HL: There’s really no set thing that it means for every cartoonist. RS: Can we take a step back, and can you tell me: when it comes to a graphic novel, what does the word outline mean? This project was much more collaborative, and it was really fun for me to play with visually. But because I was involved so early with this one, some of my ideas informed decisions that were made in the actual writing process. The process for this book evolved from working on our other books, Compass South and Knife’s Edge, where I would send sketches periodically as I was developing characters, and Hope would give feedback, and we’d go back and forth. A lot of the characters I got to have fun with, based on the outline, and to decide what would be fun to draw.
But Greda was very clear in my mind when I read the original outline. The earliest drawings of Vonceil, for instance-she had long hair and a big bow. Rebecca did so many wonderful early concept sketches that helped me to get a handle on who these characters were. We were able to start developing these characters in tandem.
I showed it to Margaret Ferguson, our editor, first, but then I got Rebecca linked in pretty quickly. So I wrote the outline, and I passed it to Rebecca early on. RS: Middle-grade certainly is a time when children are becoming more aware of the bigger world, and thinking, Where am I going to go in it? What’s my path? She’s chafing at the roles that are being offered to her by society at the time, which was 1919. And that translated really well to a middle-grade book and to the pre-adolescent main character, Vonceil, who is also trying to figure out what kind of person she wants to be as an adult. Dee, the Sugar Witch, and Greda, the Salt Witch, both came out of that questioning. I wasn’t sure what kind of woman I wanted to be, or where I saw myself in five years. In trying to figure out how I wanted the rest of my life to go, I was at this crossroads with my career and personal life. But I was going through a tough time in my mid-thirties. HL: The outline for this story came together really fast-in a night! As a rule, I usually labor over these things for weeks. Roger Sutton: If I were to write term papers, I could write a terrific one on the relationship between this book and John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” It’s basically a woman in white who loves you and then wrecks you. Graphic novelists, comics artists, whatever we call them, Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock talk to me about their new book Salt Magic and the nature of collaboration.
Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock Talk with Rogerīy Roger Sutton, Editor and Chief, The Horn Book
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