SHAUN TAN Stops by the Neighbourhood to Unpack HOMETOWN
Shaun Tan sat down at University of Melbourne with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, to chat about his latest graphic novel, Hometown, published this week through Levine Querido.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Shaun, thank you for coming today. This is the first in-studio interview I've held in four years with The Comic Book Yeti. I appreciate you joining me here, on Naarm, at the University of Melbourne, and I want to acknowledge we're convening today on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, respecting elders past and present. Before we begin, I know you're originally from Perth on Whadjuk Noongar country.
SHAUN TAN: That's right. Yeah.
CBY: Since you often reckon with both place and displacement in your work, what have you come to enjoy the most about living in Melbourne since moving here a couple of decades ago? And what do you miss the most about Perth?
ST: It's always pros and cons with migration, isn't it? I miss the landscape in Perth. I mean, that's where I grew up and that's where I have, this sort of sensory attachments and to a lesser extent cultural attachments. I feel fairly fluid that way. Melbourne is a very warm and inviting city for a city of this size. And I know I always found that when I come over from Perth because most of the publishing industry, children's publishing at least, seemed to be based in Melbourne. So when I was living there and working, I'd be hopping over and each visit I thought, I can imagine living here, not a fan of big cities, but this one I like. People are very polite and there was a sense of amicable density, which I didn't really get in Perth.
CBY: Does it have the density, though? I mean, in Perth.
ST: Maybe in some places. I mean, it's hard to generalise about a city. I know like what, 5% of Perth? Which is only the 5% that I know. And no, it's got a slightly different vibe. I think people tend to exaggerate the cultural differences, as is the want of Australians, but there's not a huge difference. The landscape is the biggest difference. The quality of the light, the weather. People always sort of make a funny remark about talking about the weather, but I think it's one of the most interesting things you can talk about. It's no surprise that it's a default conversation topic. But yeah, I noticed it more having lived here and then going back. You know, when you grow up in a place, you take a lot of things for granted. And I could go back and look with fresh eyes. I was quite startled at how strange the light is in Perth.
CBY: Very different latitude. It's also on the Indian Ocean, right?
ST: That's right.
CBY: The Southern Ocean's a very different vibe, as I've spent a lot of time on the Pacific.
ST: Yes. It feels Perth is like the morning of the Earth, you know? It's like the Earth has been born each day and it's all coming at you fresh across the Indian Ocean. New stuff. Melbourne feels more complicated. When I look at the skies; this complicated eddying thing is layers, lots of experience of water and air that's travelled over vast distances. But Perth, it's almost like each day is a prehistoric time.
CBY: Yeah, I’ll have to get out there – you're selling me on it right now! Yeah, the West Coast… Australia's a big place and I have a lot to explore. I love it here, but I know that I only know a little bit of this country.
ST: Me too, me too.
CBY: Moving on to your work, I would love to acknowledge that The Lost Thing was a mainstay of bedtime reading with my kids.
ST: Oh, okay, great.
CBY: When they were little, they’d go between that and Tove Jansson's The Moomins - Who Will Comfort Toffle?, then some Charlie and Lola stuff. But yours was heavy in the rotation.
ST: Yep, that's a good list.
CBY: I’m excited for them to see this once it goes live, because it's one of the few pieces of the comic scene that they can actually connect to.
ST: That's right, it's actually got a more sustained narrative than a lot of my other work, where I'm interested in just these little dreamlike vignettes and this one is an actual story, which is a nice thing to do.
CBY: And so I was wondering what children's literature – authors and illustrators both – inspired you growing up? Over the decades as a professional, which peers have you admired? As new creators have emerged, what do you enjoy?
ST: Well, it's interesting you mentioned Tove Jansson. I didn't grow up with her work, but my wife is Finnish. So naturally, I then was reintroduced to the sort of things I'd seen almost at the fringes, and largely through Japanese culture, you know, because they're big fans. Reading those stories, I was like, “oh yes, this has got a very Australian vibe to it.” It's that sense of, you know, proximity to nature, seasonal sensitivity, and melancholy – which is a really big part of children's literature, I think – and being frank with emotions and ambiguity. Understanding the world is ambiguous, I guess. As a kid, I was always attracted to those kinds of books, obviously anything with a sort of a fantastic element, and growing up in the northern suburbs of Perth, the main art forms were, I'd say, television and cinema. So there were a lot of exciting fantasy films in the 80’s growing up. They weren't always great, but they were wild. You couldn't make them now. They're just too crazy. But I think that flood of originality, and weirdness, and sort of can-do aesthetic bad special effects, and so on in a lot of these 80’s movies kind of had an influence on me growing up.
CBY: All of the sky effects being used...oh yeah.
ST: Which is great, in a pre-digital world, and I am a pre-digital artist, just.
CBY: But yeah, I guess as an author both writing and illustrating your own work, clearly, with Hometown, it's a story wholly of your own design. You offered acknowledgements at the close of the book, then there are many characters that clearly embody certain expressions of others’ emotion. You can feel the warmth of community beyond the mere whimsy in this very weird world that you created. So beyond mentioning your acknowledgements, as we talked about place, are there people in particular that you'd like to make mention of that inspired Hometown or maybe you added elements of them into characters and they helped enable its creation in some way?
