By Harry Kassen — Middle grade and young adult graphic novels make up a huge portion of the comics market. Here I talk with old friend Eric Gapstur and new friend Dearbhla Kelly about their exciting new book Sort of Super, an all ages superhero graphic novel published by Aladdin.

INTERVIEW: Eric Gapstur, Dearbhla Kelly talk new book, SORT OF SUPER

HARRY KASSEN: So first, let's just do introductions. I'm Harry Kassen, features editor at Comics Bookcase, and I talking today with Eric Gapstur and Dearbhla Kelly. Eric, I know for you this book is a long-time coming. Where did the inspiration for this book come from?

ERIC GAPSTUR: It came from the love of comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes and Cul de Sac, but also it came from reading just a ton of superhero comics. I love a wide range of comics, and I had the start of this idea around 2003 or 2004. Sort of Super wasn’t called that yet, but it came from me wanting to creatively explore those two things I read growing up.

HARRY: Where did the initial spark for your main character, Wyatt, come from?

ERIC: There are other stories that explore someone being so young and having a superpower, but I really wanted a silly whimsical take. I didn’t want to dive into what would really happen. I wanted it to be fun and silly, like the tone that Cul de Sac and Calvin and Hobbes did really well. Also, contrasting Wyatt with his sister Adeline, who is really smart, seemed like a fun dynamic in the beginning when this started as a comic strip.

But we’ve seen it morph over the years after it didn’t work as a comic strip. It’s a graphic novel now, which is more exciting to me creatively. It wasn’t the easier journey to get here, but I’m glad it did. It’s been really creatively rewarding.

HARRY: What made this a creatively appealing project for you to work on, Dearblha?

DEARBHLA KELLY: I was really excited about this project because I similarly grew up on Calvin and Hobbes. When I was a kid, Calvin and Hobbes was pretty much the first comic that I read, and I’ve always kind of wanted to make something like it. I used to constantly draw Calvin and Hobbes, in the margins at school. It was really exciting for me to work on a book with that look and feel, and then it was also a challenge. I hadn’t colored a full graphic novel at that point.

This is the longest single thing I’ve ever colored. Now I’m on a couple of others, but it’s really cool to have this under my belt, to look at the amount of work done on it. It’s just been a really delightful project, because I love the story and the artwork. I was also excited to work on something for this age group, because I have a niece who is 8 years old and loves comics. She’s the oldest of my nieces and nephews, and now she’ll be able to read this and get excited about it.

HARRY: Was it a big jump for you compared to working on comics for older audiences? Were there different color palette, or did you have to get in a different headspace?

DEARBHLA: In some ways, not really, because my instinct is to actually go quite saturated and bright and bold with colors, even on quite serious stuff. I usually have to tone it down a little bit. With this, it meant I could lean into the really bright. I think the word we used from the state when establishing the style for the color was effervescent. We wanted it to really crackle on the page. I was already also doing quite a bit with painting. I really had a chance to do a lot of that on this book. In some ways it was more like just putting more techniques than I do on some of my other books. I think, though, I could really just play to my strengths and lean into the kid-friendly, bright and just fun atmosphere.

HARRY: Eric, from seeing your process as you worked on this one and from the preview pages, it strikes me as very different from what you usually see in the middle grade graphic novels market. Were you trying to push the boundaries here? What impact do you think this may have on the space moving forward?

ERIC: I really don’t know. I used the storytelling sensibilities that I already had from Big Two comics, geared toward older audiences. I still wanted to deploy that dynamic composition, everything that makes for an interesting page, just like I would with any other book. I didn’t really take a different approach. I didn’t take too much into account. I just wanted to do my thing with a more cartoon aesthetic.

That’s what I enjoy. I wanted to just basically <laughs> do everything that I wanted to do. I hope it turns out well and I hope it engages, because the feedback I’ve gotten so far is really fun from kids. There was a kid who mentioned that since the story is told in a picture, you really have to pay attention with this one. I got a chuckle out of that. I think it’s engaging — I hope it’s engaging.

DEARBHLA: I don’t really think about the market or the outcome or how it measures up to similar books while I’m working on it. I just want to make each page the best it can be. Similarly, I was just having fun with it, and really trying to put effort into the storytelling, to make it look beautiful. If the outcome is that it’s something that really has an impact on the shelf, then that’s really cool. I actually had the same experience with my niece. She would see the pages I was working on without lettering, and she’d be following the story through the pictures. It’s cool to have a book that’s so well crafted visually.

