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Gareth Hinds: A golden age for the graphic novel
00:48:02
We speak with illustrator Gareth Hinds about his creative and editorial workflow, and how he turns challenging works from Shakespeare, Homer, and others into a graphic novel. We also talk about how his background in video game design influences his work, and how he chooses stories that lend themselves well to his style of illustration.
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- [00:02]
Gareth Hines
We're kind of in a golden age for the graphic novel. Like for people understanding that you can actually tell any kind of story this way and that it can be particularly powerful way to tell certain kinds of stories, especially like memoir. It's a very powerful form for that.
- [00:18]
Aaron Walter
Graphic novels are experiencing something of a renaissance recently as the medium has gained popularity. We've seen some notable thinkers like Sapiens, author Yuval Noah Hararis and the late representative John Lewis bring their stories to life beautifully in graphic novel form, and Gareth Hines has played a huge role in shaping this medium lately. His graphic novel adaptations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, Macbeth, Beowulf, and King Lear, to name a few, have brought new readers and new perspectives to these classic tales. And count me in that group of readers looking at these ancient stories differently.
- [00:56]
Eli Woolery
We speak with Gareth about his creative and editorial workflow and how he turns challenging works from Shakespeare, Homer and other authors into a graphic novel. We also talk about how his background in video game design influences his work and how he chooses stories that lend themselves well to his style of illustration. This is DesignBetter, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [01:19]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills.
- [01:29]
Host
And get inspired by the creative process of others.
- [01:32]
Aaron Walter
If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [01:54]
Sponsor
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- [03:41]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the.
- [03:48]
Host
Gareth Hines welcome to Design Better.
- [03:50]
Gareth Hines
Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [03:52]
Host
What a pleasure. We were just saying before we hit the record button, I've been reading your books for a while now, and for listeners who are new to your work, you've got a unique angle. You are an illustrator, a graphic novelist who adapts classics primarily.
- [04:10]
Gareth Hines
And.
- [04:10]
Host
And we're talking about things like this book which I have right here with me. Macbeth. This is the one I'm currently working on. The Odyssey and the Iliad are wonderful. And Beowulf, what a gem that one was. That's really great. Maybe we could just talk a little bit about how you found this space. So you have a background, you went to Parsons, you studied design and illustration, and yet you found your way into a very unique niche of doing these classic graphic novels. How did that happen?
- [04:43]
Gareth Hines
So I was at Parsons. I was doing a lot of different kinds of illustration. I was doing editorial and I was doing book covers and some printmaking and things like that. And for one of my classes, I had to pick a thesis project to spend the entire semester on. And I started writing a comic book, you know, like a graphic novel that I would do. And then I realized that it was going to take me like the whole semester to write the thing, you know, and I was like, I really want to focus on the illustration. And at the time I was reading Brothers Grimm and I was like, okay, let me just grab a fairy tale and I'm just going to adapt it and illustrate it. And I really, really enjoyed that process. And I was very happy with what I came out with. You know, my teachers were very, you know, giving me a lot of great feedback on it. And so I ended up not only delivering that as my thesis, but then also later self publishing it and decided that I wanted to try, you know, continuing in that vein a little bit. And so I thought, well, I want to do something that sort of connects to the modern superhero genre. So I decided to adapt Beowulf because he's kind of like, to me, he's one of our early superheroes. He's this monster hunter who goes around fighting all these creatures that nobody else is strong enough to deal with. It was so fun to do and it got really great feedback. And then eventually what happened once I put it out as a three issue miniseries that was self published, and then I self published a collection and I was just going around to comic shows. And then I started, I went to a national council of teachers of English, An English teachers convention. And those teachers were so excited to have that as a tool to introduce kids to the classics, that I was just like, clearly, this is where I belong. It's the perfect marriage of my illustration interest with my interest in, like, old stories and history and mythology and superheroes.
- [06:31]
Interviewer
So reading about your career a little bit, it sounds like after you graduated, you worked for a little while in video game design. Could you talk about that part of your career and maybe anything you learned from there?
