A post-SPX chat with Angela Hsieh

 by Mike Rhode

Angela Hsieh and I first met at Fantom Comics in summer 2023 at a booksigning, and then again as she tabled at SPX in 2023 and 2024. We talked about doing an interview all three times. Her first book was illustrating Antarctica: The Melting Continent, a picture book written by Karen Romano Young. Finally her graphic novel is coming out and she's answered my usual questions.

What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?
Graphic novels take up most of my time, though I've been known to do a short comic or two on the side. For the past three years I've been working on my debut graphic novel, Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology. It's finally coming out in May 2025. You can even preorder it!

Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology is a middle grade fantasy story about two friends who travel across the fantastical land of Lirrin in search of Lu's missing ah-ma (grandma). All they have to guide their way is Ah-ma's journal. One major problem: Ah-ma wrote it in her native Cylian language, which Lu can barely read. As Lu and Ren follow Ah-ma's footsteps and encounter incredible geofauna such as colossal axolotl-like ambystufa and adorably massive guinea pig-shaped cavioliths, they find out more about the complex relationships between geofauna and people—and between each other.

How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?
I write scripts in Scrivener, or in Google Docs, or on a piece of paper if that's what calls to me at that moment. I thumbnail on paper and sketch/pencil in an iPad app called Comic Draw. Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology was colored in Procreate. Procreate really isn't designed for comic pages, though, so I'm looking to other programs such as Clip Studio to improve my workflow.

Why are you in Washington now?
I moved to DC in 2018 when I got an internship at NPR. Said internship turned into a contract gig, and when that year was up I'd put down roots in DC and didn't want to pack up my life yet again and move to another city. Now I freelance from here.

What is your training and/or education in cartooning?
I took a grand total of one (1) sequential art course at my alma mater, RISD. I went through art school thinking I'd make a career as an editorial illustrator—which, to be fair, I did for a few years—so I focused on that and didn't seek classes in comics or cartooning. I wish I took more comics classes when they were more easily available to me, but I'm not going to be too hard on myself for making decisions that made sense at the time.

Who are your influences?
It changes depending on what I'm working on at the moment. While I was making Geozoology, for example, I found inspiration in Kay O'Neill's Tea Dragon series, Tim Probert's Lightfall books, and Shaun Tan's The Arrival. More broadly, nature, science, and history are core influences in my work. The world is vast and very, very interesting.

If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?
I would float backwards in time and rasp ominously into 12-year-old Angela's ear, "Your spine will never be the same again if you don't sit your ass in a chair with proper back support starting NOW."

What work are you best known for?
Probably these Bulbasaur Brassica cultivars or this mini comic I made about my cat staring into a hole in the bathroom wall.

What work are you most proud of?
Finishing an entire graphic novel. That's 256 pages!

What would you like to do or work on in the future?
I have another graphic novel I'm working on with Harper, so that'll keep me busy for the next two to three years. There isn't much I can say about it at this point in time except that it'll be in the fantasy genre, but tonally a bit darker than Geozoology. Because I always need to have multiple irons in multiple fires, I'm also working on a pitch for yet another graphic novel in collaboration with a writer. If you like gays in sports, you'll like this one.

 

What do you think will be the future of your field?
I don't know what I'm going to eat for lunch tomorrow, much less what the future of comics will be.

What local cons do you attend? The Small Press Expo, Awesome Con, or others? Any comments about attending them?
DC Zinefest and Small Press Expo are my favorites! I table at them if the lottery is kind to me. I had a great time last year at Graphic Novel Fest in Baltimore—it was their first year, and I'm looking forward to seeing it continue!
 
What comic books do you read regularly or recommend? 
Recently, I've been really into DUNGEON MESHI by Ryoko Kui. She lands every single joke. Her expressions are priceless.

Do you have a local store?
Fantom Comics!! They always have some fun event going on, and the folks that run Fantom are the best.

What's your favorite thing about DC?
That cliche-but-true characterization of it being a big city with small-town vibes. It's walkable, it's green, the buildings are short enough that I can actually see the sky, and more than once I've bumped into friends while running errands.

Least favorite?
The rent. :'|

What monument or museum do you like to take visitors to?
I always take visitors to that most respected of DC institutions, the Q Street Barbie pond.

How about a favorite local restaurant?
It's so hard to choose! Chercher (Logan Circle) is my go-to for Ethiopian, and Sharbat (Adams Morgan) has a honey cake that's, in a word, divine. If sushi's your thing, Umai Nori (Downtown) has fantastic hand rolls.

