JAMES ALBON Communicates his Feelings over LOVE LANGUAGES

Luis Godoy II is back with another interview, this time welcoming James Albon to discuss his latest release, Love Languages, released through Top Shelf Comix, with a trailer here!

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COMIC BOOK YETI: Welcome to the Yeti Cave, James Albon. I’m excited to interview you about Love Languages from your publisher Top Shelf. 

JAMES ALBON: Hello! Thanks for having me in your cave. I love what you've done with the place. The odour of Yeti is barely noticeable, and the many human remains and animal pelts really tie the room together. And this rug; is it real Yak skin?

CBY: Yes it is. 

JAMES ALBON: Delightful. 

CBY: Before we get into Love Languages, what got you into comics? 

JA: I grew up in a small village in the countryside and didn't have access to a lot of comics as a kid. My first real experience of comics was when an ex-library copy of Watchmen fell into my hands when I was around 16 years old. It was a life-changing read! I really got into reading comics when I was studying illustration in art school, reading authors like Jillian Tamaki, Eleanor Davis, and European authors like Brecht Evans and Manuele Fior. I've always loved writing and drawing, so of course comics are a natural way to combine them. I've also always loved movies, but completely lack any of the skills or professional contacts to go about making them. In a way, writing a comic feels a lot like making a movie, only as an author you get to play the role of director, editor, set dresser, costume designer, cinematographer, hair stylist, and all of the actors at once. One step up from a small child reenacting Star Wars by bashing his action figures together. 

CBY: Do you consider yourself a cartoonist since you are both writer and artist on this project, or do you have another name for the work you do?

JA: Unfortunately, I don't feel like I'm funny enough to have earned the title of "cartoonist." I generally describe myself as an author or author-illustrator, though I'm happy to go by anything and I really try to avoid getting hung up on semantic distinctions. I have traumatic memories of hours spent in art school crits having furious, belligerent arguments over whether something was "Art" or "Illustration" or the difference between "Comics" and "Graphic Novels." What a waste of time! 

CBY: Getting into Love Languages, to be honest, my typical reads for comics are superhero, sci-fi, and thrillers/horror, so your book wouldn’t have been a book I would have normally gravitated towards. That said, I really enjoyed your work. I read it probably faster than most other graphic novels. It kept me intrigued from page one. For unaware readers, I think this book would be considered a romance, but not in the traditional sense. Neither protagonist is looking for romance but it blossomed nonetheless. Can you explain the basic premise of the book?

JA: Yeah, I'd call it a "Queer Romance" for want of a better term, but just as I am not funny enough to warrant the label of "cartoonist," perhaps the book is not sexy enough to warrant the provocative label of capital R "Romance." It's a story about two women, Sarah from England and Ping from Hong Kong, who meet in Paris and begin a friendship with their shared level of intermediate French. As their friendship develops they start to learn each other's languages, with Sarah learning Cantonese and Ping learning English, they start to realise they might be more than just friends. 

The book is really about exploring how difficult it can be to ask someone "are we more than just friends?" and I find the idea of using language, transforming thought into word, really fascinating. I also love learning foreign languages, and even stammeringly trying to order a coffee in a foreign language from a waiter who clearly speaks fluent English delights me. Before I tried learning any foreign languages, I had this impression that it was like flicking a switch, that if you studied enough, you would suddenly be "FLUENT" and chat away happily in all situations. But in reality, between the first baby steps of ordering a coffee and the total mastery of reading the complete Proust in the original French, there is a huge, lengthy period which normally gets called "intermediate-advanced" in textbooks, in which you can sometimes communicate easily, and at other times are totally lost. I've spent a lot of time in this wilderness, and so Love Languages came from a desire to write about the struggle to understand our own emotions, but also the struggle of trying to communicate them. 

CBY: The main character is British, but a woman working in Paris, France, and far as I can tell from your bio, you are neither. How much of Love Languages was pulled from your own life? 

JA: Oh no, I am British, for my sins. I was born in Cambridge, England, (possibly the most British part of Britain), although I grew up in the northeast of Scotland. For American readers unsure of the difference between England, Britain and the United Kingdom, do not worry, French people also have no idea where one ends and the other begins. They refer to everyone between Normandy and Norway as "les anglais".  