- [06:40]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, sure. So that was something I kind of stumbled into. You know, I had this visual storytelling kind of focus. And when I was getting ready to graduate, we had a really great, like, professional practices class where they talked about the business of illustration. And they kept kind of hitting this idea that you just had to constantly hustle to get the next job. And I was like, you know, I don't know that I love that. And also that it was gonna be feast or famine, you know, you weren't gonna be able to turn down jobs. And so I was like, well, what if I look around for something that's a little more stable? And I went to the career services office and they had this listing for a video game job. And this was kind of before it was such a competitive industry. I applied for it and I got offered this job at Looking glass studios, which is kind of a legendary indie game developer in Boston. And so I worked there. I started there in 1994, and I worked in the game industry for 11 and a half years, first at Looking glass and then at a bunch of other studios that sort of spun off from looking glass. It was a really cool way to get started on my career because I learned a lot of software, I had a steady income. It was a field where I was rewarded for my versatility. You know, I was doing stuff in lots of different styles, and that was great. Whereas if I was trying to freelance, I would have really had to like hone a single style, which was not necessarily something I had managed to do in art school or really even have still managed to do. It just worked out it was the right time and the right place and the right place for me to be while I was sort of getting this going. But I kind of knew almost, you know, from the beginning that that wasn't going to be the career I was going to want to stay in for my whole life. So I. That whole time I kind of had my eye on other things, including graphic novels. And I was self publishing these graphic novels. And as soon as I got a sort of real publishing contract, you know, I sort of had the opportunity and kind of had to make the decision of what I wanted to do full time. You know, I knew it was going to be books. And I got out of the game industry at that point.
- [08:33]
Interviewer
So just to nerd out for a minute, I grew up with three brothers and we were way into computer games. So I was just looking through like I definitely recognize the name Looking Glass. So I was just curious like what were responsible for. So even back the early days, like 1987, Chuck Yeager played that with my brothers and friends a lot like Ultima Underworld. Did you happen to work on any of those? That was a big one for us.
- [08:52]
Gareth Hines
So I came in a little after Ultima Underworld. I came in, I was working on Flight Unlimited and System Shock 1. Original System Shock, right at the very end of that, Terra Nova, which was a game that nobody bought, but it was, it did okay critically. And then I worked a tiny bit on the Thief series, which was one of the games they really were known for. And then I worked first at Looking Glass and then later at Irrational Games on the System Shock 2, which was really kind of a cult classic. And I still even like, I'll go to schools with high schoolers who were not born when that game came out, but they've played it somehow. Those were all PC games. And then later on I worked on one PS2 game that actually got canceled. It was called the Lost, that was with Irrational. And then I worked on a bunch of handheld games for the Nintendo platforms. Most of them were Pixar tie ins. So I worked on a bunch of the, like Incredibles. Incredibles 2 cars, Ratatouille, a bunch of those for Nintendo DS and Nintendo GBA.
- [09:54]
Host
You mentioned that designing video games you had to have a diversity of styles or just different approaches. I wonder if there are Other lessons from that experience that still serve you today?
- [10:05]
Gareth Hines
Well, one of the biggest ones was that I got to sort of understand the importance of project management and scheduling because, you know, I saw how these games would kind of go off the rails schedule wise and budget wise often, and the different tools that they had to try to control that. And so I adopted some of that. So I keep a pretty. Not super detailed, but a detailed enough schedule that I always have a good idea of where I am relative to where I need to be and, you know, how far behind I'm falling on a project, if, you know, if that happens, which it often does. Also, the software skills were definitely useful. I got to know Photoshop and Illustrator and some of the 3D programs quite well. In a couple of cases, they actually sent me to, you know, like, go to like an Adobe conference and really dig into, of course, older versions of those programs. But that was very helpful and, you know, thinking in 3D. I did a lot of 3D modeling, which was something I had just barely kind of touched on in art school. And I dug deeper into that, so that was cool. And for some of my projects, I know a lot of illustrators who will actually, like, build, build a set for reference for an illustration. And I sometimes do that digitally. I sometimes build a little 3D set that I can play with the lighting, or maybe I'll model ahead of a character so that I can turn it around, look at different angles and things like that.
- [11:23]
Host
That is fascinating. I did not know that was even a practice. What does that look like? So you're talking about smaller pieces, but a set sounds extensive. How far do you go?
- [11:33]
Gareth Hines
Well, I don't go as far as some people do. For me, it's like, maybe I'll build the shape of a room. So, for example, in my Edgar Allan PO Adaptation, in the Pit and the Pendulum, you know, he sort of finds himself in this room. That is. I forget how close I stuck to his description. But basically, in my version, it's kind of this dome that's made up of tiers of rectangular panels, and each panel has like this kind of mythological illustration on it. And just to get the perspective on this kind of, you know, vaulted dome with all these panels, I built that in 3D. And so then I could, like, shoot different camera angles of that to use as reference for my illustrations.
