Broken Frontier

An Elegy for Amelia Johnson, released last week by Archaia, is the story of a young woman dying of cancer who sends her loved ones on a farewell journey on her behalf. Along the way, not only are perceptions challenged, but so are friendships too. It’s an honest book with the potential to speak to readers of all ages.

Andrew Rostan, writer of the graphic novel, was kind enough to talk with us about his process in delivering this emotional and touching book. 

BROKEN FRONTIER: This is a very large and sometimes epic story. What made you decide on this medium specifically and not a novel or film? 

ANDREW ROSTAN: It actually was first written down in my Moleskine as a film idea, but two weeks later I had a coffee with Stephen Christy, the editor-in-chief of Archaia (and full disclosure: a friend of mine from Emerson College, Class of 2007).  He had asked me to write a book for him, and I kept coming up with, to put it kindly, not very good ideas involving superheroes.  Then, I fatefully asked him what kind of story he wanted to tell, and he said he wanted a book about love and time.  I was walking back to my car -- down Third Street in Santa Monica -- and Amelia popped into my head.  Love and time, for me, added up to death, but I wanted to put a positive ending on a story about death.

So that’s the roundabout answer, but I also think it works magnificently as a graphic novel more than anything.  The book allows for level of intimacy not always present in film, but it also allows for the evocative visual character and minimalism which a novel can sometimes hinder.

BF: A story like this can often become, for lack of a better word, sappy or clichéd. Were you cognizant of that while scripting and did you sometimes find yourself swerving in order to buck stereotypes?

ROSTAN: To be honest, I wrote and edited my text in sections, focusing on different scenes or specific issues to correct.  I didn’t read the entire novel until right before it went to the printers and realized… well, this is really sentimental.  But sentimentality is not a bad thing: Paul McCartney once called it the world’s most underrated emotion.  And when you’re thinking about someone close to you whom you’re never going to see again, as much as you’ll want to try to react normally and controlled -- like you -- some deep emotion bordering on the sappy will creep in.  My goal was to let this come out in expressions (Dave and Kate did this brilliantly) and short speeches, little lines where we let our guard down.  But above all, I was trying to figure out how each character in their own voice responded to grief. That kept me from reaching cliché: focusing on each individual expression.

BF: Do you have any inspirations from any medium that you looked to for creative support? You strike such a specific tone in this book: what are some good examples that spoke to you when crafting this story?

ROSTAN: It’s funny: I have a lot of heroes and inspirations, but none of them directly inspired this book thematically.  The story was my own.  But in terms of tone, I read a wonderful book about comic scriptwriting and was really taken by Warren Ellis and Mark Millar’s ability to convey just the right amount of description and dialogue in tandem; they helped this beginner write what turned out to be a really good script.  And Robert Bolt, definitely.  A lot of people don’t recognize the name, but he wrote the screenplays of Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Man for All Seasons, The Mission -- he had the ability to write single lines of dialogue that spoke volumes, and keep a realistic tone even in the most epic of settings.  I definitely had Robert Bolt on my mind [while] writing Amelia.

BF: Artistically, the book is slightly stylized or cartoony, but maintains a very grounded and real feel. What was your input on the character design and world created? What kind of process didyou and co-creator Dave Valeza have?

ROSTAN: Dave Valeza is a man I can never say enough good things about.  I am his biggest fan and always will be.  The way we worked, which also answers the question about input, is that he took my descriptions of the characters -- mostly through the dialogue -- and came up with the physical type of who would speak that way.  I maybe took a sentence to describe each character, and Dave fleshed them out so marvelously that I would nearly get a heart attack seeing the pages -- that these pictures went with my words.  I swear he can see what I write and then find the perfect blend of the realistic and comicy, which it needs.

And Dave had even more impact on the story.  When we thought the book was nearly done, he workshopped it in his class at Savannah College of Art and Design, and the feedback led to me feverishly rewriting 70 percent of the text in one week, hunched over my friend Mike Pintar’s computer on the second floor of our house in L.A. because mine had just crashed.  The result was a book that both Stephen and Dave told me -- sorry to embarrass you guys -- made them tear up.  And it never would have happened without Dave.

