By Zack Quaintance — About 12 years ago, Portland cartoonist Jonathan Case wanted to get outside. Case was getting ready to script and draw a new book, a graphic novel he would work on for years, but he didn’t want to do that work entirely at a desk in his studio. Case instead wanted to work in a way that would force him to get outside, to connect with the natural world in meaningful ways as he developed and told a story.

It was this desire that ultimately led to Jonathan Case’s Little Monarchs. Published in April, Little Monarchs is one of the best graphic novels of 2022 so far. It tells a story set 50 years after an apocalyptical event, wherein humans develop a lethal allergy to the sun. The protagonist is 10-year-old Evie, who is travelling the West Coast in a colorful Toyota van with kayaks strapped atop it, joined and cared for by an adult biologist named Flora who’s making a sun sickness vaccine. A vaccine made from monarch butterflies.

Dramatic and absolutely well-earned twists ensue. Yet, the story never loses its connection with nature, which is built atop a sense of sunny (sorry!) optimism rare in 2022. Little Monarchs, to be frank, is stunning, a compelling comic narrative broken up by pages of young Evie’s journaling, which does everything from summarizing her world’s history to listing blackberry pie recipes she has learned to giving step-by-step instructions on knotting a cooler to the back of a kayak. This all makes for an immersive read, one that feels real throughout, anchored in every locale by real world coordinates and compass headings.

Which brings us back to Case wanting to get outside — the characters in Little Monarchs travel routes Case and his family traveled during the book’s making. They visit monarch groves (more on that below) that Case and his family visited. They even drive the same Toyota van Case and his family drove. It’s a unique process for making comics, and Case recently took time for a phone conversation with me about that process, about why monarch butterflies are so special, and about so much more.

One of the biggest questions readers might have about Little Monarchs is about the amount of research Case did for the journal portions, which fit organically in the book, yet brim with compelling information that ties into what’s happening to the characters. At times Little Monarchs feels like the world’s most fun and interesting text book.

Before getting into the how and how much of the research process, Case talked about working to incorporate those sort of pages organically with the comics storytelling. Case had this to say:

“The whole book was designed around connections to reality, to reality at a practical level — the coordinates, the compass headings — that was where it all started, and I wanted to get as much into the book that I could that would be a reference point to what was real without it bogging down the story.
I really had to figure out what felt like the right balance with those real world connections, the skills, and all of that, with an exciting adventure story. I kind of came at it thinking that if you learn something with a friend or a character, it’s usually much easier to understand and take in that new skill than it is if it’s just a big aside that’s completely divorced from storytelling and personality. That was what motivated me to format the book in the way that I did.”

When it came to researching the book, Case’s process was essentially multifaceted, and it involved the travels mentioned in this piece’s intro as well as relying on experts for help. Case described it as such:

“I had access to the Xerces Society and a couple of their naturalists. That’s a nonprofit organization in Portland…and they let me pester them a little bit with particular questions and they gave me some literature, brochures and things, that showed the location with a satellite view of a particular monarch grove, but a lot of the research was formed from my own travels and my own reading. If I had a problem or I discovered something where I don’t know quite how this works, I always had a human to reach out to at the Xerces Society.
I went on two or three major expeditions around the Western States, sort of following the pathway of the Monarch migration and gathering a lot of field data, talking to folks who were on hand who were just more than happy in those groves to tell you all about monarchs. Then, I gathered compass settings and coordinates, making sure I could make that route all make sense. Those expeditions were the first major work of it, and then it was filling in the blanks when I got home.”

I was curious how Case settled on butterflies as being so heavily involved with his story, and what made him visit those monarch groves in the first place. Little Monarchs is a wonderful title with a double meaning, and the butterflies themselves create such a natural reason for our characters to be moving through this broken world, rather than holing up in a bunker as one often sees in this type of story.

Case shared with us how butterflies flitted their way into his book, connecting it to becoming a father during the creative process:

“It all happened in a backwards way, working from this idea of what is a way I can get out in the world, out of my office, and start gaining some real life experiences and maybe even some practical skills that I could pass down as a father to my kids. It all started from a fear that I wouldn’t measure up as a parent, that I wouldn’t know how to balance my work with being a parent, that everything would kind of dissolve. I think those themes make it into the book.
The character of Flora is very much on mission and sometimes doesn’t prioritize being a parent figure as well as she might, and it’s just kind of how it goes.”

