JON BULLER ON THE FOG MOUND v3: SIMON'S DREAM

[MattBrady]

by Zack Smith

The line between books and graphic novels has grown narrower in the last few years. Novelists have started scripting comics, comic writers have started doing prose novels, novels have been adapted into comics, and comics have been adapted into novels.

But one medium that’s emerging is a combination of the two – the prose novel with sequential comic sections, such as J. M. Dematteis and Mike Ploog’s Abadazad. One that’s received a great deal of critical acclaim is Simon and Schuster’s The Fog Mound by the husband-and-wife team of Susan Schade and Jon Buller. Alternating prose chapters with comics-format chapters, its format helps bring to life a colorful yet atmospheric world of talking animals.

The series chronicles the adventures of Thelonious Chipmunk (get it?) a young dreamer who finds himself in need of a new home. But Thelonious’ journey soon takes on a bigger scale – his world is actually a far-future Earth, and his companions, including the Vespa-driving porcupine Fitzgerald, find themselves investigating the mystery of whether humans really did once rule the planet, and what happened to them. In the process, they face a variety of terrible enemies, and deal with a number of issues about experimentation, racism and the environment.

With the third book in the trilogy, Simon’s Dream, coming out this week, we caught up with Buller, who does the illustrations and co-writes the books with Schade. In the process, we found out more about how they created this series, and the advantages of working in this particular format.

Newsarama: Jon, you’ve been published as a cartoonist for more than 30 years. Why did you decide to do this novel-graphic novel fusion?

Jon Buller: Well, my original interest was in cartooning. I think I wanted to be an underground cartoonist in the days of Robert Crumb and Zap! Comix coming out. For a long time, I worked for a local weekly newspaper and did a cartoon called Captain Connecticut, which wasn’t really an underground comic, but it was my opportunity to be a real cartoonist. I couldn’t really make any money at that, but when the opportunity to do kid’s books came along, I found I could do those and make a living at it!

But cartooning was my first love. So when we got The Fog Mound and had the opportunity to combine a cartoon and a kid’s book, I jumped at the idea.

NRAMA: And how did you get the idea to combine prose with sequential artwork?

JB: Well, originally, The Fog Mound was a kid’s novel written by Susan that wasn’t accepted by anyone. We were kind of going through a slack period, and I said, “Why don’t we try it as a graphic novel?” But then, in thinking about it, I thought, “Why not do every other chapter in prose?”

We had a slight friendship with Phoebe Gloeckner, who did The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which also combined prose with cartoons. In reading a lot of graphic novels, I saw there were a lot of parts that might work better as prose – you know, there are long discussions that are hard to get across unless you have lots of panels of talking heads and long word balloons. And it’s not really what comics do best, to have a page where there are all these fat word balloons, one after the other, though there are some ideas that require that.

So it occurred to me that if you structured it as a combination of prose and cartoons, you could have those long-winded sections in the prose chapters, and it would give you an opportunity to do the kinds of things in a graphic novel that you can’t get through action and word balloons without bogging things down. And then you could put the action sequences in cartoon form, because obviously, those work better in pictures.

And to me, it seemed like it would give some variety to the reading experience – you know, there are some books that change perspectives and characters from chapter to chapter, which has the effect of giving the book some variety.

And I also thought it would be good for kids, because there are kids who are not crazy about reading page after page of blank text, but who enjoy cartoons. So I thought they might want to see the cartoons, but they would have to read through the prose parts to get to the cartoons.

So that’s how we got the idea…I think it works well enough, though it does create some marketing problems. They don’t always know whether to put you in the literature or the graphic novel section, and there may be people who want a graphic novel, and who wonder, “What’s with all these pages covered with words?” We’re still deciding whether to make our next book all graphics or to try the same format again.

NRAMA: How did you have to rework the original novel to incorporate the comic sections?

JB: I don’t remember the process in detail. I do recall that the original novel didn’t begin with Thelonious’ house being swept away right away. There was more of a build-up of his youth, how his mother raised him, etc. But I recall reading it and thinking that it would be more of an Indiana Jones beginning if you just started off with that action sequence, of him being swept off immediately.

