SP talked to cartoonist, illustrator, and author Brian Biggs, whose Fantagraphics book Frederick & Eloise: A Love Story celebrates its 30th birthday this year! This is the full interview, which was lightly edited to fit into Instagram’s character limits.
🗣️On brianbiggs.com/news you tell a great story about creating F&E. Do you have any thoughts on where the initial tablecloth-drawn story came from?
👤I wondered that myself last week when I was writing that essay about the book.
Honestly, I had nothing going on in my life but thinking about comics and drawings and stories. I was unemployed, fairly penniless, and I had nothing to do all day but read books, walk around neighborhoods, and see movies. I probably wrote weird little bits like that on a lot of tablecloths, probably every night. That particular one I liked enough to tear off and save.
I had read something in some film magazine about the Coen Brothers and their writing process, and I hope I’m remembering this correctly, where they would just go with these stream-of-conscious bits, and pass them back and forth adding and editing and elaborating. And that writing method made sense to me. Just put this person in this weird situation and see what happens.
I also had this crush, and maybe there was something about that as well. She was this artist-acquaintance named Monica, from Sweden. Just a few weeks before I wrote this, we’d gone to some gallery show on Valentine’s Day and I’d snuck a bottle of wine in my coat pocket (yes, an entire bottle). It was a rainy evening and we were on the Pont des Arts over the Seine. I pulled out the bottle and an opener and said “Happy Valentine’s Day.” She was so surprised, and just started laughing. She made it very clear she had no romantic interest in me at all, and just kept on laughing. I’m pretty confident that this episode may have had something to do with it all, now, in retrospect…
🗣️When you were expanding from the initial scene to the fuller story, were there any particular problems or challenges that you came up against?
👤My recollection is of Carlos, my friend who inspired the whole thing, suggesting I elaborate on that smaller version. Make it a real story. It’s strange that there really isn’t much in my sketchbook—it just sort of all appears, almost exactly as it ended up. I’ve written many published stories since, for graphic novels or children’s books, and I can always see how things meandered here or there from the first idea to the finished book. But with Frederick, it seems to have just been there.
🗣️ Do people ask you to explain some of the mysteries in the story? What do you tell them?
👤Well of course, no one asks me anymore. But yes, back in the 1990s I was asked about it a lot. My next graphic novel, Dear Julia, was even more opaque. In comparison, Frederick seems pretty straightforward.
With both books, I feel the answers to most of the questions are there in the story. I don’t spoon-feed the reader, but if you want to know, most of it is there. Not everything, of course.
Who killed Eloise? Serge the cab driver? Frederick, while sleepwalking? Some random accident out there in the rain during the night? I don’t know. But that wasn’t the point of the story, anyway.
🗣️ We don’t really see Eloise in the story. Did you have a complete design for her, or a sketch?
👤No sketches, no ideas. I do recall that I even debated showing her legs in the ocean scene. There are sketches for that scene that just show a beach ball on the water, and then a shark fin. I’d seen some photography exhibit with photos taken underwater and I thought they were so cool and weird, so I went with the shark’s POV. But no, I never had any idea what Eloise looked like.
🗣️You note that F&E was your first project where you had a voice and something to say. What did you hope to communicate or evoke with the story back then? And when you read it today, does it say something different?
👤That realization happened during and after the project. I didn’t go into it with any point, or message in my head. It was sort of a “Oh my god, I can do this” sort of thing.
Let me see if I can clarify: I’d been able to draw, and draw really really well, since I was a little kid. I won art contests and I showed off and I was always asked to do the posters and cartoons for school papers and the local library and so on. But I was like a pianist who could technically play well, but had no idea how to bring one’s own ideas into the music, how to express something with it. Until I was in college, I thought the pinnacle of artistic expression was to be able to draw photographically. A drawing instructor my freshman year at North Texas State beat that out of me, but that left me adrift. I studied graphic design at Parsons, figuring I’d go into publishing as an art director or book designer. But then, during my junior year abroad in Paris, I was introduced to comics. I’d never really been into the traditional American comics like Marvel or DC as a kid. Superfriends and mutants didn’t do anything for me. But when I first laid eyes on Moebius, and Tardi, and Bilal, and even Americans like Spiegelman and Frank Miller, I realized that comics wasn’t so much a genre as it was a medium. All sorts of stories could be told with comics.
I also loved film, and harbored some fantasies about being a filmmaker like Jim Jarmusch. But I had no idea how to do that, and I was not capable of collaborating, which is necessary to make any sort of film. I mean, you can be a dictatorial auteur but you still have to have actors and a camera. I had no idea how to do that.
I took some creative writing classes at times during my four years of college, and found that I really enjoyed writing very short situational fiction pieces. Beginning, middle, and end all take place within one or two paragraphs. No time for back-story or long character arcs. It’s what’s now called “flash fiction,” and in fact, totally coincidentally, my sister happens to be very very good at it and has a recent collection of flash fiction published. There were a few writers I read back then like Italo Calvino and Donald Barthelme who played with form in this way, and I found that I loved these stories for leaving so much up to the reader. Who are these people? Why are they where they are? What happens next? I didn’t have the chops for writing successful prose like that, but I think that sort of writing along with what I loved about Edward Gorey and even gag cartoons gave me this place where I could mix words with image to some interesting effect. Images are good at some things. And words are good at other things, and I realized the two can complement each other, or or they could contradict each other in interesting ways as well.
