emotions, so that the kids could say, “this is how I'm feeling,” and so the look of the character reflects the emotion, so that, “I'm feeling angry or I'm feeling jealous or I'm feeling happy” or whatever it may be, they can point to it and say “this is it.” People seem to really click with it. I have a big announcement. Not for another year because that's how publishing goes, but there's some big news in about a year.

[35:02] John: Hey, this is John Barber jumping in. We went a little long. So, we'll come back next episode and finish up with Chris and more of his amazing stories of lettering, drawing, writing, all sorts of stuff with comics, here on The Corner Box. 

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.