Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I am talking to cartoonist writer and illustrator Blue, Delle Quanti. Blue has created several comics and webcomics, including the award winning O Human star. Their most recent work is bleed any percent available online at the short box comic Fair. Blue, welcome to write on radio.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Eric, what is a webcomic?
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Oh, boy. Well, a webcomic, simply put, can be any comic that is distributed online. This is something that can come in many forms, especially these days. There are what we would call classic webcomics that are updated page by page, like maybe a page per week. Oftentimes they can be assembled into a print volume. But a lot of webcomics these days are in what's known as webtoon format, where it scrolls easy to read on a phone. But it's a really vibrant, fun, indie subsection of the comics art form that's had a lot of growth lately.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: How did you start making comics, and what drew you to web comics in particular?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: So I started becoming interested in being a comic artist when I was in my tweens, early teens. This was the early two thousands for context. So the comics industry in North America was already going through a lot of change and growth. We were starting to have a lot of movie adaptations of comics that were bringing more people into reading comics here in the states. There was a lot of manga that was being imported to North America, japanese comics, korean comics. And then the Internet became more accessible to more people. So I started discovering on my own really personal niche, eccentric digital projects by cartoonists. And I just absorbed everything I could find. And as I became more interested in pursuing it as a career, I started making friends with people online who are kind of doing the same sort of thing I was doing, and I got feedback from them. I learned how to build a website, and over time, that snowballed into a readership that has, like, grown with me and followed me through projects. So these days, I do a lot of other types of projects that aren't exclusively digital, but I am still really fond of making comics for the web and sharing my work way.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: So where were you professionally when you started writing O human star?
[00:02:46] Speaker B: I was 22 years old. I really had made very few comics up to that point. In fact, the origin of this comic, I like telling this story. It came to me as a dream when I was in college. Like, the basic premise of O human star came in a dream that I wrote down, and I found myself really intrigued by the premise, and I couldn't leave it alone, so I started developing these characters through sketching and writing about them, and that snowballed over the next couple of years into this project that I started updating a page a week, and I was young. I was in my early twenties. And people who are familiar with webcomics know that they're often labors of love. They often go on permanent hiatus after a few years, maybe. And I kind of assumed that would happen with O human star, where I would work on this project, and then I would move on with my life or get a real job or something, and then I just didn't. I proceeded to make this comic for eight years until I reached the conclusion that I'd written, you know, back in my early twenties, more or less. So, yeah, this was a passion project that I thought would peter out, and then it just didn't.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: So O human star was written between 2012 and 2020. How much of this story did you have planned from the start, and were there any aspects that changed during the process of writing it?
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Yeah, there are some aspects of O human star that have remained consistent. The premise was always the same. The premise was very similar to that initial hook that I had written in this dream journal, which was basically an inventor wakes up to discover that he is now in a robot body and furthermore, has been dead for 16 years. So he kind of has to figure out what happened, who happened to the people that he knew in his original life, and kind of figure out what he would do next. And that basic hook, plus this overall melancholic tone, is what came from that original premise. And then over time, as I started figuring out what intrigued me about these characters, I figured out their dynamic. I figured out what are their conflicts with each other and what felt important to them. I eventually got a sense of where this story probably would want to resolve. I always had the ending fairly clear, so I ended up breaking it up into an outline of basic story beats that would get me from where I was to where I wanted to go, but there was a lot of space that could be filled. And over time, as I worked on the comic, like I said, I worked at this steady pace where I would outline a chapter, maybe, but I would update a page a week, and I would, in that ensuing week, have, you know, comments or feedback from people following it in real time. And over that kind of extended pace, I got to become fond of a lot of minor characters that I had written or I had more time to cook ideas that had been going on in the background or implications of certain things that the characters did, and that let me fill in certain areas that were just sort of skeletal outline before. So the general structure, the skeleton of the story was pretty consistently intact from the beginning. But there was a lot of characters that I would consider at this point crucial to the story that came kind of organically on their own over the years. And now I couldn't imagine the story without them.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: So. O human star, the title is from a quote from Rur Rossum's universal robots, which, to my listeners who don't know, popularized the term robot. Why did you pick this particular story to reference for your story?