Do you have a website or blog?
My website is www.angela-hsieh.com. My newsletter, currently the most reliable source of updates, can be found at angelahsieh.substack.com.

In today's edition of her newsletter, Angela writes, B&N is doing a 25% off member pre-order sale today through Friday (Feb 5-7)!

WHY’RE AUTHORS ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT PRE-ORDERS?

In short, pre-orders help increase the chances of the book’s success. They signal interest in the book to publishers and retailers. Pre-orders help build “buzz” around a book, which can lead publishers to adjust print runs and encourage retailers to make larger orders. If you pre-order from an independent bookstore, not only does it help the creator, they help independent bookstores by guaranteeing sales for their stock.

Pre-orders also count towards first week sales numbers, which is how books end up on those bestseller lists when they’ve only been out in the world for less than a week. I’m not saying that I’m anticipating bestseller status for Geozoology, but I’m not gonna say no to the possibility. ;)

Megan Wagner Lloyd & Abhi Alwar At East City Bookshop, June 8 2024 audio & photos

Megan Wagner Lloyd & Abhi Alwar At East City Bookshop, June 8 2024 [Super Pancake]

Megan Wagner Lloyd; Abhi Alwar

Washington, DC: East City Bookshop

https://archive.org/details/megan-wagner-lloyd-abhi-alwar-at-east-city-bookshop-240608

Bruce Guthrie reflects on Childhood Favorites: 100 Years of Children’s Book Illustration exhibit

by Bruce Guthrie

 Recently,  I drove up to Hagerstown's Washington County Museum of Fine Arts museum to see the opening day of "Childhood Favorites: 100 Years of Children’s Book Illustration".  The exhibit runs until March 17.

The signage within the exhibit had some inconsistencies so I'm not entirely sure how many original works are present (the website says 140) or how many different artists are present (a sign in the exhibit says 62) but it's a bunch!  The printed signage is detailed and they made the effort to show you which of the pieces involved Newbery and Caldecott winners.

There is no catalog for sale and the exhibit brochure is mostly for kids activities so it's not that informative.  The exhibit is a traveling one and it has been making the rounds -- Google "Art Kandy Collection".  (Yep, that's apparently a real name.)

At some point, I'll have Google read the sign text for me and everything will be filled out better but I haven't had time for that.

Who's in the exhibit?  Oooh, it's extensive!  It does not have things like comic strips -- you won't find Sparky Schulz or Winsor McKay or Rose O'Neill in here.  These are the artists you'll see original works from -- I'm ignoring lithographs and copies of books.  By my count, there are 55 but I might have screwed up a couple:

 * Sarah Noble Ives -- pieces from c 1910-15
 * Peter Newell -- a drawing from c 1915
 * Anton Loeb -- the text describing his Wizard of Oz drawings mentions that the book was banned in some jurisdictions because of (1) anthropomorphized animals, (2) a strong female characters, and (3) no witches can be good
 * Campbell Grant
 * Feodor Rajankovsky
 * William Henry Bradley
 * Gustaf Tenggren
 * Tibor Gergely
 * Wesley Dennis
 * Theodor Seuss Geisel
 * Marc Simont
 * Garth Williams -- LOTS of Garth Williams...  Including a study sketch from "The Rabbits' Wedding" (1958) which was banned in places because a white rabbit was marrying a black rabbit
 * Michael Hague
 * Felicia Bond
 * Floyd Cooper
 * Tom Pohrt
 * David Wisniewski -- these were my FAVORITE pieces in the whole exhibit.  He did all of these with cut paper, mentioning he would go through as many as a thousand X-Acto knives per book.  These were great!  I've never heard of the books they were from ("Hand of the Fire Demon" and "Fire that Burns Forever", both from 1988) but he won a Caldecott Medal in 1997 for "Golem" -- if you view the book on Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/Golem-David-Wisniewski/dp/0618894241 ), you can do the [Read Sample] option and see how that one was done as well
 * William Stout
 * Richard Egielski
 * S. Saelig Gallagher
 * Deborah Nourse Lattimore
 * Audrey Wood
 * Dennis Nolan
 * Don Wood
 * Patricia Polacco
 * Karen Barbour
 * Mercer Mayer
 * Rosemary Wells -- again, LOTS of Rosemary Wells
 * James Marshall
 * Gerald McDermott
 * Maria Kalman
 * William (Bill) J. Dugan
 * Jerry Pinkney
 * Barry Moser
 * Tomie dePaola
 * Arnold Lobel
 * Anita Lobel
 * Edward Frascino
 * Jules Feiffer
 * Joan Walsh Anglund
 * Hillary Knight
 * David Shannon
 * Gary Baseman
 * Chris Raschka
 * Mark Teague
 * Joe Cepeda
 * John Bemelmans Marciano
 * Maurice Sendak
 * Mel Crawford
 * Laurent de Brunhoff
 * Richard Scarry
 * Alice Provensen and Martin Provensen
 * Ted Rand
 * William Pene du Bois
 * Leonard Weisgard