My wife and I spent several years living in Lyon, France (a city a couple of hours south of Paris), and visited Paris often. My wife (also an illustrator, Cat O'Neil, check out her work) is half Hong Kong Chinese, and before living in France we lived with her family in Hong Kong, which is where I began the unending struggle of learning Cantonese. So the foundation of the story, especially the battles with learning a language, is very much pulled from firsthand experience. That said, we were lucky enough to live in France as layabout bohemian artists, so the depictions of Sarah's soulless corporate job are pure fiction. I'm quite sure that no one in human history has ever been forced to work in an environment like that. 

CBY: Why was it important for the leads of Love Languages to be women, each strangers in a foreign land, instead of the traditional male/female dynamic of the vast majority of stories, especially romance books?

JA: I didn't really set out to write a Queer romance, or even a romance at all. My original intention was to write a story about the experience of learning a second language, and when I was first planning the story, I spent most of my time imagining different combinations of characters who would be interesting together. Through a lot of writing and thinking, and trial and error, I came to Sarah and Ping, and the idea that they would slowly fall in love, using language to discover something about themselves as much as they discover each other. But I do think it's really necessary to the story that they're both women, and women from slightly conservative, repressed backgrounds, who take a while to realise how they feel about each other. If it were a straight couple, they could immediately understand their feelings of sexual attraction, they could hook up by page 10, even if they couldn't speak the same language, we'd know what they wanted from each other straight away. 

CBY: Your art style conveys a lot of emotion without relying on extreme realism. How would you describe your own style and who were your inspirations in developing it?

JA: There is no such thing as style! There, I said it, the hill I will die on. Whenever I give lectures in art schools, or students message me on Instagram, or drunks grab me by the lapels as I stagger home on a Friday night, I always get asked about how to develop a style. 

In my experience, if an artist consciously chooses to draw in a certain style, to apply a specific surface to their work or to approach character and anatomy in a specific, pre-determined way, they're often boxing themselves in. The solution is really to do an enormous amount of drawing, especially life drawing or drawing from observation in a sketchbook, until you understand your materials really well and the relationship between sight, imagination, and the hand becomes seamless. If you draw enough, your natural approach to drawing will rise to the surface, and readers will recognise this as your style. But it has to be something that you've arrived at naturally. Telling yourself "I'm going to draw like Taiyo Matsumoto," and attempting to maintain a pre-conceived, forced style for 200 pages of graphic novel will be exhausting. So in that sense, I never tried to actively find my style or make my work similar to anyone else's, I just drew and drew and drew, and what you see on the page now is how it came out. 

CBY: Have you used the language translation balloon effect in your other works? It's really inspired to show the language barrier and how people who speak multiple languages actually speak.

JA: The language translation balloons are unique to Love Languages. I spent ages trying to work out how to get it to work and how to express the feeling of understanding a second language in a way that flows through the panels and doesn't make it too laborious for the reader. 

CBY: What do you hope readers pull from this story and have you heard readers pulling something from the story that was fully unintended but you’re glad it resonated with them in such ways?

JA: Horrible as I am, I actually try not to think about my readers too much; I think it's really important to write for yourself, first and foremost, and if it resonates with readers then that's a nice bonus. But occasionally, people are kind enough to reach out to me and tell me that my work does resonate with them; with Love Languages I've had a few people who are also in multilingual queer relationships get in touch to tell me that the story really chimed with their experiences of learning a language or settling in their partner's country, and it makes me so happy and grateful to hear that my work feels true to them. 

If there's anything in particular that I'd like readers to take away from the story, it's that learning a second language can be an amazing experience and really change the way you understand the world and understand yourself. 

CBY: Do you have another graphic novel in the works that you would like to or get some early promotion for? 

JA: Yes, I'm currently working on my next graphic novel, although it's quite a departure from Love Languages: it's a thriller called Beyond Belief about a martial arts cult — think Branch Davidians meets the Shaolin Temple. I lead a double life away from my rareified life as an artiste; I'm secretly also a terrible sports bro, so writing a book about martial arts is so much fun. We're along way away from having a release date though, so readers will have to make do with re-reading Love Languages again and again until Beyond Belief finally surfaces. 

CBY: Where can readers find more of your work if they are interested?

JA: My books are available in all Good Bookshops, and in Evil Bookshops too. 

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