My sketchbooks from then are full of little drawings that maybe show one thing, just something simple like a man walking down the street, with a caption that shifts the perspective in some clever way.
The tablecloth paragraph that became this story was all part of that. So the voice I found wasn’t so much around what to say, but more around how to say something. I don’t feel like I set out to communicate a particular thing. It was more like finding a new language and just exploring that language.
🗣️You show some great archival material on your post about F&E. Do you in general tend to keep your original work and sketches, etc., or was this an exception?
👤Oh man, I keep everything. I did then, and I do now. I have emotional attachments to sketchbooks and old pens and pencil-boxes. I still have a small tin that contains (for real) all of the discarded pen nibs I used while drawing Frederick & Eloise. It’s crazy.
I know some of that, back in 1991, was borne out of hubris. I was insecure, so so insecure. But what got me up in the morning and even what made me take five solid weeks and draw this book was this weird little pocket of complete confidence that I could do this, and that one day people would want to see these sketches and these drawings and this piece of tablecloth.
I have forever loved seeing the work that led to my favorite films and books. I remember seeing a huge David Hockney exhibit at the Met in 1988, and more than the paintings themselves, I loved seeing his small preliminary drawings and sketches. When Sendak’s archives lived here in Philadelphia, I’d make an appointment to visit the Rosenbach Museum, put on the white cotton gloves and hold and look at the Where the While Things Are and Juniper Tree archives. This stuff is so meaningful to me.
Much of my children’s book work has been digital, but I still keep folders of marked-up scripts and sketches and line-art. Over the pandemic I wrote and drew My Hero, which is my only children’s book that was drawn and painted entirely off the computer with actual art supplies. I just wanted to know I could do it. I have hundreds of “rehearsal” drawings of the characters and things that appear in the book like trees and a cat and buildings. And it’s all safely ensconced in three large archival boxes, right alongside Frederick & Eloise and Dear Julia, my second graphic novel.
🗣️Tell us about Awesome Girl, the lead of your picture book My Hero. She seems like an extension of that super confidence that some kids have. Were you a superhero comics reader as a kid, and did you have those kinds of imaginary adventures?
👤While My Hero began back in 2007 with me working through my own anxieties and insecurities as a kid, it ended up being much more about me as a father and my relationship with one of my own children. Superheroes and their costumes are always a mask for various emotional issues, and while I didn’t care at all about superheroes as a kid, I knew that the idea of a little boy running around in a cape and performing feats of strength was a good way to show the inner thoughts of someone who is outwardly anxious and insecure. There is always that dichotomy between wanting to believe in our children and allow them to do whatever it is they want to do, but also the desire to keep them safe.
“Yes, I want to see you climb to the top of the monkey-bars, but no, because you might fall off!”
“Yes, I think you would be a terrific artist, but how will you make a living?”
My children are now 24 and 22 years old, and it never ends. You might think you’re raising a little extension of you, but kids are their own independent beings, and will let you know that over and over again. They will challenge and defy you in ways you least expect and are least prepared to deal with. That’s what My Hero is really about.
I still have those imaginary adventures. I’ll be out on a long bike ride and give imaginary lectures about creativity and illustration to audiences of enraptured listeners, just like Awesome Girl’s superman voice at the beginning of My Hero.
🗣️It seems like lots of picture books these days are using a comics format—panels, word balloons, etc—to tell their stories. Do you get feedback about that in your work; i.e. does a publishers weigh in on those kind of design elements?
👤Comics and graphic novels are easily the biggest sellers in children’s publishing right now, so it’s really opened a lot of doors to use comics tools to tell stories in interesting ways. But comics are difficult to translate to picture books, since picture books are often read to groups, like in schools and libraries. It’s very awkward when you have multiple panels and actions and little word balloons to get across who is saying what and what’s happening to a group of listeners.
So it’s tricky.
Editors and publishers definitely don’t see comics as a lesser art form any longer and yes, they do weigh in. Just a few weeks ago an art director suggested to me to use panels to deal with a difficult picture book spread where multiple things are happening over a short period of time. It wasn’t working as a single large illustration and she asked me if “comic panels” would break down the action into small sequential parts. It will, and it works, so I’m using it.
🗣️Can you talk a bit about the teaching you’re doing? What surprises you most about how your students approach making comics?
👤I’m teaching an illustration elective offered to seniors in a graphic and interactive art department at Tyler School of Art. The students are focused mostly on branding and graphics, and I’m using illustration to introduce different tools they can use, and yeah, comics—or sequential illustrations—is one of them. I make that distinction because the use of sequences might be in order to design a recipe, for example, or a series of instructions. , just as much as it might be to tell a story like we think of comics doing. When you’re on an airplane, look at the emergency pamphlet in the seat pocket. That’s basically comics, telling you how to get off that plane before it sinks into the river. But it has to work for anyone to understand in any language.
I’ve only taught this class one semester at this point, but I taught something similar back at The University of the Arts 20 years ago. College students are much more familiar with comics then and now than I was when I was in school. They grew up reading Maus in high school, and reading Raina Telgemeier and Jillian Tamaki and manga when they were younger. I wanted to get across the idea I mentioned earlier, of comics not being a genre, but a medium. A mega-powerful, flexible communication tool. It’s not just superheroes or horror or fantasy or any of the clichés. Just like film, or prose, or theatre, comics can be anything.