[00:07:01] Speaker B: That was a narrative that I had become familiar with because of its important role in introducing this word to the english language. It. Oh, it's been a little bit, but if I'm remembering correctly, the original playwright was czech. It comes from a czech word for a. Like a serf, a servant. And that informs the role that these robots who aren't like, you know, clank, clank, like metal robots that we often think of them, they honestly are more like the. Like the Cylons from the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Like, they look more flesh and blood, human ish.
But there was a lot of really interesting dialogue going there about the role robots play and them defying expectations. That is, because it's the predecessor of a lot of these robot stories. There's not a lot of tropes that it falls into, of robots being evil, or robots looking a certain way or behaving a certain way. And there's a very, like, interesting, flowery, theatrical language because it was, I believe, written in the twenties.
So there's just this really evocative language. And there's a monologue at the very end of the story of the play that this line comes from. And it talks about how humanity is this light that extends into the future without end. And I liked that idea of humanity being something that continues on regardless of what we do or what we make or the consequences of our actions. And that had a lot of reverberation for the ideas I wanted to pursue in O human star, which were about identity and legacy and what it means to, you know, step outside of expectations that you have for yourself and that people have for yourself. And it just matched the tone of what I was going for in a way that was very, like, early 20th century, both visually, in some ways, and literally in some other ways.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: So, speaking of expectations, in several moments in the webcomic, being an Android is used as a type of metaphor for being trans, while in other moments, there are characters are quite literally trans. What drew you to including both this metaphorical depiction and a literal depiction.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Yes. This was something that first drew my attention to the story because of this original iteration of it. Our main character, Alastair Sterling, who is this considered, this visionary inventor, someone who changed the game and then tragically passed away. Al is revived and learns that his partner, who was also his lover, had taken an attempt at reviving Al. And this attempt is around and a person, but she transitioned to being female, which raises a lot of questions and a lot of tensions for this trio of characters. And again, this came in the dream. I thought about this. I was working on these characters, and I started going, you know, I feel like I should read more lgbt comics and literature as an ally. I feel like this would be the responsible thing to do. And I did a lot. I sincerely dove it a lot into queer literature, queer comics, which were, you know, early 20 teens, was going through a heyday.
And that really opened my eyes, that let me to evaluate my own identity as well. And I found that there is this long standing, really robust connection between stories about technology, stories about the body in technology, about, you know, artificial, like, robots that mesh very cohesively with stories about queer identity or trans identity.
A story in multiple media that does this quite well is ghost in the shell. Ghost in the shell is very, very transcoded. The matrix is another one that people can often see that with and have, and there's countless others. And I think there is a really interesting parallel between this idea of thinking about who you are in relation to your body, in relation to outside of your body, your physical form, and your identity kind of existing in multiple places, both in the real world, in the digital world, over time, that trans people and people who have had this deep dive into thinking about their gender or their just identity of any kind have a really strong connection to and have had a lot of deeper thoughts about. And I found that super intriguing. I really liked this idea of not only being a robot or cyborg or artificial construct, being an allegory for being trans, but also something that compounds into literally being trans, because that's something that you can genuinely explore in science fiction, concepts that often feels, I don't know, scary. And I'm doing the big scary hand wave to contemporary mainstream society, shall we say? It's easier to think about that in the world of fiction allegory.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: This story takes a positive view of the creation of artificial intelligence. Is the AI that is being used today similar to your depiction of AI? How do you feel about what is currently being described as artificial intelligence?
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Oh, I have a lot of thoughts on this. Well, so something I should mention as well is stories that really captivated me as I was developing O human star. I was the cool kind of teenager who had a subscription to Wired. And I like keeping up with stories about people who are developing technology in interesting ways or using it to create interesting projects, or just that connection between human behavior and society with changes in technology. And something that had been happening for a while and that people had been thinking about for a while is using data. Like the increasing collection of data and amassment of data that we produce from existing online, from having our, like, biometrics recorded from all sorts of things. People have always thought about what that would mean for having this digital shadow that we're all creating. And as I was working on o human star, people were starting to create projects that would try, and if not recreate, at least evoke a real person. There is a story that I recall the details of where someone had, a programmer had lost a dear friend who had, like, passed away from an illness of some kind, and undertook this project to create a chatbot that was drawing from all of the text messages and emails that this guy had had with his friend. And he wasn't entirely, you know, thinking about a purpose for this beyond just like, I wanted to talk to my friend again. I wanted to. I didn't want to think that my friend was totally gone, because I wanted to see what this generator was capable of doing. And I think there's something interesting there. But I feel like most people who think about AI from this kind of lens think about it as a.