- [12:10]
Interviewer
How's the process of working on a graphic novel differ than the other types of illustration work that you had done?
- [12:16]
Gareth Hines
Well, I mean, its scope is quite large compared to a freelance illustration job or A book cover or something like that. Of course, it's smaller than the scope of a video game or something like that. So I'm often building out a schedule that's like a year or two long. And it's broken into stages of development where the initial stage is like writing a script and. And designing the characters. And then the next stage is sketching out the entire book in rough sketches, often called a rough layout or a sketch dummy. And then that's where I really. I'm trying to solve all the kind of the visual problems, the storytelling, the staging, all of that kind of stuff. Kind of the cinematography in a sense. Then I redraw everything, you know, with more detail and more clarity and then add color, which is usually for me, what that usually looks like is on my last couple books has been drawing digitally and then printing those drawings out on watercolor paper and coloring them with watercolor. I really enjoy using traditional materials. I'm always experimenting with how to combine the digital and traditional to get the advantages of both, to get the flexibility and the speed of kind of iterating and trying things out digitally. But then the final art, I like to have a more traditional look and to be using those more traditional materials.
- [13:35]
Host
And so you've got these watercolors and then all that gets scanned in and then composited into page layouts.
- [13:41]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, exactly.
- [13:42]
Host
Is it all just you?
- [13:44]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, it's all me. Occasionally I will hire a coloring assistant. I've done that only on two books. Of course. I'm working with a publisher and I have a designer there. And that designer mostly is just doing odds and ends. Really, like things like figuring out the end papers and the flaps and where things are going to go on the copyright page. Pretty minor stuff. The book that I'm delivering to them is like 98, 99% fully laid out. They will sometimes have suggestions about typography and things like that, but yeah, it's pretty much all me.
- [14:16]
Host
That is a lot of work.
- [14:18]
Gareth Hines
It's a lot of work. Yeah, it really is. Especially for the big books like the Odyssey and the Iliad. Those are like 250 page plus books. They take a couple of years and yeah, it's a ton of work.
- [14:29]
Interviewer
You think of some of these classic works like Shakespeare, where the language itself is very challenging to us as modern folks. How do you think about translating that? And obviously his storylines are so compelling. They've lasted the ages. But how do you think of translating that into something that's graphic and visual?
- [14:46]
Gareth Hines
I mean, that's really at the Center. The core of what I do is like, figuring out how to go from one medium to another and how to tell the story visually. In some cases, there's a literal translation problem. Right. When something's written in Greek or in Old English, I have to decide what translation am I going to use. Or in the case of Homer, what I ended up doing was reading multiple translations and writing my own script. So that's a significant challenge, a significant chunk of work. And then just thinking about, okay, well, what parts of the story can I tell with pictures versus words? I will have some very rough ideas about that when I'm writing the script. A lot of comic authors will write a script that contains descriptions of what's in every panel, because if somebody else is going to illustrate it, they want to sort of present their vision. But I don't do that. I just write a few little visual notes as I'm going along of something that I have in my mind. But mostly, I then really make all those decisions. When I'm doing that rough sketch or that rough layout, I draw that right into InDesign, which is a little unconventional. InDesign is not really meant to be an illustration program, but there is a freehand pencil tool, and I use that tool to actually draw my sketches. And that allows me to manipulate the text and the sketches kind of at the same time on the same plane. I can reshape the text balloons and see exactly how much room the text takes up. That allows me to really get the page laid out exactly the way I want it, so that when I go to do the finished illustrations, there's no real question about whether the balloon is going to fit or anything like that. Those decisions are all things like, oh, for this piece of dialogue, what do we want to be looking at? Do we want to be looking at the face of the character who's saying it, or do we want to pull back and see the body language of who they're talking to? You know, if there's the piece of narration, you know, if you guys are Familiar with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, he talks a lot about, you know, you don't want to present the exact same information in both the text and the image channels, right? So it's. You want it to be complementary, where they're each adding information to the scene so that all kind of comes out through a process of experimentation and kind of a little bit of trial and error and a little bit of, you know, just instinct that happens at that stage.
