Joel Meadows interviews Garen Ewing for Tripwire issue 54, July 2010.
How long have you been doing Rainbow Orchid for?
I started drawing the strip in early 1997, but only did three pages. I picked it up again in 2002 when it appeared in BAM!, and worked on it in my spare time from then on. So, rather stretched out, and not full-time, but the answer would be thirteen years.
What and who were the main inspirations for the strip, both in terms of story and art?
Graphically the inspiration comes from European ligne claire adventure stories, predominantly those of Hergé (Tintin) and Edgar P. Jacobs (Blake and Mortimer), but also such artists as Floc'h, Yves Chaland and Roger Leloup etc - that whole school of bande dessinée. The story is more influenced by my love of the classic adventure tales of H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, with books such as Allan Quartermain, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Lost World in mind. The Rainbow Orchid is set in the 1920s, and that came about initially from my interest in silent cinema.
When you produced RO yourself, was there always the aim to get it in the hands of a mainstream publisher so you could focus on creating the series rather than having to be a jack of all trades?
While I thought it would be nice if it was one day published to a wider audience, it wasn't something I set out to achieve. I'd made a few in-raods into getting work as a comic artist, but quickly realised that I didn't actually want to put all that effort into drawing stories that weren't my own. I decided to concentrate on commercial illustration and leave the comics as something I could make purely for my own enjoyment. I didn't actually think it would be that publishable, as it was an all-ages adventure story at a time when dark and gritty violence seemed to be all the rage in comics. As for the 'jack of all trades' bit - I really enjoy being involved in all aspects of the book, and that hasn't really changed since being at Egmont, except I have a lot more professional help with it now!
How strange did it feel after struggling for years doing it yourself that a big publisher took it over?
Well, I'm not sure to be honest! Sometimes I look at the published book and think how weird it is that a comic, made by little old me, is here, in this format, on bookshelves across the land, being read by people I don't know and will never meet. But I haven't really experienced a huge surge of excitement over it - I think partially because I'm a bit older than many who come to mainstream publication for the first time, and I'm a little bit cynical from previous experiences, perhaps, and know that nothing lasts forever. That sounds a little negative, and I'm not at all - I'm really lucky.
How did the Egmont deal come about?
I'd self-published the first volume, and when that sold out I decided to continue the strip on the web. Over the space of a couple of years it built up quite a healthy following and I had a number of small publishers contact me about it, until one day I got an enquiry from Gollancz. With things looking a little more serious, and me knowing next to nothing about the book industry, I got in touch with a friend of my wife's who was a literary agent at A. P. Watt in London. She kindly invited me to their offices to offer advice, and the next thing I knew they were taking me on as a client! When my agent left APW, I was taken on by the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, and it was Oli Munson, my agent there, who then got the deal with Egmont. Interestingly, Egmont had also been aware of The Rainbow Orchid on the web, so it shows what a great platform the internet is for exposure - you never know who's reading.
In terms of material, do the Egmont books represent what you published yourself or are they redrawn and rewritten for Egmont?
It's pretty much exactly the same material, though all re-lettered after I designed my own hand-lettering font. I did redraw about ten panels for volume one and added two new pages, all my own decision. With volume two I'd only drawn 36 pages of the 40, so the last 14 pages of volume two, and all of volume three (which I'm just drawing now), is new under Egmont.
How has the reaction been in the book market to the first Rainbow Orchid book?
It's difficult to know really. Going by the forty or so reviews I've seen, they've been overwhelmingly positive - about three negative reviews among them. The Rainbow Orchid isn't a 'hot cake', but I am seeing an encouraging build-up of interest, slow and steady, which is great. There's not much of a children's graphic novel market in the UK, it's just starting, but growing thanks to publishers such as Egmont, Walker Books and the DFC Library to name a few. And while mainland Europe has dozens and dozens of clear-line style comic albums, here in the UK we've only really had Tintin, it's not as prolific as manga! And the same goes for this kind of classic adventure - there's not much around, so despite it being a heavily influenced strip, it feels like we're exploring some new or long-forgotten ground.
How has it been received in the US?
I don't have an American publisher yet, and indeed most overseas publishers are waiting until the story is completed before they decide whether to make any deals or not. I sell the books from my website myself (old self-publishing habits die hard) and I do get a lot of orders from the States, maybe just under a quarter of the total. I've seen little hints of my book doing international business, in a shop in South Africa, a library in New Zealand, reports of it on sale in Canada etc., but that side of it's all a bit of mystery at the moment. Apparently the Chinese like it.
How many Rainbow Orchid titles will be published with Egmont?
The story is three volumes long. I don't know if there'll be any more Julius Chancer adventures after that - depends how it does, I suppose. Well, even if Egmont weren't to publish more, I'd go back to self-publishing them, I love the character and his world.
It seems that there are two different markets with comics: the monthly titles and the graphic novels that appeal to readers who read GNs but never have and probably never will pick up a monthly comic in their life. How much of a fair comment do you think this is?
I'm not sure it's as clear-cut as that. I don't read periodicals any more, I haven't done so for many years, and I much prefer the book format (I always have - my introduction to comics was via Asterix). I do know a few people who discovered graphic novels through a movie franchise, and have then gone on to seek out the monthlies, but I'd be surprised if this was common, especially as it usually requires access to a specialist comic shop. And I'm sure those who are consumers of 'floppies' (monthly titles) buy their fair share of trade paperbacks too. That's concentrating more on American comics, of course. The British tradition is the weekly, and that seems to be dead, save for three or four stalwarts. There's green shoots in the UK comics industry thanks to the highly creative independent scene and the growing original graphic novel lists of a few forward-looking mainstream book publishers, bolstered by a healthy reprint/import market in the form of a range of manga and publishers such as the fantastic Cinebook. And things look set to change even further once devices such as the iPad and Kindle become accepted comic reading platforms, which I think they will. In the end it's the vitality of the medium that matters more than the delivery method - it always comes back to that lovely mix of word balloons and drawings, however you read them!
