Kelly Sue DeConnick Interviews Ronald Wimberly About Gratuitous Ninja (Exclusive)

With three days left to go, cartoonist Ronald Wimberly’s Gratutious Ninja is 95% paid for via a Kickstarter campaign that aims to create an immersive and ambitious reading package. The challenges of finding a way to bring a webcomic, originally designed to play on an infinite scroll, into the physical realm have created some cool, strange, and exciting presentation methods, but the unique design aesthetic sent Wimberly to crowdfunding, where he could presell the books in advance of their planned March 2023 release date. Ahead of the campaign’s end, acclaimed comics writer Kelly Due DeConnick spoke with Wimberly about the project.

ComicBook was there to observe and take notes, but did not directly take part, so special thanks to Deconnick, Wimberly, and Beehive Books for making this happen. The planned half-hour chat ran for over two hours, so this is modified somewhat for brevity.

You can read the first part of their conversation below, with two more installments coming to count down to the end of the campaign. You can check out the GratNin Kickstarter here.

Kelly Sue DeConnick: You’ve got this Kickstarter going on. I wasn’t actually familiar with Beehive Books, but I poked around. I got your Laab papers, but I thought that was self-published.

Ronald Wimberly: That is me, but I’m working with Beehive. They platform the paper, they publish it. Josh, when he first started Beehive, asked me, “Is there anything that you want to do?” I’d had this idea of doing a magazine, like a comics newspaper. You know, just something cool. You know how it used to be; you’d go downtown and you go into the City, you know, you go down into Chinatown, they used to have a few spots to go to the newsstand and just check out all the cool magazines.

I wanted to make something like that. Something cool, and weird a little bit, you know? It seemed nearly impossible to pull off up until that moment, and then Josh, who’s such a good partner helped figure that out. We put that together, and we put out three, and we’ll probably be launching another one later this year, if all goes well, pandemic notwithstanding.

And now we’re doing GratNin, which we had talked about in the past. I did this as a webcomic, and it was made for infinite scroll, but even at the beginning, I was thinking, “I would love to do something in print.” You thinking about how people are; it’s like “this is really cool, when are you going to come out with the print version?” So..at my pace! And now we’re here.

DeConnick: We were passing it around the office, and the first question we had was, “how are we going to make a scroll comic, a print comic?” And the accordion is the obvious answer there, and yet all of us were like, “Oh, no! Can’t be done! You’d have to put it on a drum, with a crank!”

Wimberly: We were looking into that, but then there was the whole supply chain issue. The cranks were coming from overseas, and there’s the labor issues involved.

When we first started, we had a bunch of different things we were thinking about. I had made a mock-up that was like a map — a subway map. I folded it out, and it became a subway map, and it was kind of fun to read. I was thinking, “We just do eight of these, and then you could fold it somehow to read it,” but Josh and Beehive are known for doing really nice book packages, really interesting packaging, so he was like, “Yeah, we should actually do a scroll — like a ninja scroll.”

Which I think is a cool idea, but I’m always thinking of that sweet spot beteween the tactile element and readability. I’ve had Building Stories for like ten years or something, and I don’t think I’ve read the whole thing, because it’s a little daunting. The best book is a paperback that you ust stuff in your pocket and you read on the train. And GratNin  is not that, but I wanted something in between, where it’s like, “Okay, this is pretty easy to read, but also it has some of the unique quality of the medium.”

DeConnick: The format of the book is so familiar to us that it disappears. We don’t acknowledge or think about the book, but because of making it in this accordian, we kind of have to acknowledge it and interact with it as an object. That’s really appealing. I’m always interested in challenging the things that we take for granted about our form, becuase the thing that’s so powerful aobut comics is how…I’m trying to think of a word that isn’t “hackable,” but hackable is the first thing that comes to mind.

Wimberly: What makes you say that? What makes you think hackable? Is it the way time works in comics?

DeConnick: Because it exists in this space between prose and moving pictures. Prose really works against being an object. With prose, you can have illuminated prose, you can have illustrated prose, but prose is trying to disappear into your head. Prose is is trying to not exist in this world; it’s trying to exist only [in your head].