HARRY: Eric, you’ve been working in direct market comics for a while and before that on strips, either inking or doing line art for various books. This is your return to art, writing, and lettering. Did that come naturally, or was it hard to get back to doing the whole book, except for the colors?

ERIC: It wasn’t hard at all <laughs>, it was like I was free! I’m kind of joking, but I just had so much fun with it. There was enthusiasm to working on a page every day. We’re working on book two now. Creatively, I’ve never experienced anything like this, because there’s just so much room to work on the page. It was just great. So no, it was really no struggle at all.

HARRY: Were there any Big Two concepts or skills you picked up that were really valuable here?

ERIC: Absolutely. I talked earlier about dynamic composition. I ink Phil Hester’s work, and he is such a masterful storyteller. At the time I pitched Sort of Super, I’d been working with him steadily for five or six years, but now it’s almost 10. I learned so much from him, and I brought all of that storytelling here. I wanted to bring what I learned from Phil to this. I just love his compositions. We still work on books together, and I still learn knew things because he’s inventive. He brings a different approach to all of the different projects we do in terms of storytelling.

That all informs my work. On a project like this where there are so many scenes, there are stories to tell within these. We talk often about how hard it is to make pages where characters just talk visually interesting. Those are challenging because you have to work extra when the characters aren’t physically doing anything. It’s still a challenge to compose action scenes; I want to make every scene interesting. That was definitely what I wanted to bring here.

HARRY: So Dearbhla, what was your favorite part of working on this book? The process or the book itself?

DEARBHLA: I used a slightly different process for this book than I do on my other work. I would settle in for a week or two of Sort of Super, and be like, ‘okay, now I’m in Sort of Super mode.’ That was always really nice. I would start painting all the backgrounds and focusing on the characters. It was a split up process, but I found the whole thing very relaxing. Maybe three or four chapters in, I just felt really comfortable working on it.

That’s actually very nice to have, a book that you feel comfortable working on. I had my folder of brushes set up, and I know what the palettes are. When you know exactly what you’re doing on a book, it’s a good feeling. But I think in terms of the story as well. Like what Eric was saying, there are a lot of downtime scenes and slice-of-life bits with the characters. I actually love those scenes. They’re so fun, and it really makes it feel more rounded and developed as a story. You’re kind of living with these characters, and they’re not always doing some big, bombastic superhero thing.

Funny small moments can be quite fun to color too. There’s no explosion, but you still have to bring something fun to the page. There’s a lot of humor in this book, and that’s fun too. I have to think how am I as a colorist going to elevate the humor here? I’m smiling as I work on the pages, and that’s a delight.

HARRY: I know Eric is color blind and so am I. We talk about it a fair amount. Has that impacted the process of working on the book?

DEARBHLA: Yeah, I think it it did, because in the beginning we had to figure that out <laughs>. I think it's been quite good for me to make sure that I'm like doing enough contrast, to make sure that it’s going to look as good to you color blind as it is to me. There’s definitely been a back and forth. There were one or two times when we had to figure out whether something was an error or a color blindness issue — sometimes it was both. It was an adjustment, but I found it quite interesting to work with.

ERIC: It’s great that the book is already so bright and poppy to me. I know I’m only seeing half the colors, so muted compared to how other people see them. I think about that a lot, especially when they’re outside, and there’s a lot of green on the page. That’s one that I don’t see well, and it still looks gorgeous to me.

DEARBLHA: Oh, that reminds me, there’s actually something quite unusual about this book as the coloring goes. The text boxes are already on the page when I’m coloring because they’re manually drawn in. That’s interesting to work around. Sometimes when you’re coloring you think about where you should do details because of where the lettering is going to go. That’s not the case here.

HARRY: That’s something Eric and I spent a lot of time talking about, because I’m big on lettering. I was like, ‘What if you drew the boxes on the page?’ I know how it impacted Eric’s process, but how did it also impact your process?

DEARBLHA: It’s just unusual to have those lines and bubbles on the page already. I would usually separate them all out, just to make sure I knew where they all were, and then sometimes I would color them if there were certain things, like emotional bits or whispers. It was actually nice having that extra bit of creative control over the lettering, which I usually don’t.