One other thing must be mentioned.  Dave, to my sadness, had things come up in his personal life which required him to take a break from the comics world when there was still so much art to ink.  Kate Kasenow, who was in that workshop I mentioned, stepped in and finished the art on a very short deadline -- and she was absolutely brilliant.  I had the same thrills and anticipations working with her as I did with Dave and hope in the future I’ll be able to work with both of them on projects.

BF: As a reader, it’s almost impossible not to project yourself onto a character(s), especially with very emotional stories like this. Do you identify with any one of your leads more so than the others or are these characters with real counterparts from your life?

ROSTAN: None of these characters were autobiographical, but there were counterparts.  Henry and Jillian were inspired by two very dear friends of mine, while Amelia is a combination of women I’ve known and been intoxicated by throughout my life. (If I had met my girlfriend in Los Angeles, who blows Amelia’s inspirations out of the water, she might have been perfect to the point of unreality.)  But the ideas they are expressing are autobiographical: the book is a summary of thoughts I’ve had over the past seven years or so about what it means to be alive, to love, to deal with death, to be a human being interacting with other human beings. That was why one of the biggest tricks was to make sure all of the characters didn’t end up sounding like variations of me! 

So that’s the identification: the need the characters feel to be connected to others even when it hurts, the knowledge that this, being with and for others, is the meaning of life and is what all of us, especially today in an increasingly fragmented and specialized world, need to hold on to.

BF: You did a very nice job of making all the main characters three dimensional. These people (even Amelia, who everyone loves and is dying of cancer the whole time) are not always portrayed in the brightest of lights. Do you think making this a graphic novel freed you from adhering to the more common tropes of this genre? Do you think the story’s harder moments would have remained intact had it been a movie or on television?

ROSTAN: Not necessarily. I would have written the same story no matter the medium.  As a film, it probably would have needed terrific actors (and I know a lot of people who are great actors) to strike the right balance of pathos and straight-forwardness.  Maybe that’s the one advantage of the graphic novel: more control.  This being said, I think the tough moments would remain intact.

And I avoided tropes by choice.  This is my first book, and I wanted it to be told in my style and have as little influence from others as possible.  I didn’t want Amelia to be a saint, and I ultimately realized I didn’t want to show her dying.  People know these things are happening!  Robert McKee once said that the art of storytelling is giving people what they want in a way they never expect; I wanted to tell the death story from as many different angles as it could allow.

BF: To me, music is very inspiring when writing and especially on road trips. Considering that this is a very heartfelt book with a road trip at its core, I have to ask: Were you listening to anything specific to get in the right head space? If Elegy had a soundtrack, what are some of the bands on that album?

ROSTAN: Harry Chapin is one of my idols.  His music was emotional, funny, resonant, and never failed to tell a complete story.  In fact, my favorite song of all time is a song he wrote called “Corey’s Coming,” which is about friendship, love, death, and transcendence.  Harry Chapin would dominate a soundtrack. I also was listening to Steely Dan and Miles Davis, three (altogether) geniuses whose music mixed an air of cool style with a pulsing sincerity.  And, of course, The Beatles, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, who were always there to remind me that being sentimental is no crime.

BF: What kinds of comics excite you? Do you visit the store weekly or are you a collected edition kind of person?

ROSTAN: My best friends are actually more into comics than me!  Not that I don’t love them: Craig Thompson’s Blankets is one of the most perfect works of fiction I’ve ever read, and I adore Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Halo and Sprocket, Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween (Dave Lanphear, who lettered that, lettered Amelia, which is a huge honor).  But when all is said and done, I love picking up graphic novels and indulging in a story luxuriantly.

And incidentally, Calvin and Hobbes is the greatest comic ever created.  And if I had found Achewood while writing Amelia, that would have slipped in.

BF: What’s next for you? Are you currently working on another OGN, perhaps issues, or something different all together?

ROSTAN: There are two graphic novels Stephen and I are choosing between for my next OGN, both of which will be very unique variations on the biography, but I’m also working on an actual novel.  The title keeps changing, but it will tell the story of a long weekend conversation over several bottles of red wine between three eminent figures from literary and political history.  Not saying anymore because I can’t let another writer steal it, but I wrote a first draft of an actual novel before I wrote Amelia. It was 600-pages long, and maybe 30 were good.  I know now I can write an even better book and I’m excited.

An Elegy for Amelia Johnson is in stores now.