NRAMA: When you were writing the story with Susan, how did the collaboration work?

JB: I think for Volume One, I took Susan’s book, and sort of storyboarded all the cartoon chapters. I showed them to her, because she’s the writer, and she would sometimes edit the dialogue or the cartoons, like suggesting that this image be a full page and things like that. She has a great eye for storytelling.

With that first book, we had a worked-out manuscript. With the second book, we had an outline, and sometimes I would work on a cartoon chapter and she would work on the prose, but if I got bogged down with the drawing, she would thumbnail out the cartoon part. Sometimes I would do a synopsis of what would happen – there was a lot of passing back and forth. I would do all the pen work, but we both did some of the storyboarding, and we both did some of the plotting, though the concept was from the novel that was entirely Susan’s work.

NRAMA: Well, as the series has gone on, have you had more of an input on the storyline?

JB: Actually, when we sent the novel in to Simon & Schuster originally, it was just what became the first book, without that cliffhanger ending – we thought it would just be a stand-alone book, and if it were popular, they might do the sequel.

But it turned out Simon & Schuster liked it so much, they said, “Could you give us three?” And that was a wonderful moment, because we didn’t know if we were even going to sell one! (laughs) We had to give them a synopsis, because they wouldn’t sign off on buying three books without something on paper showing we had some idea of a direction.

So we had to come up with synopses very quickly, and when I was doing the artwork for Thelonious, it was while Susan was writing Volume Two, and we were always kind of going back and forth, working as a team.

Newsarama Note: SPOILERS ahead!

NRAMA: And what’s coming up in Volume Three?

JB: Well, in Volume Three, there’s a climactic battle, and the Fog Mound is saved from the ratminks, but then they also find out what happened to the humans, and Thelonious finds a dream helmet that lets him enter the dreams of a chipmunk who lived during the time of the humans. So he gets to find out what happened to the humans, and what happened to Bill’s daughter Mary.

And it’s mostly wrapped up, though if there’s a great demand, we could introduce some new danger. There’s a new character in this book – a wolf man, who’s a mixture of man and wolf, and he’s very deadly.

(End of SPOILERS)

NRAMA: You raise some interesting issues in this book about nature and the animals and mankind’s relationship with them. What, as an author, are you trying to say through this story?

JB: It’s a lot about finding a secure place, a secure home, and a home where you can be protected, to some extent, from the dangers in the wider world. You see these troubled, unsafe places all the time on the evening news, and usually they’re all over the world, but it’s no great leap to imagine it being closer to home.

The Fog Mound originally focused on a family of bears – it was sort of based on Susan’s family. Her grandmother had some property up in Connecticut, and Susan’s mother and her aunts were raised there. And when they were young, at some point they would always leave and go to seek their fortune in the big city, but the place in Connecticut was always available as a place of refuge – if they got in trouble, there was always a place to come home to.

So, the Fog Mound is that kind of family property, but transformed into this utopian community of bears, and then the other animals that come there are kind of like the husbands who married in, brought into the family by the bears. So there’s a little bit of autobiography in there, it’s not just something from out of the clouds.

NRAMA: Do you have plans for any more stories set in this world?

JB: We’re working on something else now, and that involves some intelligent animals, but these are in a world where humans still exist, and they’ve been bred to act in a film by a slightly lunatic movie producer who wants to do like a Stuart Little type of film, but with real animals.

So he breeds these intelligent animals, but they don’t like it, and some of them escape, pursued by this movie producer. And the lead character, so to speak, is a cat. But this isn’t something we’ve sold yet, it’s something we’re writing. And it’s not exactly in the Fog Mound world, but it’s kind of a parallel to it, again dealing with the relationship between humans and animals.

NRAMA: I was curious about some of the influences on this book.