Moving pictures exist entirely here, and take all of the control out of the consumer’s hands. Moving pictures dictate. You have to passively consume it. You can’t control the pace; your eye is forced, because of the passage of time. Even when the storytelling isn’t linear, you have no say in the order in which you consume it, or the pace at which you consume it.

But comics exist in this in-between place, where they are absolutely objects in this world, and all of the action of the story is only here. I think that, because of that, there’s so much third-channel going on with comics. Infographics are still comics. Yes, you can compress or expand time, and you’ve given so much control to the reader. You can guide, you can request, but ultimately, if the reader wants, as they’re reading, to go back, and then go back again, and then go forward, you can do that. And you can do that in prose, but it’s not the same experience. It’s not your eye wandering over the page. Comics invites interaction from so many different angles that prose and moving pictures don’t do.

Wimberly: It is interesting that there’s the language aspect, which is a hard symbol, an abstraction. And then you have these pictures. There’s a lot of different types of comics. I think when you get into prose or you get into filmmaking, then you find people who are always trying to bend those rules. Right now at the Jewish Museum, they have this Jonas Mekus exhibition. He passed away; he’s a New York, underground filmmaker. He saw his films as being spatial. 

That’s the guy who uh, puts on Andy Warhol’s films. Cause he’s like, he was already thinking about, “Maybe you don’t interact with my film, even in a linear way. Maybe the film takes up the space.” 

All that to say, there are comics that there are no pictures, not in the traditional, memetic sense, but I definitely dig what you’re saying. One of the things I like to do is to pinch pages, so that I can make a unique spread, you know what I mean? Like, pinch two pages in the center, and then look, and those images register immediately. Have you ever ruined a surprise? Like when you look at a comic, and you’re like, “oh, snap,” you see it? 

DeConnick: Yeah. And that’s a conversation, even where I do most of my work, in the mots commercial, pop, straightforward comics, they have these conversations with beginning writers about how there are logistics. You cannot have a reveal on an odd page. Just a simple rule: all reveals are on even-numbered pages, because that’s revealed when you turn the page, friends! We take it in all at once, and then you go back and follow the dialogue. Then you may go back and re-examine it again, to make sure that you caught everything, but there’s noway to hide information on an odd-numbered page.

Wimberly: Yeah, the probability takes a real dive. I love that. That’s one thing I think about writers, and I guess that’s why you’re really good at what you do. I come from a different position; my personal handicap in this approach to the medium, and also with filmmaking too, is that when I started to write for other people, it’s like “yeah, buddy, you’ve got to be really specific.” 

When I write a script for myself, sometimes it’s almost like doing quick sketches. I know everything in the room already. I know the essential things that need to be there. I know the poetry; the poetry is in my head. So when I write, my first scripts were almost like technical documents — really just things to remind me of what to do when I get there.

DeConnick: I’m interested in the two models. I use “cartoonist” for someone who is the full-package, auteur model…

Wimberly: You care about language!

DeConnick: I’m always intrigued by the fact that cartoonists script for themselves at all, more than just “This is the page where this happens, this is the page where this happens.”

Wimberly: Some don’t. Sometimes I feel like a faker, because I definitely start with writing, but it depends. 

I’m working on something right now for a client, and I’m putting in big scare quotes, it’s my last commercial cartooning or illustration job. I’m both a [creative director] on this project and one of the cartoonists, so I’m my own boss. And the way the story goes, or the way I’ve been breaking things down…I had to break things down for another illustrator and I had to break things down for myself. In this case, yeah, I scripted it while I was drawing, because I had a client and I was kinda just doing almost pure drawing comics. I went straight, in and did the script on the board. 

But even sometimes, a brief outline might work. I almost always start with a particular kind of a four act thing, and I leaned so heavily on it because I liked the form, and then I’ll break out of it and I’ll do something completely different, but I usually start with that. It’s a way for me to think about what I want, how I want things to unfold, and how I kind of want them to hit. It’s a neat crutch for me. Normally when I write my own stories, I’ll start with that. With this, not so much. It’s like, it’s easy. “A priest and a rabbi walked into a bar” type of thing. You have the set up, you get there and it’s like, you could finesse the joke, you know? Oh, this is the horse talking horse behind the bar. But you already got to set up: knock, knock who’s there. I just went straight into drawing. 