ST: I'm sure, yeah. There were a number of things. It's usually with me, I don't have a great origin story. It's more like thousands of little things that just accumulate, forming a planet. Then it just sort of percolates there in my mind for some years before I think, “oh, that could be an actual story.” But I mean, when I was a kid, the first thing I saw on a VHS tape ever was this – it's a weird thing to see – Fantastic Planet.
CBY: Oh yeah, that's a French film.
ST: Yes. I'm probably getting the names wrong – René Laloux and Roland Topor – and I'm probably pronouncing them wrong as well ((Ed. – nailed it!). Yeah, it was amazing at that time that you could rewind and study things. You know, go back and look, because it's a pretty crazy movie, for those who don't know it. It's a French-Czech animated co-production, not really for children at all, with this very funky sounding 70’s soundtrack. It looks like a Hieronymus Bosch painting came to life on another planet. It's about these giant blue aliens that keep humans as pets, which is harrowing, but kind of cute in a really unsettling way. It's drawn in this style, which is reminiscent of almost a lot of, well, Eastern European illustration. Some of that, I find, has filtered into a lot of American culture. It looks a little like the work of Milton Glaser and those sort of illustrators in the 70’s and 80’s. I guess as it relates to this book, Hometown, I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but as I was drawing this, it would get kept coming up, and I thought, “I better go back and look at this thing.” I was like, “yeah, that a lot of these things that seem to me like personal dreams are probably echoes of watching this thing over and over again.”
CBY: That's the first film you saw?
ST: Yeah, so there's that influence, but it's a bunch of other things. Oddly, one of the inspirations, and I only sort of realised this when I went back and traced, “where did I start thinking about this?” was going on a whim to see The Book of Mormon with my wife. All based on a passing ad on a tram, you know? Showing the young Mormon boy so enthusiastically jumping in the air, and I thought, “I don't know anything about this, but I’ve got to see that.” I think it was a premiere in Melbourne. We didn't know it, and it had such a vibe and an energy, this particular show. It was very funny, and very blasphemous, and as offensive as it could be, and on the surface, just quite absurd. But I think the reason it's been a successful show is that it raises a number of deep philosophical questions about the nature of religion and belief. Particularly – I kept thinking about it a lot afterwards – not the jokes, but the whole situation; why is it that the most outlandish beliefs are the most attractive?
If you look at every single religion and even non-religious beliefs – and I would include a lot of children's literature – the stories that stay with us, like Grimm's Fairy Tales; the ones that are the best have a basically unbelievable element in them. There's something about Hansel and Gretel even sticking a bone out of a cage as a finger and the witch being fooled – it's unbelievable; house made of candy – it's completely unbelievable. Everything else – even the way the parents abandoned the kids – it's not believable, but there's something that hooks into our subconscious and the stories stay there. Almost every folktale – the best ones – have something that's almost like the storyteller is deliberately saying, “okay, how far are you willing to go with me on this? Because I'm really going to push it beyond the realm of credibility and see if you're still sitting there listening.” So that idea interested me a lot, that we also believe whatever we grow up with. That's the other one.
CBY: It sets your ontological space.
ST: That's right. So I would be a fundamentalist religious person if I grew up that way, definitely for sure. I would be a very objectionable, totalitarian person if I grew up in that environment. I know that I could be any of those people. So, this is a question – it's bugged me ever since I was a kid – when I see people doing bad things, especially as a group, “could I have been one of those people?” And the answer I keep coming up with is, “yes.” And so what is it? Where's the little moral compass that stops me – in different universes that I might have populated – from doing these terrible things? It's kind of an odd way to say where the idea for the story came from, but something to do with that question was the basis of this story.
CBY: Yeah, I guess it forces the character – and I don't want to give away spoilers or whatnot –to figure out where their center is, how much they're willing to stretch, and how that center has been skewed by their experience.
ST: That's right.
CBY: I mean, I think what you mentioned is willingness to go along; how far can you stretch your imagination?
ST: Yes.
CBY: There is a certain… like with musculature, as well, you have to keep stretching to be able to achieve more.
ST: That's right, yes.
CBY: With willingness to push into new ideas.
ST: Then you change as a result, and you become more like the idea, and then more receptive to further ideas. So we're all evolving into these channels and tributaries. That's right, yeah. At the same time, there's something deep within us that's a search for an objective anchor. You know, there's that deeper part of our intelligence that's checking. I'm interested in that as well. I think that's in religion, as well. There is that; there's this rational, deeper checking going on, and there are all these different complex tensions. Yeah, with this story, like you say, I'm always interested in any movies or stories in any form, or cartoons, or whatever, where somebody's world is flipped and they have to reassess their reality quite suddenly. And I think this happens in real life for people more often than we think, where your understanding of reality is really challenged in a very abrupt way, whether you're a refugee, or you have a political disillusionment suddenly, or whatever. Then you have to reassemble your sense of self. I think that's a real test of figuring out who you are, because a lot of people don't have that crisis or opportunity to assess who they really are when confronted by a significant challenge.
CBY: Yeah, to put it in Jungian terms of confronting the shadow – and going through that process of reckoning – some people just bury the shadow.
ST: That's right, yeah. That's the problem, and then there's always a question, “am I burying some of that stuff, you know? Am I avoiding things?”
CBY: You've got a unique opportunity with your work, I think, to reveal parts of it. Probably a lot of people don't get this opportunity to stretch their limbs creatively, and explore and analyze the shadows. Some people just go through their days, and keep ignoring it, and turn on Netflix after.