Having said that, all the letterers I’ve worked with have been great. I’ve worked with Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, who is brilliant. He always works with the colors really well. So yeah, this was unusual, it was a little bit of process, and I quite liked it.

ERIC: It’s all because that was my process doing strips as I did everything by myself. I wanted to do all the lettering on the board myself, but they told me no, because we have to do this in so many languages. I needed digital font.

HARRY: So this another question for each of you. What’s the most exciting thing you saw your collaborator do on this book? The thing that made you stop and say, I’m really glad to be working with this person?

DEARBLHA: There are lots of things I really love in this book. The first thing that’s coming to mind is I really loved coloring the explosions and the way you draw them. I think we’ve got a really cool back and forth process, and you do backgrounds in a way that gives me a lot of freedom to work with them. That’s always really exciting to see.

ERIC: There’s one with both characters where she’s kind of riding on his back as he’s flying away from those explosions. It’s just this burst of speed, and my contribution was just some speed motion lines. Very few. I don’t recall rendering very many. There was just so much energy put into that page. I’ve been blown away at every page as soon as colors come in. It’s very jarring to me to see any of my work in color, because I spend so much time with it in black and white.

When I’m working on stuff with Phil or even penciling my own stuff for other companies, I don’t really have much correspondence with the colorist. It really just exists in black and white to me. This is the first project where it was still like that at first, but then around chapter two with those pages where they’re flying and you start adding all these things, I start really thinking about how to judiciously spot blacks more, thinking about how color is going to effect a scene and what you’ve done. I don’t want to suggest too much, I want you to do your thing, because there’s so many places where you’ve done things that I didn’t intend you to do anything.

The colors really elevate everything. I’ve just been so happy with the collaboration.

DEARBLHA: It’s my pleasure! I think it feels like a really collaborative book, and that’s really cool. It’s nice to know when something’s been drawn for me specifically for me to color, it’s a really nice thing to work on. Other things I like seeing when the pages come in is that you do really cool things with silhouettes, really add emphasis in cool places. The other cool thing is playing with scale. Some moments in the books are just so huge, and there are other moments in the book that are just hiding under a desk.

We go from those to literally looking at the entire earth. I love the playing with scale in it. It’s cool to see from the script to when I get the pages too, because the script is quite sparse, which makes sense because you’re writing it for yourself.

ERIC: <laughs> It’s hard to be like, ‘Okay, what do my editors really need to know here?’ I’ll start by breaking things down by panels, like — this will be six panels — but then I sit down to draw, and it’s like, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking, this can be done in three panels.’ I’ll move dialogue around too. It’s always a process of refinement.

It goes through a copy editing process multiple times, and I do feel bad because I know I’m going to change so much stuff. Manuscripts are a little different because those are the final product, but scripts aren’t intended to be. There are a lot of changes.

HARRY: This is different than a lot of past projects for you both, with Eric you mostly doing comic strips and then comic books, and Dearblha you doing mostly comic books. This is different in that you’re working in the traditional book publishing market. Has that been any sort of big adjustment for you? How have you made that shift for this project?

ERIC: I don’t think there’s been any big shift as far as working. The business side of it is certainly different. Navigating that has been pretty simple. I have no complaints. It’s great to have agents who have your back, and I love my agents. They haven’t really been super involved once the project was sold.

Creatively everybody brings sensibilities. Coming up with a title is interesting. Originally, I pitched the strip as just Wyatt. Then when I pitched it as a book it was just called Little Justice. Their reasoning for wanting that to change surprised me a little bit, but it’s not uncommon at all to have editors and marketing to do that. We ended up settling on Sort of Super, which I think is a great title. As far as the creative side of things, really, there’s just not a ton of difference in the approach. I had a lot under my belt when I came to the project, and I think editors realize that too. They’re also really wonderful about figuring out your process, and they’re like, ‘How do you like to work? We’ll do that.’

DEARBLHA: Similarly, it is different with the marketing and scheduling rather than creatively. Where it maybe does have an impact creatively is that it is nice to have this length of time to work on one big thing. The difference with an issue-by-issue comic is occasionally you’ll get to issue 5 and you’ll think, ‘oh, I wish I could have put that into issue 1.’ When working on a whole thing, you get to do that. You can look at the book as a whole and make sure everything is continuous.