But if I’m kinda like, “Okay, well here’s this abstract idea,” and I’m still figuring out the characters, and almost what they’re going to do, I like to build a skeleton because by the time you get to the drawing, you might be really focused on doing the drawing. I think the drawing itself is so hard, so when for me, when I’m trying to do complex stories, I’m like, “Let me get the story down as a problem to solve in the drawing structure, like the storytelling on the page.” Because for me, look, I’m not Otomo. I’m not going to be figuring out the plot points and the drawings at the same time, that level of complexity. Can you imagine on Domu, Otomo sitting here and figuring out all these complicated things, while he’s drawing the pages? It’s like, “Get the f–k outta here. I can’t do that s–t.”

DeConnick: You know, it’s funny. I’ve never thought about that. I don’t know if you and I have ever talked about it; have we talked about, I don’t have a visual imagination?

Wimberly: No, I don’t think we did. Maybe four years ago or something, I think it came up on Twitter that that’s even a thing, and I was like, two things: One, how even? Two, props to people that don’t have that. That’s crazy. But also, the way you experience the world must be great. As an illustrator, one of he things that can be difficult is that what you make with your hands doesn’t match what you have in your head, so there’s that dissonance. if you don’t have that, you’d be like the best impressionist of all time, you know? You’re seeing things, boom, right there.

DeConnick: The natural inclination is to say “you’re a super weird fit for comics,” and it would be a super weird fit for comics if I was drawing them, but as a collaborator, it’s win-win, because I’m never going to be like, “Well, that’s not really how I was picturing it.” I’m not picturing it. I don’t picture it until I see it, so that’s why, in the model that I work in, where I work with an artist, I always think of the book as a conversation. The book is, I’m telling you a story, and then you tell it back to me, and then I learn from what you told me, and I take that into the next part, so that everything is very back and forth. 

Some of the work for hire stuff now that I have, where I’m allowed to do this, I work scene by scene. So I script a scene, it goes to pencils, while it’s being inked, I’m scripting the next scene, so that that back and forth is happening at a faster rate. There’s more conversation than just issue to issue.

Wimberly: What’s the guy, Max Ernst? What’s that movement called that’s kind of the counterpoint to the futurists? The other guy with the mustache was well known for it, but he’s not as good as Max.

DeConnick: Surrealist?

Wimberly: Right. Like you’ve kind of got like something — almost like an exquisite corpse, surrealist thing happening there, or jazz. It’s kind of like jazz. You have the theme, and you play the theme, and then like, the artist probably comes in and like plays the theme, but they have a little solo, and when you come back, you’re each playing three or four instruments. 

So, your scripts: how do you…imagine is not even the right word. I remember once I got a script, and I think about this all the time. I’ll draw weird lenses, right? Like, if we’re talking if it was photography. And this person gave me a script, and this is all one picture, right? And it was, “someone is looking at this thing, and on their face, they’re surprised.” 

So essentially, we were looking at what the person was looking at, but also we were looking at the person’s face, and the person was in the image. So I did some crazy fish-eye shot, because to me, if I were filming this, or if I was even drawing it, I would have the shot and then I would have the reaction shot, because I would want to see the scale of it. And when I write something, those are things I’m considering. The artist is free to pace things out as they will, as long as they make it fit within the page parameters. But what I thought at the time was, this person hasn’t visualized what this could possibly be. I also think it was the first page of a comic, so it was supposed to be a splash on the first page, and I was like, “Man, what am I supposed to do here?” Plus, this set up the main character, looking at this other character, who’s kind of the main villain. We’re looking inside their apartment. This other character is outside of the apartment, so ther’s a door in between. We’re supposed to see their expression and the expression of the other person outside of the apartment, and I’m like, “bro!” I think I killed it though. It was a great challenge. 

But when you’re writing, you’re not even imagining those things. So how do you work out line of sight? Is there a conversation? Are you describing what happens, and then your artist is like “Hmm, alright?”