I don't think we're at the point where we can create people, and we're just sort of iterating from stuff that already exists. What I find troubling about AI tools that are being used, and frankly, being pushed at people quite aggressively, is that it is using existing media in a way that often has not been consented to. And we're talking about things like, you know, visual art for generating images, or people's words are written, media for generating new text or music even.
I can't help but notice this is a lot of creatively driven media, and it's flattening it from a person into a product. And what I also find particularly troubling is the way that this kind of approach toward AI does nothing think about the usefulness of ignorance or gaps in knowledge.
As an example, a hobby that I took up during the pandemic was foraging. And mushroom foraging is a hobby that's been picking up a lot. And mushroom foraging is something where you really have to deal with the limits of your knowledge, because if you pick and ingest something that you don't properly identify or don't recognize, it can kill you. And this has been something, again, that has popped up multiple times, where, you know, lots of publishers, for lack of a better word, are just producing junk books that are, you know, for mushroom foragers that have fictional, like, falsified images, garbage text. And it's leading to misidentifications of stuff, because that is not encouraging the forager mindset of, like, if you don't know what something is, don't deal with it. Come back when you've learned more. It doesn't accommodate for that kind of limits because it needs to push a product. And that sort of commodification of things is something that I find really troubling. And I wish those people read more science fiction.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Oh, I want to go deep into that, but I.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: There's so much to talk about.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: How does the form of being a comic affect how this story is told? Are there parts of this story that you feel that the medium of comics allowed you to convey that other mediums might not have?
[00:17:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, with o human star in particular, something that is interesting about engaging with characters where you see them visually, but you aren't told about them, is that it often informs what adjectives that might otherwise be assigned to a character, or what pronouns, or what anything that would be assigned to a character in prose. You instead get through visual, and you have to make your own judgments, which I find really freeing. And it leads the audience to conclude things about my characters or my work that is really fun to follow along with and see where their lines of thought are, or where they're correctly guessing things or wildly off the mark. That's really fun. Something that I think is often a misunderstanding about comics is that it's just like animation or film. Like, it's just frames of images doing the same thing that film does. And it's really not, if anything, comics are more like theater. A cartoonist can figure out the scope of a story by just putting down a handful of lines to suggest a setting or suggest a tone or suggest a character. But they're kind of doing everything. They are like the costume designer. They are the set designer. They are the everything. But there's an active role that the reader plays in conjuring the story in their own mind as they read it. That is fundamentally different from, like, watching a movie where everything you see is just, like, bombarded at you from the screen. There's a more of a collaborative give and take with the role of a cartoonist and their reader that is extremely fun. It's one of my favorite things about the medium, and it can be a workout sometimes too, in a way that is very similar to sitting at a theater and, like, watching a show.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: It has been four years since you finished O human star.
How do you feel about it?
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Looking back, I'm still really fond of it, to be honest. I am aware that in the realm of comics, a webcomic is something that kind of grows with the reader. And what's often charming is that you can see that change of, like, either a artist's visual skills or you can kind of see them change as a person over time. You know, the story that you want to make when you're 22 is different from the story. You want to make it 32. So it's this slightly, like, clumsy, awkward thing that grows with you. And I do see that in ohs to some extent, but I think there were some choices that I had made early on that I think were smart. In the long run, that helps it feel more coherent than, you know, it could have been.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: While reading it, I definitely felt like, oh, this feels like the same finished product from beginning to end, as opposed to some webcomics that I've read where the art style is wildly different at the beginning to the end.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: So, yeah, yeah. Which is not necessarily always a bad thing. Like I said, it's kind of like a charming time capsule. But I do think there's some restraint that I showed at the beginning that let me put some stuff in later when I was a bit of a better storyteller that makes it look better as a result. But, yeah, I'm still honestly really proud of it. I feel like it was a good reflection of what I wanted to do and who I was becoming as, like, an artist and a storyteller that I'm still really pleased with.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: How has your career progressed since writing O Human star?