ST: Yeah, which is fine.
CBY: It's how people make it through the days. But to the point – your creative output – I love the artwork in this book. I think it's wonderful. I loved The Lost Thing and you can see the evolution and the depth. There are no hard blacks. Everything's detailed, layer on layer, color shifting seamlessly across the page. I know you mentioned in the book that you use watercolor, and colored pencil, and ink pens to achieve that look. Can you outline a bit more about your specific illustration process; what it looks like throughout, what tools and techniques that you employ?
ST: Sure. Yeah, I guess it's pretty basic. Like most picture books and comics I create, technically it's not so sophisticated. It starts off with little biro sketches in a sketchbook; like the cheapest, crappiest pens and paper, so it doesn't feel like art. That's the worst, when you feel like you're making art and it has to be important. Then I do lots and lots of versions, so it's very free and crazy. It's just a pile of compost in the beginning, and you're looking for seeds that can grow into something. Then I'll pick out the little elements; “okay, that kind of works, that kind of works,” etc., and you're just trying out all the configurations the same way any creative work goes. Permutations; test, doesn't work? Try it again, try it again, try it again.
Then there's a rough story. It's going, okay, that roughly makes sense. A bit of a skeleton there. And then I'll go through and I'll start developing the scenes. Okay, so what do they look like? Who are the characters? They changed a lot over time. So the original version of this book, the girl was very young, almost like my daughter's age at the time, which was about five or six. I was thinking, “how would a five or six-year-old respond to this crazy world?” And having spent hours watching children's television with her, the answer was “very easily.” Very easily. So it was this idea of, if you grow up in this place where your family are strange creatures, your neighborhood is just weird, your day-to-day activities are very strange – enough to sustain life but otherwise unrecognisable by our standards – you'd be very pretty happy, you'd be very adaptable. Over time, she aged because the story developed, and the arrival of another person meant that there had to be a more complex relationship between them.
CBY: It would be a different scenario if they'd arrived to meet a child.
ST: That's right, yeah. Each character had to have certain agency, so they have to be a bit older. My daughter was also – I mean, I spent eight years working on this book – so she was getting older whilst working on it. I was seeing her different realization of things, and her different responses to ideas – philosophical ideas. So then I have these very sort of basic sketches, and they're quite cartoon-like. The style approximation is something like Raymond Briggs, just very simple, dot-eyed, round-headed characters. You're standing here, it's like storyboarding for a film, standing here, camera's there, all that sort of stuff. It's very simple because I'm changing them a lot. I'm not over-investing in that side of things. And then the next part is the more complicated part. Now I have to make this plausible on the page and look real, including figure drawings, and I don't really like drawing people. I go out of my way to avoid people, and even in The Lost Thing you see, they're very stylized, post-industrial people.
In this case, I tried lots of these different stylizations, as you do with comics. Often the simplest; it's very easy to empathize with the simply-drawn characters. So I'm focusing on simplicity, but it always gets to the point. This happened with The Arrival, which had the same trajectory, in that simplicity is not enough. It needs the gravitas of real-looking people. And I'm like, “Oh my God, now I'm going to have to draw real people,” which I don't want to do. I'm not one of these brilliant comics artists that I see who just can whip off a figure, and I'm like, “How the heck do you do that?”
CBY: Yeah, that's right.
ST: Sometimes I can do it by hand and I can get away with it, but most of the time I'll make references. I use myself for every character the same way the animator would, when you get up and you do the movements because you want to feel what they're like. You want to see what the possibilities are, because you don't know always what things look like. There are some scenes where she's running downhill; I'm not sure what that looks like until I actually see it. It's quite an odd arrangement of the legs and arms when you're going downhill on a very steep decline. It's not the same as normal running. Also checking for things like how shadows fall, even when a hand goes and picks up something. Where do the shadows fall exactly?
Because there are a lot of strange creatures in this book, I sculpted them, and so we do the same thing. It's like, “okay, if they tilt this way and another one leans in, what does that look like?” So it's very helpful to just make these toys, and move them around and photograph them, and then compare all these photos and go, “okay, that one has the, I don't know why, but it has the emotional resonance that I'm looking for.” Then, that will be the basis for the drawing. So a lot of reference.
CBY: So what material do you use when sculpting, primarily? I know my son will be excited about this. He loves making figurines and other stuff.
ST: Whatever's fast. And I usually use this stuff called DAS, which is air-drying clay. There's lots of different brands, but I've always used this.
CBY: So once you lock in the design, you let it set, and then it stays in its position?
ST: That's right, yeah. Here's a tip for you if you want to make sculptures; get some aluminium foil. You crumple that up. You scrunch it up to make the basic shape and then you put a layer of this material over because otherwise it's a little heavy and unwieldy. But if it's got a good armature, like with any clay, you put that over. Because you don't have to fire it or anything, you can use tin foil and all sorts of things and shove it inside. You can even stick objects on, and attach anything you want; paper, wood, you know? Whatever's necessary to get the effect that you want. The great thing about DAS is when it dries, it's a little bit like wood and you can really carve it. So I model it and then I cut back in with a knife and do all sorts of things. Sand it. It's great.
CBY: Very cool. All right, that's good to know. I'll definitely get my son some. He'll go to town with it.