- [16:56]
Host
There's a bit of irony of how you found your way into this was, well, it's too much time and effort to create my own stories. So I'll adapt existing stories. And it turns out that is infinitely more complicated.
- [17:11]
Gareth Hines
It is complicated. Although, I mean, I will say that I definitely suffer from writer's block and all the other problems that writers have when I try to write original work and adapting stories, as difficult and as complicated as it can be, it does not ever have that problem of, okay, where does this story go? Or is this story any good? Right. That was actually one of my initial motivations, was like, I want to work with a story I already know is good. And in that sense, it suits my strength set.
- [17:40]
Host
Yeah. Well, there's another layer of complexity to what you do, which is that you're illustrating times and places that are far past. And so you have to dip into archeology. And there's a lot of imagination that you have to bring into that, of course, but you have to have some level of historical accuracy to make this story credible. Talk to us about that process.
- [18:06]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, well, and I will say, first of all, I really like the way you put that. I want to make the story credible. I don't want it to feel like it's fantasy. Right. So I need to do enough research that it plausibly grounds it in a time and a place. And then I can and often have to use a lot of artistic license to fill in things from imagination during that writing phase. And even really before the writing phase, there's kind of a just reading it a bunch of times phase. And during that whole period, I am looking for, you know, what do we know, what is the current state of archaeology about the Bronze Age or about, you know, the 10th century in Scotland or, you know, whatever the story is, you know, calls for. And of course, with the Bronze Age, there's very little. So, again, that's a situation where I do have to use my imagination quite a bit. It. And use some artistic license. And also, a lot of the authors I'm dealing with, they didn't have an idea that historical accuracy was important. So when you look at Shakespeare, you know, he's describing lots of stuff that's not historically accurate, and he's taking huge liberties with the stories where he's adapting a quasi historical event. And even when you look at Homer, like, Homer has these incredibly vivid descriptions, but there is somewhat anachronistic in places, suggesting that, you know, Homer himself, if he was a lone author or the Homeric tradition, if you are into that idea that Homer is really a succession of bards leading up to whoever finally wrote it down, that they're just describing things in the terms of their own time. You know, this might be jumping ahead, but right now I'm working on the Aeneid, and Virgil definitely does that. I mean, he's clearly describing like third century Roman times. In most of his descriptions of ships and weapons and things like that, he's not describing the Bronze Age. So on the one hand, that gives me a lot of latitude, but it also means that I have to kind of like make these interesting compromises sometimes between, okay, well, here's what we think it would have really looked like, but here's probably what is truer to the vision of the author as best I can suss that out or intuit it. So I'm always kind of dancing around that. And ultimately, just what looks best is ultimately a major factor.
- [20:15]
Host
Absolutely.
- [20:16]
Interviewer
So it was a good segue to what I was thinking about asking next, which is how do you pick your next project? How do you know what stories will lend themselves well to your style of work? In the case of the Ennead, it makes sense given the other works you worked on. But if it's a different domain or other thing that you're interested in.
- [20:33]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, so I always have kind of a list in my head of old stories that I love that I'd like to illustrate and things that I know that I've been asked for, usually by teachers. When I go to these teacher shows, they're all like, oh, when are you going to do Hamlet? Or when are you going to do Canterbury Tales? Or whatever. So I have a list of things in my head that I'm just letting simmer there, not really even actively thinking about it all. And when I get close to an end of a project, you know, I'll start thinking about, okay, what am I excited to do next from that list? What do I think there's going to be a market for? Because definitely Shakespeare. For example, my Shakespeare books have been extremely well received critically, but those haven't sold as well, partly because there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of Shakespeare graphic novels, and just within the canon of Shakespeare, there's so many plays and teachers all teach different plays. So I did four Shakespeare plays, and I may come back to Shakespeare at some point, but I'm not commercially motivated to go back to Shakespeare. So I am thinking about, you know, what are the things that I think teachers are going to ask for. I'm also listening to my fans and Actually, that's part of why I'm doing the Aeneid is because I have a lot of young fans who are like, when are you going to do the Aeneid? Which I think is not coming out of the fact that they already know and love the Aeneid so much as that it's like the ending of the Trojan War. Like, we didn't really get the ending of the Trojan War in either the Odyssey or the Iliad. And so, you know, it's almost like a completion of the story. Sometimes I also get contacted and asked to do things, or sometimes I'll be collaborating with somebody and we'll do something. So, for example, I did a adaptation of a contemporary fantasy novel called Graceling, which came out of just discussions with that author, first discussions with my wife about what would be interesting contemporary works to adapt. And then we kind of brought that up with the author because we know her and thought that would be a really cool book to adapt, and she was really excited about it. So sometimes things happen that way. Or like the Samurai Rising and Gifts for the Gods are two books that came to me that editors approached me about illustrating. So that happens as well.
- [22:32]
Host
Yeah, those are definitely on my reading list. They look super interesting. I like the description. Warning, most of the people in this book do not die of natural causes.
- [22:41]
Gareth Hines
Yes. For Samurai Rising. Yes. Because it's like 11th century Japan, and it's just like. It's just.
- [22:46]
Host
Everybody's losing violin.
- [22:48]
Gareth Hines
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
- [22:50]
Host
You talked a little bit about rarely illustrating or producing modern novels. And I have been reading a lot of graphic novels of more recent books, so there's wonderful stuff coming out.
- [23:04]
Sponsor
Watership Down.
- [23:05]
Host
I read that over Christmas. That graphic novel was wonderful. Slaughterhouse 5, to kill a Mockingbird. There's so many good books. That's actually how I came across your books was I started to find these. I think of them as traps for my children.
- [23:21]
Gareth Hines
Yes.
- [23:22]
Host
I buy these books, these graphic novels, and they are on the lowest shelf in the living room. That is right in the hallway where you can walk past and accidentally discover, hey, here's Macbeth right here. And so I'm curious if there are other books that are maybe in the last hundred, 150 years that we would probably say, like, all right, that's in the canon of great literature. Are those on the table for you as well?
- [23:47]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Yeah. And in fact, I would have loved to do this Slaughterhouse Five adaptation. I actually. I reached out to the estate at one point, and they were like, we're not interested but the timing, I think, was that they had already signed up to do that one with Ryan north, who did a fantastic job with that. When I started doing this, I had basically no competition. There had been the Classics Illustrated line, which started in the 40s and then got revived in the 80s, but they were all 48 pages long, so they really. You couldn't really do justice to these stories in that length and, you know, not much else. But now, yeah, like you said, in the last, like, five, ten years, there's been an explosion, and suddenly, you know, a lot of those modern classics are available as graphic novels, and most of them are very well. Which, again, in the old days, when somebody did come out with an adaptation, it was usually not very good.
- [24:34]
Host
So I have a few of those, too.
- [24:36]
Gareth Hines
Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely some bad. There are some bad ones out there. I won't name any names, but, yeah.
- [24:41]
Host
Just to build on that, John Lewis, the series of graphic novels that he did, March and Run, but I'm blanking on the illustrator's name.
- [24:50]
Gareth Hines
Nate Powell.
- [24:51]
Host
Nate Powell.
- [24:51]
Gareth Hines
Nate Powell is great. Yeah. And also John Lewis worked with Andrew Ayden to write them.
- [24:56]
Host
I think it's interesting that graphic novels are being seen as an important tool, the best way to tell a really powerful story, whereas, you know, not that long ago would a figure, historic figure, like John Lewis, have chosen that medium.
- [25:12]
Gareth Hines
I mean, we're kind of in a golden age for the graphic novel, like, for, you know, people understanding that you can actually tell any kind of story this way and that it can be particularly powerful way to tell certain kinds of stories, especially like memoirs. It's a very powerful form for that. And, you know, of course, every medium has its strengths. I mean, I will say that part of the reason I think we're seeing the popularity of it is that people don't want to sit down and read a whole book anymore, which is unfortunate.
- [25:37]
Host
I'm in that camp and, like, I listen to audiobooks all the time. I can do that really well. But I have a busy life. I've got children, and it's hard. And graphic novels, like, let's be honest, the Iliad and the Odyssey, if you got like an hour on a Tuesday night, is that what you're snuggling up with?
- [25:56]
Gareth Hines
It's a little tough. It's a little tough, yeah, absolutely. So the selling point that I'm always pushing is the accessibility and the fact that it kind of levels the playing field for students at different reading levels and so on. But the sort of sad truth Is that for a lot of those students, they just won't read the original. If you hand it to them, they're going to go to CliffNotes or something else. They're just not going to read it.
- [26:17]
Interviewer
ChatGPT now, these days.
- [26:19]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [26:23]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [26:30]
Sponsor
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- [26:37]
Aaron Walter
It's a real thing and it happens.
- [26:39]
Gareth Hines
To a lot of folks.
- [26:40]
Sponsor
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- [27:10]
Host
Which is very cool.
- [27:11]
Sponsor
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- [27:41]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show.
- [27:48]
Interviewer
So, Gareth, from an outsider's perspective, it seems like you've been able to build a kind of creative life working on projects that excite you. What are some of the things that allowed you to get to that point, do you think, in your career?
- [28:00]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, I mean, I've definitely been very fortunate. Especially, you know, I mentioned timing earlier with regard to video games. I think I had very good timing getting into graphic novels, you know, when they were starting to become popular and a little bit more mainstream and there wasn't a huge amount of competition for adaptations. You know, I had not a very affluent family, but they were able to send me to art school and supportive of sending me to art school, which, you know, is not necessarily something that, that a lot of young people necessarily have. I mean, I had access to some mentors, although I think actually that's something that a lot of people could, you know, now can access their mentors via, you know, online or whatever. But I did have some people in my local area that I was able to meet and sort of get advice from that was very useful to me. Like when I was in high school and thinking about going off to study illustration or whatever. And, you know, being in video games gave me a nice stable base to jump off from. And also, you know, a lot of these software companies would have stock options or some other kind of thing, and I didn't ever have a, like, home run with that. But at two of the companies, the stock options were not nothing. They helped me, gave me some padding. So in particular the last one that I was working at Helix, I got some money from their stock that helped me essentially have a year where I didn't have to be making money. That allowed me to complete the Odyssey and King Lear and sort of get those in the hopper. Because a lot of people don't realize that when you sign a contract for a book, you get an advance, but the advance is not necessarily enough to live on by itself. So, you know, I. I had a $15,000 advance for the Odyssey. It took two years to make. So I was able to do that because I had that padding from that company.
- [29:40]
Host
Could you share more about the business side of things? Like, how'd you know which door to knock on and how did you pitch your ideas to get those adopted?
- [29:50]
Gareth Hines
So again, I was mostly lucky when I did Bearskin, which was the, again, my senior thesis project, that Brothers Grimm fairy tale. I took that around to all of the comic book publishers that I knew about, and none of them were interested. And then when I was doing Beowulf, I took that to a couple of publishers as well, including a couple comic publishers, and I think maybe Pantheon, one of the book publishers that was already doing a few graphic novels. And again, it didn't get much interest at that point, you know, some kind of semi encouraging rejection letters. But then when it started to really sell, again, self published, I had self published Beowulf when it started to sell to English teachers. And I got contacted by somebody from the Boston Globe who was like, hey, I'm doing a story about local comic artists. And then we had an interview and I told him all this stuff and he was like, oh, I think actually instead of putting you in this roundup of people, I'm going to write a little article just about you. So that was great. And then that actually didn't go in the national distribution of the Boston Globe. It only went in a local paper. But this publisher I worked with is Candlewick Press. They're based in Boston. So they actually saw that article and they were trying to get into graphic novels at the time. So I was one of the first two graphic novels that they published. And it was very appealing to them that there was this educational market, because they're very strong in the educational market. And they knew that that would be a less risky bet, that they knew how to market to that and that it would have a longer shelf life. It wouldn't just be a flash in the pan if it caught on at all. And so they reached out to me and I knew enough about their reputation to know that they would be a good publisher to work with, especially in terms of the production values of their books. They make very, very beautiful books and they didn't know very much about making graphic novels at the beginning. I kind of had to educate them in the early days. But in a lot of ways they've been really fantastic to work with, I imagine.
- [31:49]
Interviewer
And you might not have direct insight into this, but they're probably one of the smaller publishers out there. Now that there's so much consolidation. It's probably advantages and disadvantages there, but I guess just your take on sort of the publishing world in general.
- [32:01]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, I mean, the publishing world is. I mean, you know, over time, like everything else, it's gone through a bunch of consolidation and some rocky times right now. There's actually, I know a lot of people who are in publishing who are having a rough go at the moment. Candlewick, among others, has been acquired by venture capital firms. So they're kind of being run by VCs and accountants. And that's not good for editorial creativity. And so there's definitely downsides to that. But they're still producing a ton of beautiful books. There's still a lot of amazing people there. I mean, I guess they're usually called a mid sized publisher, but you're right that they're way, way smaller than somebody like a Penguin Random House or a Scholastic or HarperCollins or something like that. I worked with HarperCollins. Well, I worked with Houghton, who then got acquired by Harper. And that experience was pretty good. But then now that they've been acquired, Graceling came out right when Houghton went under Harper. And that was a bad experience. I understand Harper already had their whole list they were trying to promote. And then they inherited Houghton's entire list. And I don't know how well the communication was working and so on. That didn't go well. But you always kind of have to decide whether you want to work with somebody who has a lot of financial muscle, but they're not going to care as much about you versus somebody who's really small. The Samurai Rising book. I did the Charles Bridge and I used to joke that they paid me in warm fuzzies. I mean, they did actually. The book did okay. I actually made some royalties off that book. But the main thing was it was just a delight to work with them. And they were so scrappy and they made just a lot more creative decisions than even than Candlewick, who's not that much bigger than them, but enough that their attention is split more ways. And of course I've also been at the self publishing end of things, which is the ultimate like nobody's doing anything for you. It's a great way to learn the business. I always recommend people, if you have something and you just want to get it out there, just do it. And you'll learn a lot. You're probably not going to make a lot of money, but you'll learn a lot about the industry and about who your customer is and you'll learn some harsh realities of the business and go forward with your eyes a lot wider open because I certainly learned a ton from doing that.
- [34:17]
Host
How much of marketing efforts fall upon your shoulders?
- [34:21]
Gareth Hines
Well, the publisher has a significant slate of things that they do for you kind of automatically. Like you get into their catalog which gets seen by every retailer. You know, they send out press releases, they go to all the major trade shows and they have your book, whatever your new book is out along with all the other new books. So there's a bunch of things that are significant, but they're all kind of, they're things that they're doing for their entire list at the same time. And then if they have reason to believe that your book is going to be special, they'll do something special for it. But usually not a ton, especially with the bigger publishers. Often what they're looking at is if you're a small to mid list authority, they're going to kind of see how your book does and then if it's doing well, they pump more money in. They get a better return on increasing sales of something that's already doing well versus trying to push something that's not carrying its own weight. Or of course maybe they've already spent a million dollars to get your book and then they're going to put a lot of money behind it. I've never been in that position, but obviously that happens. So those are the ones that you see everywhere. Things like social media are largely, I mean they do some social media but not too many people are really following the publisher to find out when a new book is going to come out. So you have to do your own stuff like that. If you're good at it or if you're not good at it, you just don't. Which is mostly what I do. I'm out there just enough that if people are looking for me, they can find me. And the people who are interested will know when I have a new book coming out. But I did hire a publicist for the Iliad, and that's something some authors do on their own. And that's expensive, but it can pay off, you never know. When I was self publishing, I used to do a lot more, you know, mailings and things like that. I don't do as much of that anymore, although I did do for Graceling. I sort of worked with the publisher a little bit, but I did most of the heavy lifting. To send out a mailing to people who you think are going to be influential, you know, social media influencers or book reviewers. I mean, they send to all the book reviewers, reviewers, all the book review publications, that's another thing that they do. But if you want to target specific people or anybody who's not with a major publication, then that's often either the author or the author working with the publisher to get that done.
- [36:43]
Interviewer
Gareth, have you been playing around with any of the generative AI tools, either for doing research or exploring different visual styles or things like that?
- [36:53]
Gareth Hines
Yeah, a little bit. I haven't had a ton of time, but I have been messing around with it. Initially I was playing with the image generators to just see what they're capable abilities are and how much of a threat they are to me and also how much of an opportunity they represent in terms of speeding up some part of my process. I thought, oh, this would be good for maybe generating reference images and then I can draw from it. So it's still in my style, but, you know, I'll be drawing from something realistic. But of course, the problem is that they don't do things that are accurate. So if my goal is to have any kind of accuracy, then it's not helpful for that. I do sometimes use it for like an environment maybe, or like a crowd scene where I want to be able to draw from something, but the details don't matter. Either you're not going to see them because they're so small, or I'm going to kind of make them up as I go along. What I've been playing with more actually, although still not very much, is the film generation stuff, because there's certainly the promise, and I don't think we're there yet, but there's the promise of Pretty soon being able to film yourself doing something and re render it in the style of somebody's drawings, including my own. And that's a pretty intriguing notion that I could make my own animated shorts of the Odyssey or whatever just by using those tools. I continue to be sort of agnostic about whether this ultimately is going to be a really horrible thing or a really amazing thing. It's probably going to be both. It's going to super, super disrupt large industries, large numbers of people's livelihood, and we're going to have to figure out how to grapple with that. But also it has the promise to do all kinds of amazing things in terms of medicine and blah, blah, blah, but also to allow places that don't have an entertainment industry to make movies or whatever. It increases access in ways that could be beneficial. So I think it's going to be a super, super mixed bag.
- [38:47]
Host
Could you tell us a little bit about the work that you do with schools? You visit schools and you partner with schools. How does that work?
- [38:55]
Gareth Hines
A lot of authors, especially authors for books for kids or young people, do school visits as, you know, part of A, how they make their living and B, how they hope to enrich kids lives. So, you know, I'll get contacted by a school that maybe is teaching my Odyssey or whatever and I'll go and I'll do a presentation and I'll talk about how I got to be a graphic novelist, how my process works. I'll walk them through. I'll do some like a drawing demo showing how I kind of do the rough layouts and then answer questions, talk to them a little about business and scheduling and revision. That's always a big one. Teachers can't get kids to revise, so I'm always talking about the importance of revision. So things like that. And then sometimes they'll also do like a workshop where I'll sort of give them a writing prompt and some tips and tools and we'll create some short comics, which is always really fun. And sometimes I get really creative ideas out of that as well, which is fun. I have a bunch of little short comics that maybe I'll turn into an anthology someday that came out of those workshops.
- [39:56]
Interviewer
So you mentioned you're working on the NEID next. Are there any other books out there that you're or historical works you're excited to tackle at some point?
- [40:05]
Gareth Hines
I mean, I definitely do eventually want to get back to Shakespeare and probably it would be Hamlet first when I do that. Although I also get a lot of requests for other things. Julius Caesar, Midsummer Night's Dream, things like that. I'm very interested in doing Gilgamesh at some point. I'm very interested in doing an Arthurian book at some point, some version of the King Arthur legend. I am always kind of banging away at some original projects. So I have one that's like, for kids that I keep trying to figure out. There's story issues that I still need to figure out with it before I can really draw it. I love science fiction and I aspire at some point to do an action dystopian science fiction book. And I've got numerous partial scripts for books like that. There's a lot of things that are always kicking around to the point where usually in between books I say, you know, all right, I'm going to take a couple months off and then I'm going to take like a month to, you know, write some new thing and then I'll see whether it's ready. And it always ends up being several months trying to write some new thing and it's never ready. And then I just go back to another adaptation.
- [41:09]
Host
What are you reading, watching, listening to that is particularly interesting and inspiring to you right now.
- [41:16]
Gareth Hines
Well, okay. So for one thing, I should just mention that my wife is also in the book industry and she's a children's book buyer. So we actually get into the house a large proportion of the picture books and graphic novels that are coming out for young people from the major publishers. So, you know, I've got a whole big to read list of like some stuff that I never heard of, other things that are like sequels or stuff from people that I admire. So, for example, I just read Plane Jane and the Mermaid. It's great by Vera Brosgal, who did Anya's Ghost. I've got first Cat in Space Ate Pizza, which is one of the most hilarious graphic novel series that's come out. That's Mac Barnett and Sean Harris, who are kind of legends in the picture book world. John Hendricks just came out with a graphic novel that is about Tolkien and C.S. lewis and their friendship and their work. So I just cracked that open the other day. I am always trying to keep an eye on what the new adaptations are that are coming out. So it's not really that new anymore. But like the authorized Anne Frank's Diary graphic novel is amazing. The authorized 1984 is very, very good. Although it feels longer to me than the original. I think they should have abridged it a little bit more, but oh my God, it's so gorgeous.
- [42:28]
Interviewer
Gareth, where can folks go to find you and your work?
- [42:32]
Gareth Hines
So my website is garethhines.com and you can pretty much find links to everything there. As I said, I'm on social media although I'm not super active and my publisher is Candlewick Press for most of my adaptations if you want to look them up as well. And I also have a little online store on my website so if you want signed books you can buy them directly from me.
- [42:53]
Host
Fantastic. Gareth thanks so much for being on the show.
- [42:56]
Gareth Hines
Thank you. This has been a pleasure.
- [43:02]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me Aaron Walter with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows or simply drop a link to the show in your team's slack channel channel designbetterpodcast.com it'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.