[00:21:28] Speaker B: So in those years, I have had more opportunities to work for printhead. I have had a graphic novel come out from a imprint of Penguin Random House that is more of a splashy space opera style story for middle grade readers in print. That is one of the audiences that has experienced the most growth is graphic novels for younger readers. You know, you've got like your dog man, your Raina Telgemeier stories, and that audience is growing up and becoming really sophisticated, you know, audience of comic readers. So I've done some of that. I have also been continuing to make more experimental, shorter form graphic novellas and short stories that I distribute online in various ways. And I also have been collaborating with other artists or organizations on different types of projects. I'm working on something with a children's theater company right now, actually.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Oh, cool.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we can talk about that too.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I would love to talk about that. Let me ask my next question, which is you have worked on many other projects during and after creating o human star, including working for bigger franchises like Ghostbusters and Avatar, the Last Airbender. How is writing and drawing for franchises different from creating your own projects? And how is that different from, like you said, working with more community organizations like this theater?
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So I've had a couple of opportunities to work for publishers that make works based on existing IP intellectual property. Dark Horse and IDW are an example of some publishers who will acquire the rights to produce, say, like the Avatar, the Last Airpender comic adaptations, or Ghostbusters when, you know, the most recent films came out.
What has been fun and interesting about working on those is that those comics are much more frequently a team effort. I'm used to kind of being like a one person show where I write and I draw and I ink and I color and I letter and I do everything. And that's simply not how it is at a lot of these publishers. There is a writer and there is often a artist who will do like the rough line art that is then passed to an inker, that is then passed to a colorist who then letters the comics. There's an assembly line format to it that involves more coordination.
I also work with an editor, which is a good editor, is a really great person to have in your corner because they are the one responsible for making, helping make your work the best it can be. But they also, with IP like this, they are communicating with the everyone involved in running like the Ghostbusters show, like the people who are making the films and the ones who keep track of, like, what a proton pack looks like. There's also actors who are consulted to make sure that they're okay with how I'm drawing them and to make sure their likeness is to their liking. So there's just a lot of, there's a lot of moving parts, there's a lot of cats to herd. So there is a hurry up and wait style schedule that is a bit different than what I was used to working all on my own.
But that tends to have a broader platform of a people who are interested in reading or familiar with what I'm doing.
For example, there's a lot of people really enthusiastic about Ghostbusters who, you know, interviewed me for podcasts or talked to me or were interested in what we were doing when we were working on that. Also, those people kind of made my life easier because when I had to look up reference imagery for, say, the Ghostbusters car ecto one, a lot of times I would look up images of toys or maquettes that these people had assembled and filmed them from different angles so I could get to draw the undercarriage and I got to draw the more interesting. That was kind of a fun bonus I hadn't expected, but yeah, it's just a very different dynamic. That is, it takes some getting used to. But if everybody on the team is communicating well with each other and staying in touch with each other, it can be a fun change of pace.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Your most recent project is bleed any percent for the short box comics fair. What is the short Box comics fair and what is this latest project?
[00:26:12] Speaker B: So every October for the last, I believe it's the last four years, a comics publisher in the UK, her name is Zayneb Akhtar. She ran a small publishing house called Short Box, and she has since sunsetted the, like, physical printing of books that she has been doing. But she's since organized this digital fair in which she invites a bunch of artists from all over the world, a bunch of comic artists, and literally all over the world, like Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Southeast Asia, there is a really broad swath of talent of people who are either established professionals or they, this is the first, you know, comic of this length they will ever have made. Zeyneb invites all of these comic artists to make a new comic story and to debut it in this digital fair that is posted on the website for the entire month of October. And people get it in October on the website, and then after that, it may not appear ever again. Sometimes artists will, like, make their work available elsewhere. Other times it's just gone. That was its one. That was its one show.