ST: Yeah, that's a great way. It took me a while to realize this. I really learned it from working with animators and theater people. Build. Instead of sitting there labouring over these drawings, “oh, what do they look like sideways? What do they look like from above?” Just make it and look at it, you know?
CBY: Very cool. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Well, thank you for sharing the process. And I was very curious as well, since you have a very deep portfolio of work that you've offered through a variety of publishers, can you share a bit about the process of how you selected Levine Corrido as the publisher for Hometown? To that end, what sort of terms do you prefer to work under? We were talking beforehand about accounting, so in terms of how you set up your publishing agreements as a creative professional – I know our audience at Comic Book Yeti; there are also a lot of practitioners and nascent creatives – what kind of advice do you have about how you pick your publisher and what you expect?
ST: Out of a publisher? Well, that's a good question. Wow, industry talk. Okay! It’s been pretty straightforward for me. I can't say that my career's felt very complicated. I find having a good personal relationship with the editor is the key, so that's always been the linchpin with my choice of publisher. Editor and designer – whether they're the same person or different people – that's usually informed my decision of who I want to work with. As well as just, "have we worked together previously?” I tend to stick with the same publisher just because we've built a relationship. With Levine Querido, I basically followed my editor from Scholastic.
CBY: Got it, okay.
ST: It wasn't a given they would be the publisher, but I was very interested in the kinds of books they were publishing that were dealing with often-marginalized voices. In the current climate in the US, they were having a tough time, so I was quite interested in supporting that approach and sustaining that relationship. I thought my book does actually touch on a lot of themes that this publisher is interested in. This idea of sort of more open-minded approaches to questions of identity and worth and cultural value and the idea of difference, I think is central to this particular publisher's exploration of human difference, which is a good thing. I don't know why it's often framed as a negative thing; difference or diversity as a negative thing. The critical ingredient of all life on this planet is diversity.
CBY: Yeah, that's what helps us survive.
ST: So yeah, this story is very much about that, and I don't think it's a political story, but it does have a subtle comment in there about “don't go down the rabbit hole of believing that you have a whole absolute possession of truth somehow.” You know, keep an open mind, and at least listen to other people's point of view.
CBY: Yeah, and that truth and worldview is, you know, positionally determined. A part of it is to really see certain things from certain perspectives, and to reserve judgement about treading without care into spaces you don't know. I think this story very much had resonant lessons at a deeper level that hopefully hit with readers of all ages.
ST: Yeah, I hope so. I'd be interested to see what people think, but it's very open to interpretation. So you could read it from lots of different points of view. There's no right or wrong answer and there's no hero or villain in this story. I'm not a big fan of villains. I don't think any of my stories have villains because villain is almost like ignoring why people do things. It's like we just assume they're bad and it's like, well, that's not an answer. So the person who comes in and causes a big disturbance in this universe is acting on the purest of motives. It just happens to be quite incompatible with this world.
CBY: I very much appreciate that you do not take a reductive approach towards conflict or drama in that sense, because it's very easy to draw binary lines.
ST: That's right. It's tempting. It's tempting to draw the binary lines, but I refrain from doing that.
CBY: You don't. It's part of why I will say – I don't want to spoil the way the narrative of Hometown beautifully unfolds – but there are a lot of deeply funny moments. Can you speak a bit about the story in the context of, anything else we haven't talked about that you want to convey to the reader? How have you had different people that have read it thus far respond to you about what they've taken away from it?
ST: Sure. Yeah, I haven't talked to many people about it, but I'm glad that you point out the humour, because I do think it's a comedy. It's got some serious things that happen, but it's funny. I really wanted it to be funny. It's very much in the spirit of The Lost Thing, which is the first picture book that I wrote and illustrated. I still feel like it's almost like the central story from which all my other stories have come. It's kind of the same if you look at them together, kind of the same story told in a different form; the arrival of a stranger and trying to understand how one fits into this world.
Interestingly, while I was developing this book, because it had such a long development, I was asked by a local theatre company, “do you have any new work that we can adapt as a children's show?” And I said, “well, no, but I'm working on this…”
I'd only had a very early version with some sketches, but it was enough that, like I say, “this is a story,” and I knew how it ended and all that sort of stuff, and they loved it. They said, “yeah, we can make a children's puppet show.” So they went ahead and did that, and theatre tends to move much more quickly than I do. So they opened that show. I think it might even have been a few years ago. That was interesting to watch the story played out with a slightly different evolution from mine.
CBY: Because it was in parallel?
ST: That's right, and I didn't show them all the drawings I was doing, because I wanted to see what they did. They did a great interpretation, but it was very different to mine, and it was a musical, which was lovely. At first, I thought, “okay, a musical.” I didn't actually mention to them that The Book of Mormon had been an inspiration, but it was almost a bit like that. Yeah, it had a bit of a Book of Mormon vibe to it, but for kids, if you can imagine such a thing.
One interesting bit of feedback that Philip, the director, told me about the show was, there's a point where the girl – she's a teenage girl – has to make a critical decision, and the audience, depending on their age, was a little bit divided about the merit of that decision. So the teenage girls were kind of like, “yes, that's the right decision.” Whereas the smaller children were like, “no, that's the wrong decision.” And then the parents were like, “no, that's the wrong decision.” Yes, it really made me realise, there is a point when you're a young person where it becomes very appealing to take a risk with your identity in a way that you wouldn't when you're seeking the security of a much younger child.
Because I was still working on my own book, it helped me to feel that my story was stronger than I thought, and that I also needed to emphasize the nature of the dilemma for a teenager, in particular. It's a little bit like Moana, and I think that might have been an influence, because my daughter was watching that on a loop around the same time that I was conceiving of the original story. There you've got a great film, by the way – I think it's structured really well. But the central dilemma for her is that, “I am in a great community.” I mean, yeah, it's under threat. I feel that's a bit of an artificial thing they stuck in to move the story forward, but basically, she can say, “I'm in a lovely place.” The deep attention, I think, in that character is, “but I'm becoming a woman with my own ideas and I wonder about this, what's beyond that boundary line that I'm not supposed to go to?”
CBY: Yeah, it's the redefining of oneself through rebellion.
ST: That's right.
CBY: I assume since you said your daughter was six or so, she's now a teenager.
ST: Yeah, that's right.
CBY: So, I've got 17-year-old twin girls right now. A huge part of how they respond to me is in rebellion.
ST: Yeah, we're in a difficult role, because we're the thing that needs to be rebelled against. I think it's much easier to be the rebel, because we have to support, but we're not sure in what way.
CBY: I think it helps that my wife was very, very rebellious and so our daughters have rebelled a bit against our rebellion, and they're pretty straight-laced, which I'm grateful is the case.
ST: Yeah, right, okay.
CBY: It could have gone in a very different direction, but it's very much an oppositional and response-based reaction.
ST: Yes.
CBY: Yeah, the teenage response.
ST: Yes, and I'm also aware as a parent of the extent to which I should not know about some stuff. I really don't want to know. It's inappropriate for me to know, and I know they need to make some mistakes as well for themselves, but that's tough. As long as I don't have to look at it happening, you know?
CBY: Understanding they have their individuality. Individual human beings that have their own inner worlds, and their own personal lives that it cannot be helpful or healthy for you to be involved as a parent.
ST: That's right, absolutely. Also, I'm aware that I'm wrong about a number of things and that the world is different now than when I was a teenager. So I have to factor all of that.
CBY: Oh yeah, I get spot-checked by my kids sometimes. I will say, we've talked about The Lost Thing and in this, I will say what you created; you opened a door to infinity in terms of imagination, in that ending. I can see where you kind of opened for yourself a world that could continue.
ST: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
CBY: You then took it to an animated place, so I have to say, having won the Academy Award for helming the adaptation of The Lost Thing, you have then gone on to create Tales from Outer Suburbia, which has just been released this past year in both Australia and the United States. Can you speak about how your experience with animation production has differed from your illustration work? I know they're very different spaces that involve a lot of overlap, and illustration can be a very solitary thing. It's self-directed, and then animation can be very time consuming, and it is generally a much more collaborative exercise with different roles involved. What reflections do you have on working in both worlds and what you enjoy most from each?
ST: They are very similar and very different. Like you say, the collaborative nature is completely different to work in animation or film, which I realised. Because it's such a group effort, one has to be very articulate in expressing ideas. When you're working by yourself, you can just sort of have these sort of vague intuitive impressions, and you're just stumbling along. That's great, just stumbling along on the page, but when you're in a meeting, it's not sufficient. You know, you actually need to be articulate about what's happening, and what are the possibilities, and how strongly you feel about this idea over that idea. So it's a lot of conversation, and that's something I'm not hugely accustomed to as somebody who works from home in this funny little cottage industry called book illustration. But I enjoy it. I enjoy that it actually can accelerate the creative process because you've got ideas butting heads, you know?
When you're working by yourself, you often have to play out an idea until it fails to realise that it's dumb. Whereas in a group, you’ve got someone straight away who can object, and say, “well, hang on, if you do that, how's this character going to get there?” And it's like, “yeah, okay, dumb idea, let's move on.” So it's quite good that way, and it's quite energizing. You feel less alone in the process, which helps with your morale a great deal because it's a real marathon when you're just working by yourself. The downside is exactly the same thing; when you have to explain ideas, it's like trying to explain a joke. It kills something of the energy. So it's a very careful line that you have to tread between explaining what you're doing and not explaining. For that to work, there has to be great confidence and trust within the group to say, “Okay, like I think you're onto something, let's not talk about it too much and break it down into these very unfunny little fragments. But you go away and just sort of put it together and then we'll discuss it.”
There has to be a great deal of trust. I've been pretty lucky because there has been a lot of trust. Sometimes that crumbles during a project and you go, “what the heck are you doing? That's not what I said.” That's normal, and then you come back again and you reach a new place. It's a complicated process. It's not for everybody, that's for sure. I think it's not entirely for me. Yeah, I'm not entirely suited to that, because I could see other people much better at negotiating all the different random aspects and not freaking out. I'm sort of like, “it's not working.” I start freaking out a little bit prematurely, but I've had a lot of different types of experience with these projects. Also, working with theatre – and I did some concept work with Pixar and Blue Sky Studios, oddly on Horton Hears A Who – I designed some stuff, and that was a lot of fun. I had the privilege in those cases of being at the very early end of the process, just spooling out random ideas, not having to do the difficult engineering of making them work. Whereas with the TV series, there was a lot of that really difficult conversation, “okay, these are great ideas. They're fun, they're interesting, they're surreal, but how do we make them work? And how do we make all these ten episodes somehow flow together in some kind of arc?” And that was a real jigsaw puzzle.
CBY: Getting back to what we were talking about, you suddenly had to say, “okay, here's the space in which you could stretch your imagination,” as opposed to, I guess, ordinarily where anything that you can throw out, you see what gets batted back. You don't like being the one who has to create the box?
ST: Yes, yeah, that's right.
CBY: You mentioned theatre and the puppetry side of your work, and I love puppetry. We were talking about 80’s fantasy films; Labyrinth and The Neverending Story. I guess with Sesame Street too, those are my earliest media memories of that era. I always appreciated Children's Television Workshop and The Jim Henson Company. You've got on your website The Arrival and The Red Tree as stage productions. Do you have other stage productions planned and what sort of staged events or installations would you like to do in the future?
ST: Right. Well, they're never instigated by me for a start. So, it's other theatre companies saying, “Hey, we're really interested in doing this project.” And my response is always, you know, “Okay, let's see you explain to what extent you understand the work. Like, are we on the same page with this?” And invariably they are. And then I say, “Okay, do what you want. I can help you if you need to comment or something doesn't make sense. But I would prefer it if you just absolutely run with it in your own way and be as different as you want as well. You don't have to treat the original material as gospel.”
CBY: Not being precious about it?
ST: Not really. I mean, I'm aware when working on my own stories that there's 100 different versions. I've picked one that works for me personally, but I know that for stories to work. This is something, the more you work as an artist, especially a storyteller the more you realize you're not doing it for yourself. Well, you are, but that's just the start, then it goes off and it belongs to other people, and you're not the only audience for this stuff, you know. Other people have a different view of it. So, yeah, there's always, it's surprising actually, the number internationally of people that are interested in adapting things, you know; The Lost Thing, The Red Tree, Tales from Outer Suburbia, etc. Tales from the Inner City is something in the works with that, and The Arrival; there's been maybe seven different adaptations of that, some involving dance, some involving purely music with projection, different puppet theatre, live action theatre without puppetry, all sorts of things. It's really fascinating.
You know, basically, as an artist, my strength isn't story, so the story doesn't matter. It's the concept, this visual concept; migrating to a country that doesn't exist. That's the basic concept. And once you understand that, you can do all sorts of things with it. I almost feel sad that all I can do is this little book. I can only do this one thread, because it's such a great idea that you could do in many different directions. So I'm very pleased when somebody else comes along, saying, “I get this idea. I can think of things you haven't done with it. Let's do those things.”
CBY: I mean, it's a testament to the strength of the concepts, or I guess, the core blueprint. You're building this skeleton, and it must be very encouraging to have other people say, “this resonates with me. How can I build upon it and flesh it out further?”
ST: Because not everything does. Some of it is like, crickets chirping. But it's great when somebody says, “yeah,” to all this really. Especially when they say they have a visceral reaction to it, and it's not intellectual, it's just a feeling. Rules of Summer is a book like that, because it's quite a weird book, but you can't explain it. You either feel what's going on or you don't, and when you're guided by that feeling, I think it's much easier to do a kind of adaptation.
CBY: You mentioned not being as story-driven, but I was going to ask. So I assume you are led primarily by the visual ideation process, not the story-driven ideation process. What is that process of figuring out, on a day-to-day basis, how do I make this point? Do I do it with words or pictures? When do you decide, “oh, I can't do it with pictures alone, I need words”?
ST: In the sketchbook, and it's not happening in such a structured way. It's simultaneous, you know? It's like, “how do I show this?” and I do a little doodle. “No, but that's not enough. How do I carry this concept?” Some concepts can't be illustrated, at least not by me. So, like in The Lost Thing, you could tell that story silently. At some point, you have to introduce the concept of a thing being lost and belonging as imagined by the narrator, and so there was one part where I felt, “okay, it really does need words because I need to say, he thinks it's lost.”
CBY: Very hard to show that alone.
ST: That's right, it’s hard to show certain things. In The Arrival, there were some situations where it's like, “okay, I need words,” but there, it was much more disciplined. No words are available in this world. They're just not available. So I just can't show that. I have to find some other thing. So there's always a way through, depending on what the problem is.
In terms of the ideation, it tends to be visual, but usually, it's not either/or; it's proportions. So it's like about 80% visual with 20% a word concept wrapped around it, and it's hard to explain until you start sketching it out. I mean, the ideas don't actually come and then I draw them. They come as I'm drawing them, and that's an interesting thing I've realized over the years is that work comes first, then the idea. If I sit around waiting for an idea, nothing happens. I just have to start on the slimmest of pretext – like the dumbest idea – just start, just go and it'll get better, but one thing has to suggest another. A conversation has to start in the sketchbook, and then most of those stories actually don't eventuate into anything. They're not very good.
Occasionally, like with Hometown, something comes along and I just keep coming back to the drawings and saying, “I don't understand this story, but it feels totally true and interesting,” and “I haven't read this kind of story before,” which is the big one, because I've written a lot of things that I haven't read before. And so I felt okay, and then I checked with an editor friend of mine, “have you come across a story that's like this? I'm sure someone's written exactly the same story, and they probably have, as a folktale or something,” but none that we could recall. I remember writing The Lost Thing. It was the same thing. My first thought is, “This is a great story. I'm sure I'm just remembering something I read as a kid.” And so I had to go back and check and I couldn't find any story like it.
CBY: Is that, I guess, the manifestation of something like imposter syndrome?
ST: Yes.
CBY: That thought, “This can't be original. There's no way that I've done this for the first time ever!?”
ST: Yeah, it's funny you say that because I had a conversation recently with another very prominent illustrator and we're both confessing how much of an imposter we feel like when we're working. It's like, “this can't be any good. Why does anybody like this?” Yeah, it's never gone away. It's always that sense the really good stuff in hindsight is work that at the time I really thought it was so borderline, it could be awesome or a pile of crap. Somehow, I've learned to trust that teetering. Yeah, if I feel too confident about a story, like “This is awesome!” and that's all I feel, it's probably not very good. But if I feel this oscillating between something really interesting and absolute garbage, now I'm in an interesting space. Maybe that space is originality, because I can't judge it.
CBY: I just came from another meeting and one of the participants was talking about this state of self-doubt that they've arrived in after finishing their PhD and doing something. Like, “what do I do? I don't trust my own ideas. How do I take these ideas and then do something completely different without like tying them back to that? Like, how do I create an identity?” We were talking about this stretching of imagination – self-doubt, I guess, is the same as like working out, discomfort, stabilizing, and raising plateaus.
ST: Yeah, that's right. You reach a new place and then there's a new set of challenges. So it never goes away. It's that old adage of people who are, you know, right about everything are invariably wrong. Whereas the people who are real experts – I mean, the top of their field – they're the most doubting of all because they know how little they know. It's like with any education, the more you study, the more you realise your world of your knowledge is getting small, it's not getting bigger, it's becoming this tiny, tiny thing. You realise, “man, the universe is so vast, there's so much more to do.” You can become paralysed by that. As an artist, it's very easy to just, the more you master your craft, all the more realise how little you know, and it's a devastating feeling sometimes. So I thank God for this little room that I'm in where I'm away from any of that kind of reference. I'm like a horse with the little...
CBY: Oh, the blinders.
ST: …And I'm just focusing on the work, because if I think too much about how bad an artist I am, I'm never going to get anything done. So I just have to just forget about that, just move forward.
CBY: Through the process until the idea is complete?
ST: Yeah, and sometimes it's just enough there that it sort of radiates back some measure of confidence. You can be impressed by your own drawing – it's possible sometimes. I'll look at it and there'll be a few pictures I've done. “Okay, that's actually good. Don't touch it. It's good. It's good.” Stick it on the wall, and it gives you enough confidence to move on with the rest of them. Like, “I did it. I can do this thing,” you know, because you've got to do about 1,000 drawings for the book, and not every one is going to be great. You need to have a few little boosters along the way just to have that – false or not – self-belief that gets you through to the end.
CBY: And I guess this is kind of an addendum to that before I move on – because I feel personally much more confident as a writer than an artist. I'm very, very sparingly happy with anything I've ever drawn, but do you feel like you stick the landing with the way you depict things visually or phrase things verbally more often? Like where do you feel the doubt land more often?
ST: I seem pretty equally doubtful, so they're equally doubtful. I feel I have more experience with drawing. With writing, it always feels like I'm using another person's language. It's like my second language because I didn't come up with any of these words, but a lot of the lines and shapes that I use – which is the vocabulary of drawing – the certain kind of hooks and intersections and the way I join and move and create depth and all that, those are very personal. That's a language that’s inherited to some extent, because you learn from other artists, but it's been so transformed. It's like taking words in English and totally mushing them up until you've got almost like an Anthony Burgess-type language. Then it's your own. That's how I feel about drawing. So I'm a little bit more confident with it because it's mine. Also, I know if I'm speaking that language poorly, other people don't know.
CBY: Yeah, your personal inflections.
ST: But in English, if I'm speaking that language poorly, they will know.
CBY: Talking about the disciplinary side of this, since we're here at University of Melbourne, I wanted to throw one student-related question into the mix. Especially since I've got to go talk to these short film recipients after we finish here, it would be good to have some insight for the young people in our audience who are just starting their careers, and just starting to decide what career they might desire. What advice might you have in response to seeing the trajectory of creative practice and the arts as an industry? From where you started, how has it changed from the beginning of your career through now? (I know advice that would have made sense to you when you started, probably not, but I'm curious.)
ST: Well, that's right. Yeah.
CBY: Exiting university and entering the creative industries, I mean.
ST: That's a real good question. I feel very underqualified to answer it. Obviously, we're at a kind of tipping point at the moment. I don't know whether that's a familiar or unfamiliar thing, because I remember with the advent of digital illustration, I'm old enough to remember the kind of confusion that created when Photoshop first came in, and things like that. You know, you had all these two camps saying “it's just a tool” and “Some people's jobs are disappearing, others are created.” I think a similar thing probably happened. We mentioned special effects in movies and digital effects.
CBY: Oh yeah, all the photo compositors…
ST: Yeah, so that was a big thing. In publishing, I saw, it was great in many ways. Desktop publishing also meant you just had this flood of crap, and I think we might be experiencing that at the moment. We were experiencing the flood of crap, and I saw it with digital art until it found its place. Now you've got this great digital art being created. I mean, it's on a par with any other medium and nobody sees that as a problem. AI, I'm not really sure where that sits, because it's not really a medium transition. It's something else. It's a very different conceptual shift.