DeConnick: Yeah. I try not to tell you what to draw. I don’t want to read a book that was designed by a writer. So, what I try to do is to tell you, “This is what the story feels like. This is what the story sounds like.” So, I’m really audio. The rhythm of the language and the visual rhythm of the page, the pacing of the page, I can clap out for you what scenes feel like. So I’m going to tell you the story in emotional beats, which I tend to make into panels, but you can bust those panels out. 

I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, so I do have some visual language. So I understand the necessity of some storytelling, like “but how did we get from here to here?” and “we need an establishing shot.” I have all of that, but for the most part, I’m going to try to stay out of the artist’s way as much as possible, because I think if I’m trying to do their job, I should just f–king learn to draw. Let me bring my gifts, let them bring their gifts, let’s have this conversation, and see what is the third authorial voice that isn’t my voice and isn’t their voice.

Wimberly: Yeah, the third voice! Two things this makes me think of recently: I was corresponding with Michael Arias on email. Asrias did the Tekkonkinkreet animated film, and so he worked with Matsumoto Taiyō for years, translating, and one of the things I was saying was, I was checking out something he had translated, and I was like, “Yeah, you’re doing that the thing where you’re creating the third thing.” When you translate, when you adapt, there’s a third thing that you’re looking to make. 

Legendary, at one point, had hired Spike Lee to do a pass on the Prince of Cats script, and we worked on it together. And one of the things that Spike did when he got the script was, any shot that was on the script, he just crossed them out at the beginning. Almost like, “Okay, don’t tell me what.” It just speaks to putting yourself in a space where you can actually meet halfway or create the third thing. 

This is what I was going to say about film, when you were mentioning film before. I think it doesn’t happen always when you’re watching the film, but one of the things that some of the best filmmakers…like, Jarmusch right? Dead Man. I’ve seen that movie a bunch of times. I may or may not sleep with it on. And it’s closer to what comics does. Images and sounds and things kind of floating around through space, and rearranging themselves in my memory, you know what I mean? It’s a part of a film experience, particularly when you watch in a theater, and I don’t know if we talk about it a lot, but what the film is doing after the fact. Like, you wouldn’t say that your experience with a book only happens when you’re reading it.

DeConnick: I think any experience with art only happens while you’re consuming it, but the better the art, the more you think about, right? That’s kind of how we define the experience. Nobody’s trying to make something that isn’t good, right? People are trying to make good things. And honestly, I prefer a big swing and a miss, to a safe play. Like, “I like you swung hard, and it did not land, but I am all in for how f–king big a swing that was, and how weird it was.” 

My point being, when you see a particular show and you’re like “that was neat,” and then tomorrow, you can’t remember what f–king show you saw — and it happens! –then ultimately there was no truth there. There was nothing that transcended the narrative or whatever it was. If you can’t remember the next day, what you saw, there was no reflection of humanity in it. It was just pretty pictures moving across a page, or a screen, or a stage. And look, everybody likes candy sometimes, so who am I? But that’s not really what I’m looking to make. 

And I work in a much more mainstream place than where you work…and we have strayed so f–king far from everything we’re supposed to be talking about, by the way, but I’m enjoying the s–t out of it.

Wimberly: That’s what I figured was going to happen, so it’s okay. 

I wouldn’t have minded at a certain time doing some mainstream work. I just think it’s maybe difficult for people to imagine me in that box. I can’t say why, to be honest, but also I have no little bit of pride. I was not interested in working my way up doing some D-grade character, drawing for another person who’s writing a script, for like 15 years to get my chance to write my own character. I had no interest in that, either, so like…so it goes. 

But I’m not sure that we are that different in a way, because GratNin is a pop comic. I’m working in that milieu. It’s a ninja comic, and the things that you say, the beats you need to hit, I think you’re like a punk band, too, but I’m like a punk band. I want to play Chuck Berry, but I’m not Chuck Berry. I want to play Muddy Waters but I don’t have it. What you end up with is what you might think is eccentric or whatever, but I thought I was doing Naruto, you know what I mean?