5 Things Faith Erin Hicks Learned While Drawing NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG
1) Robot fight scenes are the hardest things to draw ever.
Over the past five years of working fulltime in comics, I’ve drawn a wide variety of things. Summer camps, creepy alien birds, graveyards, ships, ghosts, schools, ponies …. but nothing is as difficult to draw as two killer robots fighting to the death. Robots are hard enough to draw when they’re standing still, but drawing them flying through the air to do battle? I may have broken down weeping over my drawing desk a few times.
2) It’s important to escape the drawing desk every now and then.
I really love my job of making comics. I probably love it a little too much, because when I’m away from my drawing desk and not making comics, I’m mostly thinking about all the comics I’m going to make when I get back to the studio. This is kind of terrible and unhealthy! I got serious about running while drawing Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, and can now jog 8 kilometers at a pretty good clip. I’d like to jog 10 kilometers at some point this summer. I hate jogging in the winter (I live in the often freezing cold Canadian city of Halifax), but in the summer it’s wonderful to get outside and spend some time with things that aren’t comics. Like the sun, and grass, and the ocean and even other people! Then I can go back to making comics.
3) I need to do better with diversity in my comics.
I was on a panel at a recent comic festival about diversity in comic books, which is a huge issue. Comics struggle a lot with representing different people, different ethnicities, different sexualities, and it’s something I want to do better. One thing that was brought up at the panel was the idea that diversity shouldn’t mean just making sure that “your group” is represented, it should be that all people are represented. I thought that was really important and useful. I’ve been very focused on women in comics (we are pretty underrepresented), and I feel I’ve been successful in making lots of comics with women and girls in them, and encouraging my fellow Lady Cartoonists. Now I need to look beyond that, and do a better job of representing the diversity of the world around me.
4) Collaborating is great fun.
Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong is the first adaptation I’ve done of someone else’s story. It was really fun to dive into a fully formed story where I didn’t have to do too much reshaping, and just start drawing. Prudence did most of the heavy lifting for me already! All I had to do was beat her story into graphic novel shape.
5) I am a sucker for a cute boy and a geeky girl.
So, spoilers, but two characters in Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong get together in the end. That was not in Prudence’s original story, but I snuck it in at the end because I am a geeky girl, and I like seeing the geeky girl get the cute boy. Also I may secretly want Prudence to write a Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong fanfiction (can you do fanfic of your own book?) about Nate and Holly dating. Because that would be hilarious.
Find out more about the graphic novel at the official website for Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong.
(via misandrwitch)