JB: Well, you know, the science fiction of James Tiptree was maybe a little bit of an influence. She did a few stories about the end of mankind – there’s one about a scientist who decides for the good of the planet, he’s going to wipe out humanity (“The Last Flight of Dr. Ain”) and there’s the one where only women were left on the planet and they come across a living male and they discuss whether to wipe him out (“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”).

I think some of that comes across in the scene where Fitzgerald argues whether the human should be allowed to live, and whether, after all the humans have done, Bill should be allowed to stay around any more. There might be a little reflection of Tiptree in that.

Actually, when I said Susan wrote the first book entirely on her own – I need to take that back. I think I was actually responsible for wiping out all humanity! (laughs) I remember, in the first draft of the first book, it was just a book about animals trying to get back home, about a bear who had been separated from her family on the Fog Mound, and how she got back home.

It was more of a Beatrix Potter or Wind in the Willows-type world full of talking animals. I remember thinking that made the book a little young, and how it would be interesting if it wasn’t a Beatrix Potter world, and there was a reason why they talked, and a reason why there were talking animals, and then you combined the pleasures of The Wind in the Willows with the pleasures of science fiction.

NRAMA: Did you ever read the Jack Kirby series Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth?

JB: You know, I hadn’t read it, but I started on this, and then I got some old Kamandi issues, and I looked at them for reference drawings when I’m drawing the ruined cities. So there might be some influence in some of the drawings – like when there’s a twisted girder, that might be the influence of Kamandi. But when the book was being written, maybe I was dimly aware of the series, but I hadn’t read it. It has been an influence on the drawing, though.

NRAMA: What are some of your other favorite science fiction stories?

JB: Well, besides Tiptree, I think Philip K. Dick is always great, combining the pleasures of pulp with something that’s intellectually interesting. And I think the first science fiction story that really blew my mind was Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. I’m reading The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe now.

NRAMA: That kind of ties in with The Fog Mound, discovering these clues about the past world…

JB: Oh yeah.

NRAMA: Any comics you’re currently enjoying?

JB: Well, Bill Griffith’s syndicated comics with Zippy the Pinhead have always been good, but lately he’s been going into strips about Dingburg, a town where everyone is a Pinhead, and it provides a different kind of humor. It has a lot of different and interesting things in the art.

And when I started The Fog Mound, a big influence was the manga Gon, which has some really wonderful action sequences, like when Gon is rolling down a mountain, things like that. And of course, I also like a lot of kid’s book illustrations, like Ernest Shepherd’s work on Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, and that kind of old-school cartooning like R. Crumb does, with all the cross-hatching and facial expressions.

NRAMA: What’s your reaction to the reception to the Fog Mound books?

JB: Well, it hasn’t sold all that well (laughs) which is disappointing…at least not that well for a major publisher like Simon and Schuster. It’s gotten some good reviews, which are definitely flattering! The sales, from an ego standpoint, are something we can withstand, but it makes it harder to sell your next book, because people are in the business of finding what works, and they tend to go with more of what sells well than what doesn’t. So I wish these would sell better or Steven Spielberg would discover them or something like that. (laughs)

NRAMA: Well, what’s the experience been like on a creative level?

JB: On a creative level, it’s been the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. The kid’s books were a pleasant enough way to make a living, and to use my drawing and storytelling abilities, but doing The Fog Mound allows me to use so much more of my abilities.

It feels like this is something I really want to continue doing. I think I’m kind of hooked on graphic novels! (laughs) It’s going to be hard to go back to children’s books after this. It’s been enormously gratifying, both artistically and personally, to create a believable world and jump into it, and I hope that I can continue doing it.

The Fog Mound Volume Three: Simon’s Dream hits bookstores on May 6th. For more on the series, visit Jon Buller and Susan Schade’s web site at: http://www.bullersooz.com/fm.html

[CitC]

If I remember my review of the first two, I think I enjoyed the prose sections more than the comic ones. I enjoyed the first two and I have #3 at home, but I haven't read it yet.

[NotAnIssue]

I just read this interview and literally walked next door to buy the first volume.

Can't wait to read it.

Proof I'm not just saying that: