Broken Frontier

Von Allan is a name you most likely won’t be familiar with. That just may change as he puts the finishing touches on his upcoming graphic novel, The Road To God Knows…

BROKEN FRONTIER: Can you give a description of who you are and what you’re working on?

VON ALLAN: I am working on and very close to finishing a graphic novel called The Road to God Knows… The story deals with a teenage girl dealing with her mom’s schizophrenia. It’s a bit of a slice of life story, it’s somewhat dark, but there is a bit of humor in there.

There’s a subplot in there that deals with pro wrestling and that balances some of the darkness of mental illness. The story will be 142 pages, and I’m hoping it will be out next year, in 2007.

BF: The book is about schizophrenia—what devices are you using to keep it from getting too dark?

VA: The main thrust of the story is sort of a teenage girl, Marie, realizing that her mom is really ill. In some ways it’s more about friendship, because it is about her and her friend Kelly, who are trying to garner enough money to go see a wrestling show that is coming into their town. So, a lot of the story is the ideas and plans they come up with for fundraisers to get enough coin together to go to this wrestling show.

The other part of it is that I didn’t want to have a story that somehow solved schizophrenia and somehow made it a neatly wrapped-up happy ending because, with things like mental illness, life isn’t like that. So, doing it thematically with a wrestling match of “will they get there or not?” made the story move to what I hope is a satisfactory conclusion, and makes for a good, fun read.

BF: Seeing as the book has wrestling involved, who is your favorite wrestler?

VA: I love tag teams, so I will answer that with my favorite ones, like the 80s tag teams Rock and Roll Express, Demolition, the Midnight Rockers, that kind of thing. The Hart Foundation. I just love tag team wrestling. Singles wrestling—I like it—but there’s something about four guys in a ring, working together, and what can happen with the referee is just magical.

BF: Excellent. Schizophrenia is a big topic. Have you dealt with this on a personal level?

VA: The story is pretty autobiographical, actually. If I was a girl it would be pretty autobiographical. There are some amazing autobiographical comics that come out like Chester Brown’s stuff. I felt that doing the book fictionally would give me some distance from the material. It would also allow me to play with time. If I did the book completely autobiographically, there’s a tendency to keep the story fairly linear.

Making it fictional allowed me to play with the events somewhat from my own life, other events that I could invent, and create a narrative that is tighter. So I was chewing it over at the concept stages two years ago, and it just felt a better way to go, fictionally. And I like how it turned out.

BF: When do you hope to have the story completed?

VA: Well, what happens next, is the manuscript is pretty well done, so I basically have a galley that I am now going to start pitching around to publishers over the next couple of months. Depending on how that goes… if they’re interested, then great, we’ll get on their publishing schedule. If it doesn’t go so great—which is always possible, for whatever reason —then I’ll just self-publish it, and if so, hopefully next year.

BF: Do you find yourself at an advantage or a disadvantage promoting something that is not a completed project?

VA: An advantage, by far, for a whole bunch of reasons. I used to run a bookstore, and I’ve seen a whole bunch of books die because they would come out and no one would know about them. It seems crass, it seems commercial, but you have to get your work out there. We’ve been at this for well over a year, when I first started it. Getting the work out there is really important, getting people exposed to your work. We’ve talked to several retailers.

Also, with the way Diamond sets up Previews, it’s based on pre-orders. If no one knew who I was, if I was just releasing it to pre-orders, no one would buy it. There’d be no interest, and certainly no retailer interest. So you have to be pragmatic, you have to do things a step at a time. The story’s changed from what we were showing last year, but it’s a strong way to go.