What's been really cool about a being invited to do this and to make work for the short box comics fair is that there is a big emphasis on making a standalone piece to, like, show off and explore your, like, interests and skills and what the comics as a medium can do. And there's really a component of camaraderie across all of these people working in all these different countries, all these different continents to, you know, share work with the world and be like hey, I made this thing. It's, you know, 23 pages long. It's about this. Try looking at this person's work, too. Like, this person from Argentina made this, like, you know, hard boiled crime story that stars, you know, cats. Or, you know, this person made a really, like, sincere Autobio about, you know, visiting her dad in Italy. And, like, it just, it makes the comics world feel larger, and it makes the comics world feel more vibrant and interesting. So I've had the chance to make one off things where I don't know if I would have had the chance to try making what I did if not for this venue to sell my work in this cool festival. But I feel like I've got to know more comic artists from all over the world by participating in this fair. It's really, really exciting. I'm glad that Zeyneb's been curating it the way she has.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: That's really cool.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Oh, I guess I should talk about what bleeding percent is.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
I was so excited about comics fairs as a, as a medium. So what I made this year, bleed any percent is science fiction. Again, it is a genre I like a lot. It is about a speedrunner, which, for people who are not familiar in the world of video games, competitive video game streaming, there is a group of people who will try and run a game as quickly or as an absurd fashion as possible, and that's known as speedrunning. And it is about a video game speedrunner who specializes in a niche augmented reality game where you're, like, engaging with stuff like, in real life, and she chooses a crowded underground mall to do her run. And it's about her being bombarded by virtual and real life stimuli as she tries to accomplish this run.
Really visually, it looks kind of different from this kind of work I did. I got to try a lot with some cool digital tools. I get to go back to the idea of technology clashing with social constructs, which is a thing I love to talk about in fiction.
It's just a structure. I haven't really played around with that much before in terms of making something that is short and done in, like, 24 pages.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: Do you consider yourself a writer, an illustrator, a cartoonist, or something else?
[00:30:47] Speaker B: I see myself as, see, when you call yourself a cartoonist, I feel like there is so much association with, like, people have a lot of, like, visuals that they associate with being a cartoonist, but that's kind of the closest word I can get to the showing off all of the roles that I have to undertake when I make a comic, because I am a writer, but there's more porousness between me writing a story and me, like, almost casting the story. I have to create characters and figure out who is the best fit for this role. I want characters to be. I am, again, a set designer. I am a costume designer. I am just thinking about all of these components of telling a story that it feels like a too reductive to have it be like, this is my writer brain, and this is my artist brain. There's just a lot of stuff going on. I also often, I've started thinking of myself more as a comics teacher. I teach comics classes, and that gets me to think a lot more about what I care about when it comes to the medium or how comics communicates certain ideas. Because when you have to teach something, you really have to think about it and figure out what you're trying to say and how you genuinely feel about things. In a way, I think that has clarified what I want to make. So I just call myself, like a comic artist, writer, and teacher, but I am a cartoonist. I'm kind of doing everything.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Well, we don't have much time left. So do you have any upcoming or current projects that you would like to share with the world?
[00:32:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So for people who are in the Twin Cities, one of the cool projects I've been working on right now is collaborating with the children's theater company in Minneapolis. They are debuting a show, a world debut of a production called drawing lessons that is about a middle school kid who is very shy, coming out of her shell by learning to draw after being guided and taught by this cantankerous old art supply seller guy. And I have been working with the director, with the crew, and the cast to draw, at this point, over 100 illustrations that are projected as part of the set design, as part of the emotional backdrop of what the actors are acting out on stage at any given time. It's a really, really interesting combination of things that I haven't seen theater do quite this way before, but I feel like this is kind of the closest I've seen to that mix of theater and comics that I always tell people about. I'll be like, see this? This is what I mean. The audience gets to react and fill in all these gaps that are being suggested both by the actors performances and by the illustration work. And I'm super excited with how it's turning out. And it's debuting, like, later this week as we are talking.
It's opening night is Saturday.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Okay, that would be Saturday the 12th.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: That sounds correct. It's running through October and most November, I believe.
[00:34:11] Speaker A: Awesome.
Thank you so much for coming in and having this conversation.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Thank you for chatting with me. I had a great time. All right.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: And now this.