There's also a fun "Freedom to Read" lithograph by Maurice Sendak which was done for an American Booksellers Association back in 1991 to develop awareness of book censorship and to aid the ABA's Legal Defense Fund.  It was signed by a bunch of people.  The main signature I noticed was Dan Rather -- top and center -- but you can also do the treasure hunt looking for other autographs.  The sign mentions a bunch of names including Harlan Ellison, Harrison Ford, Whoopi Goldberg, Jeff Goldblum, Mickey Hart, Barry Moser, Neil Simon, Gloria Steinem, Garry Trudeau, Robin Williams, and Don and Audrey Wood.

The museum's website is https://wcmfa.org/ .  It offers free admission and free parking.  Plus it's in a gorgeous park area of the town -- there's a lake across from it -- and you may notice a new memorial to Clara Barton that's about to be unveiled near the entrance.

It's definitely worth a visit.  There's also a new exhibit "Picasso on Paper" which runs until early March.  The free gallery brochure describes in a fair amount of detail his relationships with the women in his life -- pretty much the artist version of Donald Trump minus the coup attempt.

I of course photographed the hell out of everything.  The direct link to my exhibition pictures is:

http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2023_11_25A2_WCMFA_Childhood

But some of my favorites are below.

 

Meet a Local Cartoonist: A Chat with Jonathan Roth, a Children's Book Graphic Novelist

Roth with Beep (courtesy of Roth)

by Mike Rhode

Jonathan Roth appeared recently at the Politics and Prose flagship for the second book in his Rover and Speck series. Rover and Speck are sentient planetary rovers (Rover is the one from NASA, while Speck's origin is a mystery) that meet on a Mars-like planet and then explore a water world in their second book which came out recently. After having his own event that morning, Roth came back for Roz Chast's talk and Bruce Guthrie introduced the two of us. Roth's children's book bio can be found on his website.

What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

I write and illustrate almost solely for kids these days. My first graphic novel series, Rover and Speck, came out in 2022, with another book just released and book 3 slated for 2024. I’ve also created chapter books and picture books.

How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

I do rough planning and character design in pencil first, but the finished art for my graphic novels is rendered and colored digitally.

When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?

I was born in Detroit, too young to remember the first step on the moon, but I was alive for it.

Why are you in Washington (aka Rockville) now? What neighborhood or area do you live in?

Though we first settled in Ellicott City in the late 90s, so my wife could go to acupuncture school, we moved to Montgomery County when I got a job teaching elementary art here in ‘99. We’ve been in Rockville most of that time, for the past 10+ years in Twinbrook. 

When and why did you live in Zaire and the Virgin Islands?

I deferred college a year to live in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) to join my father and his wife (remarried) who were high school teachers at the American School of Kinshasa. They later taught on St. Croix, so I dropped what I was doing (not much) to spend a year there too.
 

What is your training and/or education in cartooning?

Like so many others, I started by copying characters in comic books and strips as early as 5 years old. But by the time I went to art school (Cooper Union), I was of course, like my peers, too serious an artiste to draw cartoons. But shortly after graduating I knew I wanted to write and draw above all, with a humorous bent, and my path back to cartooning (and then children’s books) was natural and fun.

Who are your influences?

Though I was addicted to Marvel and DC as a kid, I don’t see much lasting influence there. My cartoonist’s heart was mostly shaped by newspaper strips like Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes and Doonesbury. Works such as the early Star Wars movies and the Hitchhiker’s Guide books certainly taught me a lot about longer narration and humorous voice. The Simpsons, too.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

Tell us about your alt cartoonist days in Charlottesville and other newspapers please.

In the mid to late 90s, I had hundreds of strips published by weeklies and magazines such as the C-Ville Weekly in Charlottesville (a weekly strip for a couple years), Communities Magazine and the occasional acceptance in the Funny Times and similar. But the tone of these strips was much gentler than edgy, and I don’t think the alt-scene was where I belonged. I really yearned to do more mainstream newspapers and began submitting to the syndicates. United was briefly interested in one strip, but it never went anywhere. At the same time, I was also developing my interest in writing for children, which is the path I eventually took.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

Where did you get the idea to do a book series about planetary rovers?