All I can say, is that if I went back in time to myself as a kid at the bedroom table, I'd say, “just keep practicing that drawing” because that's the one skill that's kept me employed all the way through. I've never been very technically trained, so I haven't studied illustration formally. Never been good with the digital stuff, you know? I've just learnt enough to get by, just to scrape through, and relied on the advice of other people. I can't animate to save my life, yet I work in animation. The one skill I have is drawing, and I wouldn't even say it's good drawing. It's just the ability to transform concepts freely into visual images in a way that has some kind of heart in it, you know? Some feeling, so not just a technical skill, and it's not something you can even sort of figure out, but it's something that comes through practice.
CBY: The depth of practice you’ve touched upon certainly lands. I mean, in your work, clearly there is technique that conveys something that resonates broadly with people.
ST: Yeah, I don't even know why, but it works. I know that when I'm drawing in a way that feels dead honest and I don't care about how it's received, it tends to be successful. Then in other times when I feel it's a little bit trying to be like something else, it's done okay, but I'd say it's an artistic failure.
CBY: So honesty in the process?
ST: Yeah, and taking a certain amount of risk, but everything's a balance. So, you can give one bit of advice. I could immediately counter it with the opposite bit of advice, and I don't really know. It's just about basic skills; communication is good. So I should mention that I did an Arts degree, like an Arts Honours degree in Fine Arts and English literature – no practical drawing component to that at all. It was entirely critical writing. While I was doing it, I had imposter syndrome then, as well. I was like, “What am I doing here? Is this my future?” Almost immediately after finishing that degree, I was illustrating science fiction magazines, which feels totally unrelated. Eventually it got to a point where I was coming up with these weird ideas for picture books, and I had to explain them to publishing staff. And I realised, “whoa, I'm actually really articulate when it comes to breaking down my ideas.”
CBY: All that Honours Arts?
ST: Yeah, and then I'd come to an interview like this, you know? Publish a book, and people ask me these quite convoluted questions, and they'd be referencing things from, I don't know, Romanian theatre or something, and I knew what they were talking about. So I would say it's good to have really broad education outside of your field. Just really broad, so that when you end up meeting other creatives, I'm still a dunce at most things, but I have enough knowledge that I can have a basic conversation.
CBY: Resonant information.
ST: Yeah, I can talk about the Renaissance, I can talk about prehistoric art, whatever. There's enough there that I can sustain a conversation, just so that they can do the talking and show that I'm actually on board without knowing a lot. I think being articulate and being able to not just to draw well and paint well, but to talk about your ideas, unfortunately it's quite important. It shouldn't have to be, but it is quite important in the art world.
CBY: Self-reflection and the ability to communicate your process.
ST: Yeah, you can defend yourself against critics very well that way, too.
CBY: Yeah that’s a big part of academia, and a very useful response for where we are today. We've been here about an hour, and I really appreciate your time, Shaun. We always offer our guests the opportunity to recommend other unrelated work that's been catching their attention and providing inspiration. So what other comics or illustrated work, animation, film, music, literature, etc., should our audience check out after they give Hometown a look?
ST: Yeah, that's a real good question. it's always bits and pieces. I think I often return to certain people; returning to Chris Ware, the graphic novelist. Because I came across his book, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, quite randomly in a public library around the time that I was beginning The Arrival, and struggling with how to tell this story. I didn't really learn anything directly from his book to help my project, except the idea that you can create your own language. You don't have to use existing language. You can make your own, because some of the stuff he was doing in that book, I didn't understand it at all. It still worked, and it would be a page with just a dripping tap, and stuff like that.
CBY: Because it was coherent within his world?
ST: Yeah, and he'd used words and speech bubbles and strange little typographic changes and stuff. It was just a different graphic narrative experience that worked, and it was like, “oh, well, this is a new language.” I see that with a lot of his subsequent work. It's kind of genius-level visual dialogue, but still fun and entertaining, which is important. Doesn't sort of tip into “look how impressively obscure I am.” It's still quite accessible, and so I'm always on the lookout for that kind of thing; a new language that still remains accessible and not kind of self-indulgent.
CBY: Oh, yeah. Well, I think that's a very difficult thing to identify; how to deliver idiosyncrasy without alienating people.
ST: Yeah, exactly.
CBY: Shaun, I will also provide an opportunity to make mention of anything of your own that you'd like people to check out. I know you've got a website, and there is, I assume, portfolio and publication material you might want to shout out. It's been a very, very sincere pleasure having you here, and it is delightful having someone across the table.
ST: Yeah, live interview.
CBY: Yeah, better than through a Google form. This has been a delight, so thank you very much.
ST: Yeah, thanks so much. Great to talk to you. I don't really have anything else to add. I'm glad you mentioned the TV series because I think it's worth a look. It's a children's show, but it's a little bit different to an average children's show, so I recommend checking that out.
CBY: It's available; what was it through Australian media and US?
ST: Yes, BYU in the US. Interestingly, a Mormon network. So it's almost, I've come back to this interest in Mormons.
CBY: Fantastic, and on ABC iView, so anyone online can access it here in Australia. Until next time, thank you for dropping by, and I look forward to seeing more of your work, as usual!
ST: Great. Thank you.
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