He continued:

“Monarchs as a migratory species seemed like a way I could follow something into unfamiliar territory, and that’s what I wanted to do. I began with that, and then I had to answer the question of if I’m bringing these characters along like imaginary friends to these places I’m going, and I’m considering what they would be doing here, what would they want to do, what’s the conflict, why do they have to follow these butterflies — and so I had to invent the reason for them to be following this migration and I had to invent the reason for why this world was depopulated, why nature had come back in the way that it had, why a little girl who is 10 years old would be confidently exploring it with no natural predators and people not around in the daytime. I wanted all that to be going on and I had to put all those puzzle pieces together.”

That’s not to say that making the journal entries and the informational cartooning in the book fit was an easy process. It was a heavy lift, and part of the reason why making this book took about 12 years, albeit taking place while Case was making other comics, including Green River Killer, Dear Creature, and work on DC Comics’ Batman ‘66.

Case had this to say about making journal entries additive and organic within Little Monarchs:

“It was not for lack of effort. [laughs] I probably re-wrote some of those journal entries 20 times before I got it right. It was a really, really tough thing, not only to condense stuff but to just put all the puzzle pieces together around ‘okay this character is now in this part of the world and now I’m going to take them step-by-step to this next part of the world’, and is it going to make sense to the story I want to tell? Will it make sense to have them in this part of the desert because that’s where I went and that was the research I gathered. That was all ridiculously over-complicated, because I did it to myself [laughs].”

You can see some of the end product of all that work and refining in the preview pages below:

One of the other qualities of Little Monarchs that struck me most was how joyful and optimistic the book felt, but never in a forced way. There was a sense of wonder to this book, a sense of almost awe at the natural beauty. Even though the world had been ravaged by an apocalypse that left it mostly vacant, that emptiness never felt eerie or oppressive.

Case said:

“I think part of that was I set it far enough from the nasty details of how everything went down. It’s 50 years past the major event, and then you’re following it from the perspective of a kid who doesn’t know any other world. Hopefully, because she’s the primary vantage point, it does stay positive and it does stay mostly about the focus on the natural world.”

And the book so far has gotten a really positive response, complete with near-universal critical acclaim. What has been most special for Case has been parents reaching out to tell him that their children are doing drawings that mimic those in the journal sections of the book, wanting to draw their cat, for example, and label the parts of its body, kind of like a biologist might.

Another particularly special reaction was a woman whose father used to travel the monarch’s migratory route for many years. He had passed away, but Little Monarchs has made her now want to take the journey in the book with her own grandkids, sharing the groves that her family has loved for many years, thereby engaging with nature the way that Case did and the way he hopes more readers do. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘yes! It’s working!’” he said.

The other thing Case hopes comes out of Little Monarchs is appreciation for and protection of the monarch butterflies and their stunning migratory patterns.

“The monarch migration is worth preserving, both because it’s scientifically incredible, it’s unique and it’s inspiring at that level alone, but also culturally and spiritually it’s a pretty rich thing. The connection to the Day of the Dead is something that has impacted my family. The second trip that we took for research, we had just lost my son — who I ended up writing into the book as the little boy — and when we went back to the groves in Natural Bridges, California, we happened to arrive there unplanned on the Day of the Dead. When you see the monarchs there, and you understand what it took them to get there by the thousands to weigh those branches down in their big clusters, you’re thinking no one told them how to get here, they just know, they just have an eternal thread that goes through their generations deep in their bodies. There’s even a place on Lake Michigan where they fly around a mountain that is no longer their on the lake because of their generational memory. There are so many reasons to preserve them…”

Order Little Monarchs now!

Little Monarchs

Little Monarchs
Writer/Artist: Jonathan Case
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson Books
This graphic novel adventure tells the story of 10-year-old Elvie and her crucial mission to save humanity from extinction after a sun shift has changed life on earth as we know it.
It’s been fifty years since a sun shift wiped out nearly all mammal life across the earth.
Towns and cities are abandoned relics, autonomous machines maintain roadways, and the world is slowly being reclaimed by nature. Isolated pockets of survivors keep to themselves in underground sites, hiding from the lethal sunlight by day and coming above ground at night.
10-year-old Elvie and her caretaker, Flora, a biologist, are the only two humans who can survive during daylight because Flora made an incredible discovery – a way to make an antidote to sun sickness using the scales from monarch butterfly wings. Unfortunately, it can only be made in small quantities and has a short shelf life.
Free to travel during the day, Elvie and Flora follow monarchs as they migrate across the former Western United States, constantly making new medicine for themselves while trying to find a way to make a vaccine they can share with everyone. Will they discover a way to go from a treatment to a cure and preserve what remains of humanity, or will their efforts be thwarted by disaster and the very people they are trying to save?
Release Date: April 5, 2022
Buy It Here: Digital / Paperback / Hardcover

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He has written about comics for The Beat and NPR Books, among others. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.