I’ve followed Mars landers and rovers since I was a kid, but didn’t have an idea to make them characters until 2019, when I saw that the long-lived Opportunity rover had ‘died’ after an unprecedented 14 years on the Martian surface (it was supposed to last about 3 months, ha!) I immediately had an idea about another rover finding a fictional Oppy and bringing it back to ‘life’. Thus Rover and Speck were born!

 How did you pitch it, since you would be a new graphic novelist? Was it on the strength of your previous children's book series?

My agent did the pitching, so I don’t know all the details. Because so many publishers are looking for good graphic novels now, I doubt my chapter book series had much sway either way. This one sold as an initial three-book series. Book one takes place on a rocky world. Book two is set on a water planet. And, for the first time in kid’s sci-fi that I know about, book three will take place within the cloud layers of a gas giant! I wanted to try something especially unusual for that one.

Will we learn more about Speck's origins?

Not in book 3. But maybe if there are more books down the line!

The rovers are obviously not possible to engineer yet, in spite of AI advances. Beyond the alien life such as rock creatures, is the science in your books accurate?

Maybe a wee bit more accurate than Star Trek, haha! I do try to make the specifics more plausible than fantastical, but the more factual science connections are peppered throughout in the ‘Fun Science Facts.’

How do you decide which science panels to include?

There are cool, interesting facts about all aspects of nature, but I try to tie these panels into pertinent things happening at that point in the story. My editor usually has good suggestions around these too.

If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

My first agent, who was shopping my middle-grade novels around almost 15 years ago but knew about my comics background, wondered if I could do comics for kids. For some reason I wasn’t thinking in those terms yet, though if I was, I could have possibly been on the ground floor of the current kid’s graphic novel boom (I met Andy Runton at SPX around then, and books like his Owly were definitely spinning gears in my head).

What work are you best-known for?

For my work an art teacher! I mean, I teach 500+ kids a week, each student body continually replenished for 25 years. In the wider world, my Beep and Bob chapter book series is probably still the best known of my kid’s books. 

What work are you most proud of?

It’s such a longshot getting any work traditionally published in children’s books these days, so I’m grateful for all my books. If I’m proud of anything it’s my perseverance, because that’s been the key.

What would you like to do or work on in the future?

Another graphic novel series. And more picture books. No lack of ideas! Just time…

What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?

Go for a walk or bike ride. Most of my ideas come to me while not in the chair (though sitting and composing is the only way to work them out). Active bodies are active brains!

What do you think will be the future of your field?

So bright, people will be wearing shades! Not likely me, but someone.

What local cons do you attend? The Small Press Expo, Awesome Con, or others? Any comments about attending them?

I’ve been attending the Small Press Expo for about 20 years, since back when it was in a hotel in Bethesda (now at the Mariott convention center closer to me). Anyone into comics, especially those beyond superhero, should definitely go! I attend occasional other cons, but most of the events I attend and/or appear at are book festivals: the Gaithersburg Book Festival, Fall for the Book, the Chesapeake Children’s Book Festival and more.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

What comic books do you read regularly or recommend? Do you have a local store?

Just about all the kidlit and adult comics I read can be found in good indie bookstores, like Politics and Prose (where, in the last week alone, I attended talks by creators as diverse as Stephen Pastis and Roz Chast; I also spoke there too, smiley face). Sadly there are no indies in Rockville (boo!), but the new People’s Book in Takoma Park has a cool comics selection, and I’ll travel to NoVa for Bards Alley, Scrawl, One More Page or Hooray for Books (why is NoVa so much better than MoCo this way? Discuss). And MoCo Libraries has built a great collection.

What's your favorite thing about DC?

That I can ride all the way from Rockville to the Mall on beautiful bike trails (Rock Creek Trail, Capital Crescent, C and O) to visit some of the best museums in the world. For free!

Least favorite?

That there’s such a profound equity/wealth gap.

What monument or museum do you like to take visitors to?

The National Gallery is my happy place. Great Falls is a spectacular outdoor spot.

How about a favorite local restaurant?

I’m boring about dining. The Silver Diner is our main bag.

Roth at Politics and Prose; photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie 

Do you have a website or blog?

www.beepandbob.com

How has the COVID-19 outbreak affected you, personally and professionally?

Such a strange, surreal time! Fortunately we found a way to keep schools (and teaching jobs) going during the pandemic, so for me it was more of a mental than financial hardship. I wrote and sold a book in 20-21, and my series has survived, so I’m grateful there. Plus somehow I still haven’t had Covid myself! But with all we should have learned, I’m worried we aren’t going to be prepared for the next pandemic.