Q&A 22: John Smiths (Patreon)

When I was a student in Sheffield, the most widely available beer was John Smiths' bitter. It was horrible, made only slightly more tolerable by the grisly offerings of the Stones and Bass breweries that were the alternatives. I'm not much of a drinker any more. And I'm not "bitter" about this raft of posers from reader John Smith:

1. Did the Eisner awards change things for you when you won them, or not really? I've read that when Shigeru Mizuki's Showa won an Eisner it only resulted in a very small sales bump, so I'm curious. 

It's ludicrous to me that I won two Eisners, bearing in mind the low baseline I started from in 1998.

I don't think the awards changed things sales-wise. Giant Days was already over when I won in 2019, and the pandemic meant I wasn't able to take advantage of the free, all-expenses paid trip to San Diego Comic-con I was offered the following year. Awards are nice, because it's fun to win a prize, but there's also a psychological downside to them. The Eisners are the industry's top award, and I was nominated in 2016, 17, 18 (for Bad Machinery) and 2019, when I won. I've never been nominated since. Does that mean that everything I've made since has been worse? Landfill?

Of course not. Awards don't really work that way. Publishers don't submit everything. And there is a sense that once you've won, you've had your turn. That's only fair. But when the nominations come out each year, there is a feeling, a little devil, that says "I used to be a contender".

2. Do you have any stories about your work being translated into other languages? Do you ever correspond with the translators? I feel like there are a lot of people in Japan who have never read a Western comic before who would like Bad Machinery, but that may just be a feeling. 

Most of my translators have never requested my help. But on the occasions that they have, I've found them very engaging people who bring supreme craft to transposing the work to their language, preserving meaning even when cultural and idiomatic specificities have to be abandoned. Diane Lecerf, who translated most if not all of Giant Days into French, would sometimes write to ask if she had captured the spirit of what I was trying to say when she translated jokes into something that would make sense in French. Her reinterpretations usually credited me with a lot more intelligence than I actually possess. My Spanish translator Inma Andreu also has a very sure hand, which is reflected in the books' popularity there.

As for Japan, three words: coals to Newcastle.

3. Have you ever thought about trying your hand at writing song lyrics? Beyond the times when you've done that for the comics. 

I do write song lyrics sometimes; my friends Dan Berry and Jeremy Warmsley send me instrumentals and I write the lyrics and the melodies and a little vocal arrangement if I am feeling daring. They aren't allowed to play them for anyone. My music is not for the public, it's a hobby and it's just for me. I don't need more attention. And especially not for the songs I make.

4. Do you do scripts and then storyboards, or just storyboards? You may have answered this before somewhere.

I'm sure I have answered this in detail elsewhere, so to answer briefly, I write down as many ideas as I can on paper, flowcharts and little faces and bits of dialogue with potential jokes. Then, when I have the critical mass of ideas for a story, I break it down into pages - a numbered list of pages with all the story beats, any dialogue from the rough notes, and very brief supplementary notes that ensure I don't miss any critical things out of the drawings. This might be 1000-1200 words. Then I draw a rough version of the comic as I write, like a "name" in manga. These are the roughs I sometimes post here. I do the rough version in a notebook so I have a sense of page spreads and panelling.

If a story has multiple parts, I will build out the later parts as breakdowns as soon as they are needed. So I might have 2-4 breakdowns done before I start my rough versions. Though the later ones are inevitably subject to change.