As with the previous interview with Gloria Ferris, this interview with genre-blending author Justin Robinson is the direct result of social media networking. Justin actually came recommended to me by another interviewee on this blog: Dru Pagliassotti.
I can honestly say that if Dru hadn’t mentioned Justin to me, I would likely have no idea who Justin is - and that’s the point of this blog. There are so many fascinating and funny authors out there that are cast in shadow by bigger names. It’s been a challenge and a delight, deliberately seeking out new and lesser known authors. And it’s my pleasure to present them to you.
So then, what can a hard boiled, comedic, urban fantasy, ’80s glamour, science fiction, zombie noir, horror writer / graphic novelist / comic book editor tell us about writer’s craft and…punching sharks…? Turns out, he can tell us quite a lot.
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9DW: Some of your books strike me as more Gothic than horror – Everyman and Dollmaker for prime examples – while others strike me as urban fantasy / hard-boiled detective fiction, namely City of Devils. You also seem influenced by film noir, which lends itself pretty handily to everything from science fiction to mystery to horror. What genre would you consider your stories?
Photo Credit Leora Saul
Justin Robinson: I consider myself a pulp writer, so I kind of hop genres, and my primary influences are folks like John Carpenter, Bill Willingham, and Douglas Adams, who never met a genre they didn’t mash.
Dollmaker was very much me trying to take a gothic horror story and marry it to the sleazy glitz of ’80s cinema. Everyman is Dollmaker‘s sister novel. They’re both horror, and the horror stems from a person who grants himself superpowers and finds out that the cost of cheating reality is probably a little higher than he’d like. It’s got some gothic elements, definitely, but I wasn’t consciously trying to craft a gothic story with Everyman. Genre-wise, they’re the two most “pure” things I’ve done. When I write horror, I tend to get really dark, so I don’t want to dwell on that too much. Apparently it effects my mood.
I layer hardboiled detective stuff on top of other genres: Mr Blank (comic conspiracy thriller), City of Devils (comic creature feature), Nerve Zero (soft SF), Undead On Arrival (zombie survival horror), and even the introductory novella in Coldheart (urban fantasy) are all noir stories. Hardboiled tropes are fun to work with, and I’ve always liked how they play off against the conventions of other genres. I’ve now done it enough times that it’s become a natural way for me to explore stranger conceits, like with the world of monsters in City of Devils.
To actually answer your question, I usually either make up a genre (I call Undead On Arrival “zombie noir”) or I just call the book the closest applicable genre someone might recognize and hope they’re not too disappointed.
9DW: On the other hand, you list Douglas Adams as one of your other literary influences, and judging by your quirky bio, I get the idea that you like a bit of cerebral and off-the-wall humour. What kind of humour do you try to thread into your stories?
JR: My own. Trying to put someone else’s sense of humor into my books would result in whiplash.
9DW: You have a lot of four and five star ratings on Goodreads, especially for City of Devils, Mr. Blank and Undead on Arrival. What would you say is the best tactic to encourage readers to leave a review? And which do you find gets more reviews, your more serious stories or the funnier ones?
JR: I ask nicely. Whenever someone compliments a book, whether it’s a friend or a stranger reaching out over twitter, I ask them to leave a review and explain that it helps an indie author like me who doesn’t have a huge publishing house or agency backing him.
My comedies get the most love. Then again, those are both with Candlemark & Gleam, the best small press out there. I know they do a lot to draw attention to their books.
9DW: You’ve also got a couple of graphic novels to your name as well. Writing a book I understand: you put words on a page, and then you add some words, then you remove some words, or move them around, and then, if all goes well, you have a story. But a graphic novel requires less words-on-paper and more images-in-ink. From a graphic novelist perspective, what does your manuscript typically look like?
PAGE 1
Panel 1
JACK THE SHARK PUNCHER (male human, handsome, late 20s, metal hand) has
leapt from the prow (that’s the front) of his yacht (reference below),
at a fully grown adult Megalodon (think giant Great White Shark, and
I’ve included reference and size comparisons below), and punches the
shark in the face.
JACK: You monster! You ate my nephew!
SFX (punch): KRACK
Panel 2
Jack lands in the water with a splash. The shark flies away, knocked
back by the force of the punch.
SFX (water): SPLOOSH
…and so on.
9DW: With a full-length novel, you generally have a sense of how many pages will be required for you to write; same for short stories and novellas. How do you get a sense of how long a graphic novel will be, especially when pages are broken down into unequal panels? Or does it even matter, when you’re writing the story?
JR: You have an even more precise count. Before you start, your publisher is going to give you a set amount of pages (sometimes there’s a little give, depending on ad space), which is going to be somewhere between 22-32 for a single issue. Once you’ve been given your number, that’s how long your story is.
9DW: For that matter, how is writing a novella different from writing a graphic novel, in terms of skillsets?
JR: The novella in Coldheart started life as a comic script, so they’re actually fairly close in terms of story size if you’re talking something like a 6 issue limited series. When I turned the script into a novella, I got to add a few things I would have glossed over in the script, like the entry into the abandoned asylum. Fight scenes also take a lot longer in a comic script than they would in prose.
9DW: Let’s say I’ve got this great idea for a graphic novel, complete with a basic idea of images – maybe even a storyboard. But, I have zero visual arts skill, and all my artist friends are currently on commission. How do I pair up my idea with an artist and/or a graphic novel publisher like Arcana?
JR: Well, my first tip would be: Don’t. Rewrite it as prose.
Unless you know an artist and presently have him or her imprisoned in the abandoned well on your property, your book could take years to complete. You’re asking an artist — someone who likely has a paying job — to work for free, and churn out somewhere between 96-120 pages for free. That’s a lot of work. I wrote both of my graphic novels in ’04, and they’re only just this year being published.
If you’re dead set on making your comic script, your best bet is to reach out to artists over deviantart. If you’re very lucky, one of them might not laugh in your face when you say it’s not a paying gig. If you’re very, very lucky, in a couple years you might have something to sell.
9DW: You’re also an editor of comic books. I know book editors sit down with a Mighty Red Pen and assess story flow, address plot holes, fix grammar, the whole nine yards. But I also know that editors of newspapers, for example, are responsible for doing more than corrections – like editorial articles. What is it, exactly, that a comic book editor does?
JR: Same things other editors do, with a few additions. I have to check on things like the visual flow of a story — you should be able to get the gist of a comic story by the pictures alone. I have to make certain the big reveals occur on a page turn. With Fluorescent Black, I helped the writer turn a screenplay into a comic script. We chopped up scenes, storyboarded things out. We had a pretty impressive psycho wall at one point.
9DW: Greatest graphic artist of all time. Go.
JR: I’m a huge Rick Geary fan, though I don’t know if he’s the greatest of all time. Probably Stan Sakai.
9DW, Bonus round: You mention in the bio on your website that you reside in Los Angeles with 1.5 cats (among other things). What happened to the other 1/2 cat?
He’s not very friendly. It’s like having half a pet.
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Find out more about Justin Robinson:
Website: http://www.captainsupermarket.com/index.html
Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinsrobinson
Blog: http://satelliteshow.wordpress.com/author/captainsupermarket/