HARRY: Eric, you’ve got two kids of your own. Did they have an impact on you creating this book?

ERIC: Absolutely. Certainly, there are small things that are directly from them, but moreover — especially the emotional beats — you don’t have to be a parent to write a relationship between a kid and their parent, but for me, those scenes became more emotional. I felt like I had a lot more life experience to draw from once I had kids. The big shift — not necessarily in the book — they more effected my approach to work itself. Before I had kids, I wrapped up a lot of my self worth in accomplishing these goals I’d had since I was a very little kid. I knew I wanted to do this really young.

Nothing ever stopped me from making comics. I loved doing it, so I never stopped, but this business can beat you up. Younger cartoonists will ask me how to navigate that, and it’s such a hard thing to answer because all I can say is don’t put all your self worth into this. It is very likely this business will not love you back as much as you love it. When my son was born, suddenly the entirety of comics could go away and I’d be okay. Suddenly, I was in this really cool head space where I could care very deeply about my work but not let it effect my self worth and state of mind some days. It was so much easier to navigate the lows when I had so much else to focus on, something else that brought me a lot of joy and focus.

HARRY: Is there a character in the book that you each most identify with?

ERIC: Yeah, for me it’s Wyatt. I mess up all the time, but it doesn’t stop me from trying or from trying to either do the right thing or learn to be better. I hope that aspect resonates.

DEARBLHA: I think I’m a bit of an Adeline. I definitely was as a kid. I was a precocious, smart kid, but also quite naïve in her own way. She’s smarter, but she’s still a kid. I love Wyatt though, too, and I love their relationship. I love the sibling relationship. I have an older brother, and there’s definitely a bit of that — eye rolling but looking out for each other.

ERIC: I have an older brother, too. That played a lot into the book and into the relationships. It was interesting, Lisa, the editor who bought the projected, noted that it was really rare to see a brother and sister who have a good relationship.

DEARBHLA: Yes! Totally. They did remind me of me and my brother, because we used to run around playing X-Men, jumping off of couches and getting into trouble.

ERIC: Me, my brother, and my sister — we certainly had our ups and downs as anyone living together is going to have. I definitely wanted to highlight that Wyatt and Adeline have their ups and downs, too. It felt very natural to me. One of the only notes I got on the first pass of the script is that Wyatt is too easy-going in their relationship. <laughs>

HARRY: Wrapping up here, you mentioned a couple times that there is another book that you’re working on right now. Anything you can share with us about that second book and what we can expect?

ERIC: I don’t know what I can tell you. The only thing that’s out in the public realm is that it’s slated for 2023. And I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m really under the gun here.’ No, it’s on schedule, but I don’t know how much I can talk about it. You can expect hopefully a lot more humor and heart.

DEARBHLA: I’d definitely say that at least at the start of it, Wyatt is up to his usual shannanigans

ERIC: There’s a big cliffhanger at the end of Book One and there’s an overarching narrative that’s continued. I don’t want to give away any of the story or anything spoilery, so I’ll leave it at that.

HARRY: Anything I haven’t asked about that you’d like to share about this book?

DEARBHLA: It’s just been really rewarding to work on a book with a specific audience that I think is going to love it. I’ve mentioned my niece a few times, and the thing that spurred me on here and was really fulfilling was knowing she was going to have this chunky book at the end of this. She’d be able to say, ‘This is a comic that my aunt made.’ There’s just something particularly nice about making comics for kids.

ERIC: It’s been a trip to see kids’ reactions. I went to the book fair with my kids, Liam and Henry, the other day, and when you walk in there and one of Liam’s classmates turns around and is like, ‘Are you the one who wrote that book?’, and he just started asking questions. Just seeing that energy and that interest — how excited he was about it — that was really cool to see. It’s always going to be so wonderful to hear people appreciate your work.

I mentioned that 2003 was the beginning of this idea. It’s just been so long, but longer than that wanting to do something like this. To see it come to fruition and to see that warm reaction — I’m blown away, every time. I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks about it.

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Harry Kassen is a college student and avid comic book reader. When he’s not doing schoolwork or reading comics, he’s probably sleeping. Catch his thoughts on comics, food, and other things on Twitter @leekassen. You can support his writing via Ko-fi.