James A. Owen sold all of his copies of Here, There Be Dragons at the Phoenix Comicon by Saturday afternoon. He had to send someone to the nearest bookstore to pick up more copies. Here, There Be Dragons is an American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults nominee and is poised to fill the role that will be vacated by that young British wizard this July.
Pink Raygun: Could you tell me a little bit about Starchild and the genesis of that?
James A. Owen: Starchild was kind of an amalgam of several different comics projects I was doing in the early 90s. I actually started publishing in 1986 and was an exhibitor in San Diego before I had a driver’s license, so I’ve got some tenure going. I was working on Silas Marner for Classics Illustrated for First Comics. At the same time, I was working on a Superman proposal for DC called Starchild, which is Kal-El in Kryptonian. First Comics fell apart and their classic series ended, so I had sixteen pages of Silas Marner which I had written, penciled and inked. I still had the Starchild proposal and I kind of married them. Silas Marner became Ezekiel Higgins, the old weaver and I rewrote those sixteen pages of Silas Marner to be the centerpiece of the first issue of Starchild.
I published two issues, then I broke my drawing hand in a car accident and decided that this was one of those moments when you get to decide how badly you want to do what you want to do. So, I went to Kinko’s and started typesetting a story called Starchild Zero and did left handed layouts and got other artists to do the finished art. Paul Chadwick, Craig Russell, Will Eisner did one, Colleen Doran did one. We had an intro by Alan Dean Foster and we sold 45,000 copies of that. After a year of therapy, the next regular issue of Starchild sold 17,000 copies. I moved off and started doing magazines for a while then I started doing novels for a German publisher. Those are called Mythworld and they haven’t been published in English. But, the editor who asked me to write the novels was a Starchild fan. That gave me the experience I needed to do the main project now, which is writing and illustrating Here, There Be Dragons for Simon and Schuster.
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PRG: How did you develop Here, There Be Dragons?
JO: I had several outlines for book or film projects that I had pitched to several producers in Los Angeles. The very last producer I met was Mark Rosen. He passed by everything, Starchild, Mythworld, none of it was interesting. But, he had an ten page unfinished outline for Here, There Be Dragons, and he said “this is what we want�?. So I started developing the outline further from there, and it was sent to several publishers. Simon and Schuster came back with a preemptive bid, but said they wanted to see some chapters. That was on a Wednesday. They had the first three chapters on Tuesday. It’s been planned for seven novels and they’ve commissioned me for other book projects as well. The funny thing about how successful the book turned out to be is that it’s giving me the freedom to go back and finish the Starchild storyline I started at Image comics. We’ll do that as a quarterly, a big fat 96 page comic book.
PRG: From an artwork standpoint, do you work primarily in black and white or do you work in colors as well?
JO: I work in colors because I do the covers for all the books. But, the pen and ink style I developed, there isn’t much competition in that. It’s a look and a niche that not a lot of people are doing. The pen and ink style is a unique look for the book, it works equally well with illustrated novels and comics. I can move from one project to another without changing my tools or my style. It’s just different pictures for a different story.
PRG: Your artwork in Starchild and Here, There Be Dragons is very detailed and very intricate. About how much time do you put into each page?
JO: With the comics pages it got faster as i went along. i just did a story for an IDW anthology which was very detailed and took a couple of days per page. The largest stuff is more difficult. For Here, There Be Dragons, probably three or four days per page.
PRG: You clearly have a significant interest in the fantasy area. What, or who, has been influential for you?
JO: Ray Bradbury. When I was a kid, reading was how I got out of things. I was one of those stereotypical sick kids, and spent a lot of time indoors. I loved Ray Bradbury and the way he wrote about evoking the magic of childhood. I quoted something earlier, “real success is achieving in adult terms, what you dreamed about as a child”. So these things that I loved when I was a kid, I surround myself with in my studio and fantasy was a big part of it. Stories where anything can happen, that’s my favorite type of storytelling. Or finding those holes in history where you can ask “what if”. “What if�?, to me, is the greatest possible question to start a story with, because if you can tie it to real things and then go off in an unexpected direction, how fun is that?
For more about Here, There Be Dragons, including information for Owen’s signing tour, visit www.heretherebedragons.net.
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[...] like fantasy, but I want to see a different approach to it. In his novel, Here, There Be Dragons, James A. Owen does just that – he takes people and places we’re familiar with, spins them around in an [...]