If you can’t follow the story without reading the words, then the visuals haven’t done their job. My main point of advice for people who ask about drawing comics is to always make sure the visual storytelling is as clear as possible. I’m a firm believer in the power of visual storytelling and how, even in silence, you can say a lot in comics. Just creating a comic is a challenge itself, but I wanted to see if I could tell a story in Pilgrim Finch that was largely wordless, using nothing but the emotions expressed on faces, hands and gestures to tell the story and drive that forward. Young: I wanted to challenge myself a little bit, without sounding pretentious. Paste: You stray away from using any conventional dialogue in Pilgrim Finch. Right now, I’m focusing on some of the things that I’ve always wanted to do, which is genre. It would have robbed the book of any uniqueness. That probably wouldn’t have worked, just because stories like that would be a dime a dozen. At one point many years ago, I thought Nanjing might be better if I did it as a sci-fi allegory, because it would require a lot less research and give me a lot more artistic license to play around with events and timelines, so I’m not shackled to actual historical accuracy. So for my next project for Dark Horse this Fall, The Battles of Bridget Lee, I’m going full-on science-fiction genre. Even with my webcomic, Tails, which had an inkling toward genre art, and then Nanjing is a huge departure from that. Paste: Coming from Tails and Nanjing, how calculated is your muse? Do you have a plan to hit certain genres in a certain time span? Or is Pilgrim Finch a little more spontaneous? I do want to appeal to fans who are younger, and not just appeal to people who are kind of jaded and cynical, which unfortunately makes up a huge portion of fans. I’ve been more cognizant to create stuff that I can show to more people. I stand by it, and I’m still proud of it, but at the same time that’s not something I could show my five-year-old kid now. I was in my 20s and didn’t have many responsibilities aside from cats, and I just cursed a lot in the comic. That was a comic that probably could have appealed to young adults as well. Nanjing: The Burning City was meant for an older audience, but before that I was doing my semi-autobiographical comic, Tails. I think it’s renewed my desire to put more family-friendly, kid-friendly material out there. Young: I think more than anything, it fueled my desire to finish projects more quickly, because of time constraints taking care of Elliott all the time. Paste: Being a creator who’s constantly bringing new worlds to life, how does that relate to actually creating new biological life? Are there any parallels? Does it influence how you think creatively? Paste chatted with Young about fatherhood, the craft of vertical comics and the human race’s baffling relationship with its pets. That revelation mingles with Young’s humane values (he’s a vegan who fostered scores of street cats after college in New York City), laying the trajectory for a science-fiction rarity- a story all-ages adorable and emotionally ornate, like the best Pixar movies. Pilgrim Finch emerged from Young witnessing his son, Elliott, transform from a bundle of biological need to an empathetic, cognitive being in a matter of weeks. In space, nobody can hear you banter.īut the cartoonist articulates sophisticated plot points and themes despite avoiding their most obvious form of expression. To emphasize visual storytelling, Young vouches for a comic with no dialogue. Featuring a damn adorable squirrel-groundhog hybrid in a spacesuit, the vertically-scrolling narrative shows the titular astronaut crash-land on a new planet full of mischievous fauna. Pilgrim Finch, debuting this Monday from mobile comics platform Stela, explores format as much as the cosmos. Young’s next two projects travel through space instead of history The Battles of Bridget Lee arrives this Fall from Dark Horse, featuring a young medic on a journey to reclaim earth. An unforgettable portrait of honor and loss, the graphic novel unravels the complexities of one of history’s reddest days until a human core remains, raw and brilliant. Cartoonist Ethan Young is responsible for our favorite comic book experience of 2015- Nanjing: The